Dang it, @david@daiwei.me, you blew my cover!

I was raised without a TV, so I don’t miss it one bit. My parents just didn’t by a new one after their super old black and white device died. Looking after a baby was maybe spare time activity enough for them. :-P

When there was some super cool program I wanted to watch, like a James Bond movie, I visited my grandma. Sure, it sometimes was a pity that I could not join yesterday’s TV series discussions with my classmates, but oh well. I survived that. Building stuff with Lego or playing outside was all I really wanted.

Apart from a few really good programs, there’s sooooo much trash, non-stop ads and the like. Even as a kid, I was very disgusted by all that. But I have to admit that visting somebody with a TV and watching a good show was usually a highlight. These days, I can easily waste all my time and more on YouTube. :-/

And @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org is right. Not being on Github is a good thing IMO. Even when I was there with all my many projects, I basically got the same amount of “attention” as I do now. The only real way to gain more “attention” is to artificially play the “game”. You know. The stupid “Stargazer” one, and whatever you can to get into the “Top 10 X” charts. – But ultimately that doesn’t buy you “quality” contributors or users or whatever. So it’s all pointless.

@david@daiwei.me Ha, I just noticed that I changed Newsboat’s defaults. Right from the factory, new items are just bold, while read ones aren’t. No different colors, white on black. Focused items are bold yellow on blue. No matter the read status. I think that’s why I started to play with the config to differentiate them. It’s been so long ago that I didn’t know anymore I even messed with that.

And yes, you’re right, the red on black is borderline readable. Also, my white on green focus is rather silly. But I’m sooo used to it, I don’t realize how bad the contrast is. To be fair, I don’t spend a lot of time in the lists. Aha, there are new articles, Enter to hit the artice view, read it, press n to immediately jump to the next unread article, rince and repeat, finally I’m back in the article list view.

Default theme, read focused:

Default theme, unread focused:

Lyse’s schlimmbesserung, read focused:

Lyse’s schlimmbesserung, unread focused:

@david@daiwei.me Oh yes blame me for you not having fun on the “Play Station” 🚉 Haha 🤣

@david@daiwei.me @prologic@twtxt.net No worries, I was just trying it on for size.

I played it again today (10/12 on first try), but I can’t say that I love the format of the “share link” (the unnecessary yellow and green circles).

I think if I did want to post daily scores or something (for posterity), I’d likely setup a separate feed just for my “achievements”. 😁

Yeah, lol, fuck off. Tried to reproduce that hashing issue, thus playing around with Go a little bit. And what did I find?

$ tree ~/.config/go
/home/user/.config/go
└── telemetry
    ├── local
    │   ├── asm@devel-devel-linux-amd64-2026-07-14.v1.count
    │   ├── compile@devel-devel-linux-amd64-2026-07-14.v1.count
    │   ├── go@devel-devel-linux-amd64-2026-07-14.v1.count
    │   ├── link@devel-devel-linux-amd64-2026-07-14.v1.count
    │   ├── upload.token
    │   └── weekends
    └── upload

4 directories, 6 files

It collects and uploads “telemetry” now.

No.

(Don’t tell me how I can turn that off. Not interested. This is a compiler and it wants to track me, without asking for consent. That’s a no-go.)

Shipped a bunch of Twtxt App fixes & polish today 🥳 One-tap Refresh that actually refreshes, duplicate follows fixed, Reply/Fork buttons (with proper @-mentions), unread dots, Back keeps your spot, and it’ll now guide you to install it as a proper app 📱 Reload https://twtxt.app and have a play! Thanks @quark@ferengi.one and @balloon-fu-sen@tw.fus.f5.si for all the reports 🙏

What a week!

It looks like I mostly missed the #twtxthashgeddon (so happy belated twtxthashgeddon day, to those who celebrate), although I’m glad that twtxt-lib appears to have come through it more-or-less unscathed.

Also, today is (was) July 4th, so happy US Independence Day (to those that celebrate). I didn’t feel much like celebrating, myself, so instead I went and played Magic (results tomorrow).

Finally, today is (now) July 5th, so happy X-Day (to those that celebrate). I can’t help but feel like this would be a great time for the saucers to come…. Just sayin’. 👽

BTW - welcome to twtxt @GabesArcade@gabesarcade.com!

For this week’s (slightly delayed) #caturday post, we catch Bowie as he contemplates whether to play Arkham City (again).

Spoilers: he opted for a nap instead (as is his way).

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org … I also meant to comment on the very neat and stylish Play Button, but forgot to do so. 😅😅😅

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Gotta make the economy go “around” and keep public services in play 😅 Good luck! 🤞

Oh god, finally: The thumbnail generator for my blog now renders a typical “play” icon for videos.

Saves me the need to write “this is a video” every time. 😬

In Magic today, the Phyrexian Invasion failed in the first game, but the second game was EPIC!

I played my (unlisted) Dragons 2: Draconic Boogaloo deck, and…

Turn 1: Nothing special
Turn 2: Miirym (when a dragon enters, copy it)
Turn 3: Tiamat (choose 5 dragons from deck, put in hand)
Turn 4: Klauth (when dragons attack, create mana equal to their total power)
I attacked with all 5 dragons, which made 28 mana x2 = 56(!) mana.
Then (still turn 4) I played Scourge of Valkas (when a dragon enters, deal damage to target equal to number of dragons) + 5 other dragons, dealing 6 + 2 x (7+8+9+10+11+12+13+14+15+16+17) = 270(!) direct damage (more than double enough to kill the other 3 players).

Damn fine win, if I do say so myself.

In today’s #caturday image, Emperor Maximilian the First tries to teach his subjects how to play Sequence, despite never having read the rules himself…

@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 … 😞

While going through these terrible GitHub release pages, I also found these “New Project Contributors” 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. 😅

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

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org having seeing, and played with fireflies as a child I envy you. We have none around here. Children have no idea what a firefly is. I mean, they do, but vague, and based on videos and telly.

The concept of synthesis is more useful than artificiality in connection with generative media tools. Synthetic fabrics have been used in the garment industry for decades, while nobody complains anymore that synthesized music is inferior to music played on acoustic instruments. So why are synthetic artworks of all kinds routinely dismissed as inferior to human-produced art?

Installed Whonix in a VM today and playing around with it and Tor. Different vibe for sure!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Exactly! :-D

I just came across these two covers which stood out to me:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVvhHydubR0

  played a bit faster, and faster is almost always better
  

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpwGUx0Sz_4

  a choire’s polyphony usually makes things automatically better

Added a Listening box to show currently playing, and last played from my self-hosted Navidrome Music Server!

Proxmox setup on home server home… time to play

Played some games, boosted some toots, tweaked some code… now it’s time for bed.

@prologic@twtxt.net my gosh, that’s some expensive lottery! I have the feeling I would win, but I never play. 🤭 Wife, on the other hand, does. East and west coast, with a bunch of her friends (a pool). They win nothing, for many years. 😅

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. “But you could use your now free time to do something much cooler and more valuable!”, 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. “But I asked the AI and it told me that $this was impossible”, “I’ve no idea either, but the AI just generated it” 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 “do it like that” or “this solves your problem”, 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 “instruction set” 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 Powerful™ Features™?

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. :-)

I went 1-for-2 again at Magic today, winning the first game with my (mostly standard) Fallout “Hail, Caesar” deck by creating a swarm of soldiers and slapping people across the face with them (LOL!), before quitting the 2nd game for lack of time after my board got wiped (I mean, I might have lucked into something eventually, but it was getting late, so I dropped out).

I hope to play more regularly going into the summer, but who knows.

@kiwu@twtxt.net Doing well thank you! 🙏 Playing the Brisbane Open this weekend, Table Tennis 🏓

@kiwu@twtxt.net all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. :-D Doing well, how about you? Anything exciting and new?

@bender@twtxt.net Apologies, I’m still working through some layout issues with TwtStrm and frequently miss mentions…

Magic: the Gathering does not use a Game Master (although professional referees are often used in sanctioned events). While the game has alot of thematic crossover with with D&D (or fantasy games in general), the system is much more of an abstract, card-dueling system involving things like “the stack” and insanely specific rules on card timing and interactions.

Like, we joke about “I’m sending my army of (goblins / elves / angels / whatever) at you,” but that’s about as far into the “role-playing” element most magic games get in my experience (and most of the “official” competitive games I’ve played at my FLGS were even more abstract and less thematic, although it’s been years since I played in one of those).

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com is there a Gamer Master, or Dungeon Master in Magic? My kid plays DnD, and such person is decisive for many outcomes, and for the quality of the game in general.

Congratulations! :-)

@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.

@bender@twtxt.net Well I’m open to ideas of course 😅 My goal here was to build something like a Civ-1 inspired game that’s playable online and multiplayer. Do you remember this old bad boy that was played on PC(s) on MS-DOS ?! 😅

TIL that SSH actually stands for Secure Snake Home, a massively multiplayer snake game playable via the SSH protocol: ssh snakes.run

Of course, no one else was online when I was playing, so…

For the first time in years, I managed to get out and throw a round of disc golf. Had a good time playing Vietnam Veterans Park in Kannapolis, throwing +10 over 9 holes, with my only par being thanks to a 40’ “putt” with my MRV. And the weather was perfect.

I hope to play another round soon.

@prologic@twtxt.net Nice. 😊 That’s the beauty of a small instrument like that: You can just pick it up, play a little bit, put it back. 👌 (Can’t do that with my stuff. 🤣)

@prologic@twtxt.net show a video of you playing it while wearing a medieval joker costume, or it didn’t happen! :-D

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.

thinking of Masyu. What a great game. Wondering about the perfect algorithm to generate a board of arbitrary size with only one solution. That’s almost more fun than playing the game #programming #masyu #puzzle #videogame

@bender@twtxt.net Yea i’ve noticed! how do I get them to play :(

@kiwu@twtxt.net those moods don’t play, they download. 😩

@kingdomcome@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Oh, that brings back memories! I’ve played minetest one and half centuries ago. Some classmates and I tried to recreate our computer science building at the time. The proportions didn’t work out, but it still kinda worked. Minetest was one of the very few games I played a bit more extensively.

We just wanted to play one or the other quick round of Rummikub after quitting time and suddenly it’s now three hours later. :-)

@prologic@twtxt.net so far my first uploaded PDF doesn’t play, on mobile Safari.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yup, it’s been a while since I played that. 😅 Hardly rememberd it, to be honest. And apparently I did everything wrong, because that monster just came along and trashed my city, no way to stop it. 🤪

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Ahh nice! It’s been several decades since I’ve played that! Probably 3 actually come to think of it 🤣

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org A “Hello World” binary is ~372KB in size. I currently have peephole optimization and deac code optimizations in play, and a few other performance related ones, but nothing too fancy. I have a test case that ensures fib(35) doesn’t regress too badly as I continue to evolve the language.

@prologic@twtxt.net Not even entirely sure how I did it myself, but likely a lucky combination of the new tail swirl, the legs closer to the screen being bigger and the head looking slightly to the side (eye & ear position), with bottom part of the hair, going behind the snout. The white is just an outline, around most of my works, so I don’t think that plays a part.

@bender@twtxt.net Same. I think i might have played with it at some point!

Yes, I agree. Read the bible. You’ll learn why most of the world, including f****d up politics plays a massive role. Don’t be lost. READ.

Sometimes, (just sometimes) my ability to pattern match and remember how to play perfect games of chess is awesome 😎

I’ve used yazi for a while now, but I realized it has a lot of features I’m not using. Playing with it a bit.