But it is still a giant inefficient use of resources and energy 🤣

AI isn’t a shortcut for thinking. In her guide for skeptics, Hilary Gridley reframes AI as a collaborator—not a replacement. Use it like spellcheck for your thoughts. Don’t fear it—iterate with it. Insight improves, speed follows. Full post: https://hils.substack.com/p/the-ai-skeptics-guide-to-ai-collaboration

@prologic@twtxt.net I also thought it was a client-server thingy at first and usually it is, I guess, there’s just this workaround:

If it is not possible to install Borg on the remote host, it is still possible to use the remote host to store a repository by mounting the remote filesystem, for example, using sshfs.

@kate@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz @movq@www.uninformativ.de You could also have a play with eris which I use to power my little tiny server (that almost no-one uses 🤣)

@bmallred@staystrong.run I don’t use it, it is @movq@www.uninformativ.de the one who does.

I asked ChatGPT what it knows about Twtxt 😂 And surprisingly it’s rather accurate:

Twtxt is a minimalist, decentralized microblogging format introduced by John Downey in 2016. It uses plain text files served over HTTP—no accounts, databases, or APIs.
In 2020, James Mills (@prologic@twtxt.net) launched Yarn.social, an extended, federated implementation with user discovery, threads, mentions, and a full web UI.
Both share the same .twtxt.txt format but differ in complexity and social features.

‘The bomber’s words sound mainstream. Like he won ’ Oklahoma City’s tragedy
Comments ⌘ Read more

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz ngircd is nice: https://ngircd.barton.de/ You can absolutely host this on your server for you and your friends (I’ve been doing that for a very long time). Actually peering with something like libera is hard, though, because they have strict requirements and a lot of traffic. Then again, there’s no real benefit in peering, actually. IRC is pretty “decentralized” anyway and people are usually used to connecting to several networks, so joining another one isn’t a big deal, imho. 🙃

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz is there anything i can even run or is this like email where you should just use libera and shut up

@prologic@twtxt.net @bmallred@staystrong.run Ah, I just found this, didn’t see it before:

https://restic.net/#compatibility

So, yeah, they do use semver and, yes, they’re not at 1.0.0 yet, so things might break on the next restic update … but they “promise” to not break things too lightheartedly. Hm, well. 😅 Probably doesn’t make a big difference (they don’t say “don’t use this software until we reach 1.0.0”).

@prologic@twtxt.net This shi_ is as fun as it is frustrating! 😆 the bot is poking at me from a different ASN now, Alibaba’s.

1. Short term solution: I’ve geo-locked my Timeline instance since I’m the only one using it (and I only do so for reading twts when I’m away from terminal).
   
2. Long term: I took a look at your Caddy WAF but couldn’t figure things out on my own; until then, I’ll be poking at Caddy-Defender, maybe throw in a Crowdsec for lols… #FUN

@movq@www.uninformativ.de From what I can tell, they use strict semantic versioning and backwards compatibility. There are two versions of the storage, v1 and v2, but it doesn’t look like v2 is enabled yet.

@prologic@twtxt.net @bmallred@staystrong.run So is restic considered stable by now? “Stable” as in “stable data format”, like a future version will still be able to retrieve my current backups. I mean, it’s at version “0.18”, but they don’t specify which versioning scheme they use.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz oh and the logs say “failed to write msg: use of closed network connection” WHAT DOES THAT MEAN

I use restic and Backblaze B2 for offline backup storage at a cost of $6/TB/month. I don’t backup my entire ~20TB NAS and its datasets however, so I’m only paying about ~$2/month right now. I only backup the most important things I cannot afford to lose or annot re-created.

@bender@twtxt.net How is Borg? I have used restic for so long I haven’t looked at anything else.

Full Text Search of US Court records
Comments ⌘ Read more

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz pandoc is a joy! I haven’t used any Microsoft word processing tools since forever. They want a Word document? Pandoc to the rescue!

On top of my usual backups (which are already offsite, but it requires me carrying a hard disk to that other site), I think I might rent a storage server and use Borg. 🤔 Hoping that their encryption is good enough. Maybe that’ll also finally convince me to get a faster internet connection. 😂

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz It’s more like a cache, it stores things like “timestamp of the most recent twt we’ve seen per feed” or “last modification date” (to be used with HTTP’s if-modified-since header). You can nuke these files at any time, it might just result in more traffic (e.g., always getting a full response instead of just “HTTP 304 nope, didn’t change”).

@quark@ferengi.one Yes, I often write a couple of twts, don’t publish them, then sometimes notice a mistake and want to edit it. You’re right, as soon as stuff is published, threads are going to break/fork by edits.

AI is turning us into glue
Comments ⌘ Read more

@david@collantes.us Thanks I’ll fix.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz As someone who has a say in hiring decisions (every now and then – I’m not an executive nor an HR person 😆): This is gold. Writeups like these tell me/us so much about job applicants. It’s much more valuable than “a CV without gaps” or “know your algorithms” or whatever. Instead, it shows how you work and that you understand what you’re doing, and that’s the most important part. 🥇

@bender@twtxt.net NOOOO i self host an XMPP server and also revolt but as much as i love XMPP (gajim client reminds me of using skype as a kid highkey) i don’t use it much and revolt is a bitch to maintain. like i broke revolt file uploads and it stayed that way for months until literally last week lmao. i never bothered with matrix tbh maybe i should’ve but it seems not worth it

Bloody WhatsApp, bloody chat apps on smartphones, I’m going nuts. If you want to TYPE, use a device WITH A KEYBOARD. Don’t send me useless undecipherable gibberish. FFS!

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev I give you not creating another file, but then I’d vote for commenting out DMs. See https://eapl.me/timeline/post/z5e2bna

It’s easier to find the DM in comments from your side, than asking all the client maintainers to add the regex =P
You can even use a Modified comment, such as
#! <DM content>
Or something like that

This approach is retro-compatible with current and older clients.

@david@collantes.us @andros@twtxt.andros.dev The correct hash would be si4er3q. See https://twtxt.dev/exts/twt-hash.html, a timezone offset of +00:00 or -00:00 must be replaced by Z.

(That said, there’s a bug in jenny as well. It only replaces +00:00, not -00:00. 🤡)

Using AI in education is like using a forklift in the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.

https://fedi.neuwirth.priv.at/@konrad/114352350424913566

@david@collantes.us If I run

printf '%s\n%s\n%s' 'https://aelaraji.com/twtxt.txt' '2025-04-16T22:49:11+00:00' "Am I tripping or `rsync` is actually THIS effing faster than `scp`!!? 🫨" | b2sum -l 256 | awk '{ print $1 }' | xxd -r -p | base32 | tr -d '=' | tr 'A-Z' 'a-z' | tail -c 8

I have xqfsv6a. It is raw text

But… If I change de date to 2025-04-16T22:49:11Z I have si4er3q.

US Government threatens Harvard with foreign student ban
Comments ⌘ Read more

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com What protocol do you use?

A threat model for opposing authoritarianism
A decade ago, I published a book on privacy “Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance.” In the book, and since then, in articles and speeches, I have been dispensing advice to people on how to protect their privacy. But my advice did not envision the moment we are in – where the government would collaborate with a tech CEO to strip-mine all of our data from government databases and use i … ⌘ Read more

Zoom Outage Caused by Accidental ‘Shutting Down’ of the Zoom.us Domain
Comments ⌘ Read more

Even though I really do like the shell, I always use Dolphin to mount my digicam SD card and copy the photos onto my computer. I finally added a context menu item in Dolphin to create a forest stroll directory with the current date in order to save some typing:

Image

The following goes in ~/.local/share/kservices5/ServiceMenus/galmkdir.desktop:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Service
X-KDE-ServiceTypes=KonqPopupMenu/Plugin,inode/directory
Actions=Waldspaziergang;

[Desktop Action Waldspaziergang]
Name=Heutigen Waldspaziergang anlegen…
Icon=folder-green
Exec=~/src/gelbariab/galmkdir "%f"

In order to update the KDE desktop cache and make this action menu item available in Dolphin, I ran:

kbuildsycoca5

The referenced galmkdir script looks like that:

#!/bin/sh
set -e

current_dir="$1"
if [ -z "$current_dir" ]; then
    echo "Usage: $0 DIRECTORY" >&2
    exit 1
fi

dir="$(kdialog \
    --geometry 350x50 \
    --title "Heutigen Waldspaziergang anlegen" \
    --inputbox "Neues Verzeichnis in „$current_dir“ anlegen:" \
    "waldspaziergang-$(date +%Y-%m-%d)")"
mkdir "$current_dir/$dir"
dolphin "$current_dir/$dir"

This solution is far from perfect, though. Ideally, I’d love to have it in the “Create New” menu instead of the “Actions” menu. But that doesn’t really work. I cannot define a default directory name, not to mention even a dynamic one with the current date. (I would have to update the .desktop file every day or so.) I also failed to create an empty directory. I somehow managed to create a directory with some other templates in it for some reason I do not really understand.

Let’s see how that works out in the next days. If I like it, I might define a few more default directory names.

@xuu@txt.sour.is like, badly broken. I mean, the guy doesn’t even use twtxt (it is more like an RSS feed for him). So, yeah, even if it was the correct mention it would never reach the intended ears. 😂

Tell HN: Warning Google trains on your data when using aistudio.google.com
Comments ⌘ Read more

Just keeping this shell alive, and sending an useful twtxt in the process. :-P

Dirty tricks 6502 programmers use
Comments ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net I don’t no. I mostly just use whole themes. And my facourite it AMOLED

@prologic@twtxt.net I am just going over things. I don’t use it, do you?

Mark Zuckerberg’s failed negotiations with the FTC to end Meta’s antitrust case
Comments ⌘ Read more

The captchas have become sentient: we’re working on fixing the captcha issue
As some of you may have noticed, we’ve been having some issues with captchas. The powers that be – which isn’t me, I don’t know anything about web development – are looking into it, and once we’ve pinpointed the problem we’ll get it fixed. It’s annoying us too, so we want this resolved as quickly as possible. OSNews readers just trying to visit the site to read some tech stuff shou … ⌘ Read more

Hahaha! And now they show tiny! I had to reload the page. So, I see the problem on iOS and macOS Safari too. I have no other browser to test with, I exclusively use Safari.

Show HN: I made a tool to send a letter now people use it to just print
Comments ⌘ Read more

my main itch with the DMs extensions is that these messages are intended to be private, not public information. That’s why other extensions make sense, but DMs are another kind of feature.
TwiXter, Mastodon, FB and some other services usually hide the DMs in another section, so they are not mixed with the public timeline.

I find the DM topic interesting, I even made an indie experiment for a centralized messaging system here https://github.com/eapl-gemugami/owl.
Although, as I’ve said a few times here, I’m not particularly interested in supporting it on microblogging, as I don’t use it that much. In the rare case I’ve used them, I don’t have to manage public and private keys, and finally none of my acquaintances use encrypted email.
Nothing personal against anyone, and although I like to debate and even fight, it’s not the case here. This proposal is the only one allowing DMs on twtxt, and if the community wants it, I’ll support it, with my personal input, of course.

A good approach I could find with a good compromise between compatibility with current clients and keeping these messages private is ‘hiding’ the DMs in comments. For example:
# 2025-04-13T11:02:12+02:00 !<dm-echo https://dm-echo.andros.dev/twtxt.txt> U2FsdGVkX1+QmwBNmk9Yu9jvazVRFPS2TGJRGle/BDDzFult6zCtxNhJrV0g+sx0EIKbjL2a9QpCT5C0Z2qWvw==

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev I don’t see any “fighting” here. This is just good experimentation. Unfortunately there hasn’t really been enough time or effort by other “client authors” yet, me especially as I’ve been super busy with ya’ know my “day job” that pays the bills and refactoring yarnd to use a new and shiny and much better SqliteCache 🤣 – I certainly don’t think your efforts are wasted at all. I would however like @doesnm.p.psf.lt@doesnm.p.psf.lt encourage you to look at the work we’ve done as a community (which was also driven out of the Yarn.social / Twtxt community years back).

Understanding US Power Outages – By Brian Potter
Comments ⌘ Read more

EC issues burner phones for visits to US
Comments ⌘ Read more

@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.

Overuse of CT scans could cause 100k extra cancers in US
Comments ⌘ Read more