Movie magic and manic mothers: Here’s what’s in cinemas this month
November saw the return of two beloved franchises; magic-filled Now You See Me and action classic Predator — but can either live up to their predecessors? ⌘ Read more

After a 13-year search, researchers discover a ‘magical’ rare flower bloom
A team of researchers have described the “magical” experience of finding a rare species of flower in bloom deep in the Sumatran rainforest after a 23-hour trek. ⌘ Read more

One last chance to see spectacular aurora light show across Australia
If you missed the southern lights, experts say there’s still a chance sky watchers could be dazzled on Thursday night. ⌘ Read more

‘So magical’: Sky watchers treated to spectacular aurora light show across Australia
The southern lights, known also as aurora australis, dazzled sky watchers across a wide area as a severe solar storm impacted Earth. ⌘ 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. 😂

The Linux boot process: from power button to kernel
You press the power button. A second later a wall of text scrolls by, or a logo fades in, and eventually Linux appears. What happens in between is not magic. It is a careful handshake between tiny programs and a very literal CPU. This part follows that handshake until the very first line of C code inside the Linux kernel runs. ↫ 0xkato’s blog Exactly what it says on the tin. ⌘ Read more

Bending biogenic crystals naturally without external forces
From creating flexible gadgets to better medicines, the art of bending crystals is reshaping technology and health, and at the University of Houston a crystals expert makes it look almost like a magic trick. ⌘ Read more

No Silver Bullets: Why Understanding Software Cycle Time is Messy, Not Magic
Comments ⌘ Read more

The cat is doing magic ⌘ Read more

From Source to Sorcery - Kotlin Native’s Interop Magic
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@zvava@twtxt.net Going to have to hard disagree here I’m sorry. a) no-one reads the raw/plain twtxt.txt files, the only time you do is to debug something, or have a stick beak at the comments which most clients will strip out and ignore and b) I’m sorry you’ve completely lost me! I’m old enough to pre-date before Linux became popular, so I’m not sure what UNIX principles you think are being broken or violated by having a Twt Subject (Subject) whose contents is a cryptographic content-addressable hash of the “thing”™ you’re replying to and forming a chain of other replies (a thread).

I’m sorry, but the simplest thing to do is to make the smallest number of changes to the Spec as possible and all agree on a “Magic Date” for which our clients use the modified function(s).

@bender@twtxt.net Well honestly, this is just it. My strong position on this is quite simple:

Do the simplest thing that could work.

It’s one of the age old UNIX philosphies.

Therefore, the simplest thing™ to do here is to just increase the hash length, mark a magic™ date/time as @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org has indicated and call it a day. We’ll then be fine for a few hundred years, at which point there’ll be no-one left alive to give a shit™ anyway 🤣

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I’ve got this magic spell in my config: -f bestvideo[height<=?1080]+bestaudio/best

Gartner positions GitHub as a Leader in the 2025 Magic Quadrant for AI Code Assistants for the second year in a row
Our commitment is to empower every developer and stay true to our north star by building an open, secure, and AI-powered platform that defines the future of software development.

The post [Gartner positions GitHub as a Leader in the 2025 Magic Quadrant for AI Code Assistants for the second yea … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net I know we won’t ever convince each other of the other’s favorite addressing scheme. :-D But I wanna address (haha) your concerns:

1. I don’t see any difference between the two schemes regarding link rot and migration. If the URL changes, both approaches are equally terrible as the feed URL is part of the hashed value and reference of some sort in the location-based scheme. It doesn’t matter.

2. The same is true for duplication and forks. Even today, the “cannonical URL” has to be chosen to build the hash. That’s exactly the same with location-based addressing. Why would a mirror only duplicate stuff with location- but not content-based addressing? I really fail to see that. Also, who is using mirrors or relays anyway? I don’t know of any such software to be honest.

3. If there is a spam feed, I just unfollow it. Done. Not a concern for me at all. Not the slightest bit. And the byte verification is THE source of all broken threads when the conversation start is edited. Yes, this can be viewed as a feature, but how many times was it actually a feature and not more behaving as an anti-feature in terms of user experience?

4. I don’t get your argument. If the feed in question is offline, one can simply look in local caches and see if there is a message at that particular time, just like looking up a hash. Where’s the difference? Except that the lookup key is longer or compound or whatever depending on the cache format.

5. Even a new hashing algorithm requires work on clients etc. It’s not that you get some backwards-compatibility for free. It just cannot be backwards-compatible in my opinion, no matter which approach we take. That’s why I believe some magic time for the switch causes the least amount of trouble. You leave the old world untouched and working.

If these are general concerns, I’m completely with you. But I don’t think that they only apply to location-based addressing. That’s how I interpreted your message. I could be wrong. Happy to read your explanations. :-)

@zvava@twtxt.net There would be only one hash for a message. Some to be defined magic date selects which hash to use. If the message creation timestamp is before this epoch, hash it with v1, otherwise hammer it through v2. Eventually, support for v1 could be dropped as nobody interacts with the old stuff anymore. But I’d keep it around in my client, because why not.

If users choose a client which supports the extensions, they don’t have to mess around with v1 and v2 hashing, just like today.

As for the school of thought, personally, I’d prefer something else, too. I’m in camp location-based addressing, or whatever it is called. There more I think about it, a complete redesign of twtxt and its extensions would be necessary in my opinion. Retrofitting has its limits. Of course, this is much more work, though.

linode’s having a major outage (ongoing as of writing, over 24 hours in) and my friend runs a site i help out with on one of their servers. we didn’t have recent backups so i got really anxious about possible severe data loss considering the situation with linode doesn’t look great (it seems like a really bad incident).

…anyway the server magically came back online and i got backups of the whole application and database, i’m so relieved :‘)

@prologic@twtxt.net Yeah, this really could use a proper definition or a “manifest”. 😅 Many of these ideas are not very wide spread. And I haven’t come across similar projects in all these years.

Let’s take the farbfeld image format as an example again. I think this captures the “spirit” quite well, because this isn’t even about code.

This is the entire farbfeld spec:

farbfeld is a lossless image format which is easy to parse, pipe and compress. It has the following format:

╔════════╤═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╗
║ Bytes  │ Description                                             ║
╠════════╪═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╣
║ 8      │ "farbfeld" magic value                                  ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (width)                      ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ 4      │ 32-Bit BE unsigned integer (height)                     ║
╟────────┼─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────╢
║ [2222] │ 4x16-Bit BE unsigned integers [RGBA] / pixel, row-major ║
╚════════╧═════════════════════════════════════════════════════════╝

The RGB-data should be sRGB for best interoperability and not alpha-premultiplied.

(Now, I don’t know if your screen reader can work with this. Let me know if it doesn’t.)

I think these are some of the properties worth mentioning:

• The spec is extremely short. You can read this in under a minute and fully understand it. That alone is gold.
  
• There are no “knobs”: It’s just a single version, it’s not like there’s also an 8-bit color depth version and one for 16-bit and one for extra large images and one that supports layers and so on. This makes it much easier to implement a fully compliant program.
  
• Despite being so simple, it’s useful. I’ve used it in various programs, like my window manager, my status bars, some toy programs like “tuxeyes” (an Xeyes variant), or Advent of Code.
  
• The format does not include compression because it doesn’t need to. Just use something like bzip2 to get file sizes similar to PNG.
  
• It doesn’t cover every use case under the sun, but it does cover the most important ones (imho). They have discussed using something other than RGBA and decided it’s not worth the trouble.
  
• They refrained from adding extra baggage like metadata. It would have needlessly complicated things.

** Of fairies, compost, and computers **
Lately I’ve buried myself in reading fiction. Stand outs from among the crowd are, of course, Middlemarch but also a lot of sort of scholarly fairy fiction; works that follow the scholastic adventures of studious professorial types in vaugely magical settings. Namely Emily Wilde’s Encyclopedia of Faeries’, Heather Fawcett and The Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alix E. Harrow.

I’ve also been working on a handful of personal utility programs. I … ⌘ Read more

@quark@ferengi.one It’s as close as coffee as you can get. 😅 They take the beans, apply magic, and then most of the caffeine is gone. You can also buy whole decaf’d beans and then grind them yourself. It does kill some of the flavor – but it’s not like you’re drinking black water.

magic namerefs
Comments ⌘ Read more

Page Magic: A Chrome extension that uses AI to customize the appearance of any web page
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How to do some magic with indexedDB [2014]
Comments ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net yeah, that will work perfectly. Because you are using “please”—which we all know is a magic talisman word of obedience—all uploads of your code to Github will be automatically paused, until such magic word is removed. 😂

@bender@twtxt.net Here’s a short-list:

• Simple, minimal syntax—master the core in hours, not months.
  
• CSP-style concurrency (goroutines & channels)—safe, scalable parallelism.
  
• Blazing-fast compiler & single-binary deploys—zero runtime dependencies.
  
• Rich stdlib & built-in tooling (gofmt, go test, modules).
  
• No heavy frameworks or hidden magic—unlike Java/C++/Python overhead.

Jwno: a highly customisable tiling WM for Windows built with Janet
Jwno is a highly customizable tiling window manager for Windows 10/11, built with Janet and ❤️. It brings to your desktop magical parentheses power, which, I assure you, is not suspicious at all, and totally controllable. ↫ Jwno documentation Yes, it’s a Lisp system, so open your bag of spare parentheses and start configuring and customising it, because you’re going to need it if you want to use Jwno … ⌘ Read more

Satechi X1 Slim
I bought a Satechi X1 Slim for dad’s iPad about a year ago. It’s a 60%
scissor switch Bluetooth keyboard that you can use wired (USB-C), too
(Fn + Eject). The feel is rather close to the Apple Magic Keyboard.
Yeah, not even mechanical! I know, I know.

For reasons dad’s not using this keyboard so when I recently visited I
brought it back with me. It’s decent enough but in the ISO version
some keys on the right side, close to the return key, are … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net that mechanical magical ball I built is doing a good job, thus far. :-P

@bender@twtxt.net Don’t worry, I can’t replicate that score, either. 😂 Even tried with a graphics tablet, which is – to my surprise – not magically easier. 🥴

Ten Movies Overshadowed by Behind-the-Scenes Controversies
The job of Hollywood is to present us with an immaculately presented fantasy with beautiful people and big money. That’s why we can’t look away when things go wrong. For these ten movies, things went so wrong behind the scenes that it overshadowed the Hollywood magic; these ten movies had controversies bigger and more memorable […]

The post [Ten Movies Overshadowed by Behind-the-Scenes Controversies](https://listve … ⌘ Read more

i’m going to k-pop-ify the yarn verse. everyone look at miyawaki sakura or i will uh do server magic to make your CPU run worse or something

Video

[ANN] Monero, Arti, and I2P Apps for TrueNAS Scale

As part of our efforts to support critical cryptocurrency infrastructure and privacy, MAGIC Grants has implemented Monero, Arti, and I2P apps for TrueNAS Scale.

Link: https://magicgrants.org/2025/03/11/truenas-monero-arti-i2p.html

u/SamsungGalaxyPlayer (Reddit) ⌘ Read more

Why fastDOOM is fast
How much faster is fastDOOM than regular Doom on a decked-out 486 from 1993? 30% faster without cutting any features! On a demanding map like doom2’s demo1, the gain is even higher, from 16.8 fps to 24.9 fps. That is 48% faster! I did not suspect that DOOM had left that much on the table. Obviously shipping within one year left little time to optimize. I had to understand how this magic trick happened. ↫ Fabien Sanglard What follows is an incredibly detailed exploration of why, exactly, fa … ⌘ Read more

Staring until snacks magically appear. ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net I’m speculating, but if I had to guess I’d say it’s probably asking for your user password in order to access some user keyring (or whatever your OS uses to manage user secret credentials) used to safely store your passkeys related data in order to do its passkeys /ME doing air quotes Magic™ … you could try with a different password manager to avoid said scenario.

Also, passkeys UX sucks.

10 Broadway Props That Stole The Show
Broadway is known for its dazzling performances, unforgettable characters, and, of course, incredible props that help bring the magic to life. While the actors’ talent is the star of the show, some props have a way of stealing the spotlight and becoming just as iconic as the performances themselves. From inanimate objects that take on […]

The post [10 Broadway Props That Stole The Show](https://listverse.com/2025/02/13/10-broadway-props-that-stole-the-show … ⌘ Read more

LG’s briefcase TV is a bulky, battery-powered magic
If what you want is a battery-powered TV fitted inside a piece of luggage, then this gadget has you covered. ⌘ Read more

[ANN] MAGIC Monero Fund 2025 Election Results

ack-j and kowalabearhugs will serve 2-year terms. rottenwheel, Tacolopo, and XMRfamily will serve 1-year terms. Their terms will begin on January 31, 2025. We would like to thank all six committee candidates! We would like to thank everyone who voted!

Committee Members:
* ack-j
* kowalabearhugs
* rottenwheel
* Tacolopo
* XMRfamily

Link: [https://magicgrants.org/2025/01/21/Monero-Fund-2025-Election-Results.html](https://magicgrants.org/2025/01/21/Monero-Fund-2025 … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de woah it’s like a cheatsheet with explanations! java is kind of arcane magic sorcery to me so i’m having trouble understanding it but i have that with most programming languages. this is like so much easier to actually look at and read instead of my eyes glazing over lol

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz i’ve really wanted to make one of those sites you can curl that’s terminal friendly but looks different on the browser like how does wttr.in do it… magic

Today’s date, 24.12.24 (using the German date format, DD.MM.YY), is special in a quirky mathematical way! Notice how 12 (the month) is exactly half of 24 (the day and the year). This symmetry adds an extra layer of charm to an already magical time of the year. It’s a rare alignment that makes this Christmas Eve uniquely memorable. ⌘ Read more

[ANN] Serai’s status as 2024 wraps up

This is an update on where the Serai project is. While I wish I could keep this professional, parts of it will be fundamentally intertwined with my personal life. Apologies to anyone who just wants a short, professional brief. [..] I am happy and relieved to announce an anonymous donor has enabled Serai’s upcoming audits. The donations themselves have been facilitated by MAGIC Grants.

Links:

• [https://gist.github.com/kayabaNerve/5867d08025dcd329a8d44085122686fe](https://gist.github.com/ … ⌘ Read more

[ANN] MAGIC Monero Fund 2025 Election

5 December 2024: Committee and voter nominations open
31 December 2024: Committee and voter nominations close
6 January 2024: Voting opens
20 January 2024: Voting closes
~23 January 2024: Election results announced
31 January 2024: Newly elected members join the committee

Link: https://magicgrants.org/2024/12/05/Monero-Fund-2025-Election.html

u/SamsungGalaxyPlayer (Github) ⌘ Read more

How to Instantly Write a Business Plan with AI on Mac, iPhone, iPad
While there are plenty of paid options to get a business plan, from business plan software, to books, to working with a consultant, or even outsourcing the entire thing, another option is available for iPhone, iPad, and Mac users, and it uses the magic of Apple Intelligence features and ChatGPT to instantly create a business … Read More ⌘ Read more

‘A cheap magic trick’: Amazon, Google, Meta accused of dodging Senate questions
ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini and Meta’s Llama should be deemed ‘high risk’, a Senate committee has found, with executives in the firing line for their appearances. ⌘ Read more

[ANN] The MAGIC Monero Fund got an application: ‘Build a plugin for embedding dApps into Wordpress websites’
Link: https://github.com/MAGICGrants/Monero-Fund/issues/38

@r​ucknium:monero.social ⌘ Read more

Magic Mint #A7EDCC

Monza #C11924

(Contrast ratio: 4.6:1 | AA) ⌘ Read more

Beware the frauds, the bozos, the doomers or the ‘accels’.
When technology becomes indistinguishable from magic, it’s very easy to get excited, carried away, or even become irrational. Why irrational you might ask? Because when the expectation from any technology or system extends well beyond what is known to be feasible, that is an irrational behaviour. Sadly, as the result of completely unjustified expectations, financing, […] ⌘ Read more

that cabin sitting in an anonymous warehouse? being functionally a fairy mound, it attracted quite the amount of unbound magic and thaumoactive as it is, it’s now sitting in the equivalent of a cooling pond

[ANN] The MAGIC Monero Fund received a new grant application: ‘Monerotopia Buildathon 2024’

Deverick is asking for 4,000 USD to host a hackathon/buildathon to improve Monero integration in the BTCPay self-hosted merchant payment system, especially with BTCPay 2.0 coming up. Community feedback on this idea is appreciated :D

Link: https://github.com/MAGICGrants/Monero-Fund/issues/37

@r​ucknium:monero.social ⌘ Read more