My biggest (and oddest) complaint about Windows 11 so far: If its connection to the Internet is poor, the entire OS is very slow. Even opening a local offline program like Handbrake takes over a minute. Task Manager does not show any extra load on CPU or RAM in the meantime. I’ve seen it on 3 different installs with various hardware components. I can’t explain why it happens.

Ironclad – formally verified, real-time capable, Unix-like OS kernel
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My cat yawned and it looks like he’s burning in the sun ⌘ Read more

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

Bombshell Report Exposes How Meta Relied On Scam Ad Profits To Fund AI
“Internal documents have revealed that Meta has projected it earns billions from ignoring scam ads that its platforms then targeted to users most likely to click on them,” writes Ars Technica, citing a lengthy report from Reuters.

Reuters reports that Meta “for at least three years failed to identify and stop an avalanche of ads that … ⌘ Read more

Bacteria use sugar-fueled currents and molecular gearboxes to move without flagella
New studies from Arizona State University reveal surprising ways bacteria can move without their flagella—the slender, whip-like propellers that usually drive them forward. ⌘ Read more

Meet Bruno: He looks like he owns the whole alley, and honestly, he might. ⌘ Read more

The Best Early Black Friday Apple Deals on MacBook, Apple Watch, iPad, and More
We’re officially in the month of Black Friday, which will take place on Friday, November 28 in 2025. As always, this will be the best time of the year to shop for great deals, including popular Apple products like AirPods, iPad, Apple Watch, and more. In this article, the majority of the discounts will be found on Amazon.

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The First New Subsea Habitat In 40 Years Is About To Launch
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: Vanguard feels and smells like a new RV. It has long, gray banquettes that convert into bunks, a microwave cleverly hidden under a counter, a functional steel sink with a French press and crockery above. A weird little toilet hides behind a curtain. But some clues hint that you can’t just f … ⌘ Read more

Why do all(some) mainecoons look like Ron perlman ⌘ Read more

like mother like daughter ⌘ Read more

@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.

NILFS2 File-System Seeing Renewed Interest With Additional Maintainer
It’s been a while since having anything major to talk about with the NILFS2 file-system but it looks like that could be changing. NILFS2 as a reminder is a log-structured file-system with continuous snapshotting with its NILFS predecessor having been in the mainline kernel for two decades since the mid Linux 2.6 days… ⌘ Read more

My beautiful (former)stray and her insistence to sleep on me or spread out like a rubber chicken. ⌘ Read more

Video Games’ Hottest New Platform is an Old One
Web-based video games are experiencing an unexpected revival as the broader $189 billion industry stagnates. Sales for browser-based titles like GeoGuessr and chess were expected to triple from 2021 to 2028, reaching $3.09 billion, according to Google and Kantar. Playgama hosted more than 15,000 new web games in the first half of 2025, exceeding the combined total from 2021 throug … ⌘ Read more

Linux To Gain ML-DSA/Dilithium Post-Quantum Cryptography For Module Signing
New code likely to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.19 kernel would introduce ML-DSA/Dilithium post-quantum cryptography to be initially used for dealing with kernel module signing… ⌘ Read more

@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. 😂

@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.

@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).

Mesa Lands Fixes For HDR With Vulkan Drivers
Merged overnight to Mesa 26.0-devel and likely to be back-ported for the upcoming Mesa 23.3 release are a few fixes around high dynamic range (HDR) support within the common Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) / display code… ⌘ Read more

Orange cat observing like he’s Newton ⌘ Read more

You do raise very good points though, but I don’t think any of this is particularly new because there are many other examples of technology and evolution of change over time where people have forgotten certain skills like for example, changing a car tyre

How the US Cut Climate-Changing Emissions While Its Economy More Than Doubled
alternative_right shares a report from The Conversation: Countries around the world have been discussing the need to rein in climate change for three decades, yet global greenhouse gas emissions – and global temperatures with them – keep rising. When it seems like we’re getting nowhere, it’s useful to step back an … ⌘ Read more

I have been at this for like 3 hours, how the hell do i completely disable the information popup window thing in vim-lsp??? i made it not be floating, but thats about it. ⌘ Read more

iOS 26.2 to Allow Third-Party App Stores in Japan Ahead of Regulatory Deadline
Japan’s new competition rules are forcing Apple to open the iPhone to third-party app stores, and iOS 26.2 will quietly flip that switch ahead of the December deadline. MacRumors reports: According to a post shared on X by @Tzzlala, iPhones running the beta in Japan are able to install alternative app stores like AltStore PA … ⌘ Read more

The secret life of baobabs: How bats and moths keep Africa’s giant trees alive
Baobabs are sometimes called “upside-down trees,” because their branches look like roots reaching skyward. Of the eight species of baobab in the world, six are confined to Madagascar, one to northern Australia and one species, Adansonia digitata, is found across the savanna regions of continental Africa. ⌘ Read more

Why does he sleep like that? ⌘ Read more

macOS Tahoe 26.1 Improves Battery Life Significantly of MacBook Air & Pro
If you were one of the MacBook Air or MacBook Pro users who found MacOS Tahoe causing excessive battery drain and battery life reductions with MacOS 26.0 and MacOS 26.0.1, then you’ll want to update to macOS Tahoe 26.1 right away, as it will likely resolve the most significant battery life problems. Multiple user reports … Read More ⌘ Read more

A New White-Collar Gig Economy: Training AI To Take Over
AI labs are paying skilled professionals hundreds of dollars per hour to train their models in specialized fields. Companies like Mercor, Surge AI, Scale AI and Turing recruit bankers, lawyers, engineers and doctors to improve the accuracy of AI systems in professional settings. Mercor advertises roles for medical secretaries, movie directors and private detectives at … ⌘ Read more

Code research projects with async coding agents like Claude Code and Codex
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CodeWeavers Launches CrossOver Preview For Linux ARM64
CodeWeavers announced this morning a new CrossOver Preview that includes Linux ARM64 support for the first time. This commercial software built atop Wine is now comfortable with the state of running Windows x86/x64 apps on Linux ARM64 and even the ability ro enjoy many Windows games on ARM64 Linux devices like the System76 Thelio Astra… ⌘ Read more

A New Ion-Based Quantum Computer Makes Error Correction Simpler
An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: The US- and UK-based company Quantinuum today unveiled Helios, its third-generation quantum computer, which includes expanded computing power and error correction capability. Like all other existing quantum computers, Helios is not powerful enough to execute the industry’s dream money- … ⌘ Read more

This is Milo. He showed up at my door one day and never left. Now he spends his mornings sunbathing like he owns the place ☀️🐾 ⌘ Read more

FEX 2511 Delivers More Performance Improvements For Linux x86 Binaries On ARM64
FEX 2511 is out today for this open-source emulator akin to Apple’s Rosetta that allows running x86/x86+64 applications on ARM64. But in the case of FEX, for ARM64 Linux devices and akin to other open-source projects like Box64… ⌘ Read more

The Louvre’s Video Surveillance Password Was ‘Louvre’
A bungled October 18 heist that saw $102 million of crown jewels stolen from the Louvre in broad daylight has exposed years of lax security at the national art museum. From trivial passwords like ‘LOUVRE’ to decades-old, unsupported systems and easy rooftop access, the job was made surprisingly easy. PC Gamer reports: As Rogue cofounder and former Polygon arch-jester Cass … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Gemini liked your opinion very much. Here is how it countered:

The criticism of AI as untrustworthy is a problem of misapplication, not capability.

• AI as a Force Multiplier: AI should be treated as a high-speed drafting and brainstorming tool, not an authority. For experts, it offers an immense speed gain, shifting the work from slow manual creation to fast critical editing and verification.
  
• The Rise of AI Literacy: Users must develop a new skill—AI literacy—to critically evaluate and verify AI’s probabilistic output. This skill, along with improving citation features in AI tools, mitigates the “gaslighting” effect.
  

The fear of skill loss is based on a misunderstanding of how technology changes the nature of work; it’s skill evolution, not erosion.

• Shifting Focus to High-Level Skills: Just as the calculator shifted focus from manual math to complex problem-solving, AI shifts the focus from writing boilerplate code to architectural design and prompt engineering. It handles repetitive tasks, freeing humans for creative and complex challenges.
  
• Accessibility and Empowerment: AI serves as a powerful democratizing tool, offering personalized tutoring and automation to people who lack deep expertise. While dependency is a risk, this accessibility empowers a wider segment of the population previously limited by skill barriers.
  

The legal and technical flaws are issues of governance and ethical practice, not reasons to reject the core technology.

• Need for Better Bot Governance: Destructive scraping is a failure of ethical web behavior and can be solved with better bot identification, rate limits, and protocols (like enhanced robots.txt). The solution is to demand digital citizenship from AI companies, not to stop AI development.

@bender@twtxt.net Not sure, if we actually have a law like that. But I wish it was the case. The clamp doesn’t say anything like that, just that it is now cactus.

The glue takes three days to reach its final strength. Let’s see. I’m sceptical.

Things I Don’t Like in Configuration Languages
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The XMPP Standards Foundation: The XMPP Newsletter October 2025

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Welcome to the XMPP Newsletter, great to have you here again!
This issue covers the month of October 2025.

The XMPP Newsletter is brought to you by the XSF Communication Team.

Just like any other product or project by the XSF, the Newsletter is the result of voluntary work … ⌘ Read more

@zvava@twtxt.net happy belated birthday! Also, I would love to see that website. I went to the one listed on your profile, and saw the old one, not this one. I like the current, and also the pink look of the one of the screenshot!

@thecanine@twtxt.net I like Apple’s Liquid Glass. While I see there are many hatters, I haven’t had an issue with it on iOS, macOS, watchOS, nor tvOS. Have them all working fairly flawlessly.

@prologic@twtxt.net I requested an invitation. There are many like this, so it will be interesting to see how it develops. I also hope you are not hosting this on your infrastructure, at least not once you decide to monetise. I know self hosting is fun and all, but it also introduces variables that directly collide with a business model.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org … sounds like a bad day. 😅

Voting behavior in elections strongly linked to future risk of death
Voting behavior in elections is strongly linked to the future risk of death, and is likely a stronger determinant of health than education—considered a key influence on health—suggests research published online in the Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health. ⌘ Read more

Design trends I think will take off in 2026
but tierlist

S - move from flat design to more detailed, 3D, more complex logos.

A - glass, not just liquid, Windows Vista, 7, 11,… accessibility concerns, but I like to see it.

B-/C+ - black and white icons, favicons. I did it before it was cool, but it’s getting overused.

E - gradientslop, barely started, already all blends together.

Why CNCF TAGs are the core of cloud native innovation (and where to find them at KubeCon Atlanta)
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025 is just around the corner in Atlanta. While you’re mapping out your schedule for co-located events like Observability Day and Platform Engineering Day, don’t forget to connect with the groups… ⌘ Read more

reagami: A minimal zero-deps Reagent-like for Squint and CLJS
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Sculpt OS 25.10 released
In the light of this year’s roadmap focus on “rigidity, clarity, performance”, Sculpt OS 25.10 looks the same as the version 25.04 but might feel different as it includes countless under-the-hood improvements of the two preceding framework releases 25.05 and 25.08. User interaction on performance-starved platforms like the PinePhone has become visibly smoother thanks our recent CPU scheduling advances. The streamlined block-storage stack combined with various refinements of the pac … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net @aelaraji@aelaraji.com I’m glad you like ‘em. :-)

SpaceX’s Starlink and other satellites face growing threat from sun
There are now over 10,000 satellites in orbit, more than at any point in history, and this growing number is starting to reveal how solar storms could disrupt internet mega constellations like SpaceX’s Starlink ⌘ Read more