@movq@www.uninformativ.de Wow, I’m sorry to hear about that. Permanent emergency mode sucks, I’ve been there, and it always felt like drowning.

Fortunately, at my current job, we’ve been given time to keep our technical debt from overtaking the project. Unfortunately, we’ve been forced to use AI (mostly in the form of GitHub Copilot). Of course, now that the tokens cost more than a developer’s salary, they’ve been rethinking that position somewhat. 😁

In my experience, you are 100% correct - even in the best case, AI is a force multiplier. If the code is clean, it can speed you up. But if the code is a mess, it’ll just multiply the mess.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org those are sharp, and sooo nice! Are you sure the windows need cleaning?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Not bad. How many e-mails or other forms of feedback did you get?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Ah, I see. Oh, so not even make, just a shell script. :-)

@arne@uplegger.eu Hat nicht so lange gehalten. 🤪 https://movq.de/v/1359841828/s.png

@movq@www.uninformativ.de One at a time, until you build up trust, coherence to make them a maintainer 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net As have I. 🤔 I mean, since I left GitHub, I got basically 0 pull requests anyway.

Even during my time using GitHub, I noticed that “drive-by PRs” are rarely a good idea. People don’t really know/understand the code or the design principles/goals, so I often turned down PRs. Or I accepted them and was grumpy afterwards. 😅

What does work is having a team of maintainers/devs. The only question is: How do you build such a team if you don’t accept PRs? That’s going to be the interesting part.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I think I’ve been more-or-less maintaining my OSS projects this way for years hmmm 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ah, I almost thought so (that you wrote it by hand), but then I looked at the source code and saw the TOC and I was like: “Naah, probably not. I would be way too lazy to do that manually.” 😅 And indeed … ha.

Oh god, yeah, that’s a lot of <span>. 🤔 Can’t really avoid that, I guess, especially if you want to do syntax highlighting of code blocks.

You wrote your own site generator, didn’t you?

In parts. I write everything in Markdown (it’s online, even: https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-05-29/0/POSTING-en.md), plus a few Vim shortcuts (to generate thumbnails, for example), and then python-markdown renders it: https://pypi.org/project/Markdown/ This process is wrapped in a shell script, like “re-render every page if the .md file is newer than the .html file” and that’s mostly it. And the Atom feed generator is completely custom. 🤔

@bender@twtxt.net lol, no, please don’t send me a quackton of ducks. 😅 We use BIRD a lot at work, hence this bears some significance for me/us. 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de “You know what this is?” A mass produced, Chinese made, rubber ducky? LOL. Sorry, had to do it. I had no idea who Maria was/is (have a vague one now). If you collect those, I can send you some! :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de enjoy your vacation! A nice read here: https://web.archive.org/web/20260603173839/https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious/687378/, if you get bored. :-P

@bender@twtxt.net Ugh, I don’t know. I’m having a long vacation now and I try not to think about this topic anymore. 🤣

@movq@www.uninformativ.de what are your thoughts after reading it?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yes.

Maybe management should replace itself with AI…

@movq@www.uninformativ.de :-D

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It’s the “Lyse types the entire HTML by hand” generator. Yes, no kidding. I write articles so rarely, that I can do that once in a while. It’s fun to some degree, but also not.

After some time, I finally recorded some Vim macros to insert <b>…</b>, <var>…</var>, <span class=s>…</span> etc. around the tokens. This helped a little bit. But I was still questioning my mental state doing it like that. I also had to fix a bunch of the end tags by hand, because the word movement wasn’t enough or the end movement went too far. Quite the annoying process for sure.

But I think the HTML looks a wee bit nicer and is maybe even semantically a little bit better than having only <span>s everywhere. I find the <span class="whatever"> just soo awfully long. Of course, I never look at the code again, but knowing, that e.g. there is a <b> and it saves so many bytes in comparison, makes me happy. It is a more elegant solution in my opinion. Not by much, but better nonetheless. It’s a matter of simplicity. Admittedly, even I can’t avoid the <span>s alltogether. Oh well. On the other hand, I’m sure that this does not make any difference whatsoever. I bet, nobody and nothing, like a screenreader, analyzes the HTML for that, where this would be truly useful.

Oh! Maybe text browsers, though. It just occurred to me while composing this reply. :-) Haha, I lost my bet quickly. w3m picks up at least the <b> for keywords and builtin types, <u> for filenames and <i> for comments. Yey. No different styles for <var> and <mark>, unfortunately. elinks only renders the bold. It’s cool that I had the right intuition right from the beginning, despite being unable to pinpoint it. :-)

All the <span> hell with common syntax highlighters is a downer for me that keeps me from looking more into them. If I wrote more articles, I might rig something up with Pygments. At least that’s somehow positively connotated in my brain. Not sure if it actually deserves it, but I dealt with that in some loose form (can’t even remember) years and years ago. Apparently, it wasn’t too terrible.

To prepare the table of contents, I used grep and sed with some manual intervention in the end. The entire process can be improved. Absolutely.

You wrote your own site generator, didn’t you?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Nice find!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org By the way, which site generator are you using? I kind of miss having code blocks with syntax highlighting and that generic yellow highlighting thing is pretty cool, too.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org lol, “garbo” 😅 Took me a moment. 🤣

@bender@twtxt.net Hahaha! :-D

@garbo@www.uninformativ.de What a story! :-D

@kiwu@twtxt.net I like your enthusiasm. Go, go, go! :-)

@bender@twtxt.net Hahaha! :-D

@bender@twtxt.net That certainly sounds much better in English, yeah. 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de hahahahaha! I’d say “Princess Grim Reaper” is more suiting. 😂

@bender@twtxt.net It started out as me calling myself “Princess Valium” because I’m so tired and braindead today, but then someone misheard that because a garbage truck drove by, and, so … one thing lead to another. 🤪 Sadly, it kind of fits, because I’m often the one who cleans up shit. 😬

@bender@twtxt.net LOL 😂

@movq@www.uninformativ.de but why? Are they that mean?! 😅

@kiwu@twtxt.net welcome, new slave! Err, I meant, beloved employee! 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net I do! I paginate usually 10 times on HN. Their algo is so messed up (but it works, I guess) that not doing that will make me miss a lot of good, interesting, things.

@kiwu@twtxt.net In-cred-ib-ly tired. 😂

@prologic@twtxt.net @bender@twtxt.net Thanks! Yeah, it already supports Twt Hash via twtxt-lib (both v1 and v2, when the time is right), plus most of the other features (multiline, user-agent, and metadata), and I’m working on (re-)implementing threading, mentions, and hash filtering (to make conversations easier to follow).

Here’s a current snapshot of my local version, in case anyone is interested:

https://itsericwoodward.com/images/dda03946.png

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org im sure my job will be better then the hell school put me through, im ready for it!!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org LOL. Always ahead of times! Lyse, the man from the future! Sic mvndvs creatvs est!

@itsericwoordward@itsericwoodward.com Haven’t noticed anything either. These request numbers are well below some other software. :-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Interesting read! The current state is already a very great achievement. I felt honored being able to already have followed your development along here on twtxt. :-)

That’s a cool clock, I should remind myself of my working time, too.

@bender@twtxt.net The good thing is that it’s already pretty battle-tested. 😅 There was this dumpster fire a few years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31114554 This was on their front page for quite a while, just look at the number of comments … 😂

@prologic@twtxt.net woot! 🎉🎉🎉

@bender@twtxt.net Yes, but I consider this to be a flaw in the human species. Think about it, what good does it serve? What possible reason do we have to have such traits today? Survival of the fitness? pffft 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de LOL. At least now you know your infrastructure and web server can handle some traffic. Consider it a test, in addition to the fleeting recognition. 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net that possible in any profession. Contrary to what @prologic@twtxt.net’s think, I don’t think it is a human weakness. That some people are absolute and despicable assholes? Yep, I agree on that.

@rrraksamam@twtxt.net No 🤣 I think it’s a human weakness, someone born in the genes of some 🤔

@movq@www.uninformativ.de TLs is cheap, we built hardware encryption modules for AES-256 which TLS still uses so you’re fine 😅

@arne@uplegger.eu Indeed. I’m glad that it’s all just static HTML. The most expensive part about this is probably TLS. 🤷‍♀️

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hacker News hug of death. :)

@bender@twtxt.net

oh, I knew it wasn’t you. It is just nice to see your hobby was noticed. :-)

Ah, I see! 🤗

@bender@twtxt.net Doing tail -f access.log looks like a Matrix screensaver at the moment. Whoooooosh …

@bender@twtxt.net … boom, 5500+ hits on that blog post. 🤣 Should I start monetizing this shit?! 🤪 (Don’t worry, I won’t. German law gets super annoying if you do that kind of thing.)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de oh, I knew it wasn’t you. It is just nice to see your hobby was noticed. :-)

@bender@twtxt.net Oh, well, thanks, I guess? 😅 (This “zdw” person isn’t me. I don’t even have an account at HackerNews. 😅)