@movq@www.uninformativ.de I started with Delphi in school, the book (that we never ever used even once and I also never looked at) taught Pascal. The UI part felt easy at first but prevented me from understanding fundamental stuff like procedures or functions or even begin and end blocks for ifs or loops. For example I always thought that I needed to have a button somewhere, even if hidden. That gave me a handler procedure where I could put code and somehow call it. Two or three years later, a new mate from the parallel class finally told me that this wasn’t necessary and how to do thing better.

You know all too well that back in the day there was not a whole lot of information out there. And the bits that did exist were well hidden. At least from me. Eventually discovering planet-quellcodes.de (I don’t remember if that was the original forum or if that got split off from some other board) via my best schoolmate was like finding the Amber Room. Yeah, reading the ITG book would have been a very good idea for sure. :-)

In hindsight, a console program without the UI overhead might have been better. At least for the very start. Much less things to worry about or get lost.

Hence, I’d recommend to start programming with a console program. As for the language, not sure. But Python is probably a good choice, it doesn’t require a lot of surrounding boilerplate like, say Java or Go. It also does exceptionally well in the principle of least surprise.

I have a great idea for fixing the US economy. Get rid of all the nuclear weapons 🤣

@quark@ferengi.one I do have an idea for syncing this 🤞

These ideas are dr the two books:

• Drift into Failure: From Hunting Broken Components to Understanding Complex Systems by Sidney Dekker (2011)
  
• Engineering a Safer World by Nancy Leveson (2011)
  

The former I haven’t read. The later I haven’t finished reading 😅

And the idea of asynchronous evolutions comes from system accidents where control failures emerge when system structure, constraints, and evolution are poorly managed.

The idea of drift into failure is small normal adaptations erode safety over time without people noticing.

@prologic@twtxt.net I don’t understand the diagram, nor have any idea of what’s about. 👌🏻

Oddly, in defense of Google keeping Chrome
As much as I’m a fan of breaking up Google, I’m not entirely sure carving Chrome out of Google without a further plan for what happens to the browser is a great idea. I mean, Google is bad, but but things could be so, so much worse. OpenAI would be interested in buying Google’s Chrome if antitrust enforcers are successful in forcing the Alphabet unit to sell the popular web browser as part of a bid to restore competition in search, an OpenAI execu … ⌘ Read more

trying to not feel stressed today, so I digitally colored a smol frog that says fuck terfs! >m< i have no idea if I did that right bc it’s my first time using yarn to post an image so rip to me if I messed that up :’D

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Haha 🤣 We’ve explored this idea in the past and we decided that it’s actually a good idea to have an “append-only” feed for various reasons. We’ve also explored the idea of using Range requests, but opted instead to just archive/rotate our feeds periodically 😅 There really isn’t much point in having a feed in reverse chronological order, except (maybe?) so a human read view the new twts at the top of the file?! 🤣

After reading you, @eapl.me@eapl.me, I’ll tell you my point of view.
In my opinion, a feed does not have to be equivalent to a timeline. A timeline is a representation of the feed adapted to a user. You may not be interested in seeing other people’s threads or DMs. But perhaps they are interested in seeing mentions or DMs directed at them. It is important not to fall into the trap. With that clarification…
I insist, this is my point of view, it is not an absolute truth: I don’t think extensions should be respectful of customers who are no longer maintained.
We cannot have a system that is simple, backwards compatible and extensible all at the same time. We have to give up some of the 3 points. I would not like to give up simplicity because it will then make it harder to maintain the customers who do stay. Therefore, I think it is better to give up backwards compatibility and play with new formulas in the extensions. I don’t think it’s a good idea to make a hash keep so much load: a hashtag, a thread and also a DM.

Show HN: Brainstorm.gg – Get ideas out of your head fast
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💡 I had this crazy idea (or is it?) last night while thinking about Twtxt and Yarn.social 😅 There are two things I think that could be really useful additions to the yarnd UI/UX experience (for those that use it) and as “client” features (not spec changes). The two ideas are quite simple:

• Voting – a way to cast, collect a vote on a decision, topic or opinion.
  
• RSVP – a way to “rsvp” to a virtual (pr physical) event.
  

Both would use “plain text” on top of the way we already use Twtxt today and clients would render an appropriate UI/UX.

@bender@twtxt.net I noticed that although the Discover view (and your own Timeline) is much improved with a MaxAgeDays configuration at the pod level, that now some profiles are rather empty. This is only because well, they’re a bit “inactive” so to speak 🗣️ Not sure what to do about this at the moment… Open to ideas? 💡

@prologic@twtxt.net Since you have to check and double check everything it spits out (without providing sources), I don’t find any of this helpful. It’s like someone’s in the room with you and that person is saying random stuff that might or might not be correct. At best, it might spark some new idea in your head and then you follow that idea the traditional way.

Information published on the internet (or anywhere, for that matter) was never guaranteed to be correct. But at least you had a “frame of reference”: “Ah, I read this information about Linux on a blog that usually posts about Windows, so this one single Linux post might not necessarily be correct.” That is completely lost with LLMs. It’s literally all mushed together. 🤷

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I skimmed through the gamja docs and they say you need an “IRC WebSocket server” – no idea what that is. Does gamja not speak IRC directly but essentially “IRC over HTTP”? Curious. 🤔

How to think in the age of #AI : https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2025/04/how-to-think-in-the-age-of-ai

so i had the idea of adding a page to my otherwise single page girl on the moon personal site that featured my more notable projects, but it’s been hours and i CAN’T THINK OF ANYTHING TO ADD THAT I HAVEN’T ALREADY MENTIONED. i just host other people’s stuff!!!

I do think integrating things like Salty.im might actually be a good idea. I can also see a future where we integrate other things like todo.txt and calendar.txt. I’d even love to see decentralised forms of “plain text” voting too.

@prologic@twtxt.net @bender@twtxt.net @eapl.me@eapl.me I think opening another file is a bad idea because it adds complexity to the clients, breaks the single feed and I think keeping legacy clients will be more complex to add new features in the future. A modern approach is important.
I’ll be honest, I’m a bit tired of the fight around the direct message. Perhaps, we can remove it as an extension and use the alternative @prologic@twtxt.net . My suggestion apparently doesn’t like to the community. I have no problem with remove it.

well, I suggested that in https://eapl.me/timeline/conv/k2ob6bq

The idea was to help those following the spec in https://twtxt.dev/exts/directmessage.Html, to replicate the steps and validate whether your implementation gives the same result.

BTW, you could add a link to the spec in the echo web.

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Kind of a cool idea actually! 👌 I’ll follow and see what it’s like, thanks! 🙏

MacSSL: a port of Mbed-TLS for the classic Mac OS 7/8/9
Yesterday we had SDL2 for the classic Mac OS, today we have modern SSL/TLS for the classic Mac OS. This is a C89/C90 port of MbedTLS for Mac System 7/8/9. It works, and compiles under Metrowerks Codewarrior Pro 4. This is a basic app that performs a GET request on whatever is in api.h, and prints the result out to the text box (with a lot of debug information, of course). The idea of this project was to build an ‘app’ of … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net, is it my idea, or the size of avatars have gotten smaller?

@javivf@adn.org.es Oh, yes, looking at SMART is always a good idea. 😅 My SSD isn’t that old, though. It got replaced recently, tbh. But no need to reinstall, I just copy the files to a new disk. (Works just as fine when switching to an entire new machine.)

Sometimes, we spend months stuck in inertia, distracted by screens and routine. So I’d like to give you a simple reminder: creating-in whatever form-is what makes you feel alive.

The beauty of working on projects is not in their ‘success’, but in the simple act of working on them. Whether it’s writing, cooking, programming or redecorating the house: play with ideas without pressure, engage in an activity to test, fail and discover without judgement.

In the end, what remains is not a perfect product, but the satisfaction of completion and valuable lessons.

Find a project, no matter how small, and let it take you without expectations.

Wall Street Blew It
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The Curse of Ayn Rand’s Heir
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that’s certainty an interesting idea.

Building on top of that, I’m thinking of https://eapl.me/yatwt.yaml

somehow I forgot that existed.

Perhaps it was its mention of being a demo implementation here:
https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/registry.html#registry
So I though it wasn’t really active.

Anyway, I think that’s a good idea.

Is there something similar available on Yarn? Sorry for for asking if that was mentioned recently.

I think that the clients may help you to submit your URL to these directories, and also to get a view of the twts in them.

thanks @prologic!
@bender the idea of the RFC was to reach an agreement on a difficult problem, receiving proposals, and the voting is a simple count to gauge the sentiment of “is this a problem worth to be fixed?, are we committed to implement a change in our clients?”

But that’s a fair point. What do the community expect? What do y’all expect?

Twtxt was made for nerds, by nerds.
I’d like to change that. It’s by nerds/hackers, for nerds/hackers and friends of these. It doesn’t have to be hacky all the time, as you don’t need to be a nerd to have a blog.
But, for that to happen, someone has to build the tools to improve UX.

by design there really is no way to easily discovers others
Yeah, I agree, and although there are directories of email addresses, usually you don’t want that, unless you are a ‘public figure’.
I couldn’t say that a microblogging is a “social network” by default, as a blog is not either. At the same time, people would expect to find new people and conversations, as you’d do in a forum.

I think of two features on top of the current spec:

• Clients showing a few posts of what your following are watching but you don’t, so perhaps you find something interesting to follow next. Or that feature of “Your ‘followings’ are following these accounts/people”. (Hard to explain in english, but I hope you get the idea)
  
• Sharing your .txt into some directory, saying “Hey, I have this twtxt URL, I want to be discovered”. I’m thinking of something like the Federated tab on Mastodon.

@bender@twtxt.net I taught the whole ecosystem 😁
@prologic@twtxt.net @eapl.me@eapl.me The question I was asked the most was: How do I discover people?
Someone came up with a fantastic idea, instead of adding the new twt at the end of the feed, do it at the beginning. So you can paginate by cutting the request every few lines.

2 is a great idea, you should suggest it in that blog post.

About 1, well, I think anyone has an email address and only about 5% use a Feed, so it makes sense to offer what most people use 🤔

Stoop Coffee: How a Simple Idea Transformed My Neighborhood
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@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I had no idea. However, I think we’re losing our sense of anonymity. I even started using my real name!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de the idea is to be able to write documents in which I have auto time stamps on each line. Similar to this, which was posted on Hacker News today.

also I’ve made a draft of a voting page to receive preferences on each proposal
https://eapl.me/rfc0001/

Help me to play with it a bit and report any vulnerability or bug. Also any idea is welcome.

That’s a great idea. I am running GoToSocial in a local server (like Raspberry Pi) and it’s working fine.

The other day, after a discussion online, we came to the conclusion that using awk+sed+tr could replace much of the development that requires a database. However, using SQLite to have a SQL syntax isn’t a bad idea either. What do you think?

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com not sure but i will check when i can! git status is a good idea yeah

@prologic@twtxt.net oops, I’m sorry to see disagreement leading to draining emotions.

It remind me a bit of the Conclave movie where every part wanted to defend their vision and there is only a winner. If one wins the other loses. Like the political side of many leaders and volunteers representing a broad community. I don’t think that’s the case here. Most of us (in not all) should ‘win’.

I can only add that isn’t nice to listen that ‘my idea and effort’ is not what the rest of the people expect. I personally have a kind of issue with public rejection, but I also like to argue, discuss and even fight a bit. “A gem cannot be polished without friction, nor a man perfected without trials,” they say.
This exercise and belonging to this community also brings me good feelings of smart people trying to solve a human and technical problem, which is insanely difficult to get ‘right’.

I genuinely hope we can understand each other, and even with our different and respectful thoughts on the same thing, we might reach an agreement on what’s the best for most people.

Good vibes to everyone!

@prologic@twtxt.net We can’t agree on this idea because that makes things even more complicated than it already is today. The beauty of twtxt is, you put one file on your server, done. One. Not five million. Granted, there might be archive feeds, so it might be already a bit more, but still faaaaaaar less than one file per message.

Also, you would need to host not your own hash files, but everybody else’s as well you follow. Otherwise, what is that supposed to achieve? If people are already following my feed, they know what hashes I have, so this is to no use of them (unless they want to look up a message from an archive feed and don’t process them). But the far more common scenario is that an unknown hash originates from a feed that they have not subscribed to.

Additionally, yarnd’s URL schema would then also break, because https://twtxt.net/twt/<hash> now becomes https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/<hash>, https://twtxt.net/user/bender/<hash> and so on. To me, that looks like you would only get hashes if they belonged to this particular user. Of course, you could define rules that if there is a /user/ part in the path, then use a different URL, but this complicates things even more.

Sorry, I don’t like that idea.

One of the biggest gripes of the community with the way the threading model currently works with Twtxt v1.2 (https://twtxt.dev) is this notion of:

What is this hash?
What does it refer to?

Idea: Why can’t we all agree to implement a simple URI scheme where we host our Twtxt feeds?

That is, if you host your feed at https://example.com/twtxt.txt – Why can’t or could you not also host various JSON files (let’s agree on the spec of course) at https://example.com/twt/<hash> ? 🤔

That way we solve this problem in a truly decentralised way, rather than every relying on yarnd pods alone.

NetBSD on a JavaStation
Back when Java was still a new programming language, Sun had the idea of building a computer specifically designed for Java, unique processor running byte-code as its native machine code and all. This whole endeavour proved to be more complicated than Sun had hoped, and as such, they eventually abandoned the idea of a Java processor in favour of plain SPARC. When the JavaStation shipped, it was a regular SPARC workstation without a hard drive, running something called JavaOS from fla … ⌘ Read more

@eapl.me@eapl.me Sounds like a great idea! 👍

a few async ideas for later

The editing process needs a lot of consideration and compromises.

From one side, editing and deleting it’s necessary IMO. People will do it anyway, and personally I like to edit my texts, so I’d put some effort on make it work.
Should we keep a history of edits? Should we hash every edit to avoid abuse? Should we mark internally a twt as deleted, but keeping the replies?

I think that’s part of a more complete ‘thread’ extension, although I’d say it’s worth to agree on something reflecting the real usage in the wild, along with what people usually do on other platforms.

looks good to me!

About alice’s hash, using SHA256, I get 96473b4f or 96473B4F for the last 8 characters. I’ll add it as an implementation example.
The idea of including it besides the follow URL is to avoid calculating it every time we load the file (assuming the client did that correctly), and helps to track replies across the file with a simple search.

Also, watching your example I’m thinking now that instead of {url=96473B4F,id=1} which is ambiguous of which URL we are referring to, it could be something like:
{reply_to=[URL_HASH]_[TWT_ID]} / {reply_to=96473B4F_1}
That way, the ‘full twt ID’ could be 96473B4F_1.

@eapl.me@eapl.me There are several points that I like, but I want to highlight number 7. https://text.eapl.mx/a-few-ideas-for-a-next-twtxt-version #twtxt

I really like the proposal and your ideas. I have been reading your articles and several points seem very interesting to me.