Two mates and I went hiking yesterday. The sun was beating down on us, but luckily, it was also rather windy which helped to cool off. Unfortunately, we also encountered bucketloads of drunk hikers with hardcarts loaded full of beer who had to very loudly please everbody with their shitty taste of music. What a stupid tradition on 1st May public holiday over here. Other than that, it was a great hike.

I was pleasantly surprised that my trains were dead on time, so both super short times to switch connections worked out perfectly on both the way there and back. I did not expect this to happen at all and already braced myself for an additional half hour waiting time. Especially with the stupid Stuttgart Beer Festival right now. Even more drunk idiots everywhere and of course also in the trains. On the return journey, I learned about all sorts of family relations etc. in various Allgäu villages. Oh boy. At least nobody vomited, that’s a bonus.

Also, I sweated more on the first return Sauna-Bahn than on the entire hike combined. It was awfully hot in there.

Anyway, all in all it was a great time in the outdoors with my mates: https://lyse.isobeef.org/monrepos-favoritepark-hungerberg-ruine-hoheneck-2026-05-01/

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org 33! Wow! Very good stash on clicks, Lyse! And that Ford van reminds me of the police account used to keep order around here. LOL. It’s a gem!

@prologic@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de @bender@twtxt.net Thank you very much! <3

I only filtered out the noise floor of the camera itself. I selected one second of “silence” in Audacity and used the “Effect” → “Noise reduction” (Rausch-Verminderung in German) dialog with its default settings. I repeated that two or three times in total with different sections of “silence”. It’s very hard to find something where there is really no other bird singing in the background. But in contrast to the original audio, the edited version is noticeably more squeaky I find.

Oh, and I increased the volume. Especially after the noise reduction, everything is a bit quieter.

I got rather lucky, only a few cars went by and my microphone is too shitty, to really pick it up. :-D It’s kinda drowned out by the background noise. 45 seconds into the video, a car passes. Also at 1:10 without a doubt. I’m sure there were actually many were. Most of them passed behind me, the mic is facing away from that sound source. Of course, the densely built-up area still reflects a lot.

It also helped that Azabache is a loud singer himself. Fortunately, no idiots screaming either.

If you want to compare yourself or play around to see what other improvements you are able to achieve, I uploaded the original from the camera in the same directory under the lovely name DSCN5687.MOV. It’s 236.1 MiB in size.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org thank you! I got visual now! 🙈 Now, you had to pull out a pic from winter, to make those of us constantly burning in “hell” jealous, eh? 😂

@bender@twtxt.net Oh, this trekking bike is nothing special at all. It’s a Bulls Wildtail with only front suspension, 21 gears and standard V-brakes. The first immediate upgrade I did was mounting a pannier rack, it’s one of the most useful things.

I just quickly dug out this photo from one and a half years ago where it’s parked at our scout yard in November 2024. You just have to use your imagination on how the front looks like. :-D

https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/bike.jpg

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org first time you twtxt about having a bicycle, and now I am curious to see it. Show us a click! 🙈

I left at full sunshine and completely forgot to bring my bicycle’s headlamp. The taillight is always on the bike, but the front one gets charged in the house after every trip. Luckily, I found a torch and roll of duct tape in my hiking backpack. It finally paid off that I always carry all this silly gear around.

A few weeks ago, I actually thought about removing the torch, because it’s been a hot minute when I last used it. Fortunately, I did not. :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Really depends on the genre, I guess. 🤔 Quite a lot of “non-pop” music still uses the format “concept album”, I think. 🤔 But don’t ask me for any solid statistics. 😅

With all these new ways of digital publishing, I’m wondering for years why music artists still release entire albums. I would have imagined that most bands simply publish a new song whenever it’s good to go. But no, at least in my bubble, everybody still collects a bunch of new songs before throwing them as a collection into the crowd. I never used any of these streaming services, though, so maybe I’m just completely uninformed.

@bender@twtxt.net Yeah, it’s crazy!

Somehow, your link 403s here, but I just searched it. At least it has the diagonals at the lower two steps. However, the two upper platforms also suffer from the plastic covers, it appears (I cannot tell the material from the low quality images I found). Maybe it is aluminium? I think some joints use machine bolts, though (but again, not enough detail visible).

Happy ladder climbing!

Just saw the video. Can’t believe that ladder is that expensive. Even in AUD, it is almost $100. It is also 2.5 stars, with 13 reviews. Gulp. Engineering aside (and you are right, it is pretty interesting, and some, if not most of it went over my head), the ladder is rubbish. This is the one I have. Not super, but have been with me for a while, and used quite a bit, still as good as new.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’m glad you found it useful. :)

@klaxzy@klaxzy.net Thanks for that. I couldn’t agree more.

The auDA, and some 3rd-party identify service and my Registrar are a joke!

WOW! I just had to share this little story I ran into today.

I tried to register a .AU Domain the other day, only for it to instantly fail.

I emailed support, which took several days to respond, only for them to respond by saying (paraphased):

We’re sorry, but the identify checks failed. The 3rd-aprty service doesn’t tell us why, But, please make sure that the ID you used matches the Full Name, including any Middle name(s).

I used my Passport number. Which of course has my First, Middle and Last Name.

I can only assume at this point that the checks failed on the missing “Middle name”. Why? Because the Registrar I use has a database and user interface for “contacts” that only have support for First name and Last name. NO Middle Name.

🤦‍♂️ This is basically stupid at this point. Systems cannot be trusted at the most fundamental level, no matter how good they are.

Until we figure out how to build a system that allows an individual to prove to another entity that they are who they say they are without a shred of doubt (i.e: cryptographically), we’re stuffed.

There is literally nothing I can do in this case. The auDA are at fault. The 3rd-party identify service (unknown) are at fault. The registrar are at fault. Hell, even the Passport office are at fault for even bothering to or requiring a Middle name.

How has “identity” come to this?

Somebody really has got their session handling licked. I’m surfing in a webshop and opening another article to check on the details only to receive the error message: “An error occurred during the ordering procedure with PayPal. Please try again later or use the normal ordering process.”

My mate and I hiked some 16-18 kilometers to the Wasserberg. The 22°C sun was beating down hard on us. There were quite a bunch of clouds all around, but none of them casted the tiniest shade on us. Only in the second half we got a little bit luckier in that regard. Still, we were soaked before we even left town. Hardly any breeze.

Unfortunately, I left my camera at home and found it hidden behind the cettle in the kitchen after searching the entire house for some 15 odd minutes. However, a greenfinch paid me a visit this morning and I got it on camera. The sunset was crazy colored, too:

https://lyse.isobeef.org/gruenfink-2026-04-18/

¡Muchas gracias @bender@twtxt.net! I was also thinking about categorizing them a few years ago. But it’s so much work. I would have to tag every photo on its own. My use case goes more towards “give me all albums with squirrels”, though. Let’s see. I would need some tooling for easy tagging first. And then, the question is, which categories do I want to have to begin with?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de But even the same model behaves differently if you upgrade to a newer version. Or it hopefully should, why otherwise would one want to update in the first place? A fixed, predictable output would be the result of us oldtimers doing something with inferior, ancient technology!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh, yeah, right, I hadn’t even considered that (we mostly use one model). Choose a different model and it does something completely different. Cool stuff.

Another AI rant:

One of the “key features” of LLMs is that you can use “natural language”, because that is supposed to be easier than having to learn a programming language. So, when someone says to me, “I automated this process using AI!”, what they mean is: They have written a very, very large Markdown document. In this document, they list what the AI is supposed to do.

In prose.

This is a complete disaster.

Programming and programming languages have one crucial property: They follow a well-defined structure and every word has a well-defined meaning. That is absolutely brilliant, because I can read this and I can follow the program in my head. I can build a mental model. I can debug this, down to the precise instructions that the CPU executes. This all follows well-defined patterns that you can reason about.

But with these Markdown files, I am completely lost. We lose all these important properties! No debugging, no reasoning about program flow, nothing. It’s all gone. It’s a magic black box now, literally randomized, that may or may not do what you wanted, in some order.

People now throw these Markdown files at me … and … am I supposed to read this? Why? It’s completely random and fuzzy.

Sadly, these AI tools are good enough to be able to mostly grasp the authors intentions. Hence people don’t see the harm they cause, because “it works”.

We already have a ton of automations like this at work: Tickets get piped through an LLM and these Markdown files / prompts determine what will happen with the ticket, and maybe they trigger additional actions as well, like account creation or granting permissions. All based on fuzzy natural language – that no two humans will ever properly agree on.

Jesus Christ, we’re now INTENTIONALLY bringing the ambiguity of legal texts and lawyers into programming.

Using natural language is NOT easier than using a programming language. It is HARDER. Have you people never read a legal contract? And that stuff can STILL be debated in a court room.

I can’t begin to comprehend why we, tech folks, push this so hard. What is wrong with you? Or me?

(And, once again, we’re ignoring other factors here. LLMs use a ton of energy and ressources, that we don’t have to spare. It’s expensive as fuck. It doesn’t even run locally on our servers, meaning we give all these credentials and permissions to some US company. It’s insane.)

I love the smell of the rainy air. Sooooo good. The thunderstorm is gonna miss us now, two closer bangs, but that’s supposed to be it.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I couldn’t agree more! I also have the feeling that it causes more people to just accept “it’s a software problem, there’s nothing that can be done about it”. Which is very frightning to me.

Up until now, I was successful in refusing to actively use that crap. I had to do one mandatory AI training, but even our hippest AI enthusiasts found it absolutely terrible. Probably also nailed together by the same rubbish they want us to now use everyday as much as possible.

Code reviews are the part that I have to deal with most. And I believe that the code quality is degrading.

Let’s hope the bubble bursts sooner than later. It will definitely burst at some point. That’s for sure.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yes, and that’s why I’m 100% convinced that we’ll see a massive brain drain in a couple of years. This will affect young people even more, because they don’t have all the “old” knowledge to fall back on.

It’s concerning, I’ve warned about it many times, nobody listens.

I think the best thing one can do is explicitly not use any AI tools but keep your actual skills intact. Might be out of a (good) job for a while, but once this bubble bursts, this is who is going to get hired again. (I think.)

And considering how insanely expensive all this is, I’m still (mostly) convinced that the bubble will actually burst. This stuff just isn’t sustainable.

… or I might be wrong. And if so, I see an even darker future that I don’t want to put into words right now.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Now, it’s official, I AM an idiot. Yeah, thank you, that’s it! Apparently, I’ve quickly unlearned to use my brain with great success. :-(

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

Disclaimer: Can’t guarantee that I’m fully awake and I’m being trained at work not to use my brain anymore, so maybe this is complete bullshit. 😪🧟‍♀️

It says here that SQLite uses signed integers:

https://sqlite.org/datatype3.html

In pure bits, 1 << 63 would be 0x8000000000000000, but as a signed value, it gets interpreted as -9223372036854775808. Subtracting 1 yields -9223372036854775809 – but that doesn’t fit in 64 bits anymore. It’s possible that SQLite doesn’t want to wrap around but instead saturates? Haven’t checked. 🤔

With 62 bits, there is enough room.

With 1 << 64, I have no idea how SQLite wants to handle this, because this should immediately trigger a warning, because it doesn’t fit right away. Maybe it gets truncated to 0?

sqlite> select printf('0x%x', 2 * (1 << 64));
╭──────────────────────╮
│ printf('0x%x', 2 ... │
╞══════════════════════╡
│ 0x0                  │
╰──────────────────────╯
sqlite> select printf('0x%x', 0 - 1);
╭──────────────────────╮
│ printf('0x%x', 0 ... │
╞══════════════════════╡
│ 0xffffffffffffffff   │
╰──────────────────────╯
sqlite> select printf('0x%x', 0 - 2);
╭──────────────────────╮
│ printf('0x%x', 0 ... │
╞══════════════════════╡
│ 0xfffffffffffffffe   │
╰──────────────────────╯

Everything changes, right? I know we sound like curmudgeons, and perhaps AI is the next step. We are living its early infancy, the struggles and dislikes, the errors and flaws, and generations after us will simply benefit from it, and see it as natural as my children see the Internet today (it isn’t natural to me, I was born way before it).

Or maybe AI isn’t the next step. Either way, whether we like it or not, there is truly absolutely nothing (or close to) we can do. Well, complain we can, of course. :-P

Via https://github.com/newsboat/newsboat/issues/3220#issuecomment-4198066671 I came across this nice selection on why not to use AI: https://github.com/Vxrpenter/AIMania/blob/main/WHY.md#why

This then lead me to the slopware list: https://codeberg.org/small-hack/open-slopware

Holy shit, there’s even more than I thought. :-O In addition to Vim, the following affects me more or less daily (but hopefully not my ancient versions): curl, VLC, ImageMagick, rsync, Python, systemd and even the Linux Kernel itself. Oh fuck me dead. :‘-(

@kiwu@twtxt.net what in the world?! Where? Long gone here (US).

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah. Unfortunately. :-( I tried to bring up the subject of dependency upgrade reviews a few times, but nobody else cared. We finally experienced a supply chain attack (luckily, didn’t turn out too horrible for us, could have been worse) and this got the discussion slowly rolling again. So, publication of this article is perfect timing. Let’s see. Admittedly, I don’t have high hopes. And I bet someone suggests to use AI agents…

Azabache returned just a few minutes later when the sparrow or great/blue tit was gone. Next time I will use a tripod to record the video. Also sorry about the sound, I used all my Audacity skills to remove the noise, but somehow, combining the video and audio track in kdenlive somehow messed up the sound. There’s some horrible sqealing towards the beginning.

The sun was out and tricked everybody to believe it’s nice and warm. However, with the wind, the 11°C felt way colder. Still, super nice out there, I enjoyed it a lot. The quick trip to the dairy farm took me more than double the regular time, because I took close to 400 photos. Oh boy, Lyse is such an idiot!

https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2026-04-02/

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @bender@twtxt.net Waaaahhhh, they’re coming closer to earth one kilometer every second!! They’re crashing right into us!

I didn’t know either that we send people to the moon again! :-O Cool. And bender witnessed this historic moment in person. Awesome! :-)

@itsericwoordward@itsericwoodward.com Doesn’t matter if I use w3m or elinks. No, just kidding. Firefox 115. See also #47fl5jq.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de with the current regime, everything is, to put it politely, rather odd, and in disarray. They have yesterday’s window, otherwise the next one was on the 12 of April, or something like that. We knew it was going up for a few days, but we are used to that kind of thing, so it is not that super exciting any more. LOL.

Yeah, I saw it in person.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org That’s crazy! If you don’t mind me asking, what browser are you using when you see this?

@bender@twtxt.net Glad to hear it, I’ve neglected a Safari test thus far.

Thank you both for checking.

@itsericwoordward@itsericwoodward.com That’s a nice collection. :-)

It made me look at my single frisbee, that was last used maybe 8 years ago, possibly more. I immediately found it in the drawer I thought it was in. And alongside some other stuff I was unsuccessfully hunting for for literally months by now. Thanks, mate! ;-)

Hopefully, my good headlamp also reveals itself at some point in time.

This one comes from this years (now scrapped) April 1st DLSS 5 gag, that was originally supposed to use Microsofts AI - in ways similar to the Nvidia technology, which produced interesting, overly detailed results. I wanted to see if I could beat the AI thing at drawing something like that myself and many redraws later, this is my best result.

@bender@twtxt.net both, but neither directly. I know every workaround there is, including those used by developers, to test apps, while working on them. However if “sideloading” becomes so tedious, even the more technical users, cannot be bothered to do it, competing appstores and independent developers, not wanting to send their money and ID to Google, loose users at such rate, they likely won’t be able to justify continuing to maintain their projects, people like me rely on.

@prologic@twtxt.net must be nice. Congrats! I am happy for you! 😂 Off jesting, enjoy mate! The rest of us will continue slaving ourvselves. 😅

In the interest of fairness and hopefully for the last time, I ever have to address this, Google has flip-flopped again and promised “sideloading” will not be removed from their version of Android, but instead have to be enabled in the developer settings, using the following “advanced flow”:

To be perfectly clear, this still falls short of what I wanted, but at this point, it is a compromise I’m willing to take, over further pursuing this, through the various available European courts, myself.

Here is their full statement:
https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2026/03/android-developer-verification.html

@prologic@twtxt.net don’t! You might be into troubles. Just record something small, and masterful, for us to listen, forget the costume. 😅

I’m happy to report that, earlier today, I published an early version of express-twtkpr: an ExpressJS library that enables hosting (and directly posting to) a twtxt.txt file. It works great (otherwise you wouldn’t be able to read this), but it’s still in alpha and lacks documentation, examples, tests, installation flexibility, or polish, so please use it at your own risk. Enjoy! https://www.npmjs.com/package/express-twtkpr

I’m supporting incremental SQLite schema changes to just upgrade from an older database version to whatever the current software version supports. In the past, I already noticed that this is quite expensive in unit tests when each test case runs through the entire schema patches and applies them one by one.

To speed up test execution I now decided that I finally go through the troubles of maintaining both a set of incremental patches and a full schema setup in one go. A unit test verifies that both ways end up with the same structure. This gives me a set of SQLs to check the structures:

SELECT type, name, tbl_name, sql
FROM sqlite_schema
ORDER BY type, name, tbl_name

Unfortunately, the resulting CREATE TABLE SQL queries are formatted differently, depending on whether the full schema was set up in one big step or the structure had been modified with ALTER TABLE. Mainly, added columns are not on their own lines but appended in one physical line. That’s why I wanted an SQL formatting tool. Since I didn’t find one that works decently, I’m now doing some simple string manipulation. Joining consecutive whitespace into a single space character, removing spaces before commas and closing parentheses and spaces after opening parentheses. This works surpringly good enough. Of course, if it fails, the “diff” is absolutely horrendous.

Now for the cool part, my test execution dropped from around 5:05 minutes to just 1:32 minutes! I call that a win.

I just stumbled across PRAGMA table_info('tablename') https://sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_table_info, PRAGMA foreign_key_list('tablename') and friends. I guess, I have to play with that, now. It’s probably much better to use than the SQL text approach.

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org Correct, the two smaller versions are loading perfectly fine. The hickup is only for the originals. But in all reality, the middle ones are sufficient for me personally. Please don’t get me wrong, at least for the people photos, the subjects are large enough. The Japanese landscapes, however, would definitely benefit from a bit more detail. ;-)

I just tried it once more, and now, the tree with the sign (/photo/5Zy4pqVIt0oP/IMG_20251106_035048_448.jpg) fully loaded very quickly. Same with the Japanese dish (/photo/tJbmg8oleYbh/IMG_20251030_091719_086.jpg) and shopping center (/photo/qXG5ucIjpPju/IMG_20251029_045002_778.jpg). But the previous and next ones all ran into the same problems again. When I’m very lucky, I eventually get the upper half. Typically not even that much, a third, a fifth, or even less.

Waiting a bit before making an attempt, the wooden walkway through the forest or park (/photo/ojQpDLfBoGN4/IMG_20251023_043829_011.jpg) eventually also made it. But unlike the other successful attempts, it took a long time.

The more photos you add, the more beneficial it might be to separate the index into several different albums. I didn’t measure it, but it felt like 10 to 20 seconds for all the thumbnails to load. That traffic adds up.

Another idea would be to strip the EXIF data from the thumbnails and reducing quality to 90% or even 80%. Using the famous tree with the sign, I cannot tell the difference between the original thumbnail and the 80% quality one. I’m sure it depends on the subject. Here are the numbers:

$ convert -strip IMG_20251106_035048_448_size_400.jpg stripped.jpg
$ convert -quality 90 IMG_20251106_035048_448_size_400.jpg 90.jpg
$ convert -quality 80 IMG_20251106_035048_448_size_400.jpg 80.jpg
$ convert -strip -quality 90 IMG_20251106_035048_448_size_400.jpg 90-stripped.jpg
$ convert -strip -quality 80 IMG_20251106_035048_448_size_400.jpg 80-stripped.jpg
$ ls -lh *jpg | awk '{print $5 " " $9}' 
46K 80.jpg
45K 80-stripped.jpg
64K 90.jpg
63K 90-stripped.jpg
132K IMG_20251106_035048_448_size_400.jpg
127K stripped.jpg
$ ls -l *jpg | awk '{print $5 " " $9}'
46160 80.jpg
45064 80-stripped.jpg
65012 90.jpg
63916 90-stripped.jpg
135070 IMG_20251106_035048_448_size_400.jpg
129647 stripped.jpg

** WARNING: connection is not using a post-quantum key exchange algorithm.
** This session may be vulnerable to “store now, decrypt later” attacks.
** The server may need to be upgraded. See https://openssh.com/pq.html

😱😱😱

@rdlmda@rdlmda.me it is called, in Spanish, “the mother”. It is created through a bit (not by much) effort, and kept as a starting point. Just like Asian cuisine has dishes that never cool, always cooking leaving always a base on it.

How do you think a lathe (and just about any tool, etc.) is done? Yup, in part by using a lathe. 😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de just use https instead:

git clone https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/twtxt.dev.git

@bender@twtxt.net Yes, really should have chosen my words more wisely. As @movq@www.uninformativ.de mentions, we got a vague promise of an “advanced flow” being implemented, and in my case also a vague promise of a video call, with someone at Google, regarding it. Now when the backlash died down, it does not look like Google plans to follow through, with any of this and they’re completely unwilling to elaborate and get back to us, about if and how any of this will be implemented.

@rdlmda@rdlmda.me I never saw the point of a registry to be honest, as it defeated the point of what I believed to be a truly decentralised non-social social ecosystem. What can and does work however is a search engine and crawler. I used to run one, but I took it down, mostly because it got expensive to operate, at least the implementation I built… Maybe one day i’ll try again with a SQLite backend.

@rdlmda@rdlmda.me You might or might not find this useful: https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/twthash.py

@rdlmda@rdlmda.me most of our conversations used to be about twtxt, I am not going to lie. Lately? Not so much. It turns out (a) we don’t need a longer hash, (b) we don’t care so much about changing addressing, and © I am just Bender, what else can I say? :-D :-P

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Luckily, I’ve never encountered any bugs in Vim with my type of work and features I use.