I have (finally) built a fully e2e working purely decentralised and federated IRC-compatible chat server. It is currently a PoC, but it’s already working quite well. It’s inspired partly by the work we did with Salty Chat in terms of Discovery and Federation. Some screenshots of a normal IRC client irssi showing off how it works in a local e2e setup:

I am finally building a Twtxt / Yarn.social inspired Git forge. I’m actually quite confident that y’all will quite like it, but I won’t post links yet until I’m quietly confident in its design, functionality and behaviour(s).

Stay tuned 🤞 It’ll be like no other Git forge you’ve ever seen! 🤣 Actually, it’s already more like cgit than anything with plain text feeds that power it’s “pure decentralization” as you can no doubt imagine 😅 #twtxt #git #forge

My long weekend has finally arrived!

To celebrate, I busted out FCEUX (an NES emulator) and killed some ghouls in Castlevania 3, stomped some koopas in Super Mario Bros, and even hit a homerun in Base Wars (one of my personal faves, a baseball game featuring fighting robots).

I’m about to switch to MAME to play some arcade classics in preparation for an outing tomorrow night to an arcade bar (for my son’s birthday).

And I don’t go back to work until Wednesday! Woot!! 🤘

For the first time in probably 30 years, I played a game of M.U.L.E. tonight (and won!).

Granted, it was a beginner-level game, with a beginner-level alien against 3 computer players, but… I’m just sayin’.

I even lost one of my tracts of land due to it not being “recorded”, and I still won.

Take that, Mechtrons!

I finally managed to finish reading “How fast are Linux pipes anyway?”: https://mazzo.li/posts/fast-pipes.html That’s cool shit. Very interesting, highly recommended.

Yiha, quite some rain! Finally. And heaps of lightning in the distance. I love it. And it smells so wonderfully.

I finally managed to get back out disc golfing today at Vietnam Veterans Park and had a good time despite losing a brand new disc on hole 3 (on its 3rd throw ever, my glow-in-the-dark Lynx disappeared into an overgrown creek-bed and was swallowed by the underbrush). After my buddy lost a disc on hole 4, we were kinda demoralized and both threw for crap the rest of the course, but it was still a nice day to be slingin’ in the sun…

I’m still on a deckbuilding kick, so I was thrilled that we managed to get 3 games of Magic in last night.

In game 1, my Marvel Villains deck couldn’t stand up to Doctor Who’s Missy and her army of Cybermen (and Daleks). Since someone else was playing a dark lord Sauron deck, I guess that means she’s even more “villainous” that anything Marvel or Tolkien could offer.

For game 2, I ran my Guardians of the Multiverse deck (formerly known as The B-Vengers or Marvel Heroes 2: Electric Bugaloo). It was working well, and I had quite an army going, but I was still one turn from a win when an opponent’s tribal elf deck went off, killing everyone with 19 19/19 forest-walking elves. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

Then in game 3, I ran my Avengers deck, and finally got the win thanks to a Heroes’ Podium, a pair of Hawkeyes, and a flying, shield-wielding Captain America. Assemble, indeed.

Last night will likely be my final Marvel-only game night for a while. I still need to test the decks out some more, but they’re basically complete (I don’t currently plan on adding any more cards to them). Plus, while I’m on this kick, I’d like to finally finish my Sauron deck, and I’ve got some cards on order for both a Dune-themed deck and a couple of decks inspired by the old-school Beatdown Box.

Finally, I added some tests and fixed this. After updating the feed metadata, I now just return early and do not attempt to build an SQL multi-value INSERT statement. Easy-peasy.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @movq@www.uninformativ.de @klaxzy@klaxzy.net @david@daiwei.me I’m in a similar boat, they pushed us to use it, then pushed us to keep our usage below a certain threshold (although they do allow certain “power users” go beyond the limit, LOL). I dragged my feet at first, but they finally broke my spirit about a month before the limits were put into place. Unfortunately, I’ve been doing more managing than coding lately, so I mostly just use it for creating JIRA tickets (I find it to be very good at producing “Agile artifacts”).

@prologic@twtxt.net This was to be expected and I’m glad that it’s finally happening. I seriously hope that AI/LLM output gets swamped with advertisements or unwanted code, so people see what they have gotten themselves into, especially the “vibe coders”.

@david@daiwei.me Hahaha! The thing is, it doesn’t taste as good in summer as in winter for some unknown reason. Two or three decades ago I asked my grandma to bake some of her amazing gingerbread in summer. But she always refused, claiming that this only really works in winter. Of course, I didn’t believe that. Finally, after years of begging and pleading, she finally made a tray. And to my surprise, she was right. It wasn’t bad, no, no, not at all. It was really yummy. But the gingerbread in winter was just better. :-/

Maybe I should give it a shot myself. Perhaps she slightly changed the recipe on purpose. So that I will never break the tradition of seasonal food again. :-P It worked, at least I never asked her to bake gingerbread in summer again. :-D

I finally built a prototype of a marking gauge with a cutter wheel out of some scraps.

https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/streichmassprototyp-mit-messerrad/

It had been a long time in coming, I bought some replacement cutting wheels three years ago for exactly that purpose. I also found out that I need more M3 countersink bolts for future marking gauges that I want to make (maybe two or three more). Luckily, I had exactly one. I thought I got way more than that, but M3 is very, very scarce in my collection. My M3 bolt was barely long enough to attach the cutting wheel to the bar. But it’s okay for the prototype.

I was pleasantly surprised that I managed to drill the 2.5mm diameter hole almost perfectly in center in the 8mm diameter aluminium round bar. Center finder, drill press and vise with a vertical prism for the win!

I knew upfront that the M5 steel bolt to lock the bar in place definitely needs to be replaced with a brass or aluminium one (maybe with a knurled head). Otherwise, it cuts into the aluminium bar and leaves ugly marks. These burrs might even scratch the workpiece. But, of course, I don’t have any brass on hand either. Alternatively, I swap out the aluminium bar for a steel or even stainless steel one. Stainless might be tricky to precisely drill and tap, though.

I already learned a few things by making this prototype. The final wooden fence can be even a bit bigger. This round thing behind is also too short, I’d like it to be a tad longer and thicker. The final one will be made from hardwood, not spruce. Other than that, it’s great and already more practical than my store-bought marking gauge with its round fence. This only causes the tool to roll around on the workbench. Or even roll off. Stupid design.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Finally, your software is just perfect and finished by now, no need to report non-existing bugs or send in code changes. :-) How many tickets and merge requests did you get before moving to your own server?

I have to admit that I use git format-patch so rarely, I always have to pull it up from my shell history. Haven’t used git send-email even once. I definitely have to look into that soon. Wanted to do that for several years. I typically upload the patch to my server and send a link via IRC.

Maybe I was just very unlucky, but my experience is that you can perfectly ignore people and their work who only do it for the “fame”. It’s almost always been from inferior quality to say the least.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Luckily, I’m not an autist. If you walk next to a busy road or airport, I totally get the annoying noises. I’d plug my ears, too. But I meant in the woods where there are almost only nature sounds. Maybe they miss the jackhammers etc. :-D

@david@daiwei.me Hell yeah, let’s finally reintroduce the big predators! :-D

After many months of hard™ work, I’ve finally been able to get Mu (µ) lang to a point where the duplication of machine code / assembly between the ARM64/AMD64 and Mach-O and ELF formats are not all eliminated. This now means that writing a new backend target os/arch for Mu is now relatively simple to do, or far less duplicated work/effort.

Hurray! Finally, the thunderstorm is right over us. The last days we always got skipped. The rain smells so great. :-)

@david@daiwei.me Ha, I just noticed that I changed Newsboat’s defaults. Right from the factory, new items are just bold, while read ones aren’t. No different colors, white on black. Focused items are bold yellow on blue. No matter the read status. I think that’s why I started to play with the config to differentiate them. It’s been so long ago that I didn’t know anymore I even messed with that.

And yes, you’re right, the red on black is borderline readable. Also, my white on green focus is rather silly. But I’m sooo used to it, I don’t realize how bad the contrast is. To be fair, I don’t spend a lot of time in the lists. Aha, there are new articles, Enter to hit the artice view, read it, press n to immediately jump to the next unread article, rince and repeat, finally I’m back in the article list view.

Default theme, read focused:

Default theme, unread focused:

Lyse’s schlimmbesserung, read focused:

Lyse’s schlimmbesserung, unread focused:

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I’m with @prologic@twtxt.net on this one… I spent nearly a decade as an “enterprise” Java developer (servlets and JSPs and Spring, oh my!) before I finally swore it off, and I’ve been Ora-clean ever since (8 years and counting).

I won’t go back.

🥳 Finally! After nearly 4 years, yarnd v0.16.0 “Silver Sojourner” is out! 🚀 Twt Hash v2, SQLite FTS5 search, HTMX-powered UI, first-time setup wizard and literally hundreds of bug fixes 🐛

Release notes: https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/yarn/releases/tag/0.16.0

Upgrading is fully automatic — the Twt Hash v2 migration re-fetches all feeds on first start, so expect the first cycle to be a bit heavier. Images on Docker Hub as prologic/yarnd:0.16.0 👌

cc @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz @abucci@anthony.buc.ci @shinyoukai@yume.laidback.moe @eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club 🙏

@prologic@twtxt.net Well, 15 shows the site. On the left, I had a roll mat on a tarp. I borrowed some “NVA tarps” from the scouts for this trip. The scouts got them from the National People’s Army, the German Democratic Republic’s armed forces after Germany was reunited. They’re 1.75m x 1.75m in size and weigh 1.3kg, quite heavy, but super awesome. One tarp on the bottom, another one to cover up the clothes, shoes and sleeping bag in order to protect against the thaw. Finally, a mosquito net over all that, hung from a rope between two trees.

My mate just used a hammock with a mozzie net on the right hand side. The third tarp served as the luxurious bedside carpet. :-)

We sat on my second tarp to chill and enjoy the sunset and surroundings. It was nice to notice birds etc. die down. It took a really long time for the last light to fade away. Since we have a very high risk of forest fires, we of course couldn’t have a camp fire. But after all the exhaustion, I didn’t even miss it for one second.

Since we had dinner at home before leaving, all we brought were two lye rolls, two grain rolls, two brezels, some sausage and chocolate biscuits for breakfast. From the 2.5l of water, I ended up using 2l. It’s always good to have a little extra, despite the unnecessary weight. We had brekkie a few kilometers further on a bench in the shade. The first bench was already in direct sun.

Our camp site was maybe 30m to the side and a few meters down of a summit path hidden behind some trees and bushes. We were quite lucky, the other side of the hill got quite a bit of a breeze at night. We could hear the leaved treetops making much more noise behind us.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yes, these kind of dogs should really be strictly forbidden!

It’s not illegal if you own the forest or ask the owner. :-)

@david@daiwei.me Yeah, no clue. But my mate said the dog is disqualified from such adventures in the future. :-)

The temps were supposed to hit 14°C just before sunrise. Since we didn’t bring a thermometer, I can’t tell for sure. I was rather hot in my sleeping bag, so I had to pull out my arms every now and then. My mate’s sleeping bag was a little lighter and, unfortunately, the zipper jammed up. Since it didn’t close all the way, it felt quite a bit cold I was told in the morning. When we got up at 6ish (we said, we don’t care about time at all), it was probably already 16°C if not more. I brought a jumper, but a t-shirt was already nice enough to wear. The jumper just served as my pillow. The mercury raised by the minute then.

Yeah, I circled the spot with a biro to keep an eye on it. Until now, there’s absolutely nothing to see. Looks like I got lucky.

@balloonfu-sen@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz many reasons, all of which make sense. Same reason why automobiles today do not have an inner tube either. Now, about bicycles:

Tubeless bicycle tires drastically reduce punctures because internal liquid sealant instantly plugs small holes while you ride. Eliminating the inner tube also removes the risk of “pinch flats,” allowing you to safely run much lower tire pressures. This lower pressure provides superior traction and a noticeably smoother ride on rough surfaces. Finally, without an inner tube rubbing against the tire casing, rolling resistance drops, making your pedaling more efficient.

Bottom line, smoother ride, better traction, less flats.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, last night’s Magic games were dominated by the new Marvel set.

In game 1, I was running my new (unlisted) 5-color tribal Super Heroes deck (led by Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD) against a lightly-modified Avengers Assemble deck, a tribal Super Villains deck (fronted by Thanos, the Mad Titan), and 2 “classic” magic decks (Fractals and Artifacts). The heroes held their own quite well, but that game went way too long (thanks to Thanos snapping away half the board every other turn). It finally ended when everyone quit after yet another board wipe (giving the wiper her first win).

I slept for over 10 hours last night and today. Finally caught up for the many nights going to bed at 02:00, and waking up at 05:00.

What a week!

It looks like I mostly missed the #twtxthashgeddon (so happy belated twtxthashgeddon day, to those who celebrate), although I’m glad that twtxt-lib appears to have come through it more-or-less unscathed.

Also, today is (was) July 4th, so happy US Independence Day (to those that celebrate). I didn’t feel much like celebrating, myself, so instead I went and played Magic (results tomorrow).

Finally, today is (now) July 5th, so happy X-Day (to those that celebrate). I can’t help but feel like this would be a great time for the saucers to come…. Just sayin’. 👽

BTW - welcome to twtxt @GabesArcade@gabesarcade.com!

Finally done with the Van! Ready to roll out tomorrow morning 🚀

@movq@www.uninformativ.de CEF turns out to be pretty easy. I had to write a bit of C and Go to bridge, but once that got going I was able to write it into my pure Go go-wayland wlui library for final rendering. The delegating the entire CEF part was a good idea though because it keeps all the complexity in a container Image, leaving me with just the Go + C stubs/interface and SHM/IPC parts.

I complain about this a lot:

https://movq.de/v/e7cb49eefb/hiccupfx

But to be honest, my blog did the same thing – to some degree.

This is fixed now. The trick is to add width and height to all <img> tags. That way, modern browsers know how much space to reserve for the image. Without this, they just reserve zero space, so when the image finally loads, you get jumpy layout.

This effect is even worse when you use <img loading="lazy"> – which I can finally use, now that the jumpy layout has been fixed. 🥳

Finally finished another meme one, I always wanted. It took forever, to get it right, so I really hope people get the reference.

I’m just lacking that bit of quality in the final third.

Oh finally, we survived to Friday.. so ready for the weekend to start..

From Missing the Playoffs to the NBA Finals ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E3N

Oh god, finally: The thumbnail generator for my blog now renders a typical “play” icon for videos.

Saves me the need to write “this is a video” every time. 😬

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yes. The author tries hard not to break existing code, but apparently he did this time. In his defense, it’s not an official release, I just updated to master. Which is exactly what I always did in the past as there are no real versions (I even think that in one ticket he wrote years ago that master is always stable). That has finally changed a year ago, though: https://github.com/rivo/tview/releases/tag/v0.42.0

@prologic@twtxt.net Awesome work!

I’ve been thinking about learning Go for a while, maybe this will be the thing that finally gets me to do it.

Every now and then, I think that I have carefully proof-read my message enough times and hit the “Add message” button in tt. But then, in the message tree, I spot another missed typo. My process is then to go to my twtxt.txt and fix it by hand. However, I still have to clean up tt’s cache. This is rather tidious:

1. Recall the sqlitebrowser ~/.local/share/twtxt/tt2.sqlite from my shell history.
   
2. Switch to the “Browse data” tab.
   
3. Go to the messages table and wait a second or two until it’s loaded.
   
4. Sort by the created_at column twice, so that I get descending order.
   
5. Select the first message, which is typically the one in question.
   
6. Find the “Remove currently selected row” button in the tool bar.
   
7. Commit the changes.
   
8. Close sqlitebrowser.
   

So, I finally implemented the removal of messages from the cache in tt. I can now hit d and confirm the removal. Bam! Should have done that ages ago!

Next up is the search, I think.

I went to check on the fireflies this season. But I didn’t see any. Instead lots of moths. At first, I thought it might have been still too light, but it was already dark enough for me to miss and destroy a snail shell. Bummer. Maybe it was too wet tonight. Although, it’s probably just another or two weeks until my glowing friends will finally show up.

In the beginning, I passed two beautiful deer on the edge of the forest. They were just ten meters away, but didn’t run off, really cool. :-) I kept on walking. Before I eventually left the woodland, a frog or toad crossed my path. It was very dark by then, though, so all I could see was a black blob.

Back in town, the street lamps on the first third were all turned off for some reason. I was already glad that I will reach home without getting blinded this time, but unfortunately, the other lamps were all operational.

For this week’s (slightly late) #caturday, I’d like to introduce our 4th and final feline resident, the old boy we call Bugsy. He’s been with us for 8 years, and we think he’s 13-14 years old (but he’s not saying).

He used to sound a bit like a cartoon gangster (hence the name), but as the years have passed, he started to sound more like late-stage William Hickey (Uncle Lewis from Christmas Vacation).

He’s our sweet little old man, and he is loved.

NBA Finals Appearance Droughts ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/E2e

Years ago, I used Kate, no, not somebody’s wife, but the KDE Advanced Text Editor, to export source code files and fragments into HTML with syntax highlighting. I think that’s where I got the initial <b> idea from. There were also bucketloads of <span style='color:#644a9b;'> all over the place, even inside <b>. No CSS classes defined upfront, all colors inlined. The final rendering in the browser looked great, but the source code ugly as hell in my opinion. However, I’m thankful for hinting me at <b>. I think this kicked off everything. :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It’s the “Lyse types the entire HTML by hand” generator. Yes, no kidding. I write articles so rarely, that I can do that once in a while. It’s fun to some degree, but also not.

After some time, I finally recorded some Vim macros to insert <b>…</b>, <var>…</var>, <span class=s>…</span> etc. around the tokens. This helped a little bit. But I was still questioning my mental state doing it like that. I also had to fix a bunch of the end tags by hand, because the word movement wasn’t enough or the end movement went too far. Quite the annoying process for sure.

But I think the HTML looks a wee bit nicer and is maybe even semantically a little bit better than having only <span>s everywhere. I find the <span class="whatever"> just soo awfully long. Of course, I never look at the code again, but knowing, that e.g. there is a <b> and it saves so many bytes in comparison, makes me happy. It is a more elegant solution in my opinion. Not by much, but better nonetheless. It’s a matter of simplicity. Admittedly, even I can’t avoid the <span>s alltogether. Oh well. On the other hand, I’m sure that this does not make any difference whatsoever. I bet, nobody and nothing, like a screenreader, analyzes the HTML for that, where this would be truly useful.

Oh! Maybe text browsers, though. It just occurred to me while composing this reply. :-) Haha, I lost my bet quickly. w3m picks up at least the <b> for keywords and builtin types, <u> for filenames and <i> for comments. Yey. No different styles for <var> and <mark>, unfortunately. elinks only renders the bold. It’s cool that I had the right intuition right from the beginning, despite being unable to pinpoint it. :-)

All the <span> hell with common syntax highlighters is a downer for me that keeps me from looking more into them. If I wrote more articles, I might rig something up with Pygments. At least that’s somehow positively connotated in my brain. Not sure if it actually deserves it, but I dealt with that in some loose form (can’t even remember) years and years ago. Apparently, it wasn’t too terrible.

To prepare the table of contents, I used grep and sed with some manual intervention in the end. The entire process can be improved. Absolutely.

You wrote your own site generator, didn’t you?

Yay finally fixed some of those annoying “Mark as Read” behaviours/bugs 🐞

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I’m very curious…

What I like about this whole computer stuff is that you can explore how
things work. You can dig through problems and solve them. Nothing is
more satisfying than finally understanding something after you scratched
your head for some hours.

Surely you could do the same with AI? Tinker with how it works, study it, understand it, build your own and realize what it really is (without all the big tech hype)?

Of course, @movq@www.uninformativ.de! Most of my points are also included in your list.

First of all, programming is what I really do enjoy the most. So, it doesn’t make any sense at all to not do this anymore. “But you could use your now free time to do something much cooler and more valuable!”, others might reply. Fuck no, I don’t want to waste my time with other shit that doesn’t fulfill me, why on earth would I want to do that?

All this hallucination reduces quality badly. In my experience, it’s also happening much more rapidly than I expected. Even though developers are still supposed to own and understand whatever has been generated under their name and even be responsible for that, the sad reality is that teammates often blindly trust the AI output. “But I asked the AI and it told me that $this was impossible”, “I’ve no idea either, but the AI just generated it” are responses I get more often. What really makes my angry is when I point out a flaw and suggest an alternative and this is the reaction. It happened several times that just trying it out and seeing it clearly work to proof my point only took me half a minute, but people still did something handwavy else instead.

The learning effect is drastically reduced. The more time I spend on a topic, the better the odds that whatever I learned actually makes it over into long-term memory. It’s like if a collegue just says “do it like that” or “this solves your problem”, but neither explains the why or how. Somehow, people are still convinced that it’s a completely different story when you replace the human counterpart with a computer program in this equation.

Skills are unlearned. It’s like with automation in general, just much worse. You end up in a state where you’ve no clue how anything works under the hood or how to actually find out important information that are needed to solve your problem. You’re screwed when a process breaks out of the blue. Even though it can become also rather terrible, with classical automation you’re typically still be able to decipher how exactly the thing was supposed to do something.

The energy consumption is sooo high, I absolutely do not want to be a part in burning down our planet. I’m sure I find (and probably have long found without knowing) other ways to contribute to worsen our climate crisis.

The scraper part is already covered in detail in your list. :-)

I’m convinced that license and copyright violations are only played down or even refused entirely because companies want to make big money quickly. With the work of others of course. Their double standards are obvious, they still try to actively keep their own stuff secret and out of any training sets. At most for internal use only. Virtually noone in charge is interested in good long-term solutions. Short-term for the win, when disaster eventually strikes, the causers are long gone, the responsibilities in other hands.

Vendor lock-in is something that lots of folks are only realizing very slowly. It’s completely crazy to me. This drug dealer routine should be well-known by now. It’s fucking everywhere. Yet, people are always surprised when they found themselves caught in it.

Adding new AI stuff only increases complexity. But complexity is the enemy that everybody should fear and reduce as much as possible. Of course, this is not limited to AI at all. And everywhere I look around, people in charge looooove to make things way more complicated than they ever need to be. Yet, simplicity is the real art and much harder to achieve.

I don’t understand why we have to go back full force to the ambiguity of natural languages. This alone should be more than enough to realize what a stupid idea all that is. Linked to that is that the “instruction set” is interpreted differently with newer model versions. I mean, is has to be. Why else would somebody want to upgrade in the first place than to get more Powerful™ Features™?

Some people argue that with AI the democratization is empowered. However, in my view, the exact opposite is the case. Models are getting so large that you can basically not run them locally or even train them. So, you have to rely on whatever the vendor offers you and runs for you. In the end, this only gives the owners more power, the multi billionaires. Not exactly what I understand by democratization.

Finally, technology assessments are missing completely. Or they are faked such that mostly only the (questionable) benefits are listed. But all the negative impact is just ignored.

Let’s keep some popcorn around for when this all explodes. :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org … this reminds me that I should finally write that tutorial on how to make your own X11/Wayland keymaps. That helps a lot in mitigating stupid design issues like these.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org movq.de took ages to come up, but it finally did. Weird.

My Gemlog now finally has an Atom feed for Gemini as well as for the web at marcorocco.net/atom.xml.

I left at full sunshine and completely forgot to bring my bicycle’s headlamp. The taillight is always on the bike, but the front one gets charged in the house after every trip. Luckily, I found a torch and roll of duct tape in my hiking backpack. It finally paid off that I always carry all this silly gear around.

A few weeks ago, I actually thought about removing the torch, because it’s been a hot minute when I last used it. Fortunately, I did not. :-)

@klaxzy@klaxzy.net I should cancel Netflix as well. Back when they started their streaming service, it was a revelation: Finally, I could watch interesting shows in English, without having to wait for years, and legally (I like to be a paying customer, if it’s good). But this is long over. The interesting shows are gone or, once again, I have to wait for years until they’re available on Netflix. So, why bother anymore? 🤷‍♀️

Just a couple of shots from our trip to Bald Rock—finally got reception so I can share them!