@bender@twtxt.net Both Gopher and Mastodon are a way for me to “babble”. 😅 I basically shut down Gopher in favor of Mastodon/Fedi last year. But the Fediverse doesn’t really work for me. It’s too focused on people (I prefer topics) and I dislike the addictive nature of likes and boosts (I’m not disciplined enough to ignore them). Self-hosting some Fedi thing is also out of the question (the minimalistic daemons don’t really support following hashtags, which is a must-have for me).

I’ll probably keep reading Fedi stuff, I just won’t post that much, I think.

Huge reproducibility project fails to validate biomedical studies
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@eapl.me@eapl.me I wouldn’t call it natural, it is the way Bluesky decided to handle handles (not meaning to make a pun, or anything). There is no other way, but that.

The bottomline is, there are agreed upon “standards”, right? From example, on Yarnd you show as “eapl.me”, from “eapl.me”. A kind of weird redundancy because on twtxt, ever since I started using it, one will expect to see a “nick” (equivalent to a person’s first name), from “a domain” (like a surname).

There is nothing holding back someone from giving themselves the nick:

thisismyawesomenickforwhichiwillbeknownforeverandeveritsgreatisntit

But, do we really want that? 😅

on timeline the mention looks OK. Is there an issue on Yarn?

It’s an interesting topic. For example on Bsky it’s natural to allow domains https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutorial

Although TwiXter only allows (letters A-Z, numbers 0-9 and of underscores)
https://help.x.com/en/managing-your-account/x-username-rules

@prologic@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de @bmallred@staystrong.run @ionores@twtxt.net Thank you! Yeah, the yellow meadows look truly awesome.

Watching “Happy People: A Year in the Taiga” in German the evening before, this thing totally looked like a trap to us. So, we decided to sit on another, more rustic bench nearby. :-) Oh neat, it turns out, there is a much longer four part series of the documentary in English on YouTube. Highly recommended! This is part one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbhPIK-oBvA

Judging by the surroundings, I think this is actually a forest altar or something of that nature. But it looks like they started with the chappel’s reinforcement steel and then they ran out of money before completing it or even placing the concrete forms. :-P

Yeah, 78 might be photo of the month. It’s one of my favorites.

@eapl.me@eapl.me When it is up and running, I promise to add it to the specification. I will also include some corrections.
The nature of twtxt does not allow us to selectively hide clients. It’s a problem not with DM, but with any extension.
@prologic@twtxt.net Yes, it is a security hole. All dm-echo messages are readable. I intend it to be a debugging tool. Maybe I can include a warning message. If many of you see that it is a serious problem, I can remove the links.
@xuu@txt.sour.is It’s already much better than Mastodon :P . Maybe we can remove the sender and receiver references with an intermediary register.

Hunter-gatherer sea voyages extended to remotest Mediterranean islands
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Universal photonic artificial intelligence acceleration
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Another nice stroll in nature last week: https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2025-04-03/

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Show HN: Query GPT: Transform Natural Language into SQL
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@thecanine@twtxt.net My apologies, mate! :-( As @david@collantes.us pointed out, this was definitely not my intent at all.

For the easter egg hunt, I first looked for a hidden image map link on the pixel dog in the right lower corner itself. Maybe one giant pixel just links to somewhere else, I figured. But I couldn’t find any and then quickly moved on. Hence, I naturally viewed the HTML source. Because where else would be a good hiding place for easter eggs, right?

Next, I noticed the <font> tags. I thought I had read quite some time ago that they are not an HTML5 thing, but wasn’t entirely sure about it. So, I asked the W3C HTML validator. Sure enough. I thought I let you know about the violations. If somebody had found a mistake on my site, I’d love to hear about it, so I could fix it. I’m sorry that my chosen form of report didn’t resonate with you all that well. I reckoned you’ll also find it a bit funny, but I was clearly very wrong on that.

I actually followed the dog cow link to the video, so I ended up on the easter egg. However, I didn’t recognize it as such. ¯_(ツ)_/¯ Oh well.

Regarding my message about the browser quirks: I read your answer that you were arguing against the HTML validator findings. Of course, everybody can do with their sites whatever they likes.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org This is so crazy to me. When I think “forest”, I assume “untouched nature”, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. 🫤

Short summary of Project2025 and Trump’s plans for the US:

• Abolish the Federal Reserve
  Why? To end what is seen as an unelected, centralized body that exerts too much influence over the economy and monetary policy, replacing it with a more transparent, market-driven approach.

• Implement a national consumption tax
  Why? To replace the current federal income tax system, simplify taxation, and increase government revenue through a broader base that includes all consumers.

• Lower corporate tax rates
  Why? To promote business growth, increase investment, and stimulate job creation by reducing the financial burden on companies.

• Deregulate environmental policies
  Why? To reduce government intervention in the economy, particularly in energy and natural resources sectors, and to foster a more business-friendly environment.

• Restrict abortion access
  Why? To align with conservative pro-life values and overturn or limit abortion rights, seeking to restrict the practice at a federal level.

• Dismantle LGBTQ+ protections
  Why? To roll back protections viewed as promoting LGBTQ+ rights in areas like employment and education, in line with traditional family values.

• Eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs
  Why? To end policies that are seen as divisive and to promote a merit-based system that prioritizes individual achievements over group identity.

• Enforce stricter immigration policies, including mass deportations and detentions
  Why? To prioritize border security, reduce illegal immigration, and enforce existing laws more aggressively, as part of a broader strategy to safeguard U.S. sovereignty.

• Eliminate the Department of Education
  Why? To reduce federal control over education and shift responsibilities back to local governments and private sectors, arguing that education decisions should be made closer to the community level.

• Restructure the Department of Justice
  Why? To ensure the department aligns more closely with the administration’s priorities, potentially reducing its scope or focus on areas like civil rights in favor of law-and-order policies.

• Appoint political loyalists to key federal positions
  Why? To ensure that government agencies are headed by individuals who are committed to advancing the administration’s policies, and to reduce the influence of career bureaucrats.

• Develop training programs for appointees to execute reforms effectively
  Why? To ensure that political appointees are equipped with the knowledge and skills necessary to implement the proposed changes quickly and effectively.

• Provide a 180-day transition plan with immediate executive orders
  Why? To ensure that the incoming administration can swiftly implement its agenda and make major changes early in its term without delay.

Do y’all agree with any/all/some of these poliices? Hmmm 🤔

#Project2025 #US #Trump

@eapl.me@eapl.me Read flags are so simple, yet powerful in my opinion. I really don’t understand why this is not a thing in most twtxt clients. It’s completely natural in e-mail programs and feed readers, but it hasn’t made the jump over to this domain.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It’s not any better on the “ground” with trees and buildings around. They don’t dampen at all, in fact the houses just cause reverb and amplify the bangs. Rest assured, I did not hear any people laughing or anything in that nature. Just grenades going off. Talking to my mates, it appears that I live in an especially bad shithole, they reported a noticable reduction of explosions around 00:20. Over here, there was constant fire till around 02:00.

Yep, that’s exactly how I imagine a war zone, too.

No person is inherently evil by nature, and yet most white people still choose to uphold racist violence across the globe.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de been getting so sloppy my feed is slowly turning into a fox nursery, I might end up renaming it into nature-reserve.txt

due to the gemini-centric nature of my setup, I don’t get webmentions. I just scrape the network and grep. maybe my aggregator will produce notifications at some point lol

I’m still more in favor of (replyto:…). It’s easier to implement and the whole edits-breaking-threads thing resolves itself in a “natural” way without the need to add stuff to the protocol.

I’d love to try this out in practice to see how well it performs. 🤔 It’s all very theoretical at the moment.

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

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

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

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

@stigatle@yarn.stigatle.no @xuu@txt.sour.is @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org “Not cool”? I was receiving many broken (HTTP 400 error) requests per second from an IP address I didn’t recognize, right after having my VPS crash because the hard drive filled up with bogus data. None of this had happened on this VPS before, so it was a new problem that I didn’t understand and I took immediate action to get it under control. Of course I reported the IP address to its abuse email. That’s a 100% normal, natural, and “cool” thing to do in such a situation. At the time I had no idea it was @xuu@txt.sour.is .

The moment I realized it was @xuu@txt.sour.is and definitely a false alarm, I emailed the ISP and told them this was a false positive and to not ban or block the IP in question because it was not abusive traffic. They haven’t yet responded but I do hope they’ve stopped taking action, and if there’s anything else I can do to certify to them that this is not abuse then I will do that.

I run numerous services on that VPS that I rely on, and I spent most of my day today cleaning up the mess all this has caused. I get that this caused @xuu@txt.sour.is a lot of stress and I’m sincerely sorry about that and am doing what I can to rectify the situation. But calling me “not cool” isn’t necessary. This was an unfortunate situation that we’re trying to make right and there’s no need for criticizing anyone.

I’ve been out a few hours again. I came across a dozen or so forest mice. I heard tons of squeaking and saw a lighting fast moving seething mass under leaves and groves. It was impossible to capture anything but I could watch it for two, three minutes. They even seemed to come as close as 20 centimeters judging by the rustle and moving plant leaves. Pretty cool.

But heaps of people had to fire up their noise machines today. That clouded my overall joy in nature. Once a commercial airliner was about to fade away in the distance, the next one already adumbrated itself. Lots of prop planes and even a helicopter. Obnoxious loud super cars and motorcycles with broken off mufflers or I don’t know what. My felt hat amplifies the sound I noted.

Luckily, the sun hid behind the clouds most of the time, so I survived the 25°C. Even hotter tomorrow, yikes!

https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2024-04-07/

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Yet another study strongly calling into question the concept of “echo chambers”. I’ve argued it here before and people pushed back, but there is growing evidence that “echo chambers” are a moral panic and not a real phenomenon that we need to worry about. It’s time to throw it out and re-think, in my opinion.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-81531-x

Je suis à la recherche d’un script (#javascript) qui change la couleur du texte selon la nature grammaticale des mots. C’est censé faciliter la lecture. Ça vous dit quelque chose?

Types of Solar Eclipse
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@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @movq@www.uninformativ.de I’ve always liked the sound of crows, and I really really hate the sound of motorized vehicles, so I also find it absurd. I’ve come to think that some people are at some level afraid of nature, and nature sounds remind them of it.

@prologic@twtxt.net

Taking Jordan Peterson asn an example, the only thing he “preaches” (if you want to call it that) is to be honest with yourself and to take responsibility.

This is simply untrue. Read the articles I posted, seriously.

In a tweet in one of the articles I posted, Peterson states there is no white supremacy in Canada. This is blatantly false. It is disinformation. Peterson has made statements that rape is OK (he uses “fancy” language like “women should be naturally converted into mothers” but unpack that a bit–what he means is legalized rape followed by forced conception). He is openly anti-LGBTQ and refuses to use peoples’ preferred pronouns. He seems to believe that women who wear makeup at work are asking to be sexually harassed.

He’s using his platform in academia to pretend that straight, white men are somehow the most aggrieved group in the world and everyone else is just whining and can get fucked. The patron saint of Men’s Rights Activists and incels. I find him odious.

being immersed in gorgeous #nature makes me want to write elegant programs, I’m amazed by the underlying systems #coding #phylosophy

Estuve revisando una entrada del blog (Sembrando Juegos) y un caso de rol para un conocido (100 páginas), y aunque encontré decenas de errores de ortografía y gramática, muchos pasaban desapercibidos, aún con muchas leídas.

Es impresionante cómo las herramientas automatizadas facilitan la revisión de ortografía y gramática. Como se ha mencionado, es la creatividad asistida por tecnología que se está haciendo más “natural”, o simplemente la normalizamos con el tiempo.

@prologic@twtxt.net Error handling especially in Go is very tricky I think. Even though the idea is simple, it’s fairly hard to actually implement and use in a meaningful way in my opinion. All this error wrapping or the lack of it and checking whether some specific error occurred is a mess. errors.As(…) just doesn’t feel natural. errors.Is(…) only just. I mainly avoided it. Yesterday evening I actually researched a bit about that and found this article on errors with Go 1.13. It shed a little bit of light, but I still have a long way to go, I reckon.

We tried several things but haven’t found the holy grail. Currently, we have a mix of different styles, but nothing feels really right. And having plenty of different approaches also doesn’t help, that’s right. I agree, error messages often end up getting wrapped way too much with useless information. We haven’t found a solution yet. We just noticed that it kind of depends on the exact circumstances, sometimes the caller should add more information, sometimes it’s better if the callee already includes what it was supposed to do.

To experiment and get a feel for yesterday’s research results I tried myself on the combined log parser and how to signal three different errors. I’m not happy with it. Any feedback is highly appreciated. The idea is to let the caller check (not implemented yet) whether a specific error occurred. That means I have to define some dedicated errors upfront (ErrInvalidFormat, ErrInvalidStatusCode, ErrInvalidSentBytes) that can be used in the err == ErrInvalidFormat or probably more correct errors.Is(err, ErrInvalidFormat) check at the caller.

All three errors define separate error categories and are created using errors.New(…). But for the invalid status code and invalid sent bytes cases I want to include more detail, the actual invalid number that is. Since these errors are already predefined, I cannot add this dynamic information to them. So I would need to wrap them à la fmt.Errorf("invalid sent bytes '%s': %w", sentBytes, ErrInvalidSentBytes"). Yet, the ErrInvalidSentBytes is wrapped and can be asserted later on using errors.Is(err, ErrInvalidSentBytes), but the big problem is that the message is repeated. I don’t want that!

Having a Python and Java background, exception hierarchies are a well understood concept I’m trying to use here. While typing this long message it occurs to me that this is probably the issue here. Anyways, I thought, I just create a ParseError type, that can hold a custom message and some causing error (one of the three ErrInvalid* above). The custom message is then returned at Error() and the wrapped cause will be matched in Is(…). I then just return a ParseError{fmt.Sprintf("invalid sent bytes '%s'", sentBytes), ErrInvalidSentBytes}, but that looks super weird.

I probably need to scrap the “parent error” ParseError and make all three “suberrors” three dedicated error types implementing Error() string methods where I create a useful error messages. Then the caller probably could just errors.Is(err, InvalidSentBytesError{}). But creating an instance of the InvalidSentBytesError type only to check for such an error category just does feel wrong to me. However, it might be the way to do this. I don’t know. To be tried. Opinions, anyone? Implementing a whole new type is some effort, that I want to avoid.

Alternatively just one ParseError containing an error kind enumeration for InvalidFormat and friends could be used. Also seen that pattern before. But that would then require the much more verbose var parseError ParseError; if errors.As(err, &parseError) && parseError.Kind == InvalidSentBytes { … } or something like that. Far from elegant in my eyes.

Motion Blur
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@movq@www.uninformativ.de
Yes, I did ask whether or not it was possible to move twts to an “archive” folder, but it will be the same at @stackeffect@twtxt.stackeffect.de experienced (which I have, too), that is, twts will “come back”.

There is no clear solution, I am afraid, right? It is the nature of the beast.

“The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines,” Leto said. “Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed.”

Imagine a computer harnessing the natural behavior of natural systems and utilizing their behaviors to solve equations. via @devine@wiki.xxiivv.com https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/computation.html

If [you take] a look at how APLers communicate when they have ideas, you see code all the time, all day long. The APL community is the only one I’ve seen that regularly can write complete code and talk about it fluently on a whiteboard between humans without hand waving. Even my beloved Scheme programming language cannot boast this. When working with humans on a programming task, almost no one uses their programming languages that primary communication method between themselves and other humans outside of the presence of a computer. That signals to me that they are not, in fact, natural, expedient tools for communicating ideas to other humans. The best practices utilized in most programming languages are, instead, attempts to ameliorate the situation to make the code as tractable and as manageable as possible, but they do not, primarily, represent a demonstration of the naturalness of those languages to human communication. — aaron hsu

Natural magical patterns of percussion Is the discussion, so listen up close

creating an off-grid culture that can live in harmony with nature, as a bit