Day 2 was pretty tough on my old hardware. Part 1 originally took 16 minutes, then I got it down to 9 seconds – only to realize later that my solution abused some properties of my particular input. A correct solution will probably take about 30 seconds. 🫤

Part 2 took 29 minutes this morning. I wrote an optimized version but haven’t tested it yet. I hope it’ll be under a minute.

Python 1 feels really slow, even compared to Java 1. And these first puzzles weren’t even computationally intensive. We’ll see how far I’ll make it …

https://movq.de/v/f831d98103/day02.jpg

@prologic@twtxt.net Using your own language?! That’s really nice! I hope you get home soon so you can give the code a try. 😅

Day 1 was surprisingly finnicky. A lot of people got it wrong, apparently. Me too. 🤣

https://movq.de/v/488136b4ae/day01%2Dblurred.jpg

“The Internet Used To Be A Place”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYlcUbLAFmw

@bender@twtxt.net Ah, god damnit. 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net Nothing stops you from programming while in Vietnam. 😏😈😅

Advent of Code 2025 starts tomorrow. 🥳🎄

This year, I’m going to use Python 1 on SuSE Linux 6.4, writing the code on my trusty old Pentium 133 with its 64 MB of RAM. No idea if that old version of Python will be fast enough for later puzzles. We’ll see.

Image

@bender@twtxt.net Hmm, something’s weird with that post:

https://movq.de/v/cf64f3a625/s.png

😅

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Damn. That was stupid of me. I should have posted examples using 2026-03-01 as cutoff date. 😂

In my actual test suite, everything uses 2027-01-01 and then I have this, hoping that that’s good enough. 🥴

def test_rollover():
    d = jenny.HASHV2_CUTOFF_DATE
    assert len(jenny.make_twt_hash(URL, d - timedelta(days=7), TEXT)) == 7
    assert len(jenny.make_twt_hash(URL, d - timedelta(seconds=3), TEXT)) == 7
    assert len(jenny.make_twt_hash(URL, d - timedelta(seconds=2), TEXT)) == 7
    assert len(jenny.make_twt_hash(URL, d - timedelta(seconds=1), TEXT)) == 7
    assert len(jenny.make_twt_hash(URL, d, TEXT)) == 12
    assert len(jenny.make_twt_hash(URL, d + timedelta(seconds=1), TEXT)) == 12
    assert len(jenny.make_twt_hash(URL, d + timedelta(seconds=2), TEXT)) == 12
    assert len(jenny.make_twt_hash(URL, d + timedelta(seconds=3), TEXT)) == 12
    assert len(jenny.make_twt_hash(URL, d + timedelta(days=7), TEXT)) == 12

(In other words, I don’t care as long as it’s before 2027-01-01. 😏😅)

Yeah, how? We are facing this very problem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zj1uwsmWuAw

@prologic@twtxt.net Very rarely. And if I/we do, then it’s by train or by car. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net Really? That’s nice. 😅 (God, I haven’t been on a plane in 25 years, I think.)

@prologic@twtxt.net Hmm. 🤔 Well, I don’t run that server myself, so I can’t peek into the logs to see what’s going wrong … 🥴

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh yeah, there’s lots of them here. Even in winter when it’s freezing outside. I’m always baffled to see parrots in the snow … feels like a paradox. 🥴

@prologic@twtxt.net How do I test? You can try to mention my Mastodon account https://tilde.zone/@movq, if that helps. 🤔

I was having a stroll and heard this weird crackling noise. Took me a moment to realize that it’s coming from the tree above me. I looked up and didn’t see anything at first, because of the bad light. And then I saw it: About 10 parrots (alexandrine parakeets or rose-ringed parakeets) were sitting up there, heaving a feast. 😅

https://movq.de/v/3527326471/parrots.mp4

(Video isn’t great, because this is my smartphone and the light was bad.)

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, I meant ISPs. Hm, okay. 🤔

@iolfree@tilde.club They’re not wrong, are they? 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net Do these IPs belong to hosting providers or to providers of private internet connections? The latter is what I’m seeing on my server …

@prologic@twtxt.net We have a bit of a vendor lock-in here in Germany: PayPal is sometimes the only non-shady option to pay for something. ☹️

https://fokus.cool/2025/11/25/i-dont-care-how-well-your-ai-works.html

AI systems being egregiously resource intensive is not a side effect — it’s the point.

And someone commented on that with:

I’m fascinated by the take about the resource usage being an advantage to the AI bros.

They’ve created software that cannot (practically) be replicated as open source software / free software, because there is no community of people with sufficient hardware / data sets. It will inherently always be a centralized technology.

Fascinating and scary.

@bender@twtxt.net Once Advent of Code starts, I’ll start spamming, don’t worry. 😅

Hm, so regarding the hash change:

https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/twtxt.dev/pulls/28

How about 2026-03-01 00:00:00 UTC as the cut-off date? 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Probably wouldn’t help, since almost every request comes from a different IP address. These are the hits on those weird /projects URLs since Sunday:

    1 IP  has  5 hits
    1 IP  has  4 hits
   13 IPs have 3 hits
  280 IPs have 2 hits
25543 IPs have 1 hit

The total number of hits has decreased now. Maybe the botnet has moved on …

Not a day goes by at work, where I’m not either infuriated or frustrated by this wave of AI garbage. In my private life, I can avoid it. But not at work. And they’re pushing hard for it.

Something has to change in 2026.

Which actively maintained Yarn/twtxt clients are there at the moment? Client authors raise your hands! 🙋

@prologic@twtxt.net Time to make a new internet. Maybe one that intentionally doesn’t “scale” and remains slow (on both ends) so it’s harder to overload in this manner, harder to abuse for tracking your every move, … Got any of those 56k modems left?

(I’m half-joking. “Make The Internet Expensive Again” like it was in the 1990ies and some of these problems might go away. Disclaimer: I didn’t have my coffee yet. 😅)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oops. 😅 But yay, it’s working. 🥳

And regarding those broken URLs: I once speculated that these bots operate on an old dataset, because I thought that my redirect rules actually were broken once and produced loops. But a) I cannot reproduce this today, and b) I cannot find anything related to that in my Git history, either. But it’s hard to tell, because I switched operating systems and webservers since then …

But the thing is that I’m seeing new URLs constructed in this pattern. So this can’t just be an old crawling dataset.

I am now wondering if those broken URLs are bot bugs as well.

They look like this (zalgo is a new project):

https://www.uninformativ.de/projects/slinp/zalgo/scksums/bevelbar/

When you request that URL, you get redirected to /git/:

$ curl -sI https://www.uninformativ.de/projects/slinp/zalgo/scksums/bevelbar/
HTTP/1.0 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Sat, 22 Nov 2025 06:13:51 GMT
Server: OpenBSD httpd
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 510
Location: /git/

And on /git/, there are links to my repos. So if a broken client requests https://www.uninformativ.de/projects/slinp/zalgo/scksums/bevelbar/, then sees a bunch of links and simply appends them, you’ll end up with an infinite loop.

Is that what’s going on here or are my redirects actually still broken … ?

I just noticed this pattern:

uninformativ.de 201.218.xxx.xxx - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:27 +0100] "GET /projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 301 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
www.uninformativ.de 103.10.xxx.xxx  - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:28 +0100] "GET http://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 400 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

Let me add some spaces to make it more clear:

    uninformativ.de 201.218.xxx.xxx - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:27 +0100] "GET                       /projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 301 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"
www.uninformativ.de 103.10.xxx.xxx  - - [22/Nov/2025:06:53:28 +0100] "GET http://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/multipass/xiate/padme/gophcatch HTTP/1.1" 400 0 "" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/112.0.0.0 Safari/537.36"

Some IP (from Brazil) requests some (non-existing, completely broken) URL from my webserver. But they use the hostname uninformativ.de, so they get redirected to www.uninformativ.de.

In the next step, just a second later, some other IP (from Nepal) issues an HTTP proxy request for the same URL.

Clearly, someone has no idea how HTTP redirects work. And clearly, they’re running their broken code on some kind of botnet all over the world.

My webserver is getting millions of hits per month at the moment.

All bots.

@thecanine@twtxt.net That image is correct.

@thecanine@twtxt.net Not bad. 🥳 Fingers crossed that they actually do it. 🤞