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Every now and then, I think that I have carefully proof-read my message enough times and hit the ā€œAdd messageā€ 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 ā€œBrowse dataā€ 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 ā€œRemove currently selected rowā€ 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!

https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/tt-confirm-message-removal.png

Next up is the search, I think.

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In-reply-to » Oh boy, I absolutely hate this stupid trend of not writing changelogs anymore! Why the fuck would one seriously consider it to be a viable option to just let some shitty bot spew all merge requests on a goddamn GitHub release?! First of all, these merge request titles suck balls. The order of the changes in this "changelog" is completely random (well, probably merge time, which is as useless as the dick on the Pope). They are not grouped by anything at all. Additions, changes, removals, deprecations, etc. randomly mixed up in one giant list. And then "Add feature X", seventeen kilometers further down "Revert 'Add feature X'". Fuck you! Don't include this shit in the first place!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hahaha, great timing! :-D I love your article and agree with almost all your points.

On the AI changelog part, though, I’d rather recommend to just not have a changelog at all.

Another important thing for me is the deprecation notice section. What do I need to look out for in the future? Should I start to migrate to another API soon? Even right now? Or does it have time?

While going through these terrible GitHub release pages, I also found these ā€œNew Project Contributorsā€ sections (yeah, for that, they found the time to make a section) annoying. Don’t get me wrong, sure, credit where credit is due. But come on. Soooooo much space for an inefficiently formatted (and also unsorted) list. At least it was easy enough to skip over it.

And then, there are also these changelogs or rather notice documents in general that are infested with multicolored emojis all over the place. My brain’s spam filter kicks in and shoves everything to /dev/null immediately. It’s especially a thing at work.

In my previous work project, we also used the Keep A Changelog Format. That was great. You wouldn’t believe how often I resorted back to that document. At least twice a week, often several times a day. I was very glad that we put in this effort. Of course, writing the changelog took its time, but it was worth every minute and more. Reading a many months old item, it was immediately clear. I was our best customer in that regard.

Now, it’s just the same auto shitshow with MR titles in a rolling date-versioned release scheme. It’s just our team who has to deal with that, though. I think I’m the only one who is not a fan of it.

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In-reply-to » @movq That's a great effect! šŸ‘

@itsericwoordward@itsericwoodward.com I just want to let you know that your mention completion seems to be broken. :-) The URL is duplicated with a comma in between. Actually, the protocols differ. I suspect that you extract all url metadata fields from the feed, not only the canonical one used for hashing (the first one) and join them. I’m not completely sure, I would need to read up on the specs (it’s already past bed o’clock, though), but I guess that there is no explicit rule for picking the mention URL. Without having thought about it too much, I reckon the safest bet is to stick to the hashing URL when in doubt and the URL that was used to subscribe to the feed is not available for whatever reason. The URL from the subscription list is probably even better.

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In-reply-to » Okay. I have lost the ā€œbattleā€ against ā€œAIā€ at work and I will no longer try to ā€œfightā€ any of it.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Related reading (if you’re interested): Let’s Talk about LLMs by James Bennett

First, it quotes the DORA report on the ā€œState of AI-assisted Software Developmentā€:

The research reveals a critical truth: AI’s primary role in software development is that of an amplifier. It magnifies the strengths of high-performing organizations and the dysfunctions of struggling ones.

At the end, it quotes the late Fred Books:

The first step toward the management of disease was replacement of demon theories and humours theories by the germ theory. That very step, the beginning of hope, in itself dashed all hopes of magical solutions. It told workers that progress would be made stepwise, at great effort, and that a persistent, unremitting care would have to be paid to a discipline of cleanliness. So it is with software engineering today.

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In-reply-to » @prologic don’t get mad at me, but the long block of text didn’t address any of my questions. šŸ˜œšŸ˜…

@bender@twtxt.net Fine, Let me answer properly and concretely šŸ˜…

Would you want your children not to learn anything, because ā€œthey have AIā€?

No, children still need to learn. That will never change. What they learn however will over time.

Are you OK with your children using the AI for all of their homework?

Yes, frankly I am. Why? Because much of what we teach them in school is utterly pointless.
For example, learning to read Shakespear never taught me anything useful in my life. I regret much of my school years to be honest.
I leanred to read and write, sure. But I learned Math, Science, Computing and how things work on my own by being very curious.

What sense will it make?

That assumes I answered ā€œnoā€, which I did not. So it all makes perfect sense :D

What kind of future would that bring for them?

This assumes I said ā€œYesā€, which I did :D It will be an itneresting future that’s for sure. I don’t think we can just bury our heads in teh sand and pretend it’s all going to go away, It will not. It will make things very interesting for sure, as we’re already starting to see what’s possible and what’s changeing. For example; ordinary people are using these LLM(s) to write their legal suit and defense in courts with varying levels of success.

Even if AI were to become omniscient, what will it be of the human race then?

I’m not convinced it ever will. In fact, I am not convinced we know how to create true intellience at all.

What would we do?

What would be so different from say an Alien invasion from far superious beings?
What would we do that? Band together and defend humanity?

Serve the AI? Maintain the AI?

That assumes that ā€œAIā€ will become intelligent and omniscient, which I don’t believe it ever will.

Would we have found the true meaning of life then?

If the meaning of life is to create our own sub-species liken to ourselves, sure, maybe. But is that even a reality? not sure, I doubt it. We barely understand ourselves at the best of times, let alone how our minds works.

To care for AI, Is that it?

How would this be different to caring for a friend, a family member If we could ever truly reate an actual sentient being with real feelings and intelligenace, is there any reason to worry? Could we not be freinds and have mutual goals and form relationships?

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In-reply-to » @lyse Thanks! There are a few points in there that I’ll add to my list.

@bender@twtxt.net Now that’s an interesting philosophical viewpoint right there. But this assumes that the ā€œAIā€ 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 ā€˜what comes nextā€. 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 ā€œAIā€ 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 ā€œtediousā€ 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.

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In-reply-to » @arne This is interesting. Sorry I missed this, I just found this post of yours and wanted to contribute šŸ˜… Here's something interesting about me... I don't ever talk to myself, like ever. I have no, what they call, "inner monologue". Maybe I'm odd, but my wife asked me this very same question a while back and I said the same, there is never anything in my head except ideas, visuals or sounds, sometimes all at once, but never an inner monologue of "talking to myself".

@bender@twtxt.net Nope. Trust me I do not. The only time I do is when I’m reading/writing. I otherwise have no inner monologue when doing anything.

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In-reply-to » I just realized that this book, which I’m still using as a reference every now and then, is from 2005.

@tftp@tilde.town Ah, I see. I have a feeling that a lot of stuff is going on under the hood all the time and it’s mostly the userland-visible things that stay the same? šŸ¤” But yeah, some stuff is really, really old, like the TCP code I’ve recently (tried to) read.

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@tftp@tilde.town mentioning in here requires he whole shebang. With jenny, if using vim, there is a key combination:

Nick name completions: Allows you to use ^X ^U to turn verbatim nick names into full twtxt mentions. For example, typing ā€œcathā€ and then pressing ^X ^U will turn ā€œcathā€ into a full mention, like ā€œ@ā€. (This function will read the contents of your ā€œ~/.config/jenny/followā€ file.)

See: https://movq.de/git/jenny/file/vim/README.html

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In-reply-to » So apparently this is the default when making a new Matrix account, which makes me wonder why we’re even doing this whole crypto dance in the first place … ?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

So, it’s plenty good enough for them.

Yeah, but on the other hand, you can’t even log in normally to a Matrix/Element account. I mean using username + password. It’s not expected that you ever log out or lose your browser session. If you do, you must use a one-time backup code (that you must create and save beforehand) to log in again.

To be fair, I can’t say that I fully understand what Matrix is doing in the first place. The text that I quoted reads like they have your keys. But they also claim that they only store this stuff encryped: https://element.io/en/help#encryption5 So … encrypted with what? Only option here is my password, isn’t it? (But if my password was good enough to reclaim an account … why do all the other stuff …)

Matrix takes end-to-end encryption seriously. When I ran a Matrix server for the family, the family members would regularly lose their keys, because they didn’t pay attention to something. That’s on purpose! Or rather, that was on purpose. Maybe it’s different these days?

No clue.

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All sorts of .de domains don’t resolve right now. But not all, movq.de for example still works. All on our server and basically all major other sites are cactus. Maybe some DENIC problem? I’m too tired to investigate, but I’m looking forward to tomorrow to read some report on that. :-) Good night.

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In-reply-to » @lyse These days (and it’s been like that for a while), almost everything is loaded on-demand depending on which hardware the OS finds, so you can simply copy all your files with cp -a, install a bootloader, adjust some minor things /etc/fstab, done. Well, maybe not ā€œdoneā€, but it’s easy to sort out the remaining stuff afterwards.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I would love to read a more detailed account on these moves. When you write moved, you mean user data, correct?

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Finished reading The Island of Desire, by Robert Dean Frisbie. A book of two halves; the first slow, and the second nail-biting. ā˜…ā˜…ā˜…ā˜… šŸ“—

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In-reply-to » 495 turns and about ~4hrs alter I won! šŸ™Œ Small map, 2-players, myself and an AI player. šŸ˜… Media -- It took forever to beach the island the AI player was on and get enough Galley's and Swordsmen just to push back and eventually slowly destroy all enemy units and capture all cities! 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net I am going to give it a more serious spin (meaning I am going to go read the help page). I’ve got to tell you though, most successful games do not need a help. But I am fully aware that there is a subset of gamers that would not mind—if not appreciate—a game with help, manual, and the likes.

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Another AI rant:

One of the ā€œkey featuresā€ of LLMs is that you can use ā€œnatural languageā€, because that is supposed to be easier than having to learn a programming language. So, when someone says to me, ā€œI automated this process using AI!ā€, what they mean is: They have written a very, very large Markdown document. In this document, they list what the AI is supposed to do.

In prose.

This is a complete disaster.

Programming and programming languages have one crucial property: They follow a well-defined structure and every word has a well-defined meaning. That is absolutely brilliant, because I can read this and I can follow the program in my head. I can build a mental model. I can debug this, down to the precise instructions that the CPU executes. This all follows well-defined patterns that you can reason about.

But with these Markdown files, I am completely lost. We lose all these important properties! No debugging, no reasoning about program flow, nothing. It’s all gone. It’s a magic black box now, literally randomized, that may or may not do what you wanted, in some order.

People now throw these Markdown files at me … and … am I supposed to read this? Why? It’s completely random and fuzzy.

Sadly, these AI tools are good enough to be able to mostly grasp the authors intentions. Hence people don’t see the harm they cause, because ā€œit worksā€.

We already have a ton of automations like this at work: Tickets get piped through an LLM and these Markdown files / prompts determine what will happen with the ticket, and maybe they trigger additional actions as well, like account creation or granting permissions. All based on fuzzy natural language – that no two humans will ever properly agree on.

Jesus Christ, we’re now INTENTIONALLY bringing the ambiguity of legal texts and lawyers into programming.

Using natural language is NOT easier than using a programming language. It is HARDER. Have you people never read a legal contract? And that stuff can STILL be debated in a court room.

I can’t begin to comprehend why we, tech folks, push this so hard. What is wrong with you? Or me?

(And, once again, we’re ignoring other factors here. LLMs use a ton of energy and ressources, that we don’t have to spare. It’s expensive as fuck. It doesn’t even run locally on our servers, meaning we give all these credentials and permissions to some US company. It’s insane.)

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What do the Gopher Troopers think of the following? The Gopher protocol is a nearly-forgotten network protocol from the early 1990s, designed to serve and navigate text-based menus and documents over the Internet. While itĀ’s far less common than HTTP/HTTPS today, there are still some security risks associated with Gopher and Gopher space. LetĀ’s break them down carefully: 1. Lack of Encryption Problem: Gopher was designed long before widespread use of SSL/TLS. All dataĀ—including credentials, file transfers, and menu selectionsĀ—is transmitted in plaintext. Impact: Anyone intercepting traffic (e.g., via a network sniffer, public Wi-Fi, or a compromised router) can read sensitive information, including usernames and passwords. 2. No Authentication or Access Control Problem: Gopher servers rarely implement robust authentication; access control is usually limited or non-existent. Impact: Unauthorized users might browse sensitive directories or download private files, particularly if servers are misconfigured. 3. Server Software Vulnerabilities Problem: Modern OSes can still run legacy Gopher servers, but the software is often unmaintained. Impact: Old software may contain buffer overflows, directory traversal bugs, or command injection vulnerabilities that attackers could exploit. 4. Malicious Gopher Links Problem: Gopher menus can contain links that point to scripts or other servers, similar to hyperlinks in HTTP. A client following a malicious link could inadvertently: Download malware Access sensitive internal network resources (server-side request forgery) Impact: Could serve as a vector for attacks if a user opens content from untrusted sources. 5. Legacy Protocol Weaknesses Problem: Gopher lacks modern web security mechanisms like: Content security policies Same-origin policies Cross-site request forgery protection Impact: If Gopher is bridged to other services (like modern browsers via gateways), old vulnerabilities may be exposed. 6. Information Leakage Problem: Gopher servers often provide directory listings without restriction. Impact: Sensitive files, backup directories, and internal documents may be exposed unintentionally. 7. Bridging Risks Problem: Some modern browsers access Gopher via gateways (HTTP-to-Gopher proxies). These bridges may: Expose sensitive internal resources to the gateway Introduce logging or tracking that wouldnĀ’t exist on pure Gopher Impact: Attacks could occur indirectly through insecure intermediaries. Key Takeaways Gopher is inherently insecure due to its design in a pre-HTTPS era. Main threats: eavesdropping, unauthorized access, malware delivery, and exploitation of unpatched server software. Safe practice: Use Gopher only in isolated, trusted environments, or through secure HTTP(S) gateways with proper sanitization.

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Finished reading Just for Fun, by Linus Torvalds. As a Linux/Unix geek, it’s an interesting story, also fun. Would like an update ā˜…ā˜…ā˜…ā˜… šŸ“—

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Finished reading The Martian, by Andy Weir, after just four days. A very engrossing and humorous read. Time for the movie tomorrow ā˜…ā˜…ā˜…ā˜…ā˜… šŸ“—

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I’m happy to report that, earlier today, I published an early version of express-twtkpr: an ExpressJS library that enables hosting (and directly posting to) a twtxt.txt file. It works great (otherwise you wouldn’t be able to read this), but it’s still in alpha and lacks documentation, examples, tests, installation flexibility, or polish, so please use it at your own risk. Enjoy! https://www.npmjs.com/package/express-twtkpr

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Finished reading Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir, this afternoon, just in time for catching the movie tomorrow. A really fun read ā˜…ā˜…ā˜…ā˜…ā˜… šŸ“—

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In-reply-to » hi yarn! what is everyone working on today?

@kiwu@twtxt.net I am trying to read our Information Security Office ā€œmindā€ to grasp what they want. So far they seem to want to get logs from our BIG-IP F5 load balancers into Azure Sentinel, but the Telemetry Streaming plugin normally used for it is on maintenance mode, with deprecations happening on the F5 and Microsoft side soonish. So, yeah… ā€œfunā€. Oh, and they want it on production by tomorrow. LOLz!

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Do not die from hunger. Man does not live from bread only, but from every word out of God’s mouth. Read the Good News of Matthew in the Bible. bible.com or 5fi.sh in every language or gopher://rbfh.de or gopher://sdf.org/1/users/scn/Bibel .

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@movq@www.uninformativ.de I reckon up until then you had to have another first name that clearly differentiated. Didn’t read through the court decision, though.

Interesting, I always thought that Kiran was a male first name. But I only know one person with that name. As last name, though.

Now I’m wondering, was that also the beginning when parents started giving their kids really weird names?

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In-reply-to » This weekend, I'm building a service that turns PDFs into chaptered, audiobook‑quality narration in minutes—upload, listen in a built‑in player, and download MP3/M4B files with clean metadata.

Has a bit of a long history story behind this, where last year at work we were reading this book called Engineering a Safer World and initially came across a service called Speech Reply that allowed me to upload a PDF copy of the book and start to read it, but unfortunately, the free trial right now before I can finish reading it turns out that Speech Reply service cost a whopping US$30 a month and expected me to pay a full year upfront, which was well over US$300 just for one fucking book! So I sent their sales and support staff a message kindly asking if it were possible to just pay for the audio transcription of just a single book or to change to a monthly subscription fee, to which they refused, so basically in the end I got very angry and told them to go fuck themselves and built my own service. A year later here we are :-)

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In-reply-to » Btw @movq you've inspired me to try and have a good 'ol crack at writing a bootloader, stage1 and customer microkernel (µKernel) that will eventually load up a Mu (µ) program and run it! 🤣 I will teach Mu (µ) to have a ./bin/mu -B -o ... -p muos/amd64 ... target.

I’ve only got a handful of syscalls working right now. Taking inspiration from the calling convention of the Linux kernel and even made the service/interrupt handler int 0x80h 🤣 I’ve only got read, write, alloc and exit working righ tnow 🄲

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In-reply-to » Here am I looking at the different tcell.Key constants and typing different key combinations in the terminal to see the generated tcell.EventKeys in the debug log. Until I pressed Ctrl+Alt+Backspace… :-D Yep, suddenly there went my X…

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I guess so, yes. I read something about that in some ticket. In v3 the terminfo support was dropped, though. I’m still on v2 at the moment.

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