@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”.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de this I find more worrisome, and saw no mention of it on your text: Right-Wing Chatbots Turbocharge America’s Political and Cultural Wars (gift article).

Enoch, one of the newer chatbots powered by artificial intelligence, promises “to ‘mind wipe’ the pro-pharma bias” from its answers. Another, Arya, produces content based on instructions that tell it to be an “unapologetic right-wing nationalist Christian A.I. model.”

@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.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Hahaha, now I’m curious what use case you have in mind. :-D

@prologic@twtxt.net Ouch, I don’t want to get hit by these projectiles! :-O Is that black tube on the bottom the remains of a chair leg?

I reckon one could collect these hail stones and put them in the drinks to work around the lost air conditioning. At least if one doesn’t mind icy drinks. (I can’t stand that, because I immediately get hickup when drinking something cold.)

Thanks, @alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it! Yeah, this classic rivet is a good, yet laborous alternative. I don’t mind the work, I just don’t have any copper at hand. I might give this some more thought, though.

@alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it Maybe I misunderstood, but you have to keep the timezone offsets in mind. Simple alphabetical sorting of the timestamp strings does not yield a truly chronological order. It might be close enough for you, though.

@zvava@twtxt.net I gave this, in my mind, a like/star/love.

It was raining cats and dogs for a few minutes, I almost couldn’t see the houses down in the valley anymore. Pretty sick. :-)

@bender@twtxt.net Haha, yeah, we’re also better off rolling dice sometimes. I usually don’t mind liquid sunshine either. But I have to be prepared for it. As a matter of prudence, I brought my rain jacket along. In the end, I was wet from the inside as well, though. The breathability of this plastic bag isn’t as good as they always claim it to be. Especially in summer.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I couldn’t agree more! :-)

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org ooooh! I wish I had that mallet here at work today. So many uses come to mind! 😂

I think I understand now. Americans do not go camping, we do recreational activities. I don’t think campers are a thing here, but RVs (Recreational Vehicles) are. That’s why it would never cross my mind to get anything with fabric, that folds. No mate, we get a house on wheels, with a million miles engine. 🤣

Other than that, it looks nice!

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz 🎵 Grafana ana bo bana fifo bo bana gra fana!🎶 Don’t mind me, I am nuts.

@prologic@twtxt.net I am finding writing my Notes very therapeutic. Just create a markdown file and commit, push, and it’s live. Whatever comes to mind, whatever I want to keep as relevant. Silly things, more like a dump.

If I feel like it, I do. If not, I don’t. Not social, not intended for anyone to see them. I am enjoying it!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de this is mind boggling. How come it looks just fine under Mosaic, and not under IE3? Man, am I glad I don’t use a Microsoft browser!

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Cool! 😎 Mind joining the same IRC space? 🙏

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org yep! that one is my favorite… @movq@www.uninformativ.de I hope you don’t mind me snatching that one, I’d love to use it as Wallpaper.

@xuu@txt.sour.is Good point! What did you have in mind? 🙏

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz Off-topic areas are always a good idea. :-) Web forums often had those. And web forums are actually what I had in mind, @bender@twtxt.net. 😅 (While I do have a certain nostalgia for it now, Usenet has always been a bit weird to me. Can’t really explain why.)

That’s exactly what came to mind. Even millionaires would simply pay with a credit card for the convenience, and yes, because what kind of a sociopath will carry $3,000 around?! Just one more stumping item to that despicable person list.

@doesnm.p.psf.lt@doesnm.p.psf.lt Because I’m a lazy project manage and I haven’t grooomed the backlog in a while 🤣 Since you’re there, do you mind cleaning it up for me? 🙏

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Ahh cool! I’ll try following it again 🤣 Mind @-mentioning/linking@twtxt.net the feed again? 🙏

On my blog: Real Life in Star Trek, Frame of Mind https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2025/04/10/frame-mind.html #scifi #startrek #closereading

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz I am sure @prologic@twtxt.net would not mind sending an invite. Ping him!

Got anywhere in mind? 🧐

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org The bird in the wallpaper? That’s a photo from a trip to a local zoo. 😃 This little guy was sitting in one of the bushes and didn’t mind people getting rather close. Full version and more from that day.

There’s a reason I avoid speaking my mind on the internet like the plague. The same reason I’d set up a {B,Ph,Gem}log months ago but never got myself to publish any of the drafts in any of them.

@xuu@txt.sour.is ROFLMAO! 🤣 reading that, the Tech bro sounded in my mind like Cow from Cow and Chicken

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh! no need to be sorry and feel free to keep at it if it helps, I don’t mind. It’s just that I’m always on the lookout for corpo-bots and crawlers slipping through the cracks (a fun little game of sorts) 😅 the only thing I let them see is a robots.txt telling them to :diffoff

Also, I’m curious about the invalid lines in my feed. is it something I should lookout for in future?

@eapl.me@eapl.me here are my replies (somewhat similar to Lyse’s and James’)

1. Metadata in twts: Key=value is too complicated for non-hackers and hard to write by hand. So if there is a need then we should just use #NSFS or the alt-text file in markdown image syntax ![NSFW](url.to/image.jpg) if something is NSFW

2. IDs besides datetime. When you edit a twt then you should preserve the datetime if location-based addressing should have any advantages over content-based addressing. If you change the timestamp the its a new post. Just like any other blog cms.

3. Caching, Yes all good ideas, but that is more a task for the clients not the serving of the twtxt.txt files.

4. Discovery: User-agent for discovery can become better. I’m working on a wrapper script in PHP, so you don’t need to go to Apaches log-files to see who fetches your feed. But for other Gemini and gopher you need to relay on something else. That could be using my webmentions for twtxt suggestion, or simply defining an email metadata field for letting a person know you follow their feed. Interesting read about why WebMetions might be a bad idea. Twtxt being much simple that a full featured IndieWeb sites, then a lot of the concerns does not apply here. But that’s the issue with any open inbox. This is hard to solve without some form of (centralized or community) spam moderation.

5. Support more protocols besides http/s. Yes why not, if we can make clients that merge or diffident between the same feed server by multiples URLs

6. Languages: If the need is big then make a separate feed. I don’t mind seeing stuff in other langues as it is low. You got translating tool if you need to know whats going on. And again when there is a need for easier switching between posting to several feeds, then it’s about building clients with a UI that makes it easy. No something that should takes up space in the format/protocol.

7. Emojis: I’m not sure what this is about. Do you want to use emojis as avatar in CLI clients or it just about rendering emojis?

@bender@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net I’m not exactly asking yarnd to change. If you are okay with the way it displayed my twts, then by all means, leave it as is. I hope you won’t mind if I continue to write things like 1/4 to mean “first out of four”.

What has text/markdown got to do with this? I don’t think Markdown says anything about replacing 1/4 with ¼, or other similar transformations. It’s not needed, because ¼ is already a unicode character that can simply be directly inserted into the text file.

What’s wrong with my original suggestion of doing the transformation before the text hits the twtxt.txt file? @prologic@twtxt.net, I think it would achieve what you are trying to achieve with this content-type thing: if someone writes 1/4 on a yarnd instance or any other client that wants to do this, it would get transformed, and other clients simply wouldn’t do the transformation. Every client that supports displaying unicode characters, including Jenny, would then display ¼ as ¼.

Alternatively, if you prefer yarnd to pretty-print all twts nicely, even ones from simpler clients, that’s fine too and you don’t need to change anything. My 1/4 -> ¼ thing is nothing more than a minor irritation which probably isn’t worth overthinking.

@prologic@twtxt.net Thanks for writing that up!

I hope it can remain a living document (or sequence of draft revisions) for a good long time while we figure out how this stuff works in practice.

I am not sure how I feel about all this being done at once, vs. letting conventions arise.

For example, even today I could reply to twt abc1234 with “(#abc1234) Edit: …” and I think all you humans would understand it as an edit to (#abc1234). Maybe eventually it would become a common enough convention that clients would start to support it explicitly.

Similarly we could just start using 11-digit hashes. We should iron out whether it’s sha256 or whatever but there’s no need get all the other stuff right at the same time.

I have similar thoughts about how some users could try out location-based replies in a backward-compatible way (append the replyto: stuff after the legacy (#hash) style).

However I recognize that I’m not the one implementing this stuff, and it’s less work to just have everything determined up front.

Misc comments (I haven’t read the whole thing):

• Did you mean to make hashes hexadecimal? You lose 11 bits that way compared to base32. I’d suggest gaining 11 bits with base64 instead.

• “Clients MUST preserve the original hash” — do you mean they MUST preserve the original twt?

• Thanks for phrasing the bit about deletions so neutrally.

• I don’t like the MUST in “Clients MUST follow the chain of reply-to references…”. If someone writes a client as a 40-line shell script that requires the user to piece together the threading themselves, IMO we shouldn’t declare the client non-conforming just because they didn’t get to all the bells and whistles.

• Similarly I don’t like the MUST for user agents. For one thing, you might want to fetch a feed without revealing your identty. Also, it raises the bar for a minimal implementation (I’m again thinking again of the 40-line shell script).

• For “who follows” lists: why must the long, random tokens be only valid for a limited time? Do you have a scenario in mind where they could leak?

• Why can’t feeds be served over HTTP/1.0? Again, thinking about simple software. I recently tried implementing HTTP/1.1 and it wasn’t too bad, but 1.0 would have been slightly simpler.

• Why get into the nitty-gritty about caching headers? This seems like generic advice for HTTP servers and clients.

• I’m a little sad about other protocols being not recommended.

• I don’t know how I feel about including markdown. I don’t mind too much that yarn users emit twts full of markdown, but I’m more of a plain text kind of person. Also it adds to the length. I wonder if putting a separate document would make more sense; that would also help with the length.

@falsifian@www.falsifian.org “I don’t really mind if the twt gets edited before I even fetch it.”, right, that’s never the problem. Editing a twtxt before anyone fetches it isn’t even editing, right? :-P The problem we are trying to fix is the havoc is causes editing twtxts that have already been replied to, often ad nauseam. That’s the real problem.

@quark@ferengi.one I don’t really mind if the twt gets edited before I even fetch it. I think it’s the idea of my computer discarding old versions it’s fetched, especially if it’s shown them to me, that bugs me.

But I do like @movq@www.uninformativ.de’s suggestion on this thread that feeds could contain both the original and the edited twt. I guess it would be up to the author.

I came across this Gallery Theme for Hugo, and @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org immediately came to mind. I think it would be a very fitting theme to use for all your photos, Lyse!

@mckinley@twtxt.net

HTTPS is supposed to do [verification] anyway.

TLS provides verification that nobody is tampering with or snooping on your connection to a server. It doesn’t, for example, verify that a file downloaded from server A is from the same entity as the one from server B.

I was confused by this response for a while, but now I think I understand what you’re getting at. You are pointing out that with signed feeds, I can verify the authenticity of a feed without accessing the original server, whereas with HTTPS I can’t verify a feed unless I download it myself from the origin server. Is that right?

I.e. if the HTTPS origin server is online and I don’t mind taking the time and bandwidth to contact it, then perhaps signed feeds offer no advantage, but if the origin server might not be online, or I want to download a big archive of lots of feeds at once without contacting each server individually, then I need signed feeds.

feed locations [being] URLs gives some flexibility

It does give flexibility, but perhaps we should have made them URIs instead for even more flexibility. Then, you could use a tag URI, urn:uuid:*, or a regular old URL if you wanted to. The spec seems to indicate that the url tag should be a working URL that clients can use to find a copy of the feed, optionally at multiple locations. I’m not very familiar with IP{F,N}S but if it ensures you own an identifier forever and that identifier points to a current copy of your feed, it could be a great way to fix it on an individual basis without breaking any specs :)

I’m also not very familiar with IPFS or IPNS.

I haven’t been following the other twts about signatures carefully. I just hope whatever you smart people come up with will be backwards-compatible so it still works if I’m too lazy to change how I publish my feed :-)

@prologic@twtxt.net I believe you when you say registries as designed today do not crawl. But when I first read the spec, it conjured in my mind a search engine. Now I don’t know how things work out in practice, but just based on reading, I don’t see why it can’t be an API for a crawling search engine. (In fact I don’t see anything in the spec indicating registry servers shouldn’t crawl.)

(I also noticed that https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/registry.html recommends “The registries should sync each others user list by using the users endpoint”. If I understood that right, registering with one should be enough to appear on others, even if they don’t crawl.)

Does yarnd provide an API for finding twts? Is it similar?

@prologic@twtxt.net What’s the difference between search.twtxt.net and the /api/plain/tweets endpoint of a registry? In my mind, a registry is a twtxt search engine. Or are registries not supposed to do their own crawling to discover new feeds?

Never mind, I simply searched and deleted them all (D then ~f sender). :-) Phew!

I feel like complexity is measured differently at different levels of a project..

• at the function level you use cyclomatic complexity or how many branches internally and how much you need to keep in mind as it calls out to other functions.
  
• at a file/module level is a balance of the module doing too much against being so granular that you have cross dependency across modules. I have trouble with keeping things dry at this level because it can lead to parts being so abstract or generalized that it adds complexity.
  
• at a project level i suppose its a matter of how coupled things are across sub-modules.

On my blog: Real Life in Star Trek, The Mind’s Eye https://john.colagioia.net/blog/2024/04/18/mind-s-eye.html #scifi #startrek #closereading

@prologic@twtxt.net what is the maxlen one should keep in mind here? Like say if I was charing the collected works of Shakespeare? Or maybe just a gpg keychain?

More data contradicting the existence of “echo chambers”. As I’ve argued many times before, the concept of an echo chamber or information bubble is not real. The podcast below is an interview of an author of a study where they actually intervened and changed the information diet of 20,000 people (with consent!), then surveyed them after three months. They observed essentially no changes to the study subjects’ beliefs and attitudes. They also observed that the typical person, while they tend to gravitate towards people with similar political leanings, only get about 50% of their content from such like-minded people. They get the rest from neutral sources and maybe 20% from non-like-minded people.

Varied information diet + No change in attitudes when information diet is forced to be different = no echo chamber.

Listen to the podcast episode here

@adi@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net It’s worth bearing in mind that

• Fairphone has taken a considerable amount of VC funding so, sooner or later, that bill will become due: (see: https://techcrunch.com/2023/01/31/fairphone-growth-capital-raise and https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/fairphone)
  
• Fairphone comes with Google Play apps by default, so it’s also a spyware vector (see: https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/110978014080809471)
  

I used to have a lot of hope for them but these two ingredients mean that enshittification is virtually inevitable.

@prologic@twtxt.net Horseshit hype:

• AI that we have today cannot think–there is no cognitive capacity
  
• AI that we have today cannot be interviewed–“inter” “viewing” is two minds interacting, but AI of today has no mind, which means this is a puppet show
  
• AI today is not free–it’s a tool, a machine, hardly different from a hammer. It does what a human directs it to do and has no drives, desires, or autonomy. What you’re seeing here is a fancy Mechnical Turk
  

This shit is probably paid for by AI companies who desperately want us to think of the AI as far more capable than it actually is, because that juices sales and gives them a way to argue they aren’t responsible for any harms it causes.

@prologic@twtxt.net I see what you mean about tldraw. I looked at their github repository and it seems like they are distributing it as an npm package for people who want to include a whiteboard in their Javascript-based frontend. I didn’t see a way to just launch the thing.

I have half a mind to write a little scala frontend that sets up one of these, since scalajs makes it very easy to use these Javascript web component things while making it look like you’re writing scala.

There’s all this talk and speculation about Twitter, Threads, Mastodon, Minds and so on. Meanwhile twtxt sits there, forever free and open.

I never paid a lot of attention to Ben Shapiro before, but what he says is so transparently asinine it boggles the senses. You really have to have a Fox-addled mind to believe that the search for the submersible was completely faked and that the powers-that-be knew the entire time that it had imploded. To believe that a vast conspiracy among hundreds, thousands (?) of people from several countries and spanning several days was orchestrated to lie to the public in order to…..uh, achieve what exactly? “Undermine institutional credibility”? What does that even mean?

This is “the moon landing was faked” levels of conspiracy theory.

Image

@prologic@twtxt.net

Let’s assume for a moment that an answer to a question would be met with so many words you don’t know what the answer was at all. Why? Why do this? Is this a stereotype of academics and philosophers? If so, it’s not a very straight-forward way of thinking, let alone answering a simple question.

Well, I can’t know what’s in these peoples’ minds and hearts. Personally I think it’s a way of dissembling, of sowing doubt, and of maintaining plausible deniability. The strategy is to persuade as many people as possible to change their minds, and then force the remaining people to accept the idea because they think too many other people believe it.

Let’s say you want, for whatever reason, to get a lot of people to accept an idea that you know most people find horrible. The last thing you should do is express the idea clearly and concisely and repeat it over and over again. All you’d accomplish is to cement people’s resistance to you, and label yourself as a person who harbors horrible ideas that they don’t like. So you can’t do that.

What do you do instead? The entire field of “rhetoric”, dating back at least to Plato and Aristotle (400 years BC), is all about this. How to persuade people to accept your idea, even when they resist it. There are way too many techniques to summarize in a twt, but it seems almost obvious that you have to use more words and to use misleading or at least embellished or warped descriptions of things, because that’s the opposite of clearly and concisely expressing yourself, which would directly lead to people rejecting your idea.

That’s how I think of it anyway.

@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.

@carsten@yarn.zn80.net

I have to write so many emails to so many idiots who have no idea what they are doing

So it sounds to me like the pressure is to reduce how much time you waste on idiots, which to my mind is a very good reason to use a text generator! I guess in that case you don’t mind too much whether the company making the AI owns your prompt text?

I’d really like to see tools like this that you can run on your desktop or phone, so they don’t send your hard work off to someone else and give a company a chance to take it from you.