@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.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de more to read, but I read between your words that you are starving for more: https://aphyr.com/posts/411-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess :-D

@bender@twtxt.net Thanks, I’ll read it – once I have the energy. 😅

Another AI rant:

One of the “key features” of LLMs is that you can use “natural language”, because that is supposed to be easier than having to learn a programming language. So, when someone says to me, “I automated this process using AI!”, 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 “it works”.

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.)

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 it’s far less common than HTTP/HTTPS today, there are still some security risks associated with Gopher and Gopher space. Let’s break them down carefully: 1. Lack of Encryption Problem: Gopher was designed long before widespread use of SSL/TLS. All data—including credentials, file transfers, and menu selections—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 wouldn’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.

Finished reading Just for Fun, by Linus Torvalds. As a Linux/Unix geek, it’s an interesting story, also fun. Would like an update ★★★★ 📗

Finished reading The Martian, by Andy Weir, after just four days. A very engrossing and humorous read. Time for the movie tomorrow ★★★★★ 📗

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

Finished reading Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir, this afternoon, just in time for catching the movie tomorrow. A really fun read ★★★★★ 📗

@rdlmda@rdlmda.me We see and read yout mutterings just fine 😅

You are brilliant, @aelaraji@aelaraji.com! I laughed my ass off reading the first sentence. :‘-D

@rdlmda@rdlmda.me I read too. What I am afraid, though, is that you might miss our replies. Also, twtxt is very asynchronous (although in my early years I was checking and replying every minute).

@rdlmda@rdlmda.me You need to use the RFC3339 format. I would recommend you read the specs at https://twtxt.dev – This is what is used by many moden clients these days 😅

@kiwu@twtxt.net I am trying to read our Information Security Office “mind” 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… “fun”. Oh, and they want it on production by tomorrow. LOLz!

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 .

download some books, and turn off your router and data, eventually your boredom will have fun reading a book, just pull the cable out.

@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?

Behold! 🥳 My first (hopefully it doesn’t fail 🤞) µSaaS (microSaaS)

Audiofern

Turn PDFs into audiobooks.

(only supports PDF(s) at the moment, books, papers, etc)

Happy reading/listening 🤓 👂 #Audiofern #Audiobooks #microSaaS

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 :-)

Well, the Atom feed entry IDs changed, too. I had to mark everything as read again.

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 🥲

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club haha! I read as Golang the first time too. It is just the way our minds work. :-P

@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.

@prologic@twtxt.net it really is not blank. It reads:

2026-01-12T23:34:11+01:00	(you must be root)

And now the event loop is not a simple loop around curses’ getch() anymore but it can wait for events on any file descriptor. Here’s a simple test program that waits for connections on a TCP socket, accepts it, reads a line, sends back a line:

https://movq.de/v/93fa46a030/vid-1767547942.mp4

And the scrollbar indicators are working now.

I’ll probably implement timer callbacks using timerfd (even though that’s Linux-only). 🤔

Lab report: Reading a 4th Edition Research Unix tape image on Plan 9 — http://a.9srv.net/reports/index.html#v4

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Lovely! We also just had some snow. 😃 Not a lot, but still. 😅

(Lol, I totally read that as “rootfs”. 🤪)

very good blog post that reminded me why it’s taking so long to ship bbycll — previously i had computed the hashes of every post before storing them in the database, after realizing it’s a much better idea to compute the hashes during runtime and only store the post content & timestamp i’m now having to rewrite every function that reads & writes data. i hope the reason as to why i lost motivation is obvious — thankfully i caught it early enough so that once i’m done rewriting just those functions i should™ be able to finalize 1.0-rc with little hassle

⇒ the cardinal sin of software architecture: the unnecessary distribution, replication, or restructuring of state, both in space and time.

Pole Vault Pole
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2929b - I will not read the Quran. That will NOT guide me to the right path. Sorry but not sorry.

Telescope Types
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@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe I think I never watched it. In any case, enjoy reading your books.

Jumping Frog Radius
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Apples
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@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It was too late when I read the “Addictive” warning… 😆 Thanks for sharing this!

Fishing
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Hyperacute Interdynamics
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I kind of hate conventional commit messages: https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/#summary

but I am loving reading RFC 2119: https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt

Read the Quran

Yes, I agree. Read the bible. You’ll learn why most of the world, including f****d up politics plays a massive role. Don’t be lost. READ.

Read the Bible!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de how long do they need to read the scale? LOL. The penguin stayed put at least twice, no issues. I think the creator wanted some Internet points out of that video. 😂

Chessboard Alignment
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@bender@twtxt.net yeah, I’ve been reading through the documentation last night and it felt overwhelming for a minute… +1 point goes to GTS’s docs. but hey, I’ll be taking the easy route: podman-compose up -d they provide both a container image and an example compose file in a separate git repo but I’m wondering why that is not mentioned anywhere in the docs, (unless it is and I haven’t seen it yet)

idk if magical.fish admin reads this chat but it seems that the stock price tool spits an error

Inverted Catenaries
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Website Task Flowchart
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Bridge Clearance
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Better Technology, Worse Motivation: GenAI’s Mediocrity Trap

While generative AI (GenAI) promises productive efficiency, it can paradoxically lead to lower-quality work. We conducted an experiment with professional illustrators and found that AI assistance flattens the quality curve—it accelerates initial gains but sharply diminishes the returns on sustained effort. Faced with this, a significant number of professionals made a strategic choice: they sacrificed the final quality to save time.

From http://www.jin-li.org/uploads/1/1/4/5/114595093/ai_and_motivation.pdf

I haven’t read this and can’t vouch for it; seems vaguely AI-boostery. Still, the conclusions are interesting. This seems to be the picture that is emerging about generative AI generally: most people don’t like it and find that degrades the quality of work. Coders seem to like it and think that it helps them, but in fact it makes the slower, less productive, and more bug prone.

By all measures it’s a bad technology. We should just be honest about it. There is no need to make excuses for multi-trillion-dollar corporations.

@prologic@twtxt.net I remember reading a blog-post where someone has been throwing redirects to some +100GB files (usually used for speed testing purposes) at a swarm of bots that has been abusing his server in order to criple them, but I can’t find it anymore. I’m pretty sure I’ve had it bookmarked somewhere.