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Olisse Ā· 2026-06-20 22:27 UTC
haihaihiii! mbox.blue is awesome ;)

So nice of the very few folks that have discovered mbox to say such nice things about my little experimental project and free service offering 😁

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In-reply-to » Oh boy, I absolutely hate this stupid trend of not writing changelogs anymore! Why the fuck would one seriously consider it to be a viable option to just let some shitty bot spew all merge requests on a goddamn GitHub release?! First of all, these merge request titles suck balls. The order of the changes in this "changelog" is completely random (well, probably merge time, which is as useless as the dick on the Pope). They are not grouped by anything at all. Additions, changes, removals, deprecations, etc. randomly mixed up in one giant list. And then "Add feature X", seventeen kilometers further down "Revert 'Add feature X'". Fuck you! Don't include this shit in the first place!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Thanks!

On the AI changelog part, though, I’d rather recommend to just not have a changelog at all.

I’m afraid that ship has sailed. You can rest assured that someone who uses AI/LLMs for their code (which is almost everybody at this point) will most certainly also use it for changelogs.

I actually considered not mentioning AI output at all, because this just opens a huge can of worms … šŸ˜ž

While going through these terrible GitHub release pages, I also found these ā€œNew Project Contributorsā€ sections

Yeah, they play on a nerd’s pride.

Now, it’s just the same auto shitshow with MR titles in a rolling date-versioned release scheme. It’s just our team who has to deal with that, though. I think I’m the only one who is not a fan of it.

I’ve found that this whole situation is much worse at work than it is in the Free Software world. At work, it’s literally work and hardly anybody actually cares. We still don’t have all people convinced that writing good commit messages or using good branch names is worth the time. It’s … oh god, no, I’m going to stop here, this is bad for my mental health. šŸ˜…

Suffice it to say, all release notes at work are now AI-generated. Nobody gives a fuck.

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In-reply-to » @lyse (Do you want to be linked on that page? Do you want your name to be there at all? šŸ¤”)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I really like your style of writing, btw. It’s much calmer and less aggressive then mine. :-) When I turned my bullet points into paragraphs, I got a bit mad in the process.

Sure, feel free to include anything you want. Regarding citing, this is where twtxt falls short in my opinion. Especially with feed rotation, classic links die quickly. Message hashes only help so much. Nobody outside the twtxt universe knows how to deal with them. So, not perfect for inclusion on a web page. Linking to a thread or message on some yarnd instance might be the more user-friendly option. But the disadvantage is that it’s ā€œjustā€ a mirror, not the primary or original source. In all reality, this could be considered splitting hairs, though.

I should have probably written a proper article. That would have given me time to review the result more carefully, too. ;-) Perhaps that’s something for the future. But honestly, I’m not sure if I really want to waste my time and energy on that subject. So many other fun or useless things come to mind right away that I could do instead. 8-)

So, yeah, do whatever feels best to you. I don’t mind being cited or linked, but I also don’t mind not to be cited or not to be linked to. :-D Not a helpful answer, I know. Sorry. ;-) But anyway, thanks for asking, mate! I do appreciate it.

To finish my thought, linking to my frontpage is probably also useless, since I deliberatly do not have a table of contents there. In fact, my entire frontpage is rather silly.

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In-reply-to » I’ve started collecting reasons against AI usage here, so I don’t have to repeat myself all the time:

Of course, @movq@www.uninformativ.de! Most of my points are also included in your list.

First of all, programming is what I really do enjoy the most. So, it doesn’t make any sense at all to not do this anymore. ā€œBut you could use your now free time to do something much cooler and more valuable!ā€, others might reply. Fuck no, I don’t want to waste my time with other shit that doesn’t fulfill me, why on earth would I want to do that?

All this hallucination reduces quality badly. In my experience, it’s also happening much more rapidly than I expected. Even though developers are still supposed to own and understand whatever has been generated under their name and even be responsible for that, the sad reality is that teammates often blindly trust the AI output. ā€œBut I asked the AI and it told me that $this was impossibleā€, ā€œI’ve no idea either, but the AI just generated itā€ are responses I get more often. What really makes my angry is when I point out a flaw and suggest an alternative and this is the reaction. It happened several times that just trying it out and seeing it clearly work to proof my point only took me half a minute, but people still did something handwavy else instead.

The learning effect is drastically reduced. The more time I spend on a topic, the better the odds that whatever I learned actually makes it over into long-term memory. It’s like if a collegue just says ā€œdo it like thatā€ or ā€œthis solves your problemā€, but neither explains the why or how. Somehow, people are still convinced that it’s a completely different story when you replace the human counterpart with a computer program in this equation.

Skills are unlearned. It’s like with automation in general, just much worse. You end up in a state where you’ve no clue how anything works under the hood or how to actually find out important information that are needed to solve your problem. You’re screwed when a process breaks out of the blue. Even though it can become also rather terrible, with classical automation you’re typically still be able to decipher how exactly the thing was supposed to do something.

The energy consumption is sooo high, I absolutely do not want to be a part in burning down our planet. I’m sure I find (and probably have long found without knowing) other ways to contribute to worsen our climate crisis.

The scraper part is already covered in detail in your list. :-)

I’m convinced that license and copyright violations are only played down or even refused entirely because companies want to make big money quickly. With the work of others of course. Their double standards are obvious, they still try to actively keep their own stuff secret and out of any training sets. At most for internal use only. Virtually noone in charge is interested in good long-term solutions. Short-term for the win, when disaster eventually strikes, the causers are long gone, the responsibilities in other hands.

Vendor lock-in is something that lots of folks are only realizing very slowly. It’s completely crazy to me. This drug dealer routine should be well-known by now. It’s fucking everywhere. Yet, people are always surprised when they found themselves caught in it.

Adding new AI stuff only increases complexity. But complexity is the enemy that everybody should fear and reduce as much as possible. Of course, this is not limited to AI at all. And everywhere I look around, people in charge looooove to make things way more complicated than they ever need to be. Yet, simplicity is the real art and much harder to achieve.

I don’t understand why we have to go back full force to the ambiguity of natural languages. This alone should be more than enough to realize what a stupid idea all that is. Linked to that is that the ā€œinstruction setā€ is interpreted differently with newer model versions. I mean, is has to be. Why else would somebody want to upgrade in the first place than to get more Powerfulā„¢ Featuresā„¢?

Some people argue that with AI the democratization is empowered. However, in my view, the exact opposite is the case. Models are getting so large that you can basically not run them locally or even train them. So, you have to rely on whatever the vendor offers you and runs for you. In the end, this only gives the owners more power, the multi billionaires. Not exactly what I understand by democratization.

Finally, technology assessments are missing completely. Or they are faked such that mostly only the (questionable) benefits are listed. But all the negative impact is just ignored.

Let’s keep some popcorn around for when this all explodes. :-)

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In-reply-to » Eehhh, what the hell is going on here!?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org AI result ahead, feel free to ignore.

I ā€œaskedā€ the AI at work the same question out of morbid curiousity. It ā€œsaidā€ that SQLite converts that integer to floating point internally on overflows and then, when converting back, the x86 instruction cvttsd2si will turn it into 0x8000000000000000, even if the actual floating point value is outside of that range. So, yes, it allegedly actually saturates, as a side effect of the type conversion.

I couldn’t find anything about that automatic conversion in SQLite’s manual, yet, but an experiment looks like it might be true:

sqlite> select typeof(1 << 63);
╭─────────────────╮
│ typeof(1 << 63) │
ā•žā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•”
│ integer         │
╰─────────────────╯

sqlite> select typeof((1 << 63) - 1);
╭──────────────────────╮
│ typeof((1 << 63) ... │
ā•žā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•ā•”
│ real                 │
╰──────────────────────╯

As for cvttsd2si, this source confirms the handling of 0x8000000000000000 on range errors: https://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/cvttsd2si

The following C program also confirms it (run through gdb to see cvttsd2si in action):

<a href="https://yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz/search?q=%23include">#include</a> <stdint.h>
<a href="https://yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz/search?q=%23include">#include</a> <stdio.h>

int
main()
{
    int64_t i;
    double d;

    /* -3000 instead of -1, because `double` can’t represent a
     * difference of -1 at this scale. */
    d = -9223372036854775808.0 - 3000;

    i = d;
    printf("%lf, 0x%lx, %ld\n", d, i, i);

    return 0;
}

(Remark about AI usage: Fine, I got an answer and maybe it’s even correct. But doing this completely ruined it for me. It would have been much more satisfying to figure this out myself. I actually suspected some floating point stuff going on here, but instead of verifying this myself I reached for the unethical tool and denied myself a little bit of fun at the weekend. Won’t do that again.)

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HEY! I think we all noticed that privacy is dying. Government and corporate entities around the world are building the laws and tools to track you, from everything you write, to the media you consume, to where you drive your car and the people you associate with. Gopher I believe Is one of the last bastions of freedom away from what I call ā€œCorpo webā€. GopherSpace is free, I wrote my client so I know it’s safe, and I can route my traffic over tor or any proxy of my choosing. I think we should use gopher as a means to communicate and get out of the modern corpo web because soon everything you do and say on the modern web or possibly corporate owned devices is under scrutiny, even more so than it ALREADY IS. Right now I can use tor and my custom gopher cli to communicate privately here. With the ways the laws are going they are going to implement things like age verification to track you and they’ll deem privacy focused open source software as tools for circumventing these rules. It’s a slippery slope. I need to stop writing before I sound really crazy.

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@movq@www.uninformativ.de I was also extremely surprised and couldn’t believe it myself. But around the hair were definitely two, three millimeters of ice with a bunch of snow on top. I couldn’t simply brush it off, the hair were all frozen together. Back in the house, it took maybe three minutes to melt the solidified white stuff and free up and disconnect the individual hair. Crazy.

Yeah, 0°C in town, maybe -2°C on the summit. It definitely didn’t feel all the cold, but I came prepared with a few layers of cloth.

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In-reply-to » This weekend, I'm building a service that turns PDFs into chaptered, audiobook‑quality narration in minutes—upload, listen in a built‑in player, and download MP3/M4B files with clean metadata.

Has a bit of a long history story behind this, where last year at work we were reading this book called Engineering a Safer World and initially came across a service called Speech Reply that allowed me to upload a PDF copy of the book and start to read it, but unfortunately, the free trial right now before I can finish reading it turns out that Speech Reply service cost a whopping US$30 a month and expected me to pay a full year upfront, which was well over US$300 just for one fucking book! So I sent their sales and support staff a message kindly asking if it were possible to just pay for the audio transcription of just a single book or to change to a monthly subscription fee, to which they refused, so basically in the end I got very angry and told them to go fuck themselves and built my own service. A year later here we are :-)

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Trump is building a $300+ million ball room. He isn’t going to give that up for free after 3 years, LOL. He isn’t going to enjoy a $100 million/yr ballroom and then just up and leave. He plans on staying president forever it seems.

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In-reply-to » @movq wow! what is assembler?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @kiwu@twtxt.net it just so happens to be a happy coincidence that I’m extending mu’s capabilities to now include a native toolchain-free compiler (doesn’t rely on any external gcc/clang or linkers, etc) that lowers the mu source code into an intermediate representation / IR (what @movq@www.uninformativ.de refers to as ā€œthick layers of abstractionsā€ā€¦) and finally to SSA + ARM64 + Mach-O encoder to produce native binary executables (at least for me on my Mac, Linux may some later?) 🤣

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In-reply-to » I have a question! I'm looking for a small personal camera(specifically good for videos because that's what I'll use it for) that's cheap enough for a teen to afford but also actually good. Do any of you tech people have any good recs?

@kiwu@twtxt.net It also greatly depends on what kind of videos you plan to record. When you go, let’s say, diving, the specs need to be probably more suited to that type of environment. What about zoom, macro shots, wide landscapes, and so on? When typically mounted on a tripod, I’d say builtin image stabilization is not required, but for more action shots, this is fairly important to not get sea sick. :-)

I’ve got a Nikon Coolpix S9300. I typically only take photos, but it also works for the occasional video. Free hand moves are quite difficult, but when mounted to a tripod, this is not too shabby. There’s absolutely no way around a (makeshift) tridpod when zooming in, though. The audio is definitely not the best, especially wind destroys everything. If I recorded more video, I would certainly want to have an external microphone.

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https://fokus.cool/2025/11/25/i-dont-care-how-well-your-ai-works.html

AI systems being egregiously resource intensive is not a side effect — it’s the point.

And someone commented on that with:

I’m fascinated by the take about the resource usage being an advantage to the AI bros.

They’ve created software that cannot (practically) be replicated as open source software / free software, because there is no community of people with sufficient hardware / data sets. It will inherently always be a centralized technology.

Fascinating and scary.

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When I try to login to PayPal I now see:

Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker

Here’s the thing. PayPal takes fees from transactions and payments received and sent.

I have very right not have ads shoved in my face for something that isn’t actually free in the first place and costs money to use. If PayPal would like to continue to piss off folks me like, then I’ll happily close my PayPal account and go somewhere else that doesn’t shove ads in my face and consume 30-40% of my Internet bandwidth on useless garbage/crap.

#PayPal #Ads

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In-reply-to » @bender Thanks for this illustration, it completely ā€œmisunderstoodā€ everything I wrote and confidently spat out garbage. šŸ‘Œ

@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.

The criticism of AI as untrustworthy is a problem of misapplication, not capability.

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 ā€œAI literacyā€, 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 ā€œAI literacyā€, isn’t it?

My text went one step further, though: I said that when you take this requirement of ā€œAI literacyā€ 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 ā€œthought processā€ behind it. When you, a human being, make a draft, you often think something like: ā€œOkay, 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.ā€ 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.

Skill Erosion vs. Skill Evolution

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 ā€œskill evolutionā€ – 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., ā€œcomplex problem-solvingā€) 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 ā€œbugsā€ (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 (ā€œaccountant with a calculatorā€) 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 ā€œargumentā€ that it picked up on some website.

3. The Technical and Legal Perspective (Scraping and Copyright)

The AI makes two points here. The first one, I might actually agree with (ā€œbad bot behavior is not the fault of AI itselfā€).

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 ā€œlol yeah, change the lawsā€. (I wonder in what way the laws would have to be changed in the AI’s ā€œopinionā€, 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.)

tl;dr

Except for one point, I don’t accept any of Gemini’s ā€œcriticismā€. 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 ā€œthe sky is blueā€ and Bob replies with ā€œwhy do you say the sky is purple?!ā€

But it sure looks convincing, doesn’t it?

Never again

This took so much of my time. I won’t do this again. šŸ˜‚

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In-reply-to » For the innocent bystanders (because I know that I won’t change @bender’s opinion):

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Gemini liked your opinion very much. Here is how it countered:

1. The User Perspective (Untrustworthiness)

The criticism of AI as untrustworthy is a problem of misapplication, not capability.

  • AI as a Force Multiplier: AI should be treated as a high-speed drafting and brainstorming tool, not an authority. For experts, it offers an immense speed gain, shifting the work from slow manual creation to fast critical editing and verification.
  • The Rise of AI Literacy: Users must develop a new skill—AI literacy—to critically evaluate and verify AI’s probabilistic output. This skill, along with improving citation features in AI tools, mitigates the ā€œgaslightingā€ effect.
2. The Moral/Political Perspective (Skill Erosion)

The fear of skill loss is based on a misunderstanding of how technology changes the nature of work; it’s skill evolution, not erosion.

  • Shifting Focus to High-Level Skills: Just as the calculator shifted focus from manual math to complex problem-solving, AI shifts the focus from writing boilerplate code to architectural design and prompt engineering. It handles repetitive tasks, freeing humans for creative and complex challenges.
  • Accessibility and Empowerment: AI serves as a powerful democratizing tool, offering personalized tutoring and automation to people who lack deep expertise. While dependency is a risk, this accessibility empowers a wider segment of the population previously limited by skill barriers.
3. The Technical and Legal Perspective (Scraping and Copyright)

The legal and technical flaws are issues of governance and ethical practice, not reasons to reject the core technology.

  • Need for Better Bot Governance: Destructive scraping is a failure of ethical web behavior and can be solved with better bot identification, rate limits, and protocols (like enhanced robots.txt). The solution is to demand digital citizenship from AI companies, not to stop AI development.

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In-reply-to » There are no really good GUI toolkits for Linux, are there?

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, give it a shot. At worst you know that you have to continue your quest. :-)

Fun fact, during a semester break I was actually a little bored, so I just started reading the Qt documentation. I didn’t plan on using Qt for anything, though. I only looked at the docs because they were on my bucket list for some reason. Qt was probably recommended to me and coming from KDE myself, that was motivation enough to look at the docs just for fun.

The more I read, the more hooked I got. The documentation was extremely well written, something I’ve never seen before. The structure was very well thought out and I got the impression that I understood what the people thought when they actually designed Qt.

A few days in I decided to actually give it a real try. Having never done anything in C++ before, I quickly realized that this endeavor won’t succeed. I simply couldn’t get it going. But I found the Qt bindings for Python, so that was a new boost. And quickly after, I discovered that there were even KDE bindings for Python in my package manager, so I immediately switched to them as that integrated into my KDE desktop even nicer.

I used the Python KDE bindings for one larger project, a planning software for a summer camp that we used several years. It’s main feature was to see who is available to do an activity. In the past, that was done on a large sheet of paper, but people got assigned two activities at the same time or weren’t assigned at all. So, by showing people in yellow (free), green (one activity assigned) and red (overbooked), this sped up and improved the planning process.

Another core feature was to generate personalized time tables (just like back in school) and a dedicated view for the morning meeting on site.

It was extended over the years with all sorts of stuff. E.g. I then implemented a warning if all the custodians of an activitiy with kids were underage to satisfy new the guidelines that there should be somebody of age.

Just before the pandemic I started to even add support for personalized live views on phones or tablets during the planning process (with web sockets, though). This way, people could see their own schedule or independently check at which day an activity takes place etc. For these side quests, they don’t have to check the large matrix on the projector. But the project died there.

Here’s a screenshot from one of the main views: https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/k3man.png

This Python+Qt rewrite replaced and improved the Java+Swing predecessor.

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In-reply-to » Well, it sure has been a while since I last posted here. Just up late doing yet another Linux installation. Debian turned out to be about as stable as a plutonium Jenga tower, and Alpine refused to boot, so I gave it the boot. Here's to hoping that Arch fares better. Oddly, I've always found Arch to be considerably more stable than other distros...

@dce@hashnix.club Arch is the most stress-free OS I’ve ever run (I last reinstalled it 14 years ago, only rolling updates since then) – but to be honest, I sometimes wonder what role my general choice of software plays. I mostly run minimalistic software or programs that I wrote myself. I guess that greatly reduces the chance of breakage. šŸ¤”

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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 ā€œbuild a gameā€ 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 ā€œreleasableā€ state.

So many projects, so little (free) time…

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I noticed Google put out this article: https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/09/lets-talk-security-answering-your-top.html it’s very current day Google, but the comments under the YouTube video are pretty on point and I saw a few familiar faces there. There is also, unexpectedly, ways to contact Google.

First a form for ā€œteachers, students, and hobbyistsā€, that I filled politely, as someone who falls under their hobbyist category. It can be filled both anonymously, or with an e-mail attached, to be contacted by them (I chose the second option).

Also a general feedback and questions form, that I was not as polite in and used to send them the following message:

I have already provided some feedback, in the teacher, student and hobbyists form/questionaire, as well as an open letter I’ve recently sent to the European Commission digital markets act team, as I do believe your proposal might not even be legal, given the fact it puts privacy-focused alternative app stores at risk (https://f-droid.org/cs/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html) and it was proposed this early, after Google lost in court to Epic Games, over similar monopoly concerns. Why should we trust Google to be the only authority for all developer signatures, right after the European courts labeled it a gatekeeper?

Assuming this gets passed, despite justified developer backlash and at best questionable legality, can you give us any guarantees, this will not be used to target legal malware-free mods, or user privacy enhancing patchers, like the ones used for applying the ReVanced patches? I have made a few mods myself, but I am in no way associated with the ReVanced team. I just share many peoples concerns, Google Chrome has been conveniently stripped of its manifest v2 support, that made many privacy protecting extensions possible and now you’re conveniently asking for the government IDs, of all the developers, who maintain these kinds of privacy protections (be it patches, or alternative open-source apps) on Android.

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I keep getting this email occadionally:

Your iCloud storage is almost full

Now for various reasons, I don’t want my children to be using iCloud to store data, files, photos or any of the sort. They’re free to use iMessages, and other Apple services like the App Store, etc, but not storage.

So I’ve set about blocking iCloud Storage API(s) via AdGuard Home tonight as well as ensuring that my local network (client users) cannot bypass DNS policies and get out other sneaky ways, because some applications will just use other DNS servers, or DOH or DOT.

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In-reply-to » Please don't hate me today; I'm a bit grumpy and have too many reasons to be upset:

@prologic@twtxt.net I too, self-host various services on a VPS (and considering buying a mini PC to keep at home instead).

I use most of it as a hosting platform for personal use only and as a remote development environment (I do share a couple of tools with a friend though).

But given the costant risks of DDoS, hacking, bots, etc. I keep any of my public facing resources purely static and on separate hosting providers (without lock-ins of course).

Lately, I began using homebrew PWAs with CouchDB as a sync database, this way I get a fantastic local-first experience and also have total control of my data, that also sync in a locally hosted backup instance in real-time.

Also, I was already aware of Salty.im, but what I’m thinking is a more feature complete solution that even my family can use quickly, Delta.chat with the new chatmail provider (self-hostable) might be the solution for my needs.

But I’m still thinking if it’s worth the trouble. I might just drop everything and only use safe channels to speak with them (free 24/7 family tech-support is easy to manage šŸ˜†).

Also, I’ll be waiting for the day you’ll share with us your story, I’m pretty curious about it!

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In-reply-to » I would personally rather see something like this:

@prologic@twtxt.net Well, personally I would, as I already do for user feeds in my client.

That’s why part of my proposal was to allow custom strings and be free from a specific format that need periodical upgrades, but it’s not much of a problem in the end.

I’ll adapt to what we can get out of this.

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In-reply-to » Here is just a small list of thingsā„¢ that I'm aware will break, some quite badly, others in minor ways:

@prologic@twtxt.net I know we won’t ever convince each other of the other’s favorite addressing scheme. :-D But I wanna address (haha) your concerns:

  1. I don’t see any difference between the two schemes regarding link rot and migration. If the URL changes, both approaches are equally terrible as the feed URL is part of the hashed value and reference of some sort in the location-based scheme. It doesn’t matter.

  2. The same is true for duplication and forks. Even today, the ā€œcannonical URLā€ has to be chosen to build the hash. That’s exactly the same with location-based addressing. Why would a mirror only duplicate stuff with location- but not content-based addressing? I really fail to see that. Also, who is using mirrors or relays anyway? I don’t know of any such software to be honest.

  3. If there is a spam feed, I just unfollow it. Done. Not a concern for me at all. Not the slightest bit. And the byte verification is THE source of all broken threads when the conversation start is edited. Yes, this can be viewed as a feature, but how many times was it actually a feature and not more behaving as an anti-feature in terms of user experience?

  4. I don’t get your argument. If the feed in question is offline, one can simply look in local caches and see if there is a message at that particular time, just like looking up a hash. Where’s the difference? Except that the lookup key is longer or compound or whatever depending on the cache format.

  5. Even a new hashing algorithm requires work on clients etc. It’s not that you get some backwards-compatibility for free. It just cannot be backwards-compatible in my opinion, no matter which approach we take. That’s why I believe some magic time for the switch causes the least amount of trouble. You leave the old world untouched and working.

If these are general concerns, I’m completely with you. But I don’t think that they only apply to location-based addressing. That’s how I interpreted your message. I could be wrong. Happy to read your explanations. :-)

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In-reply-to » I bought the ā€œremasteredā€ versions of Grim Fandango and Forsaken on GOG, because they’re super cheap at the moment. Both have native Linux versions.

In all fairness, GOG says that Forsaken is only supported on Ubuntu 16.04 – not current Arch Linux. If you ask me, this just goes to show that Linux is not a good platform for proprietary binary software.

Is it free software, do you have the source code? Then you’re good to go, things can be patched/updated (that can still be a lot of work). But proprietary binary blobs? Very bad idea.

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It took about a year, I think, but I’ve now finished another run of Tomb Raider I, II, and III. And I have, for the first time, played the two bonus packs ā€œUnfinished Businessā€ (for TR I) and ā€œGolden Maskā€ (for TR II). They’re available as a free download, if you have the original games. (The bonus pack for TR III is not free.)

I just love these games – and the game mechanics. It’s just the right balance between challenging and relaxing.

https://movq.de/v/c55a2a137d/the%2Dend.jpg

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In-reply-to » 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

I went to the firefly party again and checked them out on a different path. Boys and girls, there were so many of them! Apparently, I took the wrong turn and the numbers dropped. Still several hundreds if not over a thousand, but I’m spoiled now.

On the way there I noticed an absolutely spectacular sunset. However, I didn’t bring my camera. Should have peaked through the closed shutters before I left.

It turns out the disco music from the next town over wasn’t only audible in the forest but is also free-to-air in my bed. :-( It’s earplugs time.

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Felt the need to make this stupid reference - nobody will get, most likely. Feel free to guess (the file name and todays date, are both a hint), any other notes and opinions appreciated too, idk if I ever drew a standing one, from the front, before.

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In-reply-to » Fuck me sideways, Rust is so hard. Will we ever be friends?

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m trying to call some libc functions (because the Rust stdlib does not have an equivalent for getpeername(), for example, so I don’t have a choice), so I have to do some FFI stuff and deal with raw pointers and all that, which is very gnarly in Rust – because you’re not supposed to do this. Things like that are trivial in C or even Assembler, but I have not yet understood what Rust does under the hood. How and when does it allocate or free memory … is the pointer that I get even still valid by the time I do the libc call? Stuff like that.

I hope that I eventually learn this over time … but I get slapped in the face at every step. It’s very frustrating and I’m always this šŸ¤ close to giving up (only to try again a year later).

Oh, yeah, yeah, I guess I could ā€œjustā€ use some 3rd party library for this. socket2 gets mentioned a lot in this context. But I don’t want to. I literally need one getpeername() call during the lifetime of my program, I don’t even do the socket(), bind(), listen(), accept() dance, I already have a fully functional file descriptor. Using a library for that is total overkill and I’d rather do it myself. (And look at the version number: 0.5.10. The library is 6 years old but they’re still saying: ā€œNah, we’re not 1.0 yet, we reserve the right to make breaking changes with every new release.ā€ So many Rust libs are still unstable …)

… and I could go on and on and on … 🤣

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utilize HetrixTools for servers monitoring, then use a small one for UptimeKuma all the running websites.

the number of servers are increasing, free plan is going to be exploded.

that’s why i have to think of a solution to have separated monitoring solutions. one for the (virtual) machines, one for the websites

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