@movq@www.uninformativ.de more to read, but I read between your words that you are starving for more: https://aphyr.com/posts/411-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess :-D

@bender@twtxt.net Thanks, I’ll read it – once I have the energy. 😅

Another AI rant:

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

In prose.

This is a complete disaster.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@rdlmda@rdlmda.me We see and read yout mutterings just fine 😅

You are brilliant, @aelaraji@aelaraji.com! I laughed my ass off reading the first sentence. :‘-D

@rdlmda@rdlmda.me I read too. What I am afraid, though, is that you might miss our replies. Also, twtxt is very asynchronous (although in my early years I was checking and replying every minute).

@rdlmda@rdlmda.me You need to use the RFC3339 format. I would recommend you read the specs at https://twtxt.dev – This is what is used by many moden clients these days 😅

@kiwu@twtxt.net I am trying to read our Information Security Office “mind” to grasp what they want. So far they seem to want to get logs from our BIG-IP F5 load balancers into Azure Sentinel, but the Telemetry Streaming plugin normally used for it is on maintenance mode, with deprecations happening on the F5 and Microsoft side soonish. So, yeah… “fun”. Oh, and they want it on production by tomorrow. LOLz!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I reckon up until then you had to have another first name that clearly differentiated. Didn’t read through the court decision, though.

Interesting, I always thought that Kiran was a male first name. But I only know one person with that name. As last name, though.

Now I’m wondering, was that also the beginning when parents started giving their kids really weird names?

Behold! 🥳 My first (hopefully it doesn’t fail 🤞) µSaaS (microSaaS)

Audiofern

Turn PDFs into audiobooks.

(only supports PDF(s) at the moment, books, papers, etc)

Happy reading/listening 🤓 👂 #Audiofern #Audiobooks #microSaaS

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 :-)

Well, the Atom feed entry IDs changed, too. I had to mark everything as read again.

I’ve only got a handful of syscalls working right now. Taking inspiration from the calling convention of the Linux kernel and even made the service/interrupt handler int 0x80h 🤣 I’ve only got read, write, alloc and exit working righ tnow 🥲

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club haha! I read as Golang the first time too. It is just the way our minds work. :-P

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I guess so, yes. I read something about that in some ticket. In v3 the terminfo support was dropped, though. I’m still on v2 at the moment.

@prologic@twtxt.net it really is not blank. It reads:

2026-01-12T23:34:11+01:00	(you must be root)

And now the event loop is not a simple loop around curses’ getch() anymore but it can wait for events on any file descriptor. Here’s a simple test program that waits for connections on a TCP socket, accepts it, reads a line, sends back a line:

https://movq.de/v/93fa46a030/vid-1767547942.mp4

And the scrollbar indicators are working now.

I’ll probably implement timer callbacks using timerfd (even though that’s Linux-only). 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Lovely! We also just had some snow. 😃 Not a lot, but still. 😅

(Lol, I totally read that as “rootfs”. 🤪)

very good blog post that reminded me why it’s taking so long to ship bbycll — previously i had computed the hashes of every post before storing them in the database, after realizing it’s a much better idea to compute the hashes during runtime and only store the post content & timestamp i’m now having to rewrite every function that reads & writes data. i hope the reason as to why i lost motivation is obvious — thankfully i caught it early enough so that once i’m done rewriting just those functions i should™ be able to finalize 1.0-rc with little hassle

⇒ the cardinal sin of software architecture: the unnecessary distribution, replication, or restructuring of state, both in space and time.

Pole Vault Pole
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Telescope Types
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@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe I think I never watched it. In any case, enjoy reading your books.

Jumping Frog Radius
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Apples
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@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It was too late when I read the “Addictive” warning… 😆 Thanks for sharing this!

Fishing
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Hyperacute Interdynamics
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I kind of hate conventional commit messages: https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/#summary

but I am loving reading RFC 2119: https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt

@movq@www.uninformativ.de how long do they need to read the scale? LOL. The penguin stayed put at least twice, no issues. I think the creator wanted some Internet points out of that video. 😂

Chessboard Alignment
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@bender@twtxt.net yeah, I’ve been reading through the documentation last night and it felt overwhelming for a minute… +1 point goes to GTS’s docs. but hey, I’ll be taking the easy route: podman-compose up -d they provide both a container image and an example compose file in a separate git repo but I’m wondering why that is not mentioned anywhere in the docs, (unless it is and I haven’t seen it yet)

Inverted Catenaries
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Website Task Flowchart
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Bridge Clearance
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@prologic@twtxt.net I remember reading a blog-post where someone has been throwing redirects to some +100GB files (usually used for speed testing purposes) at a swarm of bots that has been abusing his server in order to criple them, but I can’t find it anymore. I’m pretty sure I’ve had it bookmarked somewhere.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Ahh that would be awesome!!! I’d also somehow need read access to logs so i can figure shit out on my own 🧐

@iolfree@tilde.club @movq@www.uninformativ.de So true! Good read, thanks for recommending. :-)

Satellite Imagery
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Fifteen Years
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All my newly added test cases failed, that movq thankfully provided in https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/twtxt.dev/pulls/28#issuecomment-20801 for the draft of the twt hash v2 extension. The first error was easy to see in the diff. The hashes were way too long. You’ve already guessed it, I had cut the hash from the twelfth character towards the end instead of taking the first twelve characters: hash[12:] instead of hash[:12].

After fixing this rookie mistake, the tests still all failed. Hmmm. Did I still cut the wrong twelve characters? :-? I even checked the Go reference implementation in the document itself. But it read basically the same as mine. Strange, what the heck is going on here?

Turns out that my vim replacements to transform the Python code into Go code butchered all the URLs. ;-) The order of operations matters. I first replaced the equals with colons for the subtest struct fields and then wanted to transform the RFC 3339 timestamp strings to time.Date(…) calls. So, I replaced the colons in the time with commas and spaces. Hence, my URLs then also all read https, //example.com/twtxt.txt.

But that was it. All test green. \o/

Geologic Core Sample
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Service Outage
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EPIRBs
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I like to read through old RPG books and zines for inspiration for my games, and lately I’ve been enjoying the Arduin Grimoire (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduin), one of the earliest 3rd-party zines (coming out during the initial run of OD&D). It’s filled with a bunch of unique ideas (some better than others), entirely too many charts, and is very much a product of its time, but there’s something about its “raw”-ness (and its variety) that I still find appealing.

Beam Dump
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Car Size
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I used Gemini (the Google AI) twice at work today, asking about Google Workspace configuration and Google Cloud CLI usage (because we use those a lot). You’d think that it’d be well-suited for those topics. It answered very confidently, yet completely wrong. Just wrong. Made-up CLI arguments, whatever. It took me a while to notice, though, because it’s so convincing and, well, you implicitly and subconsciously trust the results of the Google AI when asking about Google topics, don’t you?

Will it get better over time? Maybe. But what I really want is this:

• Good, well-structured, easy-to-read, proper documentation. Google isn’t doing too bad in this regard, actually, it’s just that they have so much stuff that it’s hard to find what you’re looking for. Hence …
  
• … I want a good search function. Just give me a good fuzzy search for your docs. That’s it.
  

I just don’t have the time or energy to constantly second-guess this stuff. Give me something reliable. Something that is designed to do the right thing, not toy around with probabilities. “AI for everything” is just the wrong approach.

I mean, granting everyone read access, maybe?

Big and Little Spoons
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