Ni Hao; bīng qílín!
I’m just dropping in, to emphasize my love for ice cream and the Chinese crawler bots, allocating their time and resources, towards scraping my humble website.

To show my gratitude, I’ve even added a random little dog generator to https://thecanine.ueuo.com/sparkle.html so that everyone can pick up their own custom dogFT, on their journey through my site.

We use all the Microsoft programs at work - Teams and Outlook especially.

After all kinds of technical problems with Teams, that sometimes go unresolved for over a year, Microsoft shifted their priorities away from fixing things and towards adding an annoying AI Copilot button, that just takes up space and all it does, is loads the website in Teams, so I disabled it. Soon they just add it back, but in a different row of icons, therefore it’s now a different button, you have to disable (I think they added yet another one, to the Teams, on my work phone and I had to disabled that too). Not too long after, the desktop one just enabled itself, because of “an error” and I can disable it, but doing so activates a popup, that begs you to turn it back on, every once in a while. You can’t disable the popup and can only click “Yes” or “Not now” on it. I still keep it disabled, out of principle, but yesterday I noticed yet another Copilot button, this time in the top right corner of my Outlook and this one cannot be disabled, on the business version of Outlook and even on the personal one, it’s only possible to do it through hidden privacy settings, by prohibiting the program from connecting to Microsoft servers, for extra “features”.

There’s people complaining about it online, so it’s clear nobody really wants it, but at this point Microsofts position is that you will have at least one useless AI button on your screen, at any given time, and you will be happy. And yes, their AI sucks and if I absolutely have to use AI for something, there’s already 2 better options, we have access to, at work.

@prologic@twtxt.net AHA the .* entry did the trick! i originally had these rules in there, they were added by default except for the youtube rules:

imgur\.com
giphy\.com
imgs\.xkcd\.com
reactiongifs\.com
githubusercontent\.com
youtube\.com
yt.\be

also oooh the missing feature sounds very handy!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org “Advanced”, well, probably more “mature”. There aren’t a ton of crazy features and that icon thing is the largest code addition in the last 10 years. %)

Speaking of OS/2 … I just realized that Windows 3.x didn’t have icons, either. If I’m not mistaken, this only got added in Windows 95. In other words, OS/2 had this feature before Windows did, because at least OS/2 2.1 from 1993 had icons. Who would have thunk.

(Now I kind of want to know which system really introduced this feature.)

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com And I read the following funny response to that:

Bluesky: Users verify their age by adding a payment method or uploading a photo ID.

Mastodon: Users verify their age by posting pictures of the vintage computer equipment in their homes.

https://beige.party/@maxleibman/114848276288629121

😏

Another example:

$ setpriv \
    --landlock-access fs \
    --landlock-rule path-beneath:execute,read-file:/bin/ls-static \
    --landlock-rule path-beneath:read-dir:/tmp \
    /bin/ls-static /tmp/tmp/xorg.atom

The first argument --landlock-access fs says that nothing is allowed.

--landlock-rule path-beneath:execute,read-file:/bin/ls-static says that reading and executing that file is allowed. It’s a statically linked ls program (not GNU ls).

--landlock-rule path-beneath:read-dir:/tmp says that reading the /tmp directory and everything below it is allowed.

The output of the ls-static program is this line:

─rw─r──r────x 3000 200 07-12 09:19 22'491 │ /tmp/tmp/xorg.atom

It was able to read the directory, see the file, do stat() on it and everything, the little x indicates that getting xattrs also worked.

3000 and 200 are user name and group name – they are shown as numeric, because the program does not have access to /etc/passwd and /etc/group.

Adding --landlock-rule path-beneath:read-file:/etc/passwd, for example, allows resolving users and yields this:

─rw─r──r────x cathy 200 07-12 09:19 22'491 │ /tmp/tmp/xorg.atom

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, this really could use a proper definition or a “manifest”. 😅 Many of these ideas are not very wide spread. And I haven’t come across similar projects in all these years.

Let’s take the farbfeld image format as an example again. I think this captures the “spirit” quite well, because this isn’t even about code.

This is the entire farbfeld spec:

farbfeld is a lossless image format which is easy to parse, pipe and compress. It has the following format:

╔════════╤═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ Bytes  │ Description                                             ║
╠════════╪═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ 8      │ "farbfeld" magic value                                  ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (width)                      ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (height)                     ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ [2222] │ 4x16-Bit BE unsigned integers [RGBA] / pixel, row-major ║
╚════════╧═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

The RGB-data should be sRGB for best interoperability and not alpha-premultiplied.

(Now, I don’t know if your screen reader can work with this. Let me know if it doesn’t.)

I think these are some of the properties worth mentioning:

• The spec is extremely short. You can read this in under a minute and fully understand it. That alone is gold.
  
• There are no “knobs”: It’s just a single version, it’s not like there’s also an 8-bit color depth version and one for 16-bit and one for extra large images and one that supports layers and so on. This makes it much easier to implement a fully compliant program.
  
• Despite being so simple, it’s useful. I’ve used it in various programs, like my window manager, my status bars, some toy programs like “tuxeyes” (an Xeyes variant), or Advent of Code.
  
• The format does not include compression because it doesn’t need to. Just use something like bzip2 to get file sizes similar to PNG.
  
• It doesn’t cover every use case under the sun, but it does cover the most important ones (imho). They have discussed using something other than RGBA and decided it’s not worth the trouble.
  
• They refrained from adding extra baggage like metadata. It would have needlessly complicated things.

The lid is on and the first saw brackets are done. Let’s see how impractical they are. I might have to add heavy chamfers to better guide them in.

I added 07 to 11: https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/hobelbankschubladen/

Saw this on Mastodon:

https://racingbunny.com/@mookie/114718466149264471

18 rules of Software Engineering

1. You will regret complexity when on-call
   
2. Stop falling in love with your own code
   
3. Everything is a trade-off. There’s no “best” 3. Every line of code you write is a liability 4. Document your decisions and designs
   
4. Everyone hates code they didn’t write
   
5. Don’t use unnecessary dependencies
   
6. Coding standards prevent arguments
   
7. Write meaningful commit messages
   
8. Don’t ever stop learning new things
   
9. Code reviews spread knowledge
   
10. Always build for maintainability
    
11. Ask for help when you’re stuck
    
12. Fix root causes, not symptoms
    
13. Software is never completed
    
14. Estimates are not promises
    
15. Ship early, iterate often
    
16. Keep. It. Simple.
    

Solid list, even though 14 is up for debate in my opinion: Software can be completed. You have a use case / problem, you solve that problem, done. Your software is completed now. There might still be bugs and they should be fixed – but this doesn’t “add” to the program. Don’t use “software is never done” as an excuse to keep adding and adding stuff to your code.

@prologic@twtxt.net will do. No worries, not a show stopper. I will suggest that the muted numbered list not be sorted, but latest muted first. That way we have a better idea. Maybe adding timestamps to those too? Just a thought.

Of Pointlessware and CEOs
Had a moment, to check up on some of the companies, I stopped following, get to The Browser Company and see their newest product - it’s just Chrome, with an AI chat window pop-up and that’s it. Something Canary Chrome, come with already.
I see Theo from T3.gg, making fun of it on YouTube and promoting “his” product - an AI chat app, where you can choose from multiple models, by all the popular AI companies. Something I already have a worse version of, at work and I don’t even use it.
There’s also an interview, about the future of virtual keyboards, surely this is at least actually a real thing and not more pointless horse shit. I check the website of the keyboard SDK, and it’s around 20 identical apps, that just copy the same keyboard SDK/api and slap chatgpt features on top - in the App Store, these are surrounded by chatgpt clones, that just feed the users prompts, into the real thing and put ads, next to the answers.

Aha! So, @bender@twtxt.net added all the Spanish feeds then!? ]:->

@movq@www.uninformativ.de oh, you bet someone is adding them. Being as we are a small community, I could almost guess who added what. 😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org oh it wouldn’t be very long, maybe that’d make for a fun blog post! i just used the same tool that the nerd font people use to add glyphs, but for a “custom glyph set” i just added. the whole noto font LMAO

Amsterdam baby!!

just got a very new location added to the bag, Amsterdam.

Amsterdam baby!!

just got a very new location added to the fleet, Amsterdam.

To follow up what I said minutes ago, they don’t even want you to think of the initial idea, they want you to be a mindless organism, the AI algorithm analyses and tells what you should make, down to the script, so that you get the highest number of people possible to click it and see some AI generated advertisement, blended seemly into what’s no lonher even your work.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/05/netflix-will-show-generative-ai-ads-midway-through-streams-in-2026/
https://youtu.be/dGA6sVaGveU

@prologic@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de I don’t even think the premise of this makes much sense. If an artist is convinced they cannot compete, with the “AI” learning models, we already have today, they must have some self esteem issues, strange opinion on what the purpose of art is, or just be someone mindlessly redrawing already established things and not be all that good at it.

It might be connected to some typically non-artists assumption, that the more time and effort the artwork took to accomplish, the more artistic it is - this can be further twisted in these peoples minds, into the “more pointless detail = more artistic art” meme. AI often ads pointless and illogical details everywhere, “so it’s obviously better, than the human artist, who drew the original”.

Some people just enjoy having the picture they wanted or having the status of an artist to brag about and don’t actually enjoy the artistic process of discovery and small decisions, made while drawing, that shape the outcome into something, only you could have created.

We had sun, clouds, wind, rain and a whole lot of fun on our trip to the Wasserberg. We’ve been out seven hours in total, not bad at all for all those kilometers. We added on some detours to check out a pond I’ve been introduced by a mate a few years back.

After some (expensive) tucker at the Wasserberghaus, we tried to actually visit the summit this time. However, there’s nothing to see, just a rough logging trail (46-49). That was a dead end, so we had to turn around. It was some nice exploring, but I reckon this was my first and last time up there. :-)

Unfortunately, we didn’t go to the neighboring Fuchseck this time, only the Wasserberg with some extras.

https://lyse.isobeef.org/wanderung-auf-den-wasserberg-2025-05-18/

Buying a TV these days, means trying to avoid endless enshitification:
-Spyware and adware
-Shitty AI upscaling/ frame interpolation
-HW that breaks after 2 - 3 years
-One off OS, dead on arrival
-Android OS, that starts lagging after the third update
-8 buttons worth of ads, on your remote

You probably have to make some kind of a compromise. I thought that was buying from some other brand like Hyundai, but that one also felt into some of those categories and just broke, after less than 3 years of use. At this point I’ll probably go back to LG and hope their HW is still reliable and the rest manageable… It has AI bullshit and knowing LG, probably some spyware you have to try your best to get rid of, can buy a remote with “only” 2 ads on it, some web-based OS shared between all their TVs, that usually gets 4 - 5 years worth of updates and works decently enough afterwards.

At this point, I’ll probably settle for anything that doesn’t literally fall apart, not even 3 years in, like the Hyundai did.

I’m thinking about adding one more white guy podcaster into the world (me)

I’m also thinking of adding eye-off icon next to every Twt that, when clicked, hides that feed (tooltip: “Hide this feed”). This would work with the filters as a “temporary additive filter” to restrict/control the current view.

Pascal’s Law
⌘ Read more

slowing working away at my latest code project: learning PHP by recreating the 2000s fandom mainstay known as a fanlisting! it’s been super fun i added a dynamic nav bar and other modifications in the latest commit

fanlistings even to this day rely on old PHP scripts dating back to the early 2000s that need whole ass mySQL or postgres DBs and are incredibly insecure. you can look at them here they’re like super jank lol it’s sad that new fanlistings have to use them because there’s no other options….

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev what makes Kagi “the best search engine”? It is premium, alright. Allegedly you don’t get ads, but pay up-front for it, monthly.

I’m with @andros@twtxt.andros.dev and @eapl.me@eapl.me on this one. But I have also lost interest in twtxt lately and currently rethinking what digital tools truly add value to my life. So I will not spending my time on adding more complexity to Timeline. Still a big thanks to you @prologic@twtxt.net for all the great work you have done and all the nice conversations both here and on our video calls.

@xuu@txt.sour.is Hahaha, that’s cool! You were (and still are) way ahead of me. :-)

We started with a simple traffic light phase and then added pedestrian crossing buttons. But only painting it on the canvas. In our computer room there was an actual traffic light on the wall and at the very end of the school year our IT basics teacher then modified the program to actually control the physical traffic light. That was very impressive and completely out of reach for me at the time. That teacher pulled the first lever for me ending up where I am now.

I will be adding the code in for yarnd very soon™ for this change, with a if the date is >= 2025-07-01 then compute_new_hashes else compute_old_hashes

OpenBSD 7.7 released
Another six months have passed, so it’s time for a new OpenBSD release: OpenBSD 7.7 to be exact. Browsing through the long, detailed list of changes, a few important bits jump out. First, OpenBSD 7.7 adds support for Ryzen AI 300 (Strix Point, Strix Halo, Krackan Point), Radeon RX 9070 (Navi 48), and Intel’s Arrow Lake, adding support for the latest x86 processors to OpenBSD. There seems to be quite a few entries in the list related to power management, from work on hibernation and suspend … ⌘ Read more

Today I added support for Let’s Encrypt to eris via DNS-01 challenge. Updated the gcore libdns package I wrote for Caddy, Maddy and now Eris. Add support for yarn’s cache to support # type = bot and optionally # retention = N so that feeds like @tiktok@feeds.twtxt.net work like they did before, and… Updated some internal metrics in yarnd to be IMO “better”, with queue depth, queue time and last processing time for feeds.

Tenjin (YC S14) Is Hiring a Senior Ad Attribution Engineer (Ruby, Go)
Comments ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net @andros@twtxt.andros.dev You can delete these feeds (created by me):
https://feeds.twtxt.net/project26/twtxt.txt
https://lor.sh/@Katze_942.rss <- i’m added him but can’t find file
the only rss i follow is https://feeds.twtxt.net/posts-from-atdarkcat09atdc09-ru/twtxt.txt

Adding keyword parameters to Tcl procs
Comments ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net why don’t you terminate TLS here? It seems as easy as adding tls under route.

yes it used be http:// only and to keep hashes from breaking i added # url = http://... and now we are stock with it due to the curret specs.

Timeline of Evolution of Twtxt/Yarn.social:

• 2016 – Twtxt created by John Downey: plain text + HTTP = minimalist microblogging
  
• 2017–2019 – Community builds CLI tools, but adoption remains niche
  
• 2020 – Yarn.social launched by @prologic@twtxt.net with federation, threading, UI
  
• 2021–2023 – Pods sync, user mentions, blocking, search, and media support added
  
• 2024+ – Yarn.social becomes the reference Twtxt platform, with active federated pods

Judge declares Google’s ad network an illegal monopoly + 2 more stories
Plus, climate change may elevate arsenic in rice and new cellular discovery boosts cancer drugs. ⌘ Read more

so i had the idea of adding a page to my otherwise single page girl on the moon personal site that featured my more notable projects, but it’s been hours and i CAN’T THINK OF ANYTHING TO ADD THAT I HAVEN’T ALREADY MENTIONED. i just host other people’s stuff!!!

Google is a monopolist in online advertising tech, judge says
Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in some online advertising technology, a federal judge ruled on Thursday, adding to legal troubles that could reshape the $1.86 trillion company and alter its power over the internet. Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said in a 115-page ruling that Google had broken the law to build its dominance over the largely … ⌘ Read more

Ha! I stand corrected, didn’t scrolled long enough. Indeed, it should be added (you will need an account on Mills’ Gitea), noted.

Google Is a Monopolist in Online Advertising Tech, Judge Says
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Even though I really do like the shell, I always use Dolphin to mount my digicam SD card and copy the photos onto my computer. I finally added a context menu item in Dolphin to create a forest stroll directory with the current date in order to save some typing:

The following goes in ~/.local/share/kservices5/ServiceMenus/galmkdir.desktop:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Service
X-KDE-ServiceTypes=KonqPopupMenu/Plugin,inode/directory
Actions=Waldspaziergang;

[Desktop Action Waldspaziergang]
Name=Heutigen Waldspaziergang anlegen…
Icon=folder-green
Exec=~/src/gelbariab/galmkdir "%f"

In order to update the KDE desktop cache and make this action menu item available in Dolphin, I ran:

kbuildsycoca5

The referenced galmkdir script looks like that:

#!/bin/sh
set -e

current_dir="$1"
if [ -z "$current_dir" ]; then
    echo "Usage: $0 DIRECTORY" >&2
    exit 1
fi

dir="$(kdialog \
    --geometry 350x50 \
    --title "Heutigen Waldspaziergang anlegen" \
    --inputbox "Neues Verzeichnis in „$current_dir“ anlegen:" \
    "waldspaziergang-$(date +%Y-%m-%d)")"
mkdir "$current_dir/$dir"
dolphin "$current_dir/$dir"

This solution is far from perfect, though. Ideally, I’d love to have it in the “Create New” menu instead of the “Actions” menu. But that doesn’t really work. I cannot define a default directory name, not to mention even a dynamic one with the current date. (I would have to update the .desktop file every day or so.) I also failed to create an empty directory. I somehow managed to create a directory with some other templates in it for some reason I do not really understand.

Let’s see how that works out in the next days. If I like it, I might define a few more default directory names.

@eapl.me@eapl.me You asked me for private keys for testing purposes. I have added it to the bottom of this page: https://dm-echo.andros.dev/
It will soon be running. It won’t be long now.

guys omg the people behind pico.sh are so nice ;_; one of the people running it emailed me to let me know i had what was likely a malfunctioning (or well, not working as intended) script that was spawning the same SSH tunnel over and over and they wanted to give me a heads up.

and i felt SO BAD because i worried i was straining their service or something so i disabled my 4 tunnels (they were serving little SSH games and services) and got back to them.

but i just woke up to THE NICEST EMAIL EVER reassuring me that i was actually using it as intended, it was just my script that was having problems, and they even said that if it was intended to work that way it was fine and they just wanted to let me know!

so i restarted the tunnels but have since added lockfiles as safeguards so that when the script is run it’ll check if it’s already running :D

Adding to this, we already tried. It didn’t go too well. Slightly related—because it is a third party “integration”—I might be a “smaller group” member, but I don’t care much about one-way feeds (mostly RSS from blogs, news articles, etc.) either.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’m open to other suggestions 🤣 But hopefully both adding the additional prompt, not allowing it to enter shell history and removing from my shell history prevents me from doing such silly things in haste by pressing ^R and using fuzzy search which if you type fast you sometimes get wrong 😑

it adds users by finding them in feeds mentioning or following. Your URL is already added.

Hmm i am not sure how you got the URL with users at the end..

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org you must be loved by all the web developers in town! But ok, I have added all the missing semicolons, that should technically be there, but them not being there, does not make a difference.

Font color change inside every summary element, was a very deliberate choice, to color the text, but leave the arrow black (same as website background). But ok, I rewrote the CSS to hide the arrows and make all summaries white - since this also works better, with some dark theme enforcing browser extensions.

HOWEVER “p” as a child element of “summary” is a thing, that as far as I know, all browsers respect and if a font color is applied only once, I don’t think it matters, if it’s done through HTML or CSS, you smart ass.

thanks andros!

instead of adding the new twt at the end of the feed, do it at the beginning
The PHP client did that originally, although I didn’t see a real benefit if you use… a client.
It could help if you read the .txt file through a browser or something. Also, not many clients are prepared to cut the request, and you can’t rely on the file being organized that way, so finally we dropped that feature.

@bender@twtxt.net I taught the whole ecosystem 😁
@prologic@twtxt.net @eapl.me@eapl.me The question I was asked the most was: How do I discover people?
Someone came up with a fantastic idea, instead of adding the new twt at the end of the feed, do it at the beginning. So you can paginate by cutting the request every few lines.