@prologic@twtxt.net well, uploading and rendering, yes. Not a priority, of course. Just an item for a list somewhere.

@bender@twtxt.net That we can do easily. Just supporting tendering .webp inline eight? 🧐

@xuu@txt.sour.is as long as I see you on IRC, bouncer or not, I don’t worry. Weird, isn’t it? Glad you are OK, Winter’s coming!

@bender@twtxt.net i am split between registrars .. isnic is only managed by the country registrar. the others i have at regular reseller

@bender@twtxt.net No plus-aliases, just aliases. The mailserver runs on my OpenBSB box and is managed using BundleWrap (we use that at work), so to create a new alias, I push a new BundleWrap config to the server.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de what do you use? Is it plus-aliased emails? I am curious to know how others are accomplishing this. I am currently using the “Hide my Email” feature, from iCloud.

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”.

@tilde.club@tilde.club unwritten etiquette (by me, and for me, but one can hope, right?).

• Proper grammar (in any language).
  
• Correct capitalisation, and punctuation.
  
• Subject extension support.
  

Anything else doesn’t matter. ☺️

@prologic@twtxt.net all I can say or, rather, express is…

Thank you for the encouragement and love and kind words, @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @movq@www.uninformativ.de @bender@twtxt.net @doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt and others along the way I’m not sure of their feed uris 💕 I’ll keep at it, but for the time being I will keep my distance, mostly off IRC, because I don’t have the energy to spare in that kind of engagement (what//if the worst happens, it’s so draining). I need to remember what I ever did any of this for, it was back in ~2020 and I wanted really to build small interconnected communities that any non “tech savvy” person (more or less) could also benefit from ane enjoy. Even if there are aspects of the specs we’ve built/extended over time that aren’t “perfect”™, they’re “good enough”™ that they’ve last 5+ years (I believe this is 6 years running now). I want to spend a bit of time going back to why I did any of this in the the first place, and get a little micro-SaaS offering going (barely covering running costs) so encourage more folks to run pods, and thus twtxt feeds and grow the community ever so slightly. Other than that, I plan to get the specs “in order” to a point (with @movq@www.uninformativ.de and @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org’s help) where I hope they’ll stand the test of time – like SMTP.

Thank you all ! 🙏

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org an advent of code, I love it! Go, Lyse, go!

@lafe@tilde.club Hahaha! :-D That surely helps. What kind of plant are we talking about here?

Thank you for https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2025-11-09/0/POSTING-en.html, @movq@www.uninformativ.de! I never configured systemd timers, but I would have gotten it wrong, too. Good to know when I eventually stumble across that in the future. I’m still using cron. Yeah, its field order sucks and I always have to look it up (because I don’t deal with that all that often). Indeed, systemd’s order sounds more reasonable.

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m all for it!

@prologic@twtxt.net Glad you’re back. ✌️

Welcome to the party, @threatcat@tilde.club! I reckon it’s totally fine what you’re doing. Over time, message counts naturally drop anyway. :-D And this is fine, too.

@prologic@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de Same here, I give each service a dedicated e-mail address. It’s very interesting to see how e-mail addresses are transferred to other actors. Luckily, this only happens rarely. But it does happen. In surprising ways.

Aliases not only help to fight spam, but are also a great way to specify filter rules to sort e-mails.

@quark@ferengi.one Very sad indeed! :-(

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club Unfortunately, it’s back down again. But my hopes are high as it is a 503 this time and not a connection error anymore. :-)

@prologic@twtxt.net a good DR plan must be tested at least once a year. ☺️

PR to clean up some unwanted specs and cleanup some invalid/bad references. 🙏

@bender@twtxt.net Haha 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net nothing to be sorry about. It gave me time to watch TV with kids! 🤭

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club yay!

Looks like twtxt.net is back now!

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Brilliant, thank you! I didn’t know about that.

Somebody managed to piss @prologic@twtxt.net off, and it looks like he took twtxt.net down with it. Oh dear…

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah ! 👍 I’m trying to build my first micro-SaaS and get more lay-people to protect their own inboxes and identify 🤣 – Hopefully it all works out 💪

@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. 🥳

Double congrats, @thecanine@twtxt.net! \o/

I’m not a fan of the gemtext limits. This being only a single page (which probably doesn’t get updated a whole lot), the efforts of having two dedicates files are not all that big, or so I’d at least naively imagine.

I always recommend checking the W3C validator results, even though I’m very guilty of not doing that myself. It just doesn’t occur to me in the heat of the moment. I reckon if I were writing HTML on a more regular basis, I would pick up on making that a real habit. Anyway, your HTML being generated, you probably can’t address the findings, though. So, might not be even worth the time heading over to the validator.

From a privacy point of view, personally, I would definitely host the CSS myself. Other than that, nice link collection. :-)

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club I’ll make a release this weekend (today)

@prologic@twtxt.net yeah I should probably update. Version 0.15.1@31958f89 2025-06-29T20:35:20+10:00 go1.23.1

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club What version are you running btw? It’s probably time you upgraded and time I released a new version finally 😂 If you’re running a version that’s pre-SQLite-cache, then yeah I’m not surprised. The SQLite cache version is honestly much better 🤣

@bender@twtxt.net to work through both https and gemini, the site is not written in HTML, but in Gemtext, automatically converted to HTML, when needed. Gemtext is nicely explained for example here: https://garden.bouncepaw.com/hypha/gemtext . In short, it is so limited, no line can be more than one thing, so no links in a list are possible, othar than doing it through something like this primitive workaround.

@thecanine@twtxt.net looks good! Was the use of asterisks instead of <li> a concerted choice (it doesn’t look intended, but I might be wrong)? With CSS you can replace bullets on lists with whatever you want.

@prologic@twtxt.net He’ll be probably back in a few days or weeks I reckon. It’s not the first time that his raspi (or what hardware does he use again?) is down. :-)

@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 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.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de It’s formatted just fine 🤟

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 We could – It’s just never became “strong enough”™ of a demand that I ever extended the possibility of supporting other mime types.

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.

@prologic@twtxt.net when I first “fed” the text to Gemini, I asked for a three paragraphs summary. It provided it. Then I asked to “elaborate on three areas: user experience, moral/political impact, and technical/legal concerns”. The reply to that is too long for a twtxt.

I then asked to counter the OP opinions—as in “how would you counter the author’s opinion?”. The reply was very long, but started like this:

“That’s an excellent question, as the post lays out some very strong, well-reasoned criticisms. Countering these points requires acknowledging the valid concerns while presenting a perspective focused on mitigation, responsible integration, and the unique benefits of AI.”

What followed was extensive, so I asked for a summary, which didn’t do justice to the wall of text that preceded it.

@bender@twtxt.net Same I only have one registrar too (OnlyDomains).

@prologic@twtxt.net hehehe, yeah, it isn’t mine neither. Most obscure TLDs are in small registrars. I like to stick to one register (even though when Google Domains ceased to exist I was forced to have two, as Cloudflare doesn’t support the .ONE TLD).

@bender@twtxt.net It’s not even available on my registrar anyway 🤣

@prologic@twtxt.net save your coins! :-D

@bender@twtxt.net Makes me wonder whether somethingarather.zip is a good primary domain for the service I’m building? 🤔