@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @tftp@tilde.town Someone has pointed out that there’s OpenRsync:

https://www.openrsync.org/

Since I run OpenBSD on my servers, I actually do use that and have never noticed any incompatibilities with the “normal” rsync.

@prologic@twtxt.net

it’s “probabilistic” not “deterministic”

Yep, I know. And when I tell that to people and tell them “if we use AI here, we lose the ability to debug this stuff”, then all I get is: “But it’s good enough. We don’t need to debug this. Non-deterministic computing has its use cases.”

But that is just not how I’d like to model/implement our business processes. 🤔 I want something reliable, not “it mostly works”.

LIke with almost everything “big-tech” has done, it’s not the tech you should not trust, but the companies themselves. For example, accessing and using the models (because let’s face it, they have clusters of much larger and more powerful GPU clusters than we could ever afford to build and own ourselves, at least for now) is fine, but trusting their end-user products/services, not so much.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I’m kind of flag you bring thi sup, because you simply can’t. You wouldn’t even be able to in an atypical neural network either (which is what ehse things are anyway). The problem here really isn’t the so-called “AI” (I wish we’d stop calling it AI), but the flawed usage(s) thereof. I believe I even stated earlier in this thread that sometimes it may not do what you expect, it’s “probabilistic” not “deterministic” – those pushing for greater use need to understand this, those not happy with the “push”, should educate the ignorant here (especailly managers pushing for weak, insecure and bad uses).

@prologic@twtxt.net Ahh, I see. Okay, I’m with you there. On this high level, I can understand how the thing works.

Maybe my wording isn’t good. 🤔 Let’s take a real life example from what we do at work.

There’s this AI chatbot. It gets support requests from users, so the user says something like “I need access to a particular system”. This triggers the bot to “run” the instructions stored in a large Markdown file, like “check if the user is authorized to do this, then issue the following API requests”, and so on. This is essentially like running a little script, except it’s written in natural language (German) and there’s no “script interpreter” but just the AI.

Now, suppose that the AI doesn’t quite do what was intended. There’s some subtle bug. How do you debug this? How do you find out how the AI came to the “conclusion” to run step A instead of step B? And how do you find out how exactly you have to change your prompt so this doesn’t happen again next time?

If this was an actual script/program instead of AI, you could repeat the request and attach a debugger or throw in some printf() or whatever. How do you do that kind of thing with AI? How do you pinpoint exactly what the problem was?

(Or is this just a stupid idea? Do we have to give up that way of thinking when using AI? Is the era of debuggability over?)

@bender@twtxt.net So yeah, no, I do not have an inner monologue at all. Most of the time my inner mind is busy just replaying music or visuals (or at least it used to before I lost my sight, these days it just replays visuals and sounds), but there is never a time when I “talk to myself”, ever, I don’t ever think through something, a problem or an activity and have self-arguments. I just do.

@bender@twtxt.net Fine, Let me answer properly and concretely 😅

Would you want your children not to learn anything, because “they have AI”?

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 “no”, which I did not. So it all makes perfect sense :D

What kind of future would that bring for them?

This assumes I said “Yes”, 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 “AI” 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?

@prologic@twtxt.net so, “people with no inner monologue—a condition researchers sometimes refer to as anendophasia”, says the AI. Then “it is not a disorder: lacking an inner voice is simply a different, perfectly healthy way of being human”. Ah, so a condition, but a healthy one. Got it.

Again, I am not talking about a true monologue. If you have never thought “OK, let’s do this!” before engaging on an activity, then alright. Weird, in contrast to the rest of us, hard to believe, yes, but I believe you. Much of the troubleshooting, and creativity that comes with thought involves, well, thoughts. Maybe you are closer to AI than the rest of us, indeed! 🤪😂

@bender@twtxt.net Well no. Some of us don’t. Let me point you at some research on the subject 😅 Some people don’t have an inner monologue

@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.

@prologic@twtxt.net let me ask you this. Would you want your children not to learn anything, because “they have AI”? Are you OK with your children using the AI for all of their homework? What sense will it make? What kind of future would that bring for them? We need to analyse the repercussions from all angles, even if AI were to provide absolutely flawless answers every single time. Even if AI were to become omniscient. What will it be of the human race then? What would we do? Serve the AI? Maintain the AI? Would we have found the true meaning of life then? To care for AI. Is that it?

Aha, yesterday’s newly added support for LC_TIME to render localized timestamps also broke the feed parsing with my LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 and LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 environment. :-)

Atom feeds make use of RFC 3339 timestamps. They are first converted into RFC 882 timestamp representation, which is the one that RSS feeds use. However, this conversion now results in localized RFC 882 timestamps, which cannot be parsed into Unix timestamp numbers via curl_getdate(…). I bet that it doesn’t know about the localization at all and expects English month and weekday names. Looking at its docs, I reckon that function was selected because of its myriad of supported timestamp formats: https://curl.se/libcurl/c/curl_getdate.html RFC 3339 is not included, though, hence the transformation up front.

The intermediate Item objects in the parser domain use std::string for the timestamp representation. This isn’t all that silly, because Newsboat supports all sorts of different feed formats with different timestamp formats. These RFC 883 timestamps are centrally parsed into time_t.

Speaking of time: It’s time to go to bed after this late bug hunting fun. :-)

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. :-)

@arne@uplegger.eu @movq@www.uninformativ.de Typically, I use “I”. But also “one” and, less common, “you”.

@itsericwoordward@itsericwoodward.com @bender@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net Hahaha, it’s working fine in mine. But I cannot use spaces in the nickname. :-)

https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/nick.png

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com such a déjà vu! Breaking Yarn’s parser used to be a daily routine. Now it doesn’t happen that often mostly because I have learned what it will cause it to break, and hold myself back. But it is finicky! 😅

Over there, on the othernet, I just stumbled upon the question:

When talking to yourself in your head, do you use “I”, “you”, or “we”?

As for me, I say “we” - in regular situations. But if I fuck up, it’s “you”. 😞👈

@prologic@twtxt.net Wow, thanks everyone for the kind words! 😊

In answer to @movq@www.uninformativ.de and @bender@twtxt.net: I’m sorry, it’s just the default camera app on my Samsung Galaxy S23 phone with the “Portrait” mode turned on. It’s a trick I learned from my wife, who used to work for a dog daycare and took pics of doggos for their FB page. It works well for humans, too. 😁

I just missed the 20 year anniversary of my blog. 😬 What a stupid long time to do this.

This started out as a PHP page with user comments, MySQL as a database, a PHP webadmin … can you believe that? Totally unnecessary. But everything was “LAMP” back then, so that’s what I was using as well. I kicked out MySQL in 2011 (it just stored files since then) and eventually switched to static HTML pages in 2015.

RSS feeds have only been there since 2009, because I was late to the party. For a long time, I didn’t understand what they were good for. 🤦

Use telnet or nc with port 70.

@252aa: Stoat is trash. Whoever is using it should die.

Everyone who uses this chat is indeed cool. Also I use dillo for gopher, it’s awesome.

Everyone who uses this chat is cool. That is all, thanks.

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

In other words, it’s over 20 years old now. 😬

https://movq.de/v/8736860b1a/utlk.jpg

@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 “cath” and then pressing ^X ^U will turn “cath” into a full mention, like “@”. (This function will read the contents of your “~/.config/jenny/follow” file.)

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

Maybe I’m just used to the text-only ecosystems of Gopher and Gemini by now, but even Nostr feels too noisy for me.

hello from, portal.mozz.us

I’m pleased to announce that express-twtkpr (my ExpressJS library for hosting, editing, and posting to a twtxt.txt file) continues to crawl towards a full release with another (pre-alpha) update published to NPM. This update includes a whole new plugin system, and even a (little) more documentation. Check it out, if you dare (and use it at your own risk): https://www.npmjs.com/package/express-twtkpr

And speaking of plugins, here’s where the fun’s at: announcing express-twtkpr-core-plugins, a set of 3 plugins for your TwtKpr install: emojiButton, uploadButton, and postToMastodon. Like express-twtkpr, this set of plugins is still in pre-alpha, and lacks documentation, examples, tests, installation flexibility, or polish (so also use them at your own risk). Other than that, they work great: https://www.npmjs.com/package/express-twtkpr-core-plugins

https://itsericwoodward.com/images/bba54e39.png
https://itsericwoodward.com/images/e472ea48.png
https://itsericwoodward.com/images/65b23473.png

Stay tuned for more! 🤘

@bender@twtxt.net Apologies, I’m still working through some layout issues with TwtStrm and frequently miss mentions…

Magic: the Gathering does not use a Game Master (although professional referees are often used in sanctioned events). While the game has alot of thematic crossover with with D&D (or fantasy games in general), the system is much more of an abstract, card-dueling system involving things like “the stack” and insanely specific rules on card timing and interactions.

Like, we joke about “I’m sending my army of (goblins / elves / angels / whatever) at you,” but that’s about as far into the “role-playing” element most magic games get in my experience (and most of the “official” competitive games I’ve played at my FLGS were even more abstract and less thematic, although it’s been years since I played in one of those).

@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.

I’m using a browser. I have both Overbite and Lynx (Termux) installed.

use dillo from mainline with the dillo plugin, the one from distros it’s very outdated

@bender@twtxt.net It’s been a while (6.5 years) since I’ve done this. I’d do it like this:

• Boot some Linux from a USB stick on the new machine. Preferably Arch Linux, since that is what I’m running and that’ll make the upcoming chroot easier.
  
• Partition the new disk, create LUKS devices, filesystems, …
  
• Mount the new filesystems and copy all data (user data and the system itself – everything). Do this either over the network or by hooking up the old disk directly.
  
• chroot into the new system (Arch has an arch-chroot tool for that which is used during normal installation, if I’m not mistaken). Inside the chroot, install the bootloader.
  
• Do some fixups, like adjusting /etc/fstab or /etc/crypttab.
  

And I think that should be it. 🤔

@bender@twtxt.net I believe it’s been money well spent if I’m to be honest. It’s a great “get away” and “adventure” for not just myself but the family too. Getting away from it all, experiencing nature and what this wonderful country has to offer is pretty nice 👍 As long as we keep up the adventures over the long time, use it several times a year, it will be very well wroth the investment 👌

Two mates and I went hiking yesterday. The sun was beating down on us, but luckily, it was also rather windy which helped to cool off. Unfortunately, we also encountered bucketloads of drunk hikers with hardcarts loaded full of beer who had to very loudly please everbody with their shitty taste of music. What a stupid tradition on 1st May public holiday over here. Other than that, it was a great hike.

I was pleasantly surprised that my trains were dead on time, so both super short times to switch connections worked out perfectly on both the way there and back. I did not expect this to happen at all and already braced myself for an additional half hour waiting time. Especially with the stupid Stuttgart Beer Festival right now. Even more drunk idiots everywhere and of course also in the trains. On the return journey, I learned about all sorts of family relations etc. in various Allgäu villages. Oh boy. At least nobody vomited, that’s a bonus.

Also, I sweated more on the first return Sauna-Bahn than on the entire hike combined. It was awfully hot in there.

Anyway, all in all it was a great time in the outdoors with my mates: https://lyse.isobeef.org/monrepos-favoritepark-hungerberg-ruine-hoheneck-2026-05-01/

() Thank you, sir! It was a pleasure for us, too.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org 33! Wow! Very good stash on clicks, Lyse! And that Ford van reminds me of the police account used to keep order around here. LOL. It’s a gem!

@prologic@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de @bender@twtxt.net Thank you very much! <3

I only filtered out the noise floor of the camera itself. I selected one second of “silence” in Audacity and used the “Effect” → “Noise reduction” (Rausch-Verminderung in German) dialog with its default settings. I repeated that two or three times in total with different sections of “silence”. It’s very hard to find something where there is really no other bird singing in the background. But in contrast to the original audio, the edited version is noticeably more squeaky I find.

Oh, and I increased the volume. Especially after the noise reduction, everything is a bit quieter.

I got rather lucky, only a few cars went by and my microphone is too shitty, to really pick it up. :-D It’s kinda drowned out by the background noise. 45 seconds into the video, a car passes. Also at 1:10 without a doubt. I’m sure there were actually many were. Most of them passed behind me, the mic is facing away from that sound source. Of course, the densely built-up area still reflects a lot.

It also helped that Azabache is a loud singer himself. Fortunately, no idiots screaming either.

If you want to compare yourself or play around to see what other improvements you are able to achieve, I uploaded the original from the camera in the same directory under the lovely name DSCN5687.MOV. It’s 236.1 MiB in size.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org thank you! I got visual now! 🙈 Now, you had to pull out a pic from winter, to make those of us constantly burning in “hell” jealous, eh? 😂

@bender@twtxt.net Oh, this trekking bike is nothing special at all. It’s a Bulls Wildtail with only front suspension, 21 gears and standard V-brakes. The first immediate upgrade I did was mounting a pannier rack, it’s one of the most useful things.

I just quickly dug out this photo from one and a half years ago where it’s parked at our scout yard in November 2024. You just have to use your imagination on how the front looks like. :-D

https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/bike.jpg

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org first time you twtxt about having a bicycle, and now I am curious to see it. Show us a click! 🙈

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. :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Really depends on the genre, I guess. 🤔 Quite a lot of “non-pop” music still uses the format “concept album”, I think. 🤔 But don’t ask me for any solid statistics. 😅

With all these new ways of digital publishing, I’m wondering for years why music artists still release entire albums. I would have imagined that most bands simply publish a new song whenever it’s good to go. But no, at least in my bubble, everybody still collects a bunch of new songs before throwing them as a collection into the crowd. I never used any of these streaming services, though, so maybe I’m just completely uninformed.

@bender@twtxt.net Yeah, it’s crazy!

Somehow, your link 403s here, but I just searched it. At least it has the diagonals at the lower two steps. However, the two upper platforms also suffer from the plastic covers, it appears (I cannot tell the material from the low quality images I found). Maybe it is aluminium? I think some joints use machine bolts, though (but again, not enough detail visible).

Happy ladder climbing!

Just saw the video. Can’t believe that ladder is that expensive. Even in AUD, it is almost $100. It is also 2.5 stars, with 13 reviews. Gulp. Engineering aside (and you are right, it is pretty interesting, and some, if not most of it went over my head), the ladder is rubbish. This is the one I have. Not super, but have been with me for a while, and used quite a bit, still as good as new.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’m glad you found it useful. :)

@klaxzy@klaxzy.net Thanks for that. I couldn’t agree more.

The auDA, and some 3rd-party identify service and my Registrar are a joke!

WOW! I just had to share this little story I ran into today.

I tried to register a .AU Domain the other day, only for it to instantly fail.

I emailed support, which took several days to respond, only for them to respond by saying (paraphased):

We’re sorry, but the identify checks failed. The 3rd-aprty service doesn’t tell us why, But, please make sure that the ID you used matches the Full Name, including any Middle name(s).

I used my Passport number. Which of course has my First, Middle and Last Name.

I can only assume at this point that the checks failed on the missing “Middle name”. Why? Because the Registrar I use has a database and user interface for “contacts” that only have support for First name and Last name. NO Middle Name.

🤦‍♂️ This is basically stupid at this point. Systems cannot be trusted at the most fundamental level, no matter how good they are.

Until we figure out how to build a system that allows an individual to prove to another entity that they are who they say they are without a shred of doubt (i.e: cryptographically), we’re stuffed.

There is literally nothing I can do in this case. The auDA are at fault. The 3rd-party identify service (unknown) are at fault. The registrar are at fault. Hell, even the Passport office are at fault for even bothering to or requiring a Middle name.

How has “identity” come to this?

Where do people who still use i486 live? Maybe, I will try to move to there, so I won’t have to upgrade devices.

Somebody really has got their session handling licked. I’m surfing in a webshop and opening another article to check on the details only to receive the error message: “An error occurred during the ordering procedure with PayPal. Please try again later or use the normal ordering process.”