👋 Hello @nigergibe@anthony.buc.ci, welcome to Buccipod, a Yarn.social Pod! To get started you may want to check out the pod’s Discover feed to find users to follow and interact with. To follow new users, use the ⨁ Follow button on their profile page or use the Follow form and enter a Twtxt URL. You may also find other feeds of interest via Feeds. Welcome! 🤗

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org @bender@twtxt.net I pushed an alternative implementation to the fetch-context branch. This integrates the whole thing into mutt/jenny.

You will want to configure a new mutt hotkey, similar to the “reply” hotkey:

macro index,pager <esc>C "\
<enter-command> set my_pipe_decode=\$pipe_decode nopipe_decode<Enter>\
<pipe-message> jenny -c<Enter>\
<enter-command> set pipe_decode=\$my_pipe_decode; unset my_pipe_decode<Enter>" \
"Try to fetch context of current twt, like a missing root twt"

This pipes the mail to jenny -c. jenny will try to find the thread hash and the URL and then fetch it. (If there’s no URL or if the specific twt cannot be found in that particular feed, it could query a Yarn pod. That is not yet implemented, though.)

The whole thing looks like this:

https://movq.de/v/0d0e76a180/jenny.mp4

In other words, when there’s a missing root twt, you press a hotkey to fetch it, done.

I think I like this version better. 🤔

(This needs a lot of testing. 😆)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Didn’t know there was a yarnd IRC channel!! hopping in to say Hi 😁

You might have seen me popping up on IRC. This is how it looks:

https://movq.de/v/3a4f9833f3/

That’s EZirc from the 1990ies. (It says it needs Warp 4, but runs fine on Warp 3.)

Lots of this old stuff still works (technically), but as @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org said: A lot of it really is dead. There’s not much going on anymore in Usenet.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yes, fetching the twt by hash from some service could be a good alternative, in case the twt I have does not @-mention the source. (Besides yarnd, maybe this should be part of the registry API? I don’t see fetch-by-hash in the registry API docs.)

@Yarns@search.twtxt.net An oopsie? 🥳😂

🥳 NEW FEED: @aelaraji@aelaraji.com

@bender@twtxt.net yeah, I think so as well. Hell I can’t even get myself to upload much media files on the fedi-platforms knowing they’ll be hosted out of someone else’s pocket, someone with no ROI in mind but other’s freedom of expression.

@bender@twtxt.net What multiplexer do you use? I usually use Tmux and have my prefix mapped to C-a on my local machine and the default C-b on the remote ones so they don’t conflict if it helps.

@prologic@twtxt.net I have no clue TBH

@prologic@twtxt.net I wouldn’t mind that for the bigger images, although, my main problem is with the scrappers and other platforms that nuke my RPi whenever I post a link out there… yes! I mean Mastodon 😆

BTW! I’ve just white listed twtxt.net … you should be able to see the embedded image by now.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Ahh I see! Interesting 🧐 Would you prefer that clients like yarnd prefetch resources liks this, cache them and serve the cached copy? 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net it’s a Clownflare option to prevent images on your website from being embedded on other websites. It helps with my low bandwidth resources. And I believe you can set-up similar rules with Nginx, I’m just too lazy to do it manually RN.

CF Docs on Hotlink Protection

@movq@www.uninformativ.de confirming that the issue isn’t present when using alacrity. Wow.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Alacritty.

@prologic@twtxt.net I think I have hotlinking disabled somewhere … I’ll try and fix it this evening.

@bender@twtxt.net My index formatting is intact, probably because I still haven’t figured out how to set up my terminal to show RTL text correctly! 😅 but hey, that won’t be a problem anymore, I don’t feel like twting in Arabic. Sorry for the inconvenience.

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org the reason behind his sporadic disappearances is that he runs things from a Raspberry Pi, at home, I believe. That impacts reliability, I figure.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de my fault! Err, I meant to say, @bender@twtxt.net’s! LOL.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org ah, if only you were to finally clean up that code, and make that client widely available…! One can only dream, right? :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I mean, dinosaurs “evolved” by getting wiped, right? :-D

@movq@www.uninformativ.de you said you liked seeing the hash (which is a fair choice!). All I am asking is for a reconsideration as a user configurable feature. ;-) It looks redundant, in my opinion.

So, by “evolve” you actually mean “remove”, @prologic@twtxt.net? :-?

@bender@twtxt.net it sure breaks the index formatting.

@quark@ferengi.one this is what I see:

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com, this one, @movq@www.uninformativ.de, is slightly breaking my neomutt index. Will post screenshot from @bender@twtxt.net’s account.

Correct, @bender@twtxt.net. Since the very beginning, my twtxt flow is very flawed. But it turns out to be an advantage for this sort of problem. :-) I still use the official (but patched) twtxt client by buckket to actually fetch and fill the cache. I think one of of the patches played around with the error reporting. This way, any problems with fetching or parsing feeds show up immediately. Once I think, I’ve seen enough errors, I unsubscribe.

tt is just a viewer into the cache. The read statuses are stored in a separate database file.

It also happened a few times, that I thought some feed was permanently dead and removed it from my list. But then, others mentioned it, so I resubscribed.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de, that would be a nice addition. :-) I would also love the ability to hide/not show the hash when reading twtxts (after all, that’s on the header on each “email”). Could that be added as a user configurable toggle?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I don’t know if I’d want to discard the twts. I think what I’m looking for is a command “jenny -g https://host.org/twtxt.txt” to fetch just that one feed, even if it’s not in my follow list. I could wrap that in a shell script so that when I see a twt in reply to a feed I don’t follow, I can just tap a key and the feed will get added to my maildir. I guess the script would look for a mention at the start of a selected twt and call jenny -g on the feed.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org so, is it safe to assume you occasionally, but carefully, vet your feeds, and have contingencies in place to not keep requesting a seemingly dead feed over and over?

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org @bender@twtxt.net I’d certainly hate my client for automatic feed unsubscription, too.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Is there a good way to get jenny to do a one-off fetch of a feed, for when you want to fill in missing parts of a thread? I just added @slashdot@feeds.twtxt.net to my private follow file just because @prologic@twtxt.net keeps responding to the feed :-P and I want to know what he’s commenting on even though I don’t want to see every new slashdot twt.

@bender@twtxt.net Based on my experience so far, as a user, I would be upset if my client dropped someone from my follower list, i.e. stopped fetching their feed, without me asking for that to happen.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, I’ve noticed that as well when I hacked around. That’s a very good addition, ta! :-)

Getting to this view felt suprisingly difficult, though. I always expected my feeds I follow in the “Feeds” tab. You won’t believe how many times I clicked on “Feeds” yesterday evening. :-D Adding at least a link to my following list on the “Feeds” page would help my learning resistence. But that’s something different.

Also, turns out that “My Feeds” is the list of feeds that I author myself, not the ones I have subscribed to. The naming is alright, I can see that it makes sense. It just was an initial surprise that came up.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org errors are already reported to users, but they’re only visible in the following list.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de A family member gave me their old (pseudo-)smart phone and it had all kinds of pre-installed BS that you’re not supposed to be able to uninstall, Xiaomi, FB, google… you name it. but guess what!? I already know about this Trick and then there is the Rethink DNS/Firewall app I have setup to block all traffic then allow the stuff I need with an Allow, Bypass or Exclude rule.

You’d be surprised to see how much traffic is going to blocked!! 🤣

@rrraksamam@twtxt.net I, can’t function. 😂

@bender@twtxt.net I’m not a yarnd user, but automatically unfollowing on 404 doesn’t seem right. Besides @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org’s example, I could imagine just accidentally renaming my own twtxt file, or forgetting to push it when I point my DNS to a new web server. I’d rather not lose all my yarnd followers in a situation like that (and hopefully they feel the same).

@bender@twtxt.net 404 could be indeed a temporary error if the file resides on a mounted remote filesystem and then the mount point fails for some reason. With a symlink from the web root to the file on the mount, the web server probably will not recognize the mount point failure as such. Thus, it might not reply with a 503 Service Unavailable (or something like that), but 404 Not Found instead. (I could be wrong on that, though.)

The right™ way is to signal 410 Gone if the feed does not exist anymore and will not come back to life again. But that’s hard to come by in the wild. Somebody has to manually configure that in almost all situations.

But yes, as @falsifian@www.falsifian.org points out, exponential backoff looks like a good strategy. Probably even report a failure to users somehow, so they can check and potentially unsubscribe.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Amen! 🙏😆

@prologic@twtxt.net @bender@twtxt.net Exponential backoff? Seems like the right thing to do when a server isn’t accepting your connections at all, and might also be a reasonable compromise if you consider 404 to be a temporary failure.

@xuu@txt.sour.is I don’t even have a WhatsApp password, it never asked me? 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net I think it was some mix of phish and social engineering. She didn’t have the multifactor enabled. But i think she had clicked a message that had a fake login. She talked to someone on a phone and they made her do some things.

I never got the whole story of how it happened.

@prologic@twtxt.net, does this rings a bell to you? 159-196-9-199.9fc409.mel.nbn.aussiebb.net

@movq@www.uninformativ.de pleas no.

My wifes mom nearly got her account fully taken over by some hacker. They were able to get control and change password but I was able to get it recovered before they could get the phone number reset. They sent messages to all her contacts to send cash.

@bender@twtxt.net Sigh. 🫤 Elon Musk should buy Meta. Problem solved. 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net the whole thing took less than 2 min 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net The headline is interesting and sent me down a rabbit hole understanding what the paper (https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.279/) actually says.

The result is interesting, but the Neuroscience News headline greatly overstates it. If I’ve understood right, they are arguing (with strong evidence) that the simple technique of making neural nets bigger and bigger isn’t quite as magically effective as people say — if you use it on its own. In particular, they evaluate LLMs without two common enhancements, in-context learning and instruction tuning. Both of those involve using a small number of examples of the particular task to improve the model’s performance, and they turn them off because they are not part of what is called “emergence”: “an ability to solve a task which is absent in smaller models, but present in LLMs”.

They show that these restricted LLMs only outperform smaller models (i.e demonstrate emergence) on certain tasks, and then (end of Section 4.1) discuss the nature of those few tasks that showed emergence.

I’d love to hear more from someone more familiar with this stuff. (I’ve done research that touches on ML, but neural nets and especially LLMs aren’t my area at all.) In particular, how compelling is this finding that zero-shot learning (i.e. without in-context learning or instruction tuning) remains hard as model size grows.

@prologic@twtxt.net +1 for FrankenPHP. And built into caddy is also swell.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Variable names used with -eq in [[ ]] are automatically expanded even without $ as explained in the “ARITHMETIC EVALUATION” section of the bash man page. Interesting. Trying this on OpenBSD’s ksh, it seems “set -u” doesn’t affect that substitution.