🔥 ATTENTION: I have really bad news folks 😢

Today, (just this morning in AEST) I accidentally nuke my pod (twtxt.net). I keep backups, but unfortunately the recovery point objective (RTP) is at worst a month! 🤦‍♂️ 😱 (the recovery time objective is around ~30m or so, restoring can take a while due to the size of the archive and index) – For those that are unfamiliar with these terms, they essentially relate to “how much data loss can occur” (RPO) and “how quickly you can restore the system” (RTO).

This pod (twtxt.net) is back up and online. However we’ve last the last ~5 days worth of posts y’all may have made on your feeds (for those that use this pod).

I’m so sorry 😞

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OpenAI and Others Seek New Path To Smarter AI as Current Methods Hit Limitations
AI companies like OpenAI are seeking to overcome unexpected delays and challenges in the pursuit of ever-large language models by developing training techniques that use more human-like ways for algorithms to “think.” From a report: A dozenAI scientists, researchers and investors told Reuters they believe that these … ⌘ Read more

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Generative AI Doesn’t Have a Coherent Understanding of the World, MIT Researchers Find
Long-time Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis writes: Despite its impressive output, a recent study from MIT suggests generative AI doesn’t have a coherent understanding of the world. While the best-performing large language models have surprising capabilities that make it seem like the models are implicitly learn … ⌘ Read more

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Jack Dorsey’s Block Scraps ‘Web5’ Project
Block will abandon development of its Web5 decentralized internet project and reduce investment in music streaming service Tidal to focus on bitcoin mining hardware and self-custody wallets, the payments company announced in its third-quarter letter to shareholders. The Jack Dorsey-led firm cited strong market demand for its bitcoin mining products and Bitkey wallet as key drivers behind the st … ⌘ Read more

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One of my quirks—don’t ask me why—is collecting backpacks, bags, patches, and watches, especially those related to aviation and the military. Just yesterday, I added a Direct Action Messenger bag and a 5.11 backpack to my collection.

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I feel exhausted, burned out. The workload just keeps piling up, and there’s less and less time to rest. What keeps me going are these little escapes to the smolweb.

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Lawsuit Accuses PowerSchool of Selling Student Data To 3rd Parties
A former teacher has filed a federal lawsuit against PowerSchool, alleging the education technology giant illegally sells student data to third parties without proper consent. Emily Cherkin, lead plaintiff in the class action suit filed in San Francisco, claims PowerSchool has amassed 345 terabytes of data from 440 school districts, including … ⌘ Read more

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Been curious to see if can filter out my access.log file and output a list of my twtxt followers just in case I’ve missed someone … I came up with this awk -F '\"' '/twtxt/ {print $(NF-1)}' /var/log/user.log | grep -v 'twtxt\.net' | sort -u | awk '{print $(NF-1) $NF}' | awk '/^\(/' spaghetti monster of a command and I’m wondering if there’s a more elegant way for achieving the same thing.

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Kremlin Says It Hopes $20.6 Decillion Fine Got Google’s Attention
An enormous fine levied by a Russian court on Google caught the attention of the Kremlin – which hopes Google will notice in turn. From a report: President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, commented on the sum on Thursday. It came after a court demanded payment equivalent of $20.6 decillion – an almost incomprehensible figure that exce … ⌘ Read more

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In-reply-to » @doesnm right, jenny isn't the problem, it's your platform of choice. The fetching of archives doesn't happen all time (once only, right @movq?), but yes, depending on the amount of feeds you follow that first time might take a while.

I need to wait 30 seconds every start of mutt with 8 feeds

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Tried migrating to jenny… So seems it not suitable for my phone. Fetch command fetched archived feeds so i have 37k+ entries and mutt hangs for several seconds for loading this. Also i don’t like hardcoded paths for config and follow file

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Just throwing this out there, but does the edit, delete and reply feature work for any of you, through the website? I can only Yarn. Trying to do those other actions, generates a popup, asking me if I trust some # URL thing. Confirming it refreshes the site, without doing the thing.

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In-reply-to » So I am really curious, now that I am building upon @sorenpeter's Timeline app, how other users write/add their twtxt, and how you follow conversations. Comment svp!

Hey, @ I know. Just wondering the kind of apps or software and how you all stay up to date in conversations. Is it through webmentions?

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So, we need a computer for house (that is, wife and I) usage. We have none, we rely on our pocket computers. I would like to fill the void with the recently announced Mac mini. What technique could I use with an already stressed out wife, to accomplish this goal? 😅

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In-reply-to » @bender @prologic I'm not exactly asking yarnd to change. If you are okay with the way it displayed my twts, then by all means, leave it as is. I hope you won't mind if I continue to write things like 1/4 to mean "first out of four".

@bender@twtxt.net I try to avoid editing. I guess I would write 5/4, 6/4, etc, and hopefully my audience would be sympathetic to my failing.

Anyway, I don’t think my eccentric decision to number my twts in the style of other social media platforms is the only context where someone might write ¼ not meaning a quarter. E.g. January 4, to Americans.

I’m happy to keep overthinking this for as long as you are :-P

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In-reply-to » @prologic I'm not a yarnd user, so it doesn't matter a whole lot to me, but FWIW I'm not especially keen on changing how I format my twts to work around yarnd's quirks.

@bender@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net I’m not exactly asking yarnd to change. If you are okay with the way it displayed my twts, then by all means, leave it as is. I hope you won’t mind if I continue to write things like 1/4 to mean “first out of four”.

What has text/markdown got to do with this? I don’t think Markdown says anything about replacing 1/4 with ¼, or other similar transformations. It’s not needed, because ¼ is already a unicode character that can simply be directly inserted into the text file.

What’s wrong with my original suggestion of doing the transformation before the text hits the twtxt.txt file? @prologic@twtxt.net, I think it would achieve what you are trying to achieve with this content-type thing: if someone writes 1/4 on a yarnd instance or any other client that wants to do this, it would get transformed, and other clients simply wouldn’t do the transformation. Every client that supports displaying unicode characters, including Jenny, would then display ¼ as ¼.

Alternatively, if you prefer yarnd to pretty-print all twts nicely, even ones from simpler clients, that’s fine too and you don’t need to change anything. My 1/4 -> ¼ thing is nothing more than a minor irritation which probably isn’t worth overthinking.

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In-reply-to » @bender True, I'm just not sure we can have it both way? 🤔 I can turn smartypants off, but I do seem to recall you wanted it on 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m not a yarnd user, so it doesn’t matter a whole lot to me, but FWIW I’m not especially keen on changing how I format my twts to work around yarnd’s quirks.

I wonder if this kind of postprocessing would fit better between composing (via yarnd’s UI) and publishing. So, if a yarnd user types ¼, it could get changed to ¼ in the twtxt.txt file for everyone to see, not just people reading through yarnd. But when I type ¼, meaning first out of four, as a non-yarnd user, the meaning wouldn’t get corrupted. I can always type ¼ directly if that’s what I really intend.

(This twt might be easier to understand if you read it without any transformations :-P)

Anyway, again, I’m not a yarnd user, so do what you will, just know you might not be seeing exactly what I meant.

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The last week I’ve been playing around with https://github.com/comfyanonymous/ComfyUI , dang good tool for testing ai models and such. I really like the node based workflow.
And makes it super easy to test any AI model.
Only thing I miss now - is one of those image to video setup’s, that’s what I’m working on fixing now. So that I can generate images, and then automatically make them into short videos as well.
Fun to play around with.

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AI Slop Is Flooding Medium
AI slop is flowing onto every major platform where people post online – and Medium is no exception. Wired: The 12-year-old publishing platform has undertaken a dizzying number of pivots over the years. It’s finally on a financial upswing, having turned a monthly profit for the first time this summer. Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine and other executives at the company have described the platform as “a home for human writing.” But … ⌘ Read more

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Roses are red, violets are blue,
Why devs hate Google, and so should you?

Google ☠️ The cloud

Google Drive vs their own API: Many of us developers, go out of our way to support Google Drive in our apps, programs and websites, to make things easier for users, but over the years, Google keeps making it harder and in some cases demanding “solutions”, that conveniently involve us paying their partners:
$Our Android app is frozen in carbonite
$End of the road for Google Drive and Transmit

Google ☠️ The Internet

Google OAuth vs the Canidae browser: Users interested in testing my CEF (Chromium Embedding Framework) browser, back when the project still existed, were prohibited from passing Google OAuth in my and any other CEF browser, unless they changed their user agent string. I managed to contact Google and was told this was a necessary protection against bad actors. As we all know, no bad actor would ever add two lines of code, to change the user agent of their malware.

Google vs the point of SSL: Google Chrome presents all sites access over HTTPS as secure and all sites accessed over HTTP as dangerous. This is very misleading to less educated Internet users, falling for “secure” phishing sites with SSL certificates and avoiding “dangerous” static webpages, that never needed one.

Google ☠️ Android apps

Googles friends vs FOSS
developers:
X and other big social media platforms running their own servers, are allowed to host seemingly any user generated content, while Google forces us, developers helping to maintain XMPP clients for Android, to exclude features, that allow our users to discover chatrooms, that anyone can host on their servers. We are thus not only held responsible for what we publish, what we host, but also for the whole XMPP network. I offer my version of the client, unrestricted, on my website, others choose their repo or F-droid.

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