In-reply-to » I have a question! I'm looking for a small personal camera(specifically good for videos because that's what I'll use it for) that's cheap enough for a teen to afford but also actually good. Do any of you tech people have any good recs?

@bender@twtxt.net a mobile phone camera doesn’t cut it because it cant take long videos. I would say like the cheapest possible tbh! it doesn’t have to be an amazing grade a camera, just something that will record in decent quality for long periods of time! I mostly want it to make vlogs :p

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I have a question! I’m looking for a small personal camera(specifically good for videos because that’s what I’ll use it for) that’s cheap enough for a teen to afford but also actually good. Do any of you tech people have any good recs?

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In-reply-to » Speaking of WAF(s) / Web Applicaiton Firewalls -- I actually had forgotten that not only have I designed a new WAF from scratch, but I've actually implemented it already, and done some local testing. I just haven't put it into production yet... What od you think @aelaraji ? 🤔 https://git.mills.io/prologic/caddy-waf

@prologic@twtxt.net yeah, I’ve had even requested access to it in order to give it a try and report whatever I can but, Sorry I never got to do any of it. 2025 slam dunked a massive pile of 💩 over my life (hence the disappearance, trying to avoid talking about any of it) and I’m just starting to recover (or at least trying to).

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Better Technology, Worse Motivation: GenAI’s Mediocrity Trap

While generative AI (GenAI) promises productive efficiency, it can paradoxically lead to lower-quality work. We conducted an experiment with professional illustrators and found that AI assistance flattens the quality curve—it accelerates initial gains but sharply diminishes the returns on sustained effort. Faced with this, a significant number of professionals made a strategic choice: they sacrificed the final quality to save time.

From http://www.jin-li.org/uploads/1/1/4/5/114595093/ai_and_motivation.pdf

I haven’t read this and can’t vouch for it; seems vaguely AI-boostery. Still, the conclusions are interesting. This seems to be the picture that is emerging about generative AI generally: most people don’t like it and find that degrades the quality of work. Coders seem to like it and think that it helps them, but in fact it makes the slower, less productive, and more bug prone.

By all measures it’s a bad technology. We should just be honest about it. There is no need to make excuses for multi-trillion-dollar corporations.

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PSA: Just in case you start getting 5xxs on my end, I’m not dead 😂 (well, unless I am). Well be changing ISPs and hopefully get the new line up and running before the old provider cuts us off.

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In-reply-to » Oh fuck me! I had basically turned off the route to git.mills.io last night and went ot bed at ~2AM after unsuccessfully trying to control the attacks (bad bots) that were behaving like a DDoS attack. Tried to re-enable the route this monring and *BOOM, they're back! As-if they never stopped?! what da actual fuq?! Media Anyone have any clever ideas of what I can do here to allows normal users, like you nice folk and block ths obnoxious traffic?!

@prologic@twtxt.net I’d say give crowdsec a try but I know for sure you prefer your own WAF … 😅

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In-reply-to » Hmmm 🧐 I'm annectodaly not convinced so-called "AI"(s) really save time™. -- I have no proof though, I would need to do some concrete studies / numbers... -- But, there is one benefit... It can save you from typing and from worsening RSI / Carpal Tunnel.

@prologic@twtxt.net AI is slot machines for coders:

The same intermittent reward operant conditioning that gets people addicted to gambling and thinking that if they follow certain rituals they’ll win “next time” drives people’s beliefs that AI tools are making them more productive when they’re making them less productive. I’m going to guess that a side effect of this is that people think they’re typing less when in the longer term they’re typing the same amount or more when you factor in the productivity loss (as far as I’ve read the studies don’t measure this so I’m only guessing).

People are also being rapidly de-skilled by this technology: the more they use it, the more their actual skills atrophy. “Continuous exposure to AI might reduce the ADR (adesoma detection rate) of standard non-AI assisted colonoscopy, suggesting a negative effect on endoscopist behaviour.” (science speak for saying that radiologists get worse at seeing tumors in scans once they’ve used AI): https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(25)00133-5/abstract

Nobody who cares about the future should be using this stuff for anything.

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since there are quite literally no note taking apps that work for me, i’ve began writing my own! to get started real quick i adapted the core part of bbycll’s backend and it works so nicely — which speaks volumes to the quality of the code! should really break it out into a custom framework. i’m also realizing how easy it would be to get bbycll v1 ready…but this is probably more important since it’ll allow me to get my life in order ^^’

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To everyone previously asking, what my (and other developers) endless complaining about Google, to both every EU body, with a form on their website and every relevant team at Google accomplished…
WE FUCKING WON!!!
“While security is crucial, we’ve also heard from developers and power users who have a higher risk tolerance and want the ability to download unverified apps.”
-source

I was also able to work with my new webhost, to bring back “🐕.fr.to” - everyones favorite vanity redirect domain, for my site, Googles changes to SSL warnings in Chrome, killed at the beginning of this year.

The lesson: I NEED TO COMPLAIN MORE

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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!

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Image


Endlich habe ich das letzte der zehn deutschen “Stahlratte” Bücher von Harry Harrison. Jetzt muss ich es nur noch lesen. Zur Sicherheit die ganze Reihe noch einmal! 🤓

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Well, it sure has been a while since I last posted here. Just up late doing yet another Linux installation. Debian turned out to be about as stable as a plutonium Jenga tower, and Alpine refused to boot, so I gave it the boot. Here’s to hoping that Arch fares better. Oddly, I’ve always found Arch to be considerably more stable than other distros…

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is the first url metadata field unequivocally treated as the canon feed url when calculating hashes, or are they ignored if they’re not at least proper urls? do you just tolerate it if they’re impersonating someone else’s feed, or pointing to something that isn’t even a feed at all?

and if the first url metadata field changes, should it be logged with a time so we can still calculate hashes for old posts? or should it never be updated? (in the case of a pod, where the end user has no choice in how such events are treated) or do we redirect all the old hashes to the new ones (probably this, since it would be helpful for edits too)

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I finally solved the loading issue in my WIP reader, TwtStrm (and apologies again to anyone that got spammed while I was diagnosing the issue).

After another round of coding this weekend, I’m happy to report that it now renders all the twts (with markdown parsing), complete with localstorage and server-based file caching.

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In-reply-to » is there consensus on what characters should(n't) be allowed in nicks? i remember reading somewhere whitespace should not be allowed, but i don't see it in the spec on twtxt.dev — in fact, are there any other resources on twtxt extensions outside of twtxt.dev?

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @movq@www.uninformativ.de bbycll’s nickname regex is /^([-_\p{N}\p{L}])+$/iu because i don’t like how english-centric only allowing ascii letters/numbers is though this only applies to local users as of now, currently all nicknames are tolerated when parsing remote feeds and i just do mentions how yarn does (just the feed url)

in the wild, i’ve noticed a texedus feed with spaces in the nick (where its spec explicitly disallows whitespace in the nick) and feeds with other symbols in the nick too. honestly, i think we should just tolerate arbitrary nicknames for sake of user expression (while stripping or converting unreasonable characters) and just leave them out of mentions

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is there consensus on what characters should(n’t) be allowed in nicks? i remember reading somewhere whitespace should not be allowed, but i don’t see it in the spec on twtxt.dev — in fact, are there any other resources on twtxt extensions outside of twtxt.dev?

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Warum ist es nur so kniffelig ein Sudoku-Rätsel zu erstellen?
Ich meine nicht, das Erstellen eines komplett ausgefüllten Sets, sondern das Leeren der Felder so, dass ein einigermaßen herausforderndes Sudoku mit nur einer Lösungsmöglichkeit entsteht. 🤔

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In-reply-to » @prologic im unsure how i feel about the hash v2 proposal, given it is completely backward incompatible with hash v1 it doesn't really solve any of the problems with it. it only delays collisions, and still fragments threads on post edits

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org i dont mind if the hash is not backward compatible but im not sure if this is the right way to proceed because the added complexity dealing with two hash versions isnt justified

regular end users wont care to understand how twt hashes are formed, they just want to use twtxt! so i guess i could work in protecting users from themselves by disallowing post edits on old posts or posts with replies, but i’m not fond of this either really. if they want to break a thread, they can just delete the post (though i’ve noticed yarn handling post deletes dubiously…)

on activitypub i do genuinely find myself looking through several month or even year old posts sometimes and deciding to edit/reword them a little to be slightly less confusing, this should be trivial to handle on twtxt which is an infinitely simpler specification

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In-reply-to » @zvava love the direction this is heading, hope this soon evolves into a basic Android app, usable with any instance.

@bender@twtxt.net @thecanine@twtxt.net well now this has me thinking abt the feasibility of making an android twtxt app for pods, the actual apis of pods would have to be standardized (or the fucked up way that activitypub does it, where the “mastodon api” is the defacto client api (does yarn even have an api reference?)) or the client is just simply..a client..but editing feeds via PUT, PATCH, DELETE etc. is standardized!…? (not to mention i dont even know where to begin making an android app lmao)

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