@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I was surprised by that as well. 😅 I thought these were features that you can use, but no, you must do all this.

By the way, I now fixed the issue that I mentioned at the end and it works on the netbook now. 🥳

https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-12-21/0/netbook.jpg

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe But I thought Alpine was one of the good distro’s left. 😢 What’s it doing wrong?

Got a nice conspiracy theory for you:

https://mastodon.social/@mcc/115670290552252848

Actually wait I just thought about this and realized that the precise timing of the ACTUAL GitHub seed bank, by which I mean the Arctic Code Vault, on 2020-02-02, makes it more or less a perfect snapshot of pre-Copilot GitHub. Also precisely timed before we all got brain damage from COVID. This is the only remaining archive of source code by people with a fully working sense of smell

(Bonus points because the Arctic World Archive is located in Svaldbard and that’s the name of the AI in Stacey Kade’s “Cold Eternity”.)

Scientists Thought Parkinson’s Was in Our Genes. It Might Be in the Water
For decades, Parkinson’s disease research has overwhelmingly focused on genetics – more than half of all research dollars in the past two decades flowed toward genomic studies – but a growing body of evidence now points to something far more mundane as a primary culprit: contaminated drinking water.

A landmark study by epide … ⌘ Read more

Investigation reopened into man’s ‘accidental’ death eight years ago
Police say the death of Phillip Rudd, once thought to be an accident, could be more sinister following new information. ⌘ Read more

Odd elements in supernova blast might have implications for alien life
Some of the elements used by living systems are far more abundant in Cassiopeia A than we thought, hinting that some parts of our galaxy might be more suitable for life than others ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Ah, shit, you might be right. You can even buy these slot plates on Amazon. I didn’t even think to check Amazon, I went straight to eBay and tried to find it there, because I thought “it’s so old, nobody is going to use that anymore, I need to buy second-hand”. 🤦🤦🤦

It really shows that I built my last PC so long ago … I know next to nothing about current hardware. 😢

My current PC is from 2013, so I never even bothered to check, but as it turns out: My motherboard still has a serial port. 🤯 I thought these had long died out by then. To be honest, I didn’t have the need for one, either, not until recently … So I completely lost track if PCs have these things or not.

All I needed was one of those slot-cable-thingies. (And if the order of pins is correct, then it actually works. 🤦)

https://movq.de/v/89a67cf40f/slot.jpg

Cool! One less USB device. 😃

How one man’s method became the death penalty standard
On this day in history, the US carried out its first execution by lethal injection — a method thought up by one doctor. ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @bender@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net Four people! Exactly my thoughts, bender, but super cute. :-)

Forming moon may have taken three big impacts early in Earth’s history
Conventionally, the moon is thought to have formed during one big impact, but a three-impact model might make more sense ⌘ Read more

Search for British hiker who went missing in Romanian mountains
George Smyth’s mother says “the thought of life without him is unbearable”. ⌘ Read more

Man thought he was ‘attacking the devil’ during fatal Broome stabbing
Ian Ralph Brooke has been found unfit to stand trial for murder, with a special proceedings hearing underway. ⌘ Read more

New warning for Ozempic-style drugs over risk of suicidal thoughts
Australia’s medicines regulator issues a safety warning over the potential risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviours when taking Ozempic-style drugs. ⌘ Read more

‘I thought I would die in there’: Report exposes ‘inhumane’ NT watch houses
The Northern Territory’s prison watchdog has called on the government to urgently remove all inmates from police cells following an investigation which revealed prisoners sleeping between toilets and claims guards watched women showering. ⌘ Read more

Before experiencing postpartum depression, this mother had never heard of it
Nilupulie Karunaratne thought asking for help was a sign of weakness. Then her husband referred her to a psychologist. ⌘ Read more

Our verdict on sci-fi novel Every Version of You: We (mostly) loved it
New Scientist Book Club members share their thoughts on our November read, Grace Chan’s Every Version of You ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org ugh, well, there goes my thought.

Guys my cat is forming his first thought! ⌘ Read more

** Sticker party, November **
Some random thoughts including how the band Imagine Dragons is kinda like Metal for kids; distributing apps, even without involving Apple at all, is deeply annoying on macOS; Pokemon ZA is fun, but I think that I’m a turn-based girlie at heart; my partner has been playing a lot of Tears of the Kingdom lately, it has been a lot of fun for me to watch, and hair-pullingly frustrating for our nearly 10 year old who has strong opinions about the correct order of operations in that game; I wrote, but am cu … ⌘ Read more

How the Internet Rewired Work - and What That Tells Us About AI’s Likely Impact
“The internet did transform work — but not the way 1998 thought…” argues the Wall Street Journal. “The internet slipped inside almost every job and rewired how work got done.”

So while the number of single-task jobs like travel agent dropped, most jobs “are bundles of judgment, coordination and hands-on work,” and in … ⌘ Read more

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 … ?

American Kids Can’t Do Math Anymore
An anonymous reader shares a report: For the past several years, America has been using its young people as lab rats in a sweeping, if not exactly thought-out, education experiment. Schools across the country have been lowering standards and removing penalties for failure. The results are coming into focus.

Five years ago, about 30 incoming freshmen at UC San Diego arrived with math skills below high- … ⌘ Read more

I was looking at some ancient code and then thought: Hmm, maybe it would be a good idea to see more details in this error message. Which of the values don’t line up. On the other hand, that feature isn’t probably used anyway, because it’s a bit ugly to use (historically evolved). And on top of that, most teams need something slightly different, if they deal with that sort of thing.

I still told my workmates about it, so they could also have a look at it and we can decide tomorrow what to do about it. Speaking of the devil, no kidding, not even half an hour later, a puzzled tester contacted me. She received exactly that rather useless error message. Looks like I had an afflatus. ;-)

It’s interesting, though, that in all those years, nobody stumbled across this before. At least we now know for sure that this is not dead code. :-)

Why quasicrystals shouldn’t exist but are turning up in strange places
Matter with “forbidden” symmetries was once thought to be confined to lab experiments, but is now being found in some of the world’s most extreme environments ⌘ Read more

Light can influence the magnetic properties of some materials
An experiment 180 years ago first demonstrated a connection between light and electromagnetism – but the link is deeper than we thought ⌘ Read more

Four-fifths of the world’s population now live in urban areas
A comprehensive UN report has found that cities and towns are home to 81 per cent of the world’s population, much more than previously thought ⌘ Read more

The final ride of the year?
Today I did another bike tour, following several I’ve taken recently. I didn’t blog about those, although they were quite nice and I truly enjoyed them, now more appropriately dressed.1 ⌘ Read more

Neanderthals’ hefty noses weren’t well adapted to cold climates
Neanderthals were thought to have structures inside their noses that helped them deal with the cold, but analysis of an exceptionally preserved specimen contradicts that ⌘ Read more

The gold saga on @quark@ferengi.one’s thoughts continues with https://netbros.com/1750974122. That’s without any doubt the most beautiful 404 page I’ve ever come across in my entire life. What an overall master piece of art. Well done, mate! <3

https://netbros.com/some-rubbish-just-to-see-the-new-birds-on-the-404-page

25 years by my side. I never thought this moment would come. Thank you for teaching me so much 💔 ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org then it was, most likely, space debris—which, sadly, make up for 98% of all space anomalies these days. And thought they have applied to the Grant Wishes Council, they are yet to be approved. Keep playing, though. 😅

Djoker opens up on Sinner’s doping saga
Novak Djokovic reveals his thoughts on the handling of Jannik Sinner’s doping saga. ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Sounds about right.

I had a brainfart yesterday, though. For whatever reason I thought of subdomains, which are modeled with server entries in nginx. So, each could define its own access_log location. However, there are no subdomains in place! Searching around, I didn’t find any solution to give each user their own access log file.

One way would be a cronjob, aeh, systemd timer as I learned the other day, that greps the main access log and writes all user access log files with only the relevant stuff.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Haha, right. :-D

Ah, it’s this famous font. :-) I already thought so, but wasn’t sure if it’s actually the same.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Wow, that’s a hell lot of food! If it doesn’t spoil, it’s easily enough for the rest of your life and all your neighbors and surrounding cities, probably more. :-D

That’s a great font. I like it. It just suits the print style incredibly well. No offence, to the absolute contrary, I would not have thought that you actually designed that. It looks just so right. Hats off! :-)

Help Define the Future of Development – Take the Docker State of Application Development Survey 2025
Welcome to the fourth annual Docker State of Application Development survey! Please help us better understand and serve the application development  community with just 20 minutes of your time. We want to know where you’re focused, what you’re working on, and what is most important to you. Your thoughts and feedback will help us build… ⌘ Read more

What’s the Best Ways for Humans to Explore Space?
Should we leave space exploration to robots — or prioritize human spaceflight, making us a multiplanetary species?

Harvard professor Robin Wordsworth, who’s researched the evolution and habitability of terrestrial-type planets, shares his thoughts:

In space, as on Earth, industrial structures degrade with time, and a truly sustainable life support system must have the capa … ⌘ Read more

DOJ tells Republicans that Epstein files even worse for Trump than they thought: report
Carl Gibson,  Staff Writer  -  AlterNet

_Stephan: We do not have a functioning Congress in large measure because the Republican members are trying to protect “king” Trump from what the release of the complete Epstein files will reveal about him. That’s why Rep.-elect Adelita Grijalva (D-Ariz), has yet to be sworn into office. Over 800,000 citizens in A … ⌘ Read more

Samsung Galaxy XR vs. Apple Vision Pro
Samsung recently came out with the Galaxy XR, its first mixed reality headset. The Galaxy XR competes with the Apple Vision Pro, so we thought we’d pick one up to see how it compares to Apple’s headset.

_Subscribe to the MacRumors YouTube channel for more videos._

In person, it’s hard to mist … ⌘ Read more

16-bit Data Pointers on RV32
Comments ⌘ Read more

Oh, and I forgot (because I thought it was obvious, my bad), set a nick, and a url at the very minimum on your feed. See “Metadata Extension”.

WINE gaming in FreeBSD Jails with Bastille
FreeBSD offers a whole bunch of technologies and tools to make gaming on the platform a lot more capable than you’d think, and this article by Pertho dives into the details. Running all your games inside a FreeBSD Jail with Wine installed into it is pretty neat. Initially, I thought this was going to be a pretty difficult and require a lot of trial and error but I was surprised at how easy it was to get this all working. I was really happy to get … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de my apologies if I crossed some lines, I only meant it as a friendly engagement (which, all aside, was achieved!). Thank you for sharing your thoughts; please know that I appreciate them.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I’m going to bed, but I’ll have a closer read/think tomorrow 🤞

@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. 😂

This brings a thought I had for a long time, why can’t we upload arbitrary files to a twtxt? If not an image, make it simply a link. I could have used such feature to upload the text.

Thoughts/Opinions on Cap 🤔

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TIL on my bike
Today, with the weather at a nice 19 °C, I took the chance for another bike tour. I had tried out my new, warmer cycling clothes yesterday during a long break from work, but since the weather will be much colder soon, I really wanted to get this second ride in. ⌘ Read more

Bikeshedding Handle and other follow-up thoughts
Comments ⌘ Read more