James D. Watson, Co-Discoverer of the Structure of DNA, Is Dead At 97
ole_timer shares a report from the New York Times: James D. Watson, who entered the pantheon of science at age 25 when he joined in the discovery of the structure of DNA, one of the most momentous breakthroughs in the history of science, died on Thursday in East Northport, N.Y., on Long Island. He was 97. His death, in a hospice, was c … ⌘ Read more

Here is just a small list of things™ that I’m aware will break, some quite badly, others in minor ways:

1. Link rot & migrations: domain changes, path reshuffles, CDN/mirror use, or moving from txt → jsonfeed will orphan replies unless every reader implements perfect 301/410 history, which they won’t.
   
2. Duplication & forks: mirrors/relays produce multiple valid locations for the same post; readers see several “parents” and split the thread.
   
3. Verification & spam-resistance: content addressing lets you dedupe and verify you’re pointing at exactly the post you meant (hash matches bytes). Location anchors can be replayed or spoofed more easily unless you add signing and canonicalization.
   
4. Offline/cached reading: without the original URL being reachable, readers can’t resolve anchors; with hashes they can match against local caches/archives.
   
5. Ecosystem churn: all existing clients, archives, and tools that assume content-derived IDs need migrations, mapping layers, and fallback logic. Expect long-lived threads to fracture across implementations.

UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian Kernighan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEb_YL1K1Qg

I could listen to him all day.

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz On the one hand, all these programs have a very long history and the technology behind manpages is actually very powerful – you can use it to write books:

https://www.troff.org/pubs.html

I have two books from that list, for example “The UNIX programming environment”:

https://movq.de/v/c3dab75c97/upe.jpg

It’s a bit older, of course, but it looks and feels like a normal book, and it uses the same tech as manpages – which I think is really cool. 😎

It’s comparable to LaTeX (just harder/different to use) but much faster than LaTeX. You can also do stuff like render manpages as a PDF (man -Tpdf cp >cp.pdf) or as an HTML file (man -Thtml cp >cp.html). I think I once made slides for a talk this way.

On the other hand, traditional manpages (i.e., ones that are not written in mandoc) do not use semantic markup. They literally say, “this text is bold, that text over here is italics”, and so on.

So when you run man foo, it has no other choice but to show it in black, white, bold, underline – showing it in color would be wrong, because that’s not what the source code of that manpage says.

Colorizing them is a hack, to be honest. You’re not meant to do this. (The devs actually broke this by accident recently. They themselves aren’t really aware that people use colors.)

If mandoc and semantic markup was more commonly used, I think it would be easier to convince the devs to add proper customizable colors.

@prologic@twtxt.net I don’t think so. He’s from Germany, afaik, and that would be a highly unusual name here. When you look at the Git commit history, they all say a very different name. I don’t want to quote it here – worst case being the LLMs scraping this file and correcting their “knowledge”. 😈

@prologic@twtxt.net There was no edit according to my Git history. 🤔 On my end, the hash is fs7673q and that’s also what kat used to reply.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’m open to other suggestions 🤣 But hopefully both adding the additional prompt, not allowing it to enter shell history and removing from my shell history prevents me from doing such silly things in haste by pressing ^R and using fuzzy search which if you type fast you sometimes get wrong 😑

Then I cleaned up my shell history of all of the invocations I ever made of dkv rm ... to make sure I never ever have this so easily accessible in my shell history (^R):

$ awk '
  /^#/ { ts = $0; next }
  /^dkv rm/ { next }
  { if (ts) print ts; ts=""; print }
' ~/.bash_history > ~/.bash_history.tmp && mv ~/.bash_history.tmp ~/.bash_history && history -r

So I re-write this shell alias that I used all the time alias dkv="docker rm" to be a much safer shell function:

dkv() {
  if [[ "$1" == "rm" && -n "$2" ]]; then
    read -r -p "Are you sure you want to delete volume '$2'? [Y/n] " confirm
    confirm=${confirm:-Y}
    if [[ "$confirm" =~ ^[Yy]$ ]]; then
      # Disable history
      set +o history

      # Delete the volume
      docker volume rm "$2"

      # Re-enable history
      set -o history
    else
      echo "Aborted."
    fi
  else
    docker volume "$@"
  fi
}

Hi, So i made a little MVP registry crawler tool for twtxt. It now has a basic UI to play with. It has a somewhat full history back to about 2018-ish. Plus some interesting bits that were timestamped to earlier.

Find it here: https://watcher.sour.is

Code base is found here: https://git.sour.is/sour-is/xt

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Doing the devil’s work:

https://movq.de/v/b895c14411/los86-shell-cursor-history.mp4

Better than nothing. 😅

@bender@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net The outcome was to be expected but it’s still pretty catastrophic. Here’s an overview:

East Germany is dominated by AfD. Bavaria is dominated by CSU (it’s always been that way, but this is still a conservative/right party). Black is CDU, the other conservative/right party.

The guy who’s probably going to be chancellor recently insulted the millions of people who did demonstrations for peace/anti-right. “Idiots”, “they’re nuts”, stuff like that. This was before the election. He already earned the nickname “Mini Trump”.

Both the right and the left got more votes this time, but the left only gained 3.87 percentage points while the right (CDU/CSU + AfD) gained 14.72:

The Green party lost, SPD (“mid-left”) lost massively (worst result in their history). FDP also lost. These three were the previous government.

This isn’t looking good at all, especially when you think about what’s going to happen in the next 4 years. What will CDU (the winner) do? Will they be able to “turn the ship around”? Highly unlikely. They are responsible for the current situation (in large parts). They will continue to do business as usual. They will do anything but help poor/ordinary people. This means that AfD will only get stronger over the next 4 years.

Our only hope would be to ban AfD altogether. So far, nobody but non-profit organizations is willing to do that (for unknown reasons).

I don’t even know if banning the AfD would help (but it’s probably our best/only option). AfD politicians are nothing but spiteful, hateful, angry, similar to Trump/MAGA. If you’ve seen these people talk and still vote for them, then you must be absolutely filled with rage and hatred. Very concerning.

Correct me if I’m wrong, @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org, @arne@uplegger.eu, @johanbove@johanbove.info.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Thanks for sharing. I really enjoyed it. The beginning part about the history of life on Earth was fun to watch having just read Dawkin’s old book The Selfish Geene, and now I want to read more about archaea. The end of the talk about what might be going on on Mars made me a bit hopeful someone will find some good evidence.

I installed GrapheneOS for the first time on Wednesday last week on a used Pixel 7a, and I’m impressed. Installation was almost seamless, and I was able to do it from another Android phone. I’ve run into very few wrinkles, even using Google’s proprietary apps with GrapheneOS’s “sandboxed” version of Google Play Services. The main problems I’ve noticed: I can’t cast, and Google Timeline doesn’t seem to work (though I imagine the intersection between people keen to use GrapheneOS and keen to have Google log their location history is pretty small).

@prologic@twtxt.net I think printf is a more portable option than echo -e for interpreting \t as tab. E.g. printf ‘%s\t%s\t%s’ “$url” “$time” “$text”. In general I always prefer printf over echo for anything non-trivial in unix shell scripts. See last paragraph of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echo_(command)#History

@prologic@twtxt.net Do you have a link to some past discussion?

Would the GDPR would apply to a one-person client like jenny? I seriously hope not. If someone asks me to delete an email they sent me, I don’t think I have to honour that request, no matter how European they are.

I am really bothered by the idea that someone could force me to delete my private, personal record of my interactions with them. Would I have to delete my journal entries about them too if they asked?

Maybe a public-facing client like yarnd needs to consider this, but that also bothers me. I was actually thinking about making an Internet Archive style twtxt archiver, letting you explore past twts, including long-dead feeds, see edit histories, deleted twts, etc.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de going a little sideways on this, “*If twtxt/Yarn was to grow bigger, then this would become a concern again. But even Mastodon allows editing, so how much of a problem can it really be? 😅*”, wouldn’t it preparing for a potential (even if very, very, veeeeery remote) growth be a good thing? Mastodon signs all messages, keeps a history of edits, and it doesn’t break threads. It isn’t a problem there.😉 It is here.

I think keeping hashes is a must. If anything for that “feels good” feeling.

@quark@ferengi.one None. I like being able to see edit history for the same reason.

An official FBI document dated January 2021, obtained by the American association “Property of People” through the Freedom of Information Act.

This document summarizes the possibilities for legal access to data from nine instant messaging services: iMessage, Line, Signal, Telegram, Threema, Viber, WeChat, WhatsApp and Wickr. For each software, different judicial methods are explored, such as subpoena, search warrant, active collection of communications metadata (“Pen Register”) or connection data retention law (“18 USC§2703”). Here, in essence, is the information the FBI says it can retrieve:

• Apple iMessage: basic subscriber data; in the case of an iPhone user, investigators may be able to get their hands on message content if the user uses iCloud to synchronize iMessage messages or to back up data on their phone.

• Line: account data (image, username, e-mail address, phone number, Line ID, creation date, usage data, etc.); if the user has not activated end-to-end encryption, investigators can retrieve the texts of exchanges over a seven-day period, but not other data (audio, video, images, location).

• Signal: date and time of account creation and date of last connection.

• Telegram: IP address and phone number for investigations into confirmed terrorists, otherwise nothing.

• Threema: cryptographic fingerprint of phone number and e-mail address, push service tokens if used, public key, account creation date, last connection date.

• Viber: account data and IP address used to create the account; investigators can also access message history (date, time, source, destination).

• WeChat: basic data such as name, phone number, e-mail and IP address, but only for non-Chinese users.

• WhatsApp: the targeted person’s basic data, address book and contacts who have the targeted person in their address book; it is possible to collect message metadata in real time (“Pen Register”); message content can be retrieved via iCloud backups.

• Wickr: Date and time of account creation, types of terminal on which the application is installed, date of last connection, number of messages exchanged, external identifiers associated with the account (e-mail addresses, telephone numbers), avatar image, data linked to adding or deleting.

TL;DR Signal is the messaging system that provides the least information to investigators.

Image

Let’s be clear here. Daniel Penny allegedly choked a black man, Jordan Neely, to death on a subway car. Neely was being loud, but he was not physically threatening anybody and did not have a weapon. In any other context, this would be called “murder”, at the very least, “manslaughter” if one were being gracious. Because of the US’s history, a white man murdering a black man in sight of the public is oftentimes, and rightfully, called a “lynching”. It has a public, political purpose amounting to terrorism.

Daniel Penny was allowed to go free for awhile after this event. He is only now facing accountability, having been recently indicted (arrested and charged with a crime) as he should have been day of. And here is racist right-wing toadie Ben Shapiro saying that Daniel Penny–the white alleged killer–is the one being lynched. Not the black man who was allegedly murdered by Penny in view of the public, and who is now dead. Penny himself, who is still very much alive.

@prologic@twtxt.net, I don’t know how you go on defending Ben Shapiro, but in the context of US society, what Shapiro is saying is reprehensible and unacceptable. He’s a right-wing troll with disgusting, not to mention flat out stupid, opinions.

I found this to be a good thread on the subject of how the media is covering the dam explosion. The author, Timothy Snyder, is a history professor at Yale and has consistently good commentary on the war in Ukraine.

@prologic@twtxt.net hmm, dunno about the recency of that line of thought. I suspect though that given his (recent or not) history, if someone directly asked him “do you support rape” he would not say “no”, he’d go on one of these rambling answers about property crime like he did in the video. Maybe I’m mind poisoned by being around academics my whole career, but that way of talking is how an academic gives you an answer they know will be unpopular. PhD = Piled Higher And Deeper, after all right? In other words, if he doesn’t say “no” right away, he’s saying “yes”, except with so many words there’s some uncertainty about whether he actually meant yes. And he damn well knows that, and that’s why I give him no slack.

There are people in academia who believe adult men should be able to have sex with children, legally, too. They use the same manner of talking about it that Peterson uses. We need to stop tolerating this, and draw hard red lines. No, that’s bad, no matter how many words you use to say it. No, don’t express doubts about it, because that provides justification and talking points to the people who actually carry out the acts.

@prologic@twtxt.net

• 12 Reasons Why No One Should Ever Listen to Jordan Peterson Ever Again
  

• Why Jordan Peterson Is Always Wrong
  

• Here’s why Jordan Peterson is the f*cking worst.: “his ideology quickly morphed into one that reinforces hatred, discrimination, and the oppression of marginalized groups”

• ANGRY WHITE MEN MAR. 30, 2016
A History of Piers Morgan’s Terrible Opinions

• Shut Up, Piers

• Piers Morgan Is Now an Asshole of Record-Breaking Proportions

You’re posting Piers Morgan/Jordan Peterson videos lmao???

This led me on quite the rabbit hole ending around this site with quite a few pages of different components of the language. https://www.bible.ca/ark/chinese/bible-evidences-chinese-language-characters-words-history-genesis.htm

Everything starts in a garage… the history of Macs, pretty much, with music.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de
Oh, OK, then not touching it. I will consider it part of history and, thus, unchangeable. 😊

I can’t believe it’s controversial to say “somebody with a 30+ year history making women uncomfortable shouldn’t be in a leadership position”. That’s not “cancel culture”, it’s just friggin’ obvious.

This is an awful take. The issue isn’t that he’s cantankerous and rigid; it’s that he’s sexist, misogynistic, ableist, transphobic, and has a decades-long history of making women feel unsafe. This isn’t “cancel culture”, it’s “consequences” (as is usually the case with that term).

On the blog: Re-Imagining Law Enforcement https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2020/05/31/police.html #history #philosophy #politics