i need to do a writeup about C(oncurrent)S(equentional)P(roccesses)

what i imagine is a pipeline like 2682 -> readable -> scheme-target + support libs. the first two have flip-flopped a bit, i WOULD like to do everything i want syntax-wise using only reader macros.

I know its been a long time, but I did come about around to howl a bit recently https://git.gay/xjix/howl needs a ton of work to be usable, but I think itll be a fun way to browse the twtxtverse.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, I noticed that too. I haven’t double-checked my code, though. Maybe it has something to do with selecting the correct URL? I mean, these feeds don’t have any # url = fields, so maybe that’s it?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Ah, there it is. 😃 Never gets old. 👍

@arne@uplegger.eu … I still haven’t watched that show. 🤦

@prologic@twtxt.net And none of them use Yarn-style threading. I don’t think they’re aware of us, they’re probably using plain twtxt. Other than one hit by @threatcat@tilde.club a few days ago, I’ve seen no traffic from them. 🤔

Hmmm, looks like my twt hash algorithm implementation calculates incorrect values. Might be the tilde in the URL that throws something off. :-? At least yarnd and jenny agree on a different hash.

Speaking of sunsets … https://movq.de/v/753ab5f9e5/sunset.jpg

@threatcat@tilde.club Let me guess, sl? 😏

This looks like a botnet, to be honest. The IPs are all over the place. Ethopia, Brazil, Kenya, Lebanon, Netherlands, … I mean, that’s the logical thing to do, isn’t it? Do your web crawling on infected PCs. Nobody will block those, because those are the same IP ranges as legitimate requests. And obviously you don’t have to pay for computing time.

… and they all send invalid HTTP requests, all answered with HTTP 400 … How silly.

yooooo I just mistyped one of the most common commands and was so pleasantly surprised. bonus manpage too!

Hmmm all these tilde.club feeds have no # nick and is messing with yarnd’s behavior 😅

Nothing too crazy, but still nice:

Image

@bender@twtxt.net Better safe than sorry, I guess. 😅

My goodness, a new level of stupidity.

The bots are now doing things like this:

GET http://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/feednotify/datenstrahler/slinp/countty HTTP/1.1

1. That URL does not exist.
   
2. By including http://uninformativ.de in that request, this instructs the webserver to do an HTTP proxy request. Of course, this isn’t allowed on my webserver (and shouldn’t by allowed on any normal webserver), resulting in HTTP 400. And even if it were, the target would be the exact same server, making a proxy request unnecessary.
   

And of course, it’s not just 50 hits like this or 100 or 1’000 or 10’000. No, it’s over 150’000 in the last 2 days. All from vastly different IP ranges of different cloud hosters.

This almost looks like a DDoS attack, but it’s just completely stupid. This feels more like some idiot vibe coded a crawler.

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.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Well, they say you have to build up stocks, don’t they? 😅

The font is fiamf3 (scaled up 2x, it would be too small when printed). It’s the same one that I use in my terminal and the status bars. 😃

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, it feels broken. It often needs a couple of retries and a lot of patience. It’s been like that for months. 🫤

It is harder to regain ownership of an IRC channel than crossing the Mexico/US border. 😅

I used to run office hours at Google and the number of people who came into my office absolutely convinced that there was no way to search a dataset without having the entire thing in memory for every process was too damn high.

Lol, YouTube supports increasing the playback speed, but when you want to go to 4x, they want you to pay extra:

https://movq.de/v/a1c79485fb/s.png

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org There’s a couple of new users on https://tilde.club, but since this is a shared host, I doubt that they have access to their access.log files. Hence they’ll never see followers, unless we notify them out of band. 🫤

Android shopping list apps disappointed me too many times, so I went back to writing these lists by hand a while ago.

Here’s what’s more fun: Write them in Vim and then print them on the dotmatrix printer. 🥳

And, because I can, I use my own font for that, i.e. ImageMagick renders an image file and then a little tool converts that to ESC/P so I can dump it to /dev/usb/lp0.

(I have so much scrap paper from mail spam lying around that I don’t feel too bad about this. All these sheets would go straight to the bin otherwise.)

Image

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, I’m glad I’m not the only one who didn’t get this right. 😅 You never had to configure a systemd timer? Lucky. 😅

@bender@twtxt.net No plus-aliases, just aliases. The mailserver runs on my OpenBSB box and is managed using BundleWrap (we use that at work), so to create a new alias, I push a new BundleWrap config to the server.

Thank you for https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-11-09/0/POSTING-en.html, @movq@www.uninformativ.de! I never configured systemd timers, but I would have gotten it wrong, too. Good to know when I eventually stumble across that in the future. I’m still using cron. Yeah, its field order sucks and I always have to look it up (because I don’t deal with that all that often). Indeed, systemd’s order sounds more reasonable.

@prologic@twtxt.net Glad you’re back. ✌️

I am sorry folks 😞

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It’s possible to run the validator locally (my blog generator scripts do that):

https://validator.w3.org/nu/about.html

That way you don’t forget. 🥳

@prologic@twtxt.net FWIW, I love the idea and I do the same with my email domains. It’s the most effective way to fight spam, IMO. 🥳

Double congrats, @thecanine@twtxt.net! \o/

I’m not a fan of the gemtext limits. This being only a single page (which probably doesn’t get updated a whole lot), the efforts of having two dedicates files are not all that big, or so I’d at least naively imagine.

I always recommend checking the W3C validator results, even though I’m very guilty of not doing that myself. It just doesn’t occur to me in the heat of the moment. I reckon if I were writing HTML on a more regular basis, I would pick up on making that a real habit. Anyway, your HTML being generated, you probably can’t address the findings, though. So, might not be even worth the time heading over to the validator.

From a privacy point of view, personally, I would definitely host the CSS myself. Other than that, nice link collection. :-)

I just successfully used my own SnipMail service with a real business, whoohoo! 🥳

Just a small update, on my birthday (on the 5th), I accidentally deleted the main page, of my website, so I’m using that as an opportunity, to try something new, at https://thecanine.smol.pub or gemini://thecanine.smol.pub - depending on your preferred protocol.

Any feedback is welcome!

@bender@twtxt.net All good. ✌️ It’s just that I’ve been through several iterations of this (on other platforms), AI output back and forth, pointing out what’s wrong, but in the end people were just trolling (not saying that’s what you had in mind), because apparently that’s “fun”.

This is formatted poorly on twtxt.net, so here’s a plain text file: https://movq.de/v/971c5a125d/wall-of-text.txt

… and now I just read @bender@twtxt.net’s other post that said the Gemini text was a shortened version, so I might have criticized things that weren’t true for the full version. Okay, sorry, I’m out. (And I won’t play that game, either. Don’t send me another AI output, possibly tweaked to address my criticism. That is besides the point and not worth my time.)

@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.

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 “AI literacy”, 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 “AI literacy”, isn’t it?

My text went one step further, though: I said that when you take this requirement of “AI literacy” 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 “thought process” behind it. When you, a human being, make a draft, you often think something like: “Okay, 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.” 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.

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 “skill evolution” – 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., “complex problem-solving”) 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 “bugs” (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 (“accountant with a calculator”) 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 “argument” that it picked up on some website.

The AI makes two points here. The first one, I might actually agree with (“bad bot behavior is not the fault of AI itself”).

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 “lol yeah, change the laws”. (I wonder in what way the laws would have to be changed in the AI’s “opinion”, 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.)

Except for one point, I don’t accept any of Gemini’s “criticism”. 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 “the sky is blue” and Bob replies with “why do you say the sky is purple?!”

But it sure looks convincing, doesn’t it?

This took so much of my time. I won’t do this again. 😂

@bender@twtxt.net It’s sad. Remember that Munich once ran the LiMux project. 😞

We could build a strong IT sector in Germany or the EU, but we just don’t want to.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @bender@twtxt.net I’m not very knowledgable regarding the two points you mentioned, hence I didn’t include them in my list. But, yeah, from what I’ve heard, it doesn’t look good.

Bavaria is moving to the Microsoft cloud: The state government intends to conclude a contract with the US corporation by the end of the year for the use of the cloud office package Microsoft 365.

Source: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Bavaria-wants-to-move-to-Microsoft-cloud-by-year-end-11066929.html

🎉🎉🎉

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Maybe, but still nice. 😊

@bender@twtxt.net Thanks for this illustration, it completely “misunderstood” everything I wrote and confidently spat out garbage. 👌

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org There’s an auto-finish function:

https://movq.de/v/7a01b9471c/os2-autofinish.mp4

I just did it by hand because I found it satisfying. 😅

Not as cool as yesterday: https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2025-11-05/

For the innocent bystanders (because I know that I won’t change @bender@twtxt.net’s opinion):

curl -s gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2025/2025-11/2025-11-05--my-current-reasons-against-ai.txt

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, you have to manually move each card one by one. That’s annoying. Haha, I remember the old Windows Solitair animation. :-)

Winning animations (TkSol’s timing is screwed up): https://movq.de/v/92d7758740

Won a bunch of games of Solitaire and then rearranged the cards for maximum negative points, to distract me from the horrors.

(Still ended up with >0 points on OS/2, because don’t ask me.)

https://www.uninformativ.de/desktop/2025%2D11%2D04%2D%2Dkatriawm%2Dsolitaire.png

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org … sounds like a bad day. 😅