@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. 🥳

@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.

@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. 😅

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

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. 😅

@prologic@twtxt.net Nothing, yet. It was sent in written form. There’s probably little point in fighting this, they have made up their minds already (and AI is being rolled up en masse in other departments), but on the other hand, there are – truthfully – very few areas where AI could actually be useful to me.

There are going to be many discussions about this …

This is completely against the “spirit” of this company, btw. We used to say: “It’s the goal that matters. Use whatever tools you think are appropriate.” That’s why I’m allowed to use Linux on my laptop. Maybe they will back down eventually when they realize that trying to push this on people is pointless. Maybe not.

s/Mittelaltermärkte/KI/g

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-x0KRfF_Is

It happened.

Management asked me if I’m using enough AI and what I’m doing to learn more about it.

@prologic@twtxt.net That too, yeah … 😢

Java’s Swing is allegedly in “maintenance mode”, so I doubt it’s a good idea to use it for new programs. For example, I very much doubt that it will ever support Wayland.

The replacement is supposed to be JavaFX, but that’s not included in JREs – anymore! It used to be, now it’s not, even though it’s well over 15 years old now.

This whole thing (“Java GUIs”) appears to have stagnated a lot. Probably because everything is web stuff these days …

https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/javafx/faq-javafx.html#6

@arne@uplegger.eu MeckPomm erscheint mir immer wie ein großartiges Bundesland, in dem ich gerne Leben würde. Kleines Häuschen auf dem Land mit Hühnerstall. Ginge aber – was auch diese Umfrage da impliziert – vermutlich nur, wenn ich meinen derzeitigen Job behalten und full-remote weitermachen würde, damit genug Geld fließt? 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Hmmmmmmmmmmmm … guess I should take a look at Qt. 🤔 That’s the one popular toolkit that I’ve never really tried for some reason. I really don’t like C++ (might as well use Rust), so I’ll also use Python.

(… won’t be fast, either, though …)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

The one for Delphi was quite good.

It was! I didn’t use Delphi for long, though. Dunno why, I always gravitated towards Visual Basic back then. 😅

These days I don’t deal with GUI programming anymore.

I also avoid it when possible, because … it’s exhausting, because … the tools that I have/know are “subpar”. Doing anything regarding GUIs always feels like a chore. That wasn’t the case in the VB days.

Well, I made this in ~2009 with Java/Swing and it was pretty nice to work with, custom widgets and all:

https://movq.de/v/de26d5edb3/s.png

I wouldn’t dare doing this with GTK.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Can’t tell if serious or not – because I’m actually considering this. 😅

And maybe I should go back to using GUI designers. Haven’t used those since the Visual Basic days. 🤔 It wasn’t pretty, but you got results very quickly and efficiently.

(When I switched to Linux, I quickly got stuck with GTK and that only had Glade, which wasn’t super great at the time, so I didn’t start using it … and then I never questioned that decision …)

https://movq.de/v/eaa24b109b/vb.png

Theming on Qt6 is a bit unusual (you have to install qt6ct and then set an environment variable for every Qt program?), but at least pcmanfm-qt doesn’t look like brain damage anymore now. 🤔 (Except there’s no darkmode. What is this, 1980?)

https://movq.de/v/2d0d5da3d2/s.png

@prologic@twtxt.net Hmm, I’ll have to take a look. Appears to be Go only, doesn’t it?

I’m not quite sold yet on the idea of “immediate mode” GUIs. 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net Such as? 🤔

There are no really good GUI toolkits for Linux, are there?

They’re either slow (like GTK4, Qt6), don’t support Wayland (like Tk), and/or unmaintained (like GTK2 and many others).

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Nothing special, just fooling around in corporate chats. 🤪

(https://www.uninformativ.de/git/zalgo/file/README.html)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org (… I am making a Zalgo Generator in Python right now, because I need it for something else … 🤣)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org They’re seriously telling us at work: “Can it be AI’d? Do it, don’t waste time!” Shit like that is the result. (What’s this weird gray triangle in the bottom right corner?)

@arne@uplegger.eu Reicht, wenn die Kinder lernen, wie Arbeit und Disziplin geht. https://movq.de/v/e92f4b59ec/capitalism.mp4

Just FTR, in case this wasn’t obvious, the “right to repair” (if there ever is one) needs to be more than just “you’re legally allowed to repair stuff”.

I just fixed this thing by replacing two capacitors. Great, but this was an absolute shitshow and it took several days. So many obstacles, everything’s tiny, connectors glued together, … It worked in the end, but I was so close to giving up.

Being legally allowed to do something is basically worthless if it’s not feasible to actually do it.

@prologic@twtxt.net Ah, I see. Yeah, you might be right. (Still a fragile process due to the general AI wonkiness, but it can help to some degree, yes.)

@prologic@twtxt.net Yes, although I have a feeling that speech recognition or other means of entering text could be better and much less computationally intensive. 🤔

GTK2 about to be removed from the official Arch repos: https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/arch-dev-public@lists.archlinux.org/thread/2BDHYLEFSYQBDTMUOZT5J6AFTA5M3FO6/

It’ll probably all be dropped to the AUR, so I can build this myself, because I still have some stuff that depends on it (and will never receive further updates).

This was a great read, btw. 😃 If you liked Event Horizon, this is for you. I’m gonna get her other two scifi books as well, that’s for sure.

@prologic@twtxt.net No pressure! This is meant to be fun. 😅

Fuck me sideways, trying to repair stuff that isn’t meant to be repaired is such a pain. So many pointless obstacles.

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, lots of people are welcoming this change, saying they are relieved that there are fewer puzzles. And ngl, I, too, have been very exhausted at the end of the month. It’s a lot of fun and I loved it each time, but yeah, it can be exhausting.

Der ganze Vorgang ist archetypisch für die seit Jahrzehnten völlig ohne Not stattfindende politische Selbstverzwergung Europas.

A comment on heise about the recent AWS outage.

https://www.heise.de/meinung/Kommentar-zum-Totalausfall-bei-AWS-Nichts-gelernt-in-den-letzten-30-Jahren-10794622.html?wt_mc=sm.red.ho.mastodon.mastodon.md_beitraege.md_beitraege&utm_source=mastodon

(Too bad there’s no good translation for the great word “Selbstverzwergung”.)

I’m paraphrasing: Europe (and other regions) depend on US IT services, a lot, without an actual need. We saw AWS, Google, and Microsoft build large datacenters and then we thought “welp, shit, nothing we can do about that, guess we’ll just be an AWS customer from now on.” Nobody really went ahead and built German/European alternatives. And now we completely depend on the US for lots of our stuff.

The article even claims that there’s now a shortage of sysadmins in the EU? I’m not so sure. But I’d welcome it, makes my job more secure. 🤣

Hosting services, datacenters, software, everything, it’s all US stuff. Why do we accept this, why not build alternatives …

@prologic@twtxt.net

Are we some of the only people in the world that realize how fucking dumb all this Internet-connect shit™ really is?

Yeah, but don’t ask me why that is. I’ve never gotten a satisfying answer when I talk to people who hype this kind of stuff. (I mean just normal tech people, not CEOs or something.) They just shrug it off and/or think that my concerns are paranoid. 🤔

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Hm, that might actually be (partially) true. Some external CD drives (without such a weight) start to spin/wiggle when the drive spins up and down … Although I guess that’s not really the case for Audio CDs as they are run at a fixed low RPM value, I think. 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net That sounds horrible. 😅 I wouldn’t want to own such a car. (My plan is not to buy a new car after my current one finally broke down entirely.)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org First time I heard about eCall. I don’t think I like this. 🫤 Feels like another attempt at going for complete surveillance. Yes, yes, it’s about “security”/“safety” … it always is.

Advent of Code will be different this year:

https://old.reddit.com/r/adventofcode/comments/1ocwh04/changes_to_advent_of_code_starting_this_december/

There will only be 12 puzzles, i.e. only December 1 to December 12. This might make it more interesting for some people, because it’s (probably) less work and a lower chance of people getting burned out. 🤔

Personally, I’ll probably stretch it out over 24 days. Giving myself more time to solve each puzzle and I really want this event to last the entire month. 😅

Maybe this makes it more interesting for some people around here as well?

Haha, beds “stopped working” due to that outage? 🤪

• https://agora.echelon.pl/notice/AzQlI7XeQFjsmlNK1w
  
• https://status.8slp.net/

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah. The actual services don’t run on AWS, apparently, but often it’s just the login service?! The whole Atlassian suite was “down” today because you couldn’t log in. But if you already were logged in, it wasn’t much a problem.