@bender@twtxt.net Unfortunately, this also breaks the browser search.

@bender@twtxt.net Sounds about right.

I had a brainfart yesterday, though. For whatever reason I thought of subdomains, which are modeled with server entries in nginx. So, each could define its own access_log location. However, there are no subdomains in place! Searching around, I didn’t find any solution to give each user their own access log file.

One way would be a cronjob, aeh, systemd timer as I learned the other day, that greps the main access log and writes all user access log files with only the relevant stuff.

I used Gemini (the Google AI) twice at work today, asking about Google Workspace configuration and Google Cloud CLI usage (because we use those a lot). You’d think that it’d be well-suited for those topics. It answered very confidently, yet completely wrong. Just wrong. Made-up CLI arguments, whatever. It took me a while to notice, though, because it’s so convincing and, well, you implicitly and subconsciously trust the results of the Google AI when asking about Google topics, don’t you?

Will it get better over time? Maybe. But what I really want is this:

• Good, well-structured, easy-to-read, proper documentation. Google isn’t doing too bad in this regard, actually, it’s just that they have so much stuff that it’s hard to find what you’re looking for. Hence …
  
• … I want a good search function. Just give me a good fuzzy search for your docs. That’s it.
  

I just don’t have the time or energy to constantly second-guess this stuff. Give me something reliable. Something that is designed to do the right thing, not toy around with probabilities. “AI for everything” is just the wrong approach.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Have we reached peak enshittification yet?

YouTube is completely broken for me for a week or more. The player doesn’t even load anymore. Trying to limit the search results to real videos doesn’t do shit, etc. It’s useless. But downloading the videos with yt-dlp still works like a dream.

I used to run office hours at Google and the number of people who came into my office absolutely convinced that there was no way to search a dataset without having the entire thing in memory for every process was too damn high.

I should work on my client again and add some new features. Like adding a new feed directly in the client and not having to go to the config first. And showing a preview of a feed before actually adding it. Also, a search would be something to add. And finally combining my User-Agent analyzer with my subscription list to spot new feeds automatically.

@prologic@twtxt.net Let’s go through it one by one. Here’s a wall of text that took me over 1.5 hours to write.

This section says AI should not be treated as an authority. This is actually just what I said, except the AI phrased/framed it like it was a counter-argument.

The AI also said that users must develop “AI literacy”, again phrasing/framing it like a counter-argument. Well, that is also just what I said. I said you should treat AI output like a random blog and you should verify the sources, yadda yadda. That is “AI literacy”, isn’t it?

My text went one step further, though: I said that when you take this requirement of “AI literacy” into account, you basically end up with a fancy search engine, with extra overhead that costs time. The AI missed/ignored this in its reply.

Okay, so, the AI also said that you should use AI tools just for drafting and brainstorming. Granted, a very rough draft of something will probably be doable. But then you have to diligently verify every little detail of this draft – okay, fine, a draft is a draft, it’s fine if it contains errors. The thing is, though, that you really must do this verification. And I claim that many people will not do it, because AI outputs look sooooo convincing, they don’t feel like a draft that needs editing.

Can you, as an expert, still use an AI draft as a basis/foundation? Yeah, probably. But here’s the kicker: You did not create that draft. You were not involved in the “thought process” behind it. When you, a human being, make a draft, you often think something like: “Okay, I want to draw a picture of a landscape and there’s going to be a little house, but for now, I’ll just put in a rough sketch of the house and add the details later.” You are aware of what you left out. When the AI did the draft, you are not aware of what’s missing – even more so when every AI output already looks like a final product. For me, personally, this makes it much harder and slower to verify such a draft, and I mentioned this in my text.

You, @prologic@twtxt.net, also mentioned this in your car tyre example.

In my text, I gave two analogies: The gym analogy and the Google Translate analogy. Your car tyre example falls in the same category, but Gemini’s calculator example is different (and, again, gaslight-y, see below).

What I meant in my text: A person wants to be a programmer. To me, a programmer is a person who writes code, understands code, maintains code, writes documentation, and so on. In your example, a person who changes a car tyre would be a mechanic. Now, if you use AI to write the code and documentation for you, are you still a programmer? If you have no understanding of said code, are you a programmer? A person who does not know how to change a car tyre, is that still a mechanic?

No, you’re something else. You should not be hired as a programmer or a mechanic.

Yes, that is “skill evolution” – which is pretty much my point! But the AI framed it like a counter-argument. It didn’t understand my text.

(But what if that’s our future? What if all programming will look like that in some years? I claim: It’s not possible. If you don’t know how to program, then you don’t know how to read/understand code written by an AI. You are something else, but you’re not a programmer. It might be valid to be something else – but that wasn’t my point, my point was that you’re not a bloody programmer.)

Gemini’s calculator example is garbage, I think. Crunching numbers and doing mathematics (i.e., “complex problem-solving”) are two different things. Just because you now have a calculator, doesn’t mean it’ll free you up to do mathematical proofs or whatever.

What would have worked is this: Let’s say you’re an accountant and you sum up spendings. Without a calculator, this takes a lot of time and is error prone. But when you have one, you can work faster. But once again, there’s a little gaslight-y detail: A calculator is correct. Yes, it could have “bugs” (hello Intel FDIV), but its design actually properly calculates numbers. AI, on the other hand, does not understand a thing (our current AI, that is), it’s just a statistical model. So, this modified example (“accountant with a calculator”) would actually have to be phrased like this: Suppose there’s an accountant and you give her a magic box that spits out the correct result in, what, I don’t know, 70-90% of the time. The accountant couldn’t rely on this box now, could she? She’d either have to double-check everything or accept possibly wrong results. And that is how I feel like when I work with AI tools.

Gemini has no idea that its calculator example doesn’t make sense. It just spits out some generic “argument” that it picked up on some website.

The AI makes two points here. The first one, I might actually agree with (“bad bot behavior is not the fault of AI itself”).

The second point is, once again, gaslighting, because it is phrased/framed like a counter-argument. It implies that I said something which I didn’t. Like the AI, I said that you would have to adjust the copyright law! At the same time, the AI answer didn’t even question whether it’s okay to break the current law or not. It just said “lol yeah, change the laws”. (I wonder in what way the laws would have to be changed in the AI’s “opinion”, because some of these changes could kill some business opportunities – or the laws would have to have special AI clauses that only benefit the AI techbros. But I digress, that wasn’t part of Gemini’s answer.)

Except for one point, I don’t accept any of Gemini’s “criticism”. It didn’t pick up on lots of details, ignored arguments, and I can just instinctively tell that this thing does not understand anything it wrote (which is correct, it’s just a statistical model).

And it framed everything like a counter-argument, while actually repeating what I said. That’s gaslighting: When Alice says “the sky is blue” and Bob replies with “why do you say the sky is purple?!”

But it sure looks convincing, doesn’t it?

This took so much of my time. I won’t do this again. 😂

sorry i haven’t been working on bbycll or even hanging around twtxt much at all as of late – gf was over for a few weeks, i turned twenty years old, and have been doing extremely unnecessary things to my website

@prologic@twtxt.net Don’t worry about it!

I also getting angry thinking how this Chat Control crap will escalate to.

I’m already thinking of countermeasures and self-hosted alternatives, while searching lists of affected apps and services to replace/drop in the worst scenario (and probably devices).

Hello everyone! 👋

After a long while away, I’m back on twtxt with this new feed.

Some of you might remember me as justamoment@twtxt.net, that was a test account I made for trying things out, but I ended up keeping it more than planned.

I also tried other social platforms in search of a place that felt right for me.

In the end twtxt was the one that ticked all of my boxes:

• Slow social: it act more like a feed reader and I really appreciate that there’s no flood of content that I can’t keep up with.
  
• No server needed: I absolutely love to have total control over my content, I tend to avoid having moving parts that might break, plus you can put your feed under version control and it’s all backed up.
  
• Ownership: I can put my feed anywhere I want and nobody can decide if I can access it or not.
  
• For hackers: a single .txt file allows me to join a community, how cool is that!
  

This is why I decided to build my own twtxt client, one that allows you to decide how the feed is presented on your “instance”.

It’s still in the making but I’ll try to share a bit of it once I defined how things should work.

Coincidentally, I discovered that @itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com and @zvava@twtxt.net were also building a twtxt client, seems like twtxt is set to grow!

Drawn based on a quick doodle, the canine returns victorious, from the battle of Hot Topic bargain bin, as smug as can be.
Whoever will be the first to inform him, the spikes aren’t real gold and it’s most likely not even leather, meaning it’s not what he’s really been searching the universe for, better prepare themselves, to be jumped on, bitten and shredded by claws.

search page, bookmarks page, improved thread view (that i will probably improve further), as well as a logo and a whole ui redesign. it is truly all coming together…were i to mark any items off the roadmap :p

About ChatGPT rotting people’s brains, similarly could be said about search engines, and reference books. Oh, also doom scrolling, and mobile devices, and the Internet… :-P

@movq@www.uninformativ.de A quick search revealed https://www.tux-onlineshop.de/plueschtiere next door to you, but these tuxes look rather ugly. Also, shipping to the US&A is 60 bucks. I bet @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz’s sister can do better. :-)

Farrrk me Google search is and these days. Will they please “fuck off” with this Gemini AI garbage at the top that takes forever and is distracting as shit™ 💩 Fark me 🤦‍♂️ #Google #Search #Sucks #AI #Gemini

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah I actually use sift a lot these days for most “searching” – at least code and text searching. For finding files by name I still use find | grep.

@bender@twtxt.net Yes, you right. But is premium for more than that.
I use a feature I love a lot: customising different searches with different themes or links.
It’s easy to understand with an example. I have a search with the name “Django”. I set sources: Django documentation, stack overflow, topic “programming” and so on. It’s very quick to find Django solutions.
I also have another way to find my stuff: search my blog and repositories.
I had problems paying for the first mouths, now it’s a working tool for me.

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev what makes Kagi “the best search engine”? It is premium, alright. Allegedly you don’t get ads, but pay up-front for it, monthly.

I am very agree with the article. For me, Kagi is the best search engine. A premium experience.

Help ChatGPT discover your products
Comments ⌘ Read more

@thecanine@twtxt.net Yeah this is where I think all the hype really falls down. It’s all just a really really expensive search engine and auto-complete 🤦‍♂️ That’s it!

I just fixed a bug in tt’s reply to parent feature. Previously, when the message tree looked like the following

Message
├╴Reply 1
│ └╴Subreply
└╴Reply 2

and “Reply 2” was selected, pressing A to reply to the parent should have picked “Message”. However, a reply to “Reply 2” was composed instead. The reason was a precausiously introduced safety guard to abort the parent search which stopped at “Subreply”, because its subject didn’t match “Reply 2”’s. It was originally intended to abort on a completely different message conversation root. Just in case. Turns out that this thoght was flawed.

Fixing bugs by only removing code is always cool. :-)

/ME slipping a note under @klaxzy@klaxzy.net’s keyboard.

Note: “You should check https://marginalia-search.com/ I bet you’ll love it.”

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

A Principled Approach to Querying Data – A Type-Safe Search DSL
Comments ⌘ Read more

Hmmm there’s a bug somewhere in the way I’m ingesting archived feeds 🤔

sqlite> select * from twts where content like 'The web is such garbage these days%';
      hash = 37sjhla
  feed_url = https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt/1
   content = The web is such garbage these days 😔 Or is it the garbage search engines? 🤔
   created = 2024-11-14T01:53:46Z
created_dt = 2024-11-14 01:53:46
   subject = #37sjhla
  mentions = []
      tags = []
     links = []
sqlite>

Timeline of Evolution of Twtxt/Yarn.social:

• 2016 – Twtxt created by John Downey: plain text + HTTP = minimalist microblogging
  
• 2017–2019 – Community builds CLI tools, but adoption remains niche
  
• 2020 – Yarn.social launched by @prologic@twtxt.net with federation, threading, UI
  
• 2021–2023 – Pods sync, user mentions, blocking, search, and media support added
  
• 2024+ – Yarn.social becomes the reference Twtxt platform, with active federated pods

Full Text Search of US Court records
Comments ⌘ Read more

Judge Rules Blanket Search of Cell Tower Data Unconstitutional
Comments ⌘ Read more

Viral ChatGPT trend is doing ‘reverse location search’ from photos
Comments ⌘ Read more

Google Search to redirect its country level TLDs to Google.com
Comments ⌘ Read more

Dam the search here is sooo good now 😅

Windows Recall returns, and its companion feature does not keep data on-device
Remember Windows Recall, the Windows feature that would take a screenshot of your desktop every three seconds, stored them in a database, and then let you search through them at later dates? The feature has been hobbled by implementation problems, security issues, and privacy troubles, and has been released in preview and pulled since its original unveiling. Well, it’s back in … ⌘ Read more

Anyway. this was a good use for search btw. I couldn’t find my Twt, so I just quickly searched for it, snap, bingo I found it in a snap! 🫰

PostgreSQL Full-Text Search: Fast When Done Right (Debunking the Slow Myth)
Comments ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net, from IRC:

1. Saving preferences is failing. Specifically trying to save “Open Links” on the same window. For sure it isn’t happening. Check errors on browser’s console.
   
2. Search results pagination is broken. Search for “twtxt.net” and see it. Also, picking oldest/newest makes no difference on that search query.

@prologic@twtxt.net I can live without highlights. Actually, I prefer not to have them. A good search is all I want.

Search syntax appears to be:

hello
"hello world"
hello AND world
hello OR world
hello NOT world
"this is a phrase"

@prologic@twtxt.net pretty neat, search actually works now!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’m open to other suggestions 🤣 But hopefully both adding the additional prompt, not allowing it to enter shell history and removing from my shell history prevents me from doing such silly things in haste by pressing ^R and using fuzzy search which if you type fast you sometimes get wrong 😑

FYI: I’ve re-opened up search for anonymous use. So things like this now work without having to have an account on this pod or login. 👌 #search #twtxt

I don’t think I can trust Google as my search engine anymore
Comments ⌘ Read more

How to protect your phone and data privacy at the US border
Comments ⌘ Read more

Activeloop (YC S18) Is Hiring Senior Python Back End and AI Search Engineers
Comments ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net If it develops, and I’m not saying it will happen soon, perhaps Yarn could be connected as an additional node. Implementation would not be difficult for any client or software. It will not only be a backup of twtxt, but it will be the source for search, discovery and network health.

Google, DuckDuckGo massively expand “AI” search results
Clearly, online search isn’t bad enough yet, so Google is intensifying its efforts to continue speedrunning the downfall of Google Search. They’ve announced they’re going to show even more “AI”-generated answers in Search results, to more people. Today, we’re sharing that we’ve launched Gemini 2.0 for AI Overviews in the U.S. to help with harder questions, starting with coding, advanced math and multimodal queries, with mor … ⌘ Read more

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.

@prologic@twtxt.net Of course you don’t notice it when yarnd only shows at most the last n messages of a feed. As an example, check out mckinley’s message from 2023-01-09T22:42:37Z. It has “[Scheduled][Scheduled][Scheduled]“… in it. This text in square brackets is repeated numerous times. If you search his feed for closing square bracket followed by an opening square bracket (][) you will find a bunch more of these. It goes without question he never typed that in his feed. My client saves each twt hash I’ve explicitly marked read. A few days ago, I got plenty of apparently years old, yet suddenly unread messages. Each and every single one of them containing this repeated bracketed text thing. The only conclusion is that something messed up the feed again.

@prologic@twtxt.net @xuu@txt.sour.is There:

Just search for ][ in https://twtxt.net/user/mckinley/twtxt.txt and you’ll see.

reviewing logs this morning and found i have been spammed hard by bots not respecting the robots.txt file. only noticed it because the OpenAI bot was hitting me with a lot of nonsensical requests. here is the list from last month:

• (810) bingbot
  
• (641) Googlebot
  
• (624) http://www.google.com/bot.html
  
• (545) DotBot
  
• (290) GPTBot
  
• (106) SemrushBot
  
• (84) AhrefsBot
  
• (62) MJ12bot
  
• (60) BLEXBot
  
• (55) wpbot
  
• (37) Amazonbot
  
• (28) YandexBot
  
• (22) ClaudeBot
  
• (19) AwarioBot
  
• (14) https://domainsbot.com/pandalytics
  
• (9) https://serpstatbot.com
  
• (6) t3versionsBot
  
• (6) archive.org_bot
  
• (6) Applebot
  
• (5) http://search.msn.com/msnbot.htm
  
• (4) http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html
  
• (4) Googlebot-Mobile
  
• (4) DuckDuckGo-Favicons-Bot
  
• (3) https://turnitin.com/robot/crawlerinfo.html
  
• (3) YandexNews
  
• (3) ImagesiftBot
  
• (2) Qwantify-prod
  
• (1) http://www.google.com/adsbot.html
  
• (1) http://gais.cs.ccu.edu.tw/robot.php
  
• (1) YaK
  
• (1) WBSearchBot
  
• (1) DataForSeoBot
  

i have placed some middleware to reject these for now but it is not a full proof solution.