@bender@twtxt.net Thanks, mate!

On the back of the bench, the badge says: “Gestiftet Verein berg hohenstaufen Göppingen 2013”. I read that as the Mt. Hohenstaufen club donated the bench itself: https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2026-07-03/69.jpg

On the front of the bench, the badge says: “Gestiftet von Hildegard Schuster, Gesellschafterin der Schwarz-Gruppe, Firma Wackler”. The bronze lady was donated by a shareholder of the Schwarz group, specifically the local Wackler trucking and logistics company. Clip of 27 in original resolution: https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2026-07-03/70.jpg

The book itself reads: “Zur Erinnerung an Ralph Kobza” It’s in memory of the sales manager of the art foundry next town that created also this statue. My mate took this photo: https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2026-07-03/71.jpg

Many ASCII art with humorous russian words

The concept of synthesis is more useful than artificiality in connection with generative media tools. Synthetic fabrics have been used in the garment industry for decades, while nobody complains anymore that synthesized music is inferior to music played on acoustic instruments. So why are synthetic artworks of all kinds routinely dismissed as inferior to human-produced art?

@bender@twtxt.net Now that’s an interesting philosophical viewpoint right there. But this assumes that the “AI” we seemingly have available to us today is actually telligent, understands and has cognitive reasoning. It does not. All of these LLM models from big-tech companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Alibaba are all just very powerful, very large multidimensional neural networks with attention that are very good at statistical probabilities of ‘what comes next”. I think we get really upset over the wrong things sometimes. We need to continue to be upset that these 🤬 companies have basically destroyed any meaningful value of the concept of Copyright and Intellectual Property and Works of art. The so-called “AI” we have today is just a tool. Can you say for certain that the typewriter and the computer ruined our ability to write? Perhaps yes, but we still learn how to do so, likewise, I still think that learning to write code, research, read and write are all valuable skills to learn. Later on once you have the basics, you can defer some of the “tedious” work to these models, because frankly, they’re far better at inferencing and pattern matching than you or i will ever be, not because they’re better at pattern-matching per se, but because they have been trained on a very large corpus and they are much much faster at doing the same basic things we are far superior at.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Thanks! There are a few points in there that I’ll add to my list.

Your very first point is obviously crucial. “Writing code” is just the means to an end for many people and they don’t really care about it or like it, so they love AI. I had this in another draft (it refers to the other list I posted):

https://movq.de/v/614f14c3ef/ramble.txt

And this right here is so important:

simplicity is the real art and much harder to achieve.

Finding an elegant, simple solution is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay harder than anything else. And here’s the thing: I don’t get why nerds/techies don’t get “nerd-sniped” by this. A lot of people love building big stuff and then brag about being clever/competent because they were able to build that big thing – but once you realize that this approach is the lazy one, shouldn’t you make finding the elegant solution your goal? Doesn’t that give you more bragging rights?

(Am I being clear? Do you understand what I mean? 😅)

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. :-)

@thecanine@twtxt.net I love these. Pixel art is amazing. It looks so simple, but it’s really, really hard. 😳

@movq@www.uninformativ.de LOL. I think I get the idea. I am concerned about AI too. Managers starting with “I don’t know anything about this, but here is what says”. Infuriating.

I came across this one today, here is a gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/15/opinion/art-artificial-intelligence.html?unlocked_article_code=1.bFA.XNiu.ZukFfdNl3Al1&smid=nytcore-ios-share

On Sunday, the strongest gusty wind speed of 37.2 m/s was measured at the Kylmäpihlaja station in Rauma. https://www.is.fi/kotimaa/art-2000011716535.html

2025 end the year rewind:

Compared to only 3 new artworks in 2024 and next to no work, on other projects, this year I not only met the self-imposed goal of monthly pixelart, but exceeded it by 50%, with 18 additions in total.

Relicensed the majority of canine faction owned art and projects, under two less restrictive Creative Commons licensees*. This also applies retroactively, to everyone who used/archived our art and projects, back when the old license didn’t allow it.

Disappointed by the current state of the Internet and continued lack of competition among browsers, completely reworked the main website* and made Smol Drive** (a new image gallery project), both made to be compatible with as many web and Gemini browsers, as possible.

*see https://thecanine.smol.pub
**see https://thecanine.smol.pub/smolbox

The gold saga on @quark@ferengi.one’s thoughts continues with https://netbros.com/1750974122. That’s without any doubt the most beautiful 404 page I’ve ever come across in my entire life. What an overall master piece of art. Well done, mate! <3

https://netbros.com/some-rubbish-just-to-see-the-new-birds-on-the-404-page

The Art of Solder Jumper Programming ; a book I’d love to write one day . #halfbaked #electronics #programming

My open letter, to the European Commission digital markets act team:

Hello,

I am joining other developers, concerned about Googles new plan, to approve every app and effectively destroy most of the competing 3rd party stores this way. The biggest one of these alternative stores, most known for their focus on user and developer privacy, already states, this would make it impossible for them to operate: https://f-droid.org/cs/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html
Even communities like the XDA forum, where new developers are often introduced to the world of Android development, would likely be strongly impacted, as making, publishing and installing Android apps is made less accessible.

I am not just writing on their behalf, I run a small website myself (https://thecanine.ueuo.com/), that both provides legal modifications, for some android apps - for example adding an amoled dark theme, to the most popular XMPP chat client for Android, or increasing one of Androids keyboard apps height. This all comes after Googles previous changes to the Android operating system, that prevent users from installing old apps (old to Google, can mean only a couple of months, without an update - https://developer.android.com/google/play/requirements/target-sdk and the target version gets increased every year). I rely on apps developed by a single developer, even for things like making the pixel art presented on my website and sideloading as a way to make these apps work, before developers can catch up to Google’s new requirements - if Google is allowed to slowly kill these options, us digital artists will soon lose the tools we need to create digital art.

Thanks, @thecanine@twtxt.net. It’s completely horizontal, I don’t see any diagonals. Anyway, it’s great art, happy drawing!

Today is a good day! Took my daughter to art class, got a beard trim, wife is awesome and we’re all doing great 🤞🍀

gopher://hashnix.club:70/1/~dce/art/

Thanks to a blog post by ~solderpunk and the presence of ImageMagick on my pubnix, all of my weirdcore art (apart from the animated works) is now under 32K in size! Honestly, I’d say the lower JPEG quality actually adds to the vibe of the images: something from the early web, taken permanently out of context and long forgotten.

@thecanine@twtxt.net My daughter (who is pretty good already at art and only 10 :D) says this looks like a “blob” 🤣 I tried to explain to her that this is pixel art, but I’m not quite sure she has the same appreciation (yet) 😅

upcoming workshop! we will participate in the Alpaca Conference (Algorithmic Patterns in the Creative Arts) with: Introduction to the qiudanz technique: computational transformation of minimalist movement sequences | https://compudanzas.net/talks_and_workshops.html

Since Fastly acquired and recently shut down glitch.com, some of my ancient webapps are no longer available, nor do I have any plans to make them available again - all had either zero, or very few monthly visits, used outdated libraries and would be a waste of money, to continue hosting and updating elsewhere.

All art archives remain unaffected and all projects shut down before 2025, were already permanently deleted, but if there’s someone out there, still relying on the recently discontinued projects, somehow - you can reach out and request their source code.

These requests will only be honoured, until the end of this year, when we plan to permanently delete, all of this data (both webapps and files only hosted on Amazons CDN).

Canine out °_°

https://0x0.st/8d0X.gif #art #ia #video

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org dmenu is a great example.

There have been several attempts at porting dmenu from X11 to Wayland. Well, not exactly “porting” it, more like rewriting it from scratch. Turns out: It’s not that easy.

dmenu is super fast and reliable. None of the Wayland rewrites are (at least none of the popular ones that I know of). They are either bloated and/or slow.

It takes a lot of discipline and restraint to write simple software and not blow up the codebase. This is much harder than people think. It’s a form of art, really.

Felt the need to make this stupid reference - nobody will get, most likely. Feel free to guess (the file name and todays date, are both a hint), any other notes and opinions appreciated too, idk if I ever drew a standing one, from the front, before.

FRIENDS I GOT A PHYSICAL COPY OF A TUX GAME LOOK AT ITTTTTTTTTT

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz i found this, could be a good start: https://github.com/seaweedfs/seaweedfs/wiki/Getting-Started

speaking of minio

I sent you my QR code, please respond!

*for context: long ago, there were some complaints, about some of my sitting drawings, where the legs are apart, not using dithering/more shading and one of my favourite artists, made a video, exploring the use of QR codes, in art
P.S.: the code just redirects to my websites

My vision with this newsletter is to have a slower medium for communicating about my art as well as ideas and projects I’m working on regarding how we can use digital technology to our own benefits instead of being exploited by big tech.

Twtxt not sloe enough for you? 🤣

@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.

IT ROCKS!! oh my god do they do their art on paper with colored pencils then scan it & tweak everything digitally….. it looks it…… sick :0

new icon! art is by rian gonzales, one of my fave comic artists :)

@prologic@twtxt.net Absolutely! It is essential to practice and deepen every art 😄

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Programming is art. You become good at art by practising your art. You learn artistic patterns by being inspired by and reading others art works. The most importance however is that you practise your art.

@prologic@twtxt.net Sounds like art to me 😀

Legal art forgery, for the sake of movies
Comments ⌘ Read more

‘Bright Circle’ and ‘Margaret Fuller’: The Rise of the Transcendental Woman
Comments ⌘ Read more

Home galleries are hiding in plain sight across Canada
Comments ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org You’re realling pushing it with those distances. 😅 I went for a quick 2km walk today, saw two deer, that’s it. 😅

What the heck is going on in 86.jpg? An art installation, apparently, but, uh, I wouldn’t trust that. 😂

The Art of Assembly Language
Comments ⌘ Read more

Bring Back RSS Feeds to Browsers
Comments ⌘ Read more

Nice Things with SVG
Comments ⌘ Read more

@thecanine@twtxt.net contribution mine:

“Any art I posted here, can be found through my (now almost—thanks to @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org—entirely HTML 5 complient) website.”

@prologic@twtxt.net it’s fine, I never expected my yeets, to be preserved for future generations. Any art I posted here, can be found through my (now almost entirely HTML 5 complient) website.

Switzerland’s Vinyl Turntable Roundabout: Unique Road Art
Comments ⌘ Read more

There’s a secret art easter egg thing, hidden on my website ( https://thecanine.ueuo.com ), for this years April fools event - it’s been there for a few weeks, but now I can finally give hints.

The Art of DJing: Avalon Emerson
Comments ⌘ Read more

Bit of an update, there is now a general licence for all my stuff:

“Unless projects are accompanied by a different license, Creative Commons apply (“BY-NC-ND” for all art featuring the Canine mascot and “BY-NC” for everything else).”

It’s even included on my website, where most of the demand for a clear licence originated from:

In practice this changes nothing, as I was never enforcing anything more than this anyway and given permission for other use too. Now it’s just official that this is the baseline, of what can be done, without having to ask for permission first.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de :-D

In the meantime, I tried to add English subtitles, so the international audience has a chance of enjoying some of them, too. There are a bunch of puns, so translations don’t work at that great.

I went to an exhibition of my fine arts teacher who passed away last year. He was a pretty cool dude and good teacher. I reckon I had him in 7th and probably also 8th grade. His Schelme (imps) were very famous here in this county and presumably well beyond.

Unfortunately, picture frame glas doesn’t mix all that great with a fairly dark light and my camera. So, sorry in adavance for the poor quality. Anyway, I photographed a few funny paintings. Watch out, it may contain saucy contents: https://lyse.isobeef.org/siegfried-wagner-farrenstall-2025-03-15/.

Zen and the art of microcode hacking
Now that we have examined the vulnerability that enables arbitrary microcode patches to be installed on all (un-patched) Zen 1 through Zen 4 CPUs, let’s discuss how you can use and expand our tools to author your own patches. We have been working on developing a collection of tools combined into a single project we’re calling zentool. The long-term goal is to provide a suite of capabilities similar to binutils, but targeting AMD microcode instead of CPU mach … ⌘ Read more

We went up our backyard mountain again right after lunch. The sun peaked through the clouds sometimes. The 6°C felt much, much cooler with the northeast wind. We got lucky, though, it was dead calm at the summit. At least on the southwestern side, which is a few meters lower than the very top to the east. That was shielded absolutely perfectly from the wind (we were extremely surprised), so we sat down on a bench and could really enjoy the sun heating us up. Apart from the haze, the view was really nice.

There were even patches of snow left up top, that was unexpected. Also, somebody created a cool rock art piece on a tree stump. That one rock absolutely looked like a face. Crazy!

Enjoy: https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2025-03-01/

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Just before the pandemic, we watched Uncle Bob videos once a week in the lunch break. While almost all of my old teammates agreed with his views, I partially found them to be very odd and even counterproductive.

I didn’t come across John Ousterhout or any of his work before, at least not deliberately. So, this document is my first contact.

I only finished the chapter on comments and I totally agree with John so far. This document just manifests to me how weird Bob’s view is on certain subjects.

I always disagreed with the concept of a maximum method length. Sure, generally, shorter functions are probably better, but it always depends. And I’ve certainly seen super short methods that just made the code flow even worse to follow. While “one function should only do one thing” is a nice general rule, I’m 100% in team John with the shown examples. There are cases, where this doesn’t help readability at all. Not even close.

To me, a function always has to justify its existence. Either by reusing it at least at another place or by coming up with dedicated tests for it. But if it is just called once and there are no tests, I almost always decide against it. Personally, I don’t mind longer methods. We just recently had a discussion about that and I lost against two other workmates who are more in Uncle Bob’s camp, they refactored one medium sized method into three very short ones. Luckily, we agree on most other topics.

Lol, what!? The shorter the method, the longer the variables inside? I first thought I misread or the writeup mixed it up. I’ll always do it the other way around.

I’ve been also bitten badly by outdated comments in the past, but Bob must have worked on really terrible projects to end up with such an attitude to dislike comments. Oh well. No doubt, I’ve come across by several orders of magnitude more useless comments, in my experience (autogenerated) JavaDocs fall in the category more frequently than not. So, I know that there are different types of comments. A comment doesn’t automatically mean that it is good and justified.

But I also partially agree with Bob and John and think that a good name has a proper chance to save a comment. Though, when in doubt, I go John’s route and use a shorter name with a comment rather than use a kilometer long identifier. Writing good comments typically takes some time, sometimes much longer than writing the code. It regularly takes me several minutes. It’s a hard art.

I perhaps should read up on John’s work. He seems to be more reasonable and likeminded. :-) Let me continue to complete this document.