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AI usage at work has risen to absurd and moronic levels.

Entire dev teams getting dismantled and fired.

The people that work in accounting are expected to write their own accounting software (or rather, let AI do it). Same for marketing. And everybody else.

Former ā€œtech nerdsā€, whom I used to respect, tell me that they haven’t read any code in months. Let alone written some. They tell me that ā€œAI is really good nowā€, it’s the future, yadda yadda. At the same time, when I read their code, I want to scream and cry (and most days I do).

Virtually everything is vibe-coded now. Everywhere you look you get to see code that no human will ever be able to maintain. Huge system ā€œdesignsā€, expensive, slow.

At this point, I’m almost hoping for the bubble NOT to burst, because that might very well mean the end of this company (and, thus, my job).

There is no ā€œexit strategyā€. We completely depend on AI services now.

At the same time, I’m expected to implement ISO27001.

Everything is vague, chaotic, wonky, shitty, buggy.

People are actively working on making themselves obsolete, and they don’t seem to notice that they’re doing that, because they’re so engulfed with playing with their new AI toy.

I checked job offers, but it looks like every company is like this now. Maybe some are still a bit behind, but sooner or later, they’ll all be like that.

And the worst part is: None of this matters in the slightest, as long as there’s some idiot out there who buys our stuff. Welcome to capitalism.

People keep telling me that you can ā€œuse AI responsiblyā€ and ā€œjust to some degree, just as a toolā€, but they don’t seem to realize that this does not matter in capitalism. Companies don’t need ā€œgood productsā€. They just need to sell something. If you still believe that ā€œdoing a good jobā€ matters and that ā€œthey still need competent peopleā€, haha, my sweet summer child, nothing you do matters. You just happened to be needed in the past, but those days are gone.

The future is absolutely bleak – assuming there is a future.

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↳ In-reply-to » Chilly 15°C in the shade with a slight breeze, but it was very nice in direct sun. I jumped outside after calling it quits. There were five herons on that meadow, super sweet. One even caught something fairly large when I returned, but it was already too dark, so my camera just cooked up a blurry pixel soup.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org What is that ā€œtowerā€ in the top left of 05? šŸ¤” And wow, 20 and 21 are great!

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↳ In-reply-to » The original twt is unavailable. It may have been edited or deleted, or is from an unknown or muted feed.

@david@daiwei.me I use OpenBSD’s smtpd, which was super easy to set up. It gets a little bit more complicated these days because you also need a DKIM setup, so every outgoing mail goes from smtpd to dkimproxy and back to smtpd. And then dovecot for POP3/IMAP (has basically nothing to do with the other two).

I’m cheating a bit, though: I use config management on top, which means that all the UNIX users and mailboxes and directories are created by that. If you were to do that manually, it would be a huge pain.

Maybe I’ll write a blog post about this some day, just for fun. šŸ¤”

JMAP? Never heard of it.

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#FrakturFreitag: Jemand hat Geburtstag und hier ist der Draft für die Karte. (Oder – wie beim letzten Mal – die tatsƤchliche Karte, wenn ich zu faul bin, das nochmal ā€žsauberā€œ zu machen. šŸ˜)

Das Geschenk ist ein Zeitungsabo, daher dieses Ƥußerst kreative ā€žGedichtā€œ.

Diesmal auf die Uhr geschaut: Gedauert hat das ~30 Minuten. Und weil ich es wagte, so lange dasselbe Bild auf meinem Monitor anzuzeigen – meine Buchstabenreferenz –, hab’ ich jetzt erstmal für werweißwielange ’ne tolle Image Retention.

Ich brauche einen neuen Monitor.

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↳ In-reply-to » @lyse

Haha, indeed:

  1. Initial uptime: A bit over 1 minute.
  2. Changing to serial console, running uptime again: It’s down to 7 seconds.
  3. Changing back to the VGA console: It’s again down to 1 second.

This really doesn’t track the actual uptime, it just happens to ā€œmostly workā€. (Like a lot of things in DOS.)

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↳ In-reply-to » Made a little program to print the system’s uptime on DOS, OS/2, and Windows NT:

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

Crazy, who comes up with things like that?

I didn’t come up with it, but I was close, I guess. DOS is so small, you don’t have much of a choice but to search for ā€œanything related to timeā€. There aren’t that many syscalls/functions. You’ll quickly notice that there’s no global tick counter. So what else is there? Hmm, ā€œget the mtime of a fileā€ is pretty much the only other time-related thing. And which file is ā€œstableā€, probably allocated just once at boot? Mark Aitchison tried to use NUL, which is a pretty good idea. Thinking about it in retrospect, stdin does indeed make more sense, though, because that object really does get allocated just once at ā€œbootā€ and then it stays the same. That’s not guaranteed for NUL (although just as likely).

But, it is possible in DOS to move ā€œthe consoleā€ to a serial port:

I wonder what that does to my little uptime program. :-)

Today, I also learned that -R is an alias for -r in rm.

Ah, I remember that. Dug it up and saved it in the blog: -R is more portable/consistent: http://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-09-30/0/POSTING-en.html

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Made a little program to print the system’s uptime on DOS, OS/2, and Windows NT:

https://movq.de/git/retrouptime/

(Release pending.)

This was pretty easy to do on Windows, a bit harder on OS/2 (because documentation is scarce), and quite the mess on DOS. DOS doesn’t explicitly keep track of the system’s uptime, so you have to resort to tricks like ā€œgive me the mtime of stdinā€, which probably works … Yeah.

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↳ In-reply-to » Did I post this here already?

@prologic@twtxt.net Right, sorry!

It’s a video filmed by a person standing on a beach. The hero of this little movie is a guy on a stand-up paddle board: He’s out on the ocean and tries to reach his air mattress, which is floating on the ocean next to him. But it’s a cloudy and windy day, and he can’t quite reach it. So he keeps paddling and paddling, until he almost got it. Then, another gust of wind – the mattress is gone again. But he doesn’t give up! He keeps paddling, almost reaches it – and another gust of wind. This keeps going for quite a while. Eventually, he is so close to his air mattress that he jumps off his board and tries to truly grab the mattress. And he aaaaaaalllllmooooooooost got it! But then, of course, another big gust of wind and the mattress gets pushed far, far away. Probably gone for good. 🄲

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↳ In-reply-to » @lyse Thanks. šŸ˜… I didn’t check the time, but I guess something between 15 and 30 minutes? šŸ¤”

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Might be because the typical ā€œGerman Frakturā€ (this isn’t a thing) uses very unusual uppercase letters. And ā€œkā€ is just weird. And ā€œfā€ and ā€œÅæā€ (long ā€œsā€) are very close together.

This is ā€œLuther’sche Frakturā€ from around 1708 (a photo from the book ā€œFrakturā€ by Albert Kapr), the book says this was one of the most popular ones:

I have lots of trouble deciphering those uppercase letters.

By the way, this is worth mentioning: Fraktur fonts are often associated with Nazi Germany, but did you know that the Nazis eventually banned these fonts in 1941?



Yeah. Typical Nazi stuff.

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↳ In-reply-to » I’d estimate that ~90% of the traffic I get is some kind of non-human / non-browser thing.

Oh, and only 29 clients have requested the actual image:

29 movq.de/blog/postings/2026-09-25/0/bine-initial.png

Assuming that that’s an actual human being who’s interested in the content, then it’d be less than 1% of the hits that I get.

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I’d estimate that ~90% of the traffic I get is some kind of non-human / non-browser thing.

Here are some numbers on the recent blog post:

3804 movq.de/blog/postings/2026-09-25/0/POSTING-en.html
 404 movq.de/blog/postings/2026-09-25/0/t/bine-initial.png.jpg

The HTML page is obviously the blog post itself. The image is the thumbnail of the ā€œopenerā€ image: That’s the thing that you’re pretty much guaranteed to see when you open the post in a browser.

But out of the 3800 hits on the HTML page, only 400 (~10%) are also requesting that image.

So … it’s ~90% noise, right?

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You know that I’m ā€œPrinzessin Müllabfuhrā€, but the English translation isn’t that great.

So, I’m going by ā€œPrincess Dumpsterfireā€ now.

(I’m forced to use this shit at work.)

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↳ In-reply-to » Just some light Sunday afternoon entertainment: Printing from NetBSD on the dotmatrix printer by dumping data to /dev/ulpt0. The netbook doesn’t have a parallel port, so this must be done over USB. NetBSD.escp was created by a little custom ESC/P converter written in C. 🄳

@shinyoukai@twtxt.net Sounds promising. šŸ¤” I’ll check it out!

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↳ In-reply-to » Just some light Sunday afternoon entertainment: Printing from NetBSD on the dotmatrix printer by dumping data to /dev/ulpt0. The netbook doesn’t have a parallel port, so this must be done over USB. NetBSD.escp was created by a little custom ESC/P converter written in C. 🄳

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, the partition stuff with disklabels is what I’m absolutely not used to. I need to invest more time learning this. Not just using it, but how and where is it represented on disk and all that.

I carry my notebook/netbook around a lot. šŸ˜… Watching movies in bed, for example.

I think I’ll stick with NetBSD for a while. It works surprisingly well, it’s new stuff to explore, it’s fast, and then there’s this:

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@netbsd/112446618914747900

Gentoo (https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/AI_policy) might be another idea, but I’m afraid that the little netbook might be too slow for that? Or are there binary packages? No idea, it’s been ages since I touched this distro.

(Regarding Linux in general … we all know what Linus said. I’m not sure where this project is heading.)

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