In-reply-to » I’ve started collecting reasons against AI usage here, so I don’t have to repeat myself all the time:

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Thanks! There are a few points in there that I’ll add to my list.

Your very first point is obviously crucial. “Writing code” is just the means to an end for many people and they don’t really care about it or like it, so they love AI. I had this in another draft (it refers to the other list I posted):

https://movq.de/v/614f14c3ef/ramble.txt

And this right here is so important:

simplicity is the real art and much harder to achieve.

Finding an elegant, simple solution is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay harder than anything else. And here’s the thing: I don’t get why nerds/techies don’t get “nerd-sniped” by this. A lot of people love building big stuff and then brag about being clever/competent because they were able to build that big thing – but once you realize that this approach is the lazy one, shouldn’t you make finding the elegant solution your goal? Doesn’t that give you more bragging rights?

(Am I being clear? Do you understand what I mean? 😅)

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In-reply-to » @lyse Uhhh, yes, I have one single script to build the website and I ran that while writing that noai.html page. Apart from the global updated field in my feeds (that one got changed), everything else should be stable, though.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Thanks. I noticed the <updated> of the feed, too. But for some reason, some articles were suddenly marked as new.

On some YouTube feed <entry>s, I noticed updated <updated> fields showing today’s timestamps. But unless there is no <published>, the <updated> is not even considered. I verified that in the source code. Yet, all the affected articles in Newsboat show today’s timestamp, not the years old publication timestamp. I generate the YouTube feeds from the original feeds myself once a day, so I doubt that this is cause by some YouTube shenanigans.

Very weird, it doesn’t make any sense at all. What is going on here? O_o It doesn’t appear that I have duplicates in the database either.

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In-reply-to » You didn't change your Atom feed by any chance yesterday or today, @movq? Not only do I have a metric shitton of "new" old items in my YouTube feeds, but also a bunch of your old articles are shown as new.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Uhhh, yes, I have one single script to build the website and I ran that while writing that noai.html page. Apart from the global updated field in my feeds (that one got changed), everything else should be stable, though.

Maybe this helps narrow things down? https://movq.de/v/a6b8a0d15f/feed.png

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You didn’t change your Atom feed by any chance yesterday or today, @movq@www.uninformativ.de? Not only do I have a metric shitton of “new” old items in my YouTube feeds, but also a bunch of your old articles are shown as new.

I fear that this is a Newsboat bug. I rebuilt it yesterday from master.

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We’re currently at about 28-30°C, but the relative humidity is at a crazy low level of 20%. 😳 This actually feels pretty nice. If it only were always like that …

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Over there, on the othernet, I just stumbled upon the question:

When talking to yourself in your head, do you use “I”, “you”, or “we”?

As for me, I say “we” - in regular situations. But if I fuck up, it’s “you”. 😞👈

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In-reply-to » By the way, did you know that I have a five month notice period? Starting next year, it’ll be six months. Germany is the opposite of “hire and fire”, but it applies to both parties.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, I’ve heard of that option (“Aufhebungsvertrag”). I guess the real challenge will be finding something else that isn’t just as silly.

And on the bright side, you don’t even have to hand over anything.

They actually say that with a straight face. (Did I mention that already?) “The age of maintainership is over. Anyone can now contribute to any project at any time.”

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In-reply-to » @prologic There is nothing I can do – except quit. The company explicitly wants it that way.

By the way, did you know that I have a five month notice period? Starting next year, it’ll be six months. Germany is the opposite of “hire and fire”, but it applies to both parties.

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I just missed the 20 year anniversary of my blog. 😬 What a stupid long time to do this.

This started out as a PHP page with user comments, MySQL as a database, a PHP webadmin … can you believe that? Totally unnecessary. But everything was “LAMP” back then, so that’s what I was using as well. I kicked out MySQL in 2011 (it just stored files since then) and eventually switched to static HTML pages in 2015.

RSS feeds have only been there since 2009, because I was late to the party. For a long time, I didn’t understand what they were good for. 🤦

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In-reply-to » I just realized that this book, which I’m still using as a reference every now and then, is from 2005.

@tftp@tilde.town Ah, I see. I have a feeling that a lot of stuff is going on under the hood all the time and it’s mostly the userland-visible things that stay the same? 🤔 But yeah, some stuff is really, really old, like the TCP code I’ve recently (tried to) read.

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In-reply-to » So apparently this is the default when making a new Matrix account, which makes me wonder why we’re even doing this whole crypto dance in the first place … ?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

So, it’s plenty good enough for them.

Yeah, but on the other hand, you can’t even log in normally to a Matrix/Element account. I mean using username + password. It’s not expected that you ever log out or lose your browser session. If you do, you must use a one-time backup code (that you must create and save beforehand) to log in again.

To be fair, I can’t say that I fully understand what Matrix is doing in the first place. The text that I quoted reads like they have your keys. But they also claim that they only store this stuff encryped: https://element.io/en/help#encryption5 So … encrypted with what? Only option here is my password, isn’t it? (But if my password was good enough to reclaim an account … why do all the other stuff …)

Matrix takes end-to-end encryption seriously. When I ran a Matrix server for the family, the family members would regularly lose their keys, because they didn’t pay attention to something. That’s on purpose! Or rather, that was on purpose. Maybe it’s different these days?

No clue.

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I’m not always on the same page as Rob Pike, but this hit close to home:

Although trained in physics, I worked in the computing industry with pride and purpose for over 40 years. And now I can do nothing but sit back and watch it destroy itself for no valid reason beyond hubris (if I’m being charitable).

Ineffable sadness watching something I once loved deliberately lose its soul.

I spent my time trying to make it better. Not just write code, but find better or at least different ways to do so. Simpler, cleaner, more general, more comprehensible.

What’s happening today is a complete repudiation of everything I was trying to achieve.

“Simpler, cleaner, more general, more comprehensible”, that’s what I’ve been trying to establish in our teams as well. Obviously not to the same degree, but you get the idea.

And it all goes out the window now. We’re doing the complete opposite – and with full force.

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In today’s episode of “everything goes to shit because we want it to”: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-act-2/

The supply of deep technical problems is multiplying, and the engineers who can solve them will be among the scarcest and most valuable talent in the market.

And yet:

We’re reevaluating our operational footprint, and are planning to reduce the number of countries by up to 30% where we have small teams.

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I’m still having some fundamental design issues with my TUI widget system, so I’m still not comfortable making this code public.

But after a day of work (and discussing AI ad nauseam at work), I just don’t have any energy left. 😑

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In-reply-to » @lyse your wildlife photography is getting much better! Got to name them, what do you think? Too early? :-)

@bender@twtxt.net I misread that sentence and thought that your first crush was called Gisela, and was like “wait, he’s not that old”.

Turns out, Gisela is a much younger name than I thought:

https://namecensus.com/first-names/gisela-meaning-and-history/

A peak in the late 1970is and late 1990ies? What?

But then it turned out that, in Germany, the popularity dropped rapidly in the late 1950ies, which actually matches my expectations:

https://www.beliebte-vornamen.de/5203-gisela.htm

In other words, some other countries picked up the name Gisela after it had already faded away in Germany.

What a fun rabbit hole. 😅

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In-reply-to » All sorts of .de domains don't resolve right now. But not all, movq.de for example still works. All on our server and basically all major other sites are cactus. Maybe some DENIC problem? I'm too tired to investigate, but I'm looking forward to tomorrow to read some report on that. :-) Good night.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yep, this was a big oopsie at DENIC:

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