Oh boy, it was bloody humid this morning. Just around 20°C when we left, but climbing rapidly. The flow of air when walking was okay, but as soon as we stopped, streams of sweat were pouring down on us. Luckily, it was cloudy, but the lack of wind was bad. Now, the sun is out, 29°C will be reached in an hour and I’m glad that the house is still cool. It will be a different story in a few weeks or months. Not looking forward to that at ll.

On the bright side, we saw the first tadpoles of the year and an also first, but sadly dead slow worm that probably some bird dropped on a bench next to the fountain. The fly was stuck to its feast and also cactus. The municipality fixed the railing nicely and we came across a giant patch of great looking fire bugs on the summit.

All in all, a successful stroll through the woods but for the humid heat.

https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2026-05-30/

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/

damn, my 2015 backup archive, 2 out of 6 hdds dead, both seagates, sympthoms - click of death.

Fuck me dead, our sky burned down once again! https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2026-04-28/

You can hear Azabache somewhere in these trees, but the video only shows a raven. I think. There are also pidgeons over there, but it looks more raveny to me.

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. :‘-(

Fuck me dead! I accidentally confused an HTML file for a YAML file and manually opened it in my browser. Unfortunately, I clicked on the OK button of the popped up dialog a bit too fast, it just caught me off guard. It asked which program to open the YAML file in. Of course Firefox thought that it could handle that and suggested itself by default. Conveniently, the “don’t prompt me again and always use this selection from now on” checkbox was enabled.

And then the endless loop of death started. Turns out, this fucking browser can’t do shit with YAML files and delegated to what had been just configured. Oh, would you look at that!? Firefox! Empty tabs after empty tabs appeared. Killing and restarting Firefox just loaded the last session with all the tabs and the loop continued.

Some bloody snakeoil on my work machine slows down link openening requests by two, three seconds. It’s always absolutely anoying, but luckily, it actually limited the rate of new tabs popping up. I still could not close the many tabs fast enough that had accumulated before I noticed what was going on in the background.

Going to the settings to change them was always interrupted with a new tab opening in the foreground.

Finally, killing Firefox and renaming the file on disk before restarting Firefox did the trick and broke the loop. I was still holding down Ctrl+W for a minute or so to get rid of the useless tabs. I didn’t want to loose the important tabs, so just ditching the session wasn’t an option.

@bender@twtxt.net ICQ, yeah, I vaguely remember these times, despite I still know my ICQ number like it was yesterday. :-D

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe No, it’s not dead. The one account in question actually is on jabber.org.

The compiler technique I’m using here is to not “emit” most of the runtime if it’s actually never used in your program, and also dropping dead code in the SSA pass.

PSA: Just in case you start getting 5xxs on my end, I’m not dead 😂 (well, unless I am). Well be changing ISPs and hopefully get the new line up and running before the old provider cuts us off.

I was looking at some ancient code and then thought: Hmm, maybe it would be a good idea to see more details in this error message. Which of the values don’t line up. On the other hand, that feature isn’t probably used anyway, because it’s a bit ugly to use (historically evolved). And on top of that, most teams need something slightly different, if they deal with that sort of thing.

I still told my workmates about it, so they could also have a look at it and we can decide tomorrow what to do about it. Speaking of the devil, no kidding, not even half an hour later, a puzzled tester contacted me. She received exactly that rather useless error message. Looks like I had an afflatus. ;-)

It’s interesting, though, that in all those years, nobody stumbled across this before. At least we now know for sure that this is not dead code. :-)

Today, the internet was dead, and you’ve learned how many websites are actually made by humans and how many are made by AI.

I am not dead. promise.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Uh, that actually looks not that terrible. Somehow, I remember Swing GUIs being way uglier.

As for Visual Basic, I only had to use VBA once in my life. That was in the beginning of my career when I inherited a project from a leaving coworker. Fuck me, was that awful. Just alone the damn compiler error dialog box popping up in my face all the time while editing and the compiler already trying to parse the unfinished and hence of course uncompilable code. Boy, that left a lasting impression on me. I ported everything to Java very quickly. Luckily, the code base wasn’t all that large at that point in time. I had to add a bunch of new features after that, so I was very glad that I convinced my workmate/project manager to do that first. We didn’t even need a GUI, the button in Excel was transformed to a command line program that just generated the large file.

But I cannot comment on the VB GUI designer, I never used that. Your screenshot looks very similar to the Delphi one, though. Only towards the end of my Delphi days I found out about the possibility to make the widgets snap to window edges and corners (I don’t remember how that was called), so that resizing the windows was actually possible without messing up their entire contents.

Switching to Linux, Delphi wasn’t an option anymore. For some reason I couldn’t use Kylix. Maybe it was already dead by the time I changed OSes. Or I couldn’t get it to run. I just don’t remember. I just recall that the unavailability of Delphi was the reason it took me a while to actually settle on Linux. I then fully switched to Java. The GridBagLayout was my absolutely favorite Swing layout manager. I reckon I used it 98% of the time, because it was so powerful and made the windows resize properly, just as I had learned to do in Delphi shortly before.

Up until discovering Swing, I used Java’s AWT for a short amount of time. That was very limited I think and I hit the limits fairly quickly. Later at uni, we had one project making use of SWT. Didn’t convince me either. I could be wrong, but I think there was also a SWT GUI designer plugin for Eclipse. If there really was, that one wasn’t in the same street as Delphi’s (there must be a reason I forgot about it ;-)).

After taking most of the year off from role-playing, I’ve got 3 one-shots coming up in the next month, all of which need some tweaking before I can run them (as do my homebrew rules).

Plus there’s a “build a game” code challenge at work, a pair of media boxes I need to rebuild, a pair of dead machines I need to diagnose, and I’d like to (eventually) get my twtxt apps to a “releasable” state.

So many projects, so little (free) time…

Finally, new books arrived. Let’s see if Dead Silence is as good as it sounds. 😃

And I need to make something absolutely clear as well here. Twtxt was completely and utterly dead back in {Aug 2020](https://yarn.social/about.html) when I came across the spec and its simplicity and realised the lost opportunity. Since then we’ve continued to grow a small but thriving community. The extensions we’ve built over time have stood and lasted the test of time for the past ~5 years. We need not break things too badly, because what we have today and was designed years ago actually works quite well™ (despite some flaws).

Because here’s the ugly truth: service is dead. The only thing still alive is the endless, humiliating upsell and self-service. Every industry is an overcrowded airport lounge now | Hacker News

Since 2020, I’ve been putting together one playlist every year, in which each track represents one month of that year. However, I also have assigned each season two specific songs, which do not change year-to-year: Spring: “A Little Bit Of Love” by Weezer and “Gretel” by Alex G; Summer: “Dumb” by Roe Kapara and “Endless Bummer” by Weezer; Autumn: “1979” by The Smashing Pumpkins and “The Dead Come Talking” by Roe Kapara; Winter: “Red Water (Christmas Mourning)” by Type O Negative and “Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End)” by The Darkness

internet is dead

Hahaha, I’m sure there were well over one thousand fireflies today! Basically at all times I could watch at least 15 of them around me. At better spots where one could see a few meters into the forest, there were easily 30 individuals, probably more. One even landed on my small finger. I didn’t feel anything at all, but my finger glowed. :-) Awwww! After a 20 meters ride it took off.

But it looks like I have to go already at 21:30 at sunset the next days. Today, I left the house at 22:00 and all the above happend in the first half. The second half of the walk was rather boring, maybe just around 70 glowworms in total. The extremely busy route yesterday was virtually dead this time I came around. They all have already gone to sleep, or something like that.

I also encountered two toads. I nearly stepped on the first one, but it luckily jumped to the side in time. No animals harmed.

OH, FUCK ME DEAD! On the way home from today’s walk I saw easily 800 fireflies! Yes, over eight hundred! That was absolutely amazing. First time this year and already this many. Crazy! They were just fricking everywhere in the entire forest. I counted to one hundred and then stopped. The darker it got, the more fireflies came out and glowed around. :-) There were spots where in under ten seconds I counted 20 glowworms. Super sick. Soooo beautiful. <3

Before I left I tried to call a mate to join me, who apparently wasn’t home yet, though, didn’t pick up. But in the very end I surprisingly met her in the forest and we were super happy to encounter all the fireflies. She also said that today was her first time this year to spot them. I’ll definitely check them out in the next days, too.

Apart from all the glowworms, I also came across some goats, two deer (one of which only the ears showing out of the grass), according to the sounds I sadly must have scared up four more, bucketloads of tadpoles, four big and very active anthills next to each other and three bats to finish the stroll off. I call that extremely successful.

There ya go: https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2025-06-24/

Maybe everyone is dead, or there really are fewer people than bots.

twtxt its dead my friends! my first twt from twtwt #twtxt #dead

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Ta! The dead end wasn’t all that bad in my opinion. Personally, I really do like dirt paths and exploring. It was all dried up, so no muddy mess we had to walk through. More like climbing over thick branches that have been worked into the ground by harvesters or forwarders in the muddy winter. Rough terrain. My mate, on the other hand – whose idea it was to check out the real summit in the first place ;-) — wasn’t all that pleased about the detour. Oh well. :-D

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org sooo pretty! sucks about the dead end tho

We had sun, clouds, wind, rain and a whole lot of fun on our trip to the Wasserberg. We’ve been out seven hours in total, not bad at all for all those kilometers. We added on some detours to check out a pond I’ve been introduced by a mate a few years back.

After some (expensive) tucker at the Wasserberghaus, we tried to actually visit the summit this time. However, there’s nothing to see, just a rough logging trail (46-49). That was a dead end, so we had to turn around. It was some nice exploring, but I reckon this was my first and last time up there. :-)

Unfortunately, we didn’t go to the neighboring Fuchseck this time, only the Wasserberg with some extras.

https://lyse.isobeef.org/wanderung-auf-den-wasserberg-2025-05-18/

Buying a TV these days, means trying to avoid endless enshitification:
-Spyware and adware
-Shitty AI upscaling/ frame interpolation
-HW that breaks after 2 - 3 years
-One off OS, dead on arrival
-Android OS, that starts lagging after the third update
-8 buttons worth of ads, on your remote

You probably have to make some kind of a compromise. I thought that was buying from some other brand like Hyundai, but that one also felt into some of those categories and just broke, after less than 3 years of use. At this point I’ll probably go back to LG and hope their HW is still reliable and the rest manageable… It has AI bullshit and knowing LG, probably some spyware you have to try your best to get rid of, can buy a remote with “only” 2 ads on it, some web-based OS shared between all their TVs, that usually gets 4 - 5 years worth of updates and works decently enough afterwards.

At this point, I’ll probably settle for anything that doesn’t literally fall apart, not even 3 years in, like the Hyundai did.

Confession:

I’ve never found microblogging like twtxt or the Fediverse or any other “modern” social media to be truly fulfilling/satisfying.

The reason is that it is focused so much on people. You follow this or that person, everybody spends time making a nice profile page, the posts are all very “ego-centric”. Seriously, it feels like everybody is on an ego-trip all the time (this is much worse on the Fediverse, not so much here on twtxt).

I miss the days of topic-based forums/groups. A Linux forum here, a forum about programming there, another one about a certain game. Stuff like that. That was really great – and it didn’t even suffer from the need to federate.

Sadly, most of these forums are dead now. Especially the nerds spend a lot of time on the Fediverse now and have abandoned forums almost completely.

On Mastodon, you can follow hashtags, which somewhat emulates a topic-based experience. But it’s not that great and the protocol isn’t meant to be used that way (just read the snac2 docs on this issue). And the concept of “likes” has eliminated lots of the actual user interaction. ☹️

Is Outbound Going to Die?
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@prologic@twtxt.net Exactly, @bender@twtxt.net! :-D This is at the entrance of a veggie farm (11 & 12) where there are free-ranging kids playing on the road, so people should slow down when driving there to buy some supplies. I also wondered why the sign says “Halt!” instead of “Langsam fahren!” (Drive slowly!) or something like that. On second thought, maybe to actually park there on the street right at the property line.

I actually never walked on that road before and discovered that this was a dead end. There’s usually at the very least a foot path on which to continue when passing a farm. Not this time, though. I didn’t want to stamp down the high grass to cut across country, so I had to walk back maybe 150 meters. Not too bad.

I went on a small hike, just 12-13km this time. The weather was great, blue sky, sunny 18°C, but with the wind it felt colder. Leaves and other green stuff is exploding like crazy. It looks super beautiful right now.

I came across an unfortunately dead salamander on the forest road, some fenced in deer, heaps of sheep, some unmagnetic cows (some were aligned very roughly north-south, but mainly with the axis of the best view I believe), a maybeetle and finally an awesome sunset. Not too shabby! The sheep were mehing all the time, that was really lovely to hear. And the crickets were already active, too. Didn’t expect them to hear yet. I tried to record the concert, but the wind messed it all up. Oh well.

https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2025-04-27/

@test_dont_fetch@aelaraji.com Let’s raise another from the dead! “Facio, Voco, Ferre” 🧝 🪄 #ForScience

Hey @sorenpeter@darch.dk, is your neotxt.dk feed permanently dead or will you resurrect it?

@prologic@twtxt.net The number of “followers” I had also dropped significantly. 😅 Looks like there were lots of dead accounts.

Dead trees keep surprisingly large amounts of carbon out of atmosphere
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@aelaraji@aelaraji.com are you Jesus, or something? 😂 You are resurrecting the dead! 😅🤣

No code is dead. Long live vibe coding
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Ask HN: Why do some links start out [dead]?
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@movq@www.uninformativ.de one less dead account! 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net I wonder what this will do to my followers list. I suspect there were a lot of dead accounts out there. 😅

i can see your twts here: https://watcher.sour.is/?uri=https://eapl.me/tw.txt

@david@collantes.us.. i see this one but it says its dead. https://watcher.sour.is/?uri=https://ferengi.one/twtxt.txt

Val Kilmer has passed away
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Netflix CEO Says Movie Theaters Are Dead
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2,200-year-old pyramid filled with coins and weapons found near Dead Sea
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@prologic@twtxt.net In all seriousness: Don’t worry, I’m not going to host some Fediverse thingy at the moment, probably never will. 😅

But I do use it quite a lot. Although, I don’t really use it as a social network (as in: following people). I follow some tags like #retrocomputing, which fills my timeline with interesting content. If there was a traditional web forum or mailing list or even a usenet group that covered this topic, I’d use that instead. But that’s all (mostly) dead by now. ☹️

neat! my watcher is currently sitting at about 75 MB following over 1500 feeds. only about 200 are currently somewhat active.

-rw-r--r--. 1 xuu  xuu   69M Mar 25 20:46 twt.db
-rw-r--r--. 1 xuu  xuu   32K Mar 25 21:34 twt.db-shm
-rw-r--r--. 1 xuu  xuu  5.6M Mar 25 21:34 twt.db-wal

sqlite> select state, count(*) n from feeds group by 1;
hot|7
warm|8
cold|183
frozen|743
permanantly-dead|857

@movq@www.uninformativ.de You could also just use a tiling window manager. :-) As a bonus, it doesn’t waste dead space, the window utilizes the entire screen. To also get rid of panels and stuff, put the window in fullscreen mode.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, most of the graphical applications are actually KDE programs:

• KMail – e-mail client
  
• Okular – PDF viewer
  
• Gwenview – image viewer
  
• Dolphin – file browser
  
• KWallet – password manager (I want to check out pass one day. The most annoying thing is that when I copy a password, it says that the password has been modified and asks me whether I want to save the changes. I never do, because the password is still the same. I don’t get it.)
  
• KPatience – card game
  
• Kdenlive – video editor
  
• Kleopatra – certificate manager
  

Qt:

• VLC – video player
  
• Psi – Jabber client (I happily used Kopete in the past, but that is not supported anymore or so. I don’t remember.)
  
• sqlitebrowser – SQLite browser
  

Gtk:

• Firefox – web browser
  
• Quod Libet – music player (I should look for a better alternative. Can’t remember why I had to move away from Amarok, was it dead? There was a fork Clementine or so, but I had to drop that for some unknown reason, too.)
  
• Audacity – audio editor
  
• GIMP – image editor
  

These are the things that are open right now or that I could think of. Most other stuff I actually do in the terminal.

In the past™, I used the Python KDE4 bindings. That was really nice. I could pass most stuff directly in the constructor and didn’t have to call gazillions of setters improving the experience significantly. If I ever wanted to do GUI programming again, I’d definitely go that route. There are also great Qt bindings for Python if one wanted to avoid the KDE stuff on top. The vast majority I do for myself, though, is either CLI or maybe TUI. A few web shit things, but no GUIs anymore. :-)

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Pointers can be a bit tricky. I know it took me also quite some time to wrap my head around them. Let my try to explain. It’s a pretty simple, yet very powerful concept with many facets to it.

A pointer is an indirection. At a lower level, when you have some chunk of memory, you can have some actual values sitting in there, ready for direct use. A pointer, on the other hand, points to some other location where to look for the values one’s actually after. Following that pointer is also called dereferencing the pointer.

I can’t come up with a good real-world example, so this poor comparison has to do. It’s a bit like you have a book (the real value that is being pointed to) and an ISBN referencing that book (the pointer). So, instead of sending you all these many pages from that book, I could give you just a small tag containing the ISBN. With that small piece of information, you’re able to locate the book. Probably a copy of that book and that’s where this analogy falls apart.

In contrast to that flawed comparision, it’s actually the other way around. Many different pointers can point to the same value. But there are many books (values) and just one ISBN (pointer).

The pointer’s target might actually be another pointer. You typically then would follow both of them. There are no limits on how long your pointer chains can become.

One important property of pointers is that they can also point into nothingness, signalling a dead end. This is typically called a null pointer. Following such a null pointer calls for big trouble, it typically crashes your program. Hence, you must never follow any null pointer.

Pointers are important for example in linked lists, trees or graphs. Let’s look at a doubly linked list. One entry could be a triple consisting of (actual value, pointer to next entry, pointer to previous entry).

  _______________________
 /               ________\_______________
↓               ↓         |              \
+---+---+---+   +---+---+-|-+   +---+---+-|-+
| 7 | n | x |   | 23| n | p |   | 42| x | p |
+---+-|-+---+   +---+-|-+---+   +---+---+---+
      |         ↑     |         ↑
       \_______/       \_______/

The “x” indicates a null pointer. So, the first element of the doubly linked list with value 7 does not have any reference to a previous element. The same is true for the next element pointer in the last element with value 42.

In the middle element with value 23, both pointers to the next (labeled “n”) and previous (labeled “p”) elements are pointing to the respective elements.

You can also see that the middle element is pointed to by two pointers. By the “next” pointer in the first element and the “previous” pointer in the last element.

That’s it for now. There are heaps ;-) more things to tell about pointers. But it might help you a tiny bit.

TL is dead af right now where IS EVERYONEEEEEEEEEEEEEE