@prologic@twtxt.net pretty cool! I like these, wish there was a way (I am sure there is, but not for tourists) to go to the top. :-)

When the boss asks if my code review of the new junior is going well ⌘ Read more

Queensland government considering youth ‘breach bail, go to jail’ laws
The government says it will consider the policy after the LNP claimed the seat of Hinchinbrook in Saturday’s by-election, where its candidate campaigned heavily on the policy. ⌘ Read more

Morgan Stanley Warns Oracle Credit Protection Nearing Record High
A gauge of risk on Oracle debt “reached a three-year high in November,” reports Bloomberg.

“And things are only going to get worse in 2026 unless the database giant is able to assuage investor anxiety about a massive artificial intelligence spending spree, according to Morgan Stanley.”

A funding gap, swelling balance sheet and obsolesce … ⌘ Read more

Advent of Code 2025 starts tomorrow. 🥳🎄

This year, I’m going to use Python 1 on SuSE Linux 6.4, writing the code on my trusty old Pentium 133 with its 64 MB of RAM. No idea if that old version of Python will be fast enough for later puzzles. We’ll see.

‘A lot of the shame I felt has gone’: Em Rusciano on finding balance in life
As a writer, singer, comedian, podcaster, author and single mum, Em Rusciano has become accustomed to navigating a chaotic life. The self-described “maximalist power queen” shares how she unwinds and how her approach to life has changed since going through perimenopause and being diagnosed with ADHD and autism. ⌘ Read more

Think you’ll nail this week’s Hard Quiz? Cute
I’m not going to stop you from trying, but it might be worth readjusting your expectations. Let’s play, HARD! ⌘ Read more

Fixing the “Civilization 6 is Damaged” Error on Mac
Civilization 6 may be an older strategy game, but it retains immense popularity and replay value for fans of the Civilization franchise. If you’re a Mac gamer who has Civilization VI (Civilization 6 for those who aren’t fans of roman numerals), you might have come across a situation where you go to play Civilization 6 … Read More ⌘ Read more

Albanese and Haydon have wed in a ceremony that will go down in history
Anthony Albanese and Jodie Haydon can trace their relationship back five years, but the historic nature of their secretly planned wedding at The Lodge runs far deeper. ⌘ Read more

Use unoptimized Colemak bindings or go back to QWERTY? ⌘ Read more

That’s going to be most of our holidays next year 🤣 Mostly because we bought a van to go “glamping” about the country 😆

@movq@www.uninformativ.de You don’t go on holidays anywhere? 🧐

@kiwu@twtxt.net It also greatly depends on what kind of videos you plan to record. When you go, let’s say, diving, the specs need to be probably more suited to that type of environment. What about zoom, macro shots, wide landscapes, and so on? When typically mounted on a tripod, I’d say builtin image stabilization is not required, but for more action shots, this is fairly important to not get sea sick. :-)

I’ve got a Nikon Coolpix S9300. I typically only take photos, but it also works for the occasional video. Free hand moves are quite difficult, but when mounted to a tripod, this is not too shabby. There’s absolutely no way around a (makeshift) tridpod when zooming in, though. The audio is definitely not the best, especially wind destroys everything. If I recorded more video, I would certainly want to have an external microphone.

Europe doesn’t find the prospect of Russian aggression as funny as Putin does
Something has now been unleashed in Europe which is going to be hard to put back in the bottle. ⌘ Read more

When I learn a teammate’s Friday morning release is still going at 5 p.m. ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Hmm. 🤔 Well, I don’t run that server myself, so I can’t peek into the logs to see what’s going wrong … 🥴

Going away over summer? Here’s how I prep my garden
Leaving my garden in the heat of summer can feel worrying but some simple planning means it misses me less than I miss it. ⌘ Read more

Finally!! I can go to sleep!

Roos coach sheds light on ‘really difficult’ AFLW grand final omission
North Melbourne coach Darren Crocker says telling Mia King she isn’t going to play in the AFLW grand final is “one of the harder conversations” he’s had to have. ⌘ Read more

Breaking: No Cummins as Australia picks unchanged squad for second Ashes Test
Australia will go into the second Ashes Test against England in Brisbane next week with an unchanged line-up, meaning there is no place for captain Pat Cummins. ⌘ Read more

Regional pharmacist wins award for dedication to patients and community
A north-west Victorian pharmacist is being celebrated for his contribution to his local community after winning an award for going the “extra mile”. ⌘ Read more

@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe there you go! What I am trying to say is, if @prologic@twtxt.net truly wants to be able to diagnose something as difficult to diagnose as ActivityPub, he ought to run his own. There is no workaround.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com I think I’ll just end up using the Official CrowdSec Go library 🤔

@prologic@twtxt.net The main thing that I tought of is that whomever is abusing your services must be a well known actor (by range/set of IPs) that got reported by other Crowdsec users. So to my simpleton’s understanding, your reverse-proxy/web server passes the requests by crowdsec for processing, they get banned for $N hours if the source has already been blacklisted by the community or violates any of a set of behavior base rules (and even more hours for repeat offenders); otherwise the requests/responses go as per usual. Not sure if I got things right but this might help paint a better picture of the process.

Labor and Greens agree on extra ABC funding for kids’ programs
A deal between the federal government and the minor party will see an extra $50 million go to the public broadcaster to facilitate passage of a bill to impose local content requirements on streaming platforms. ⌘ Read more

This caveman is getting too old for the Internet… 😅 It took me 1 hrs and 50 mins to catch up with what’s been going on my feed.

Liverpool crashes to 72-year first after shocking Champions League loss
Liverpool’s nightmare run of form continues after being humbled at home once again as Arsenal flexes its muscles in a heavyweight clash to go top of the Champions League. ⌘ Read more

Chinese Pharma is On the Cusp of Going Global
China’s pharmaceutical industry has quietly evolved from a hub for generics and clinical trials into something more ambitious – a genuine competitor in drug discovery that Western giants are now courting to fill gaps left by looming patent expirations worth over $300 billion by 2030. In the first half of 2025, nearly a third of global licensing agreements signed by big pharma inv … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net AI is slot machines for coders:

• “Before starting tasks, developers forecast that allowing AI will reduce completion time by 24%. After completing the study, developers estimate that allowing AI reduced completion time by 20%. Surprisingly, we find that allowing AI actually increases completion time by 19%–AI tooling slowed developers down.” https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/
  
• “Stack Overflow data reveals the hidden productivity tax of ‘almost right’ AI code”: https://venturebeat.com/ai/stack-overflow-data-reveals-the-hidden-productivity-tax-of-almost-right-ai-code
  

The same intermittent reward operant conditioning that gets people addicted to gambling and thinking that if they follow certain rituals they’ll win “next time” drives people’s beliefs that AI tools are making them more productive when they’re making them less productive. I’m going to guess that a side effect of this is that people think they’re typing less when in the longer term they’re typing the same amount or more when you factor in the productivity loss (as far as I’ve read the studies don’t measure this so I’m only guessing).

People are also being rapidly de-skilled by this technology: the more they use it, the more their actual skills atrophy. “Continuous exposure to AI might reduce the ADR (adesoma detection rate) of standard non-AI assisted colonoscopy, suggesting a negative effect on endoscopist behaviour.” (science speak for saying that radiologists get worse at seeing tumors in scans once they’ve used AI): https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(25)00133-5/abstract

Nobody who cares about the future should be using this stuff for anything.

Optus customers trapped in complaint ‘merry-go-round’ over network issues
Optus has been under intense scrutiny after a network outage in September left hundreds of people unable to call Triple Zero and was linked to three deaths. ⌘ Read more

Cold-water swimming has benefits for the brain as well as the body
There is a growing body of research on the physical benefits of going for a dip in chilly water, but now researchers are starting to find that cold-water swimming may also be reshaping our brains for the better in lasting ways ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.8 Will Go Wayland-Exclusive In Dropping X11 Session Support
KDE developers announced they are going “all-in on a Wayland future” and with the Plasma 6.8 desktop it will become Wayland-exclusive. The Plasma X11 session is going away… ⌘ Read more

What has changed in the year since the NT’s landmark DV inquest?
A year after NT Coroner Elisabeth Armitage handed down 35 recommendations from a landmark domestic violence inquest, those on the frontline say things are going backwards. ⌘ Read more

When I try to login to PayPal I now see:

Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker

Here’s the thing. PayPal takes fees from transactions and payments received and sent.

I have very right not have ads shoved in my face for something that isn’t actually free in the first place and costs money to use. If PayPal would like to continue to piss off folks me like, then I’ll happily close my PayPal account and go somewhere else that doesn’t shove ads in my face and consume 30-40% of my Internet bandwidth on useless garbage/crap.

#PayPal #Ads

I’ve once again brought up a Gitea instance on my server space, but there are two highlights here:

1. No self-registration (accounts are tied to the e-mail server, which is in turn tied to the system accounts)
   
2. Going beyond the landing page requires to be logged in, no excuses. (It also could scare the AI crawlers to oblivion, avoiding Anubis at that)
   

That’s it.

The river is life for these remote communities, but no-one will swim in it
For months, people in remote Indigenous communities have been reporting skin rashes after going in the water, and a report confirms something is wrong with the river. ⌘ Read more

Improved Upstream Kernel Support For TUXEDO Laptops Being Worked On
While TUXEDO Computers recently ended their efforts for a Snapdragon X Elite Linux laptop, their Linux Intel/AMD laptop efforts continue going well and recently they have been posting patches working to enhance the upstream kernel support for those x86_64 devices… ⌘ Read more

Sperm’s evolutionary origins go back before multicellular animals
Analysis of the DNA and proteins of a range of animals has revealed that sperm’s molecular toolkit arose in our single-celled ancestors, perhaps more than a billion years ago ⌘ Read more

Google Looks To Bring JPEG-XL Support Back To Chrome / Chromium
Back in 2022 was the surprising decision by Google that they were going to deprecate JPEG-XL image support in Chrome. By the end of 2022 they went ahead and removed JPEG-XL support from Chrome/Chromium to the frustration of many web developers and end-users interested in this image format. Now though as we get ready to roll into 2026, Google engineers are looking at bringing back JPEG-XL support to the Chrome web browser… ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net Time to make a new internet. Maybe one that intentionally doesn’t “scale” and remains slow (on both ends) so it’s harder to overload in this manner, harder to abuse for tracking your every move, … Got any of those 56k modems left?

(I’m half-joking. “Make The Internet Expensive Again” like it was in the 1990ies and some of these problems might go away. Disclaimer: I didn’t have my coffee yet. 😅)

Fark me 🤦‍♂️ I woke up quite late today (after a long night helping/assisting with a Mainframe migration last night fork work) to abusive traffic and my alerts going off. The impact? My pod (twtxt.net) was being hammered by something at a request rate of 30 req/s (there are global rate limits in place, but still…). The culprit? Turned out to be a particular IP 43.134.51.191 and after looking into who own s that IP I discovered it was yet-another-bad-customer-or-whatever from Tencent, so that entire network (ASN) is now blocked from my Edge:

+# Who: Tentcent
+# Why: Bad Bots
+132203

Total damage?

$ caddy-log-formatter twtxt.net.log | cut -f 1 -d  ' ' | sort | uniq -c | sort -r -n -k 1 | head -n 5
  61371 43.134.51.191
    402 159.196.9.199
    121 45.77.238.240
      8 106.200.1.116
      6 104.250.53.138

61k reqs over an hour or so (before I noticed), bunch of CPU time burned, and useless waste of my fucking time.

GCC Steering Committee Allows New Language Front-End To Land For GCC 16
Joining Ada, C/C++, COBOL, D, Fortran, Go, Modula-2, Objective-C/Objective-C++ and Rust is now another programming language expected to be added for the GCC 16 compiler release due out in the new year… ⌘ Read more

All my newly added test cases failed, that movq thankfully provided in https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/twtxt.dev/pulls/28#issuecomment-20801 for the draft of the twt hash v2 extension. The first error was easy to see in the diff. The hashes were way too long. You’ve already guessed it, I had cut the hash from the twelfth character towards the end instead of taking the first twelve characters: hash[12:] instead of hash[:12].

After fixing this rookie mistake, the tests still all failed. Hmmm. Did I still cut the wrong twelve characters? :-? I even checked the Go reference implementation in the document itself. But it read basically the same as mine. Strange, what the heck is going on here?

Turns out that my vim replacements to transform the Python code into Go code butchered all the URLs. ;-) The order of operations matters. I first replaced the equals with colons for the subtest struct fields and then wanted to transform the RFC 3339 timestamp strings to time.Date(…) calls. So, I replaced the colons in the time with commas and spaces. Hence, my URLs then also all read https, //example.com/twtxt.txt.

But that was it. All test green. \o/

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 … ?

Linux 6.18 Sees Late Improvements For Xbox Ally, Lenovo Legion Go, & Alienware Laptops
We’re closing in on the Linux 6.18 stable kernel release likely in little more than one week (30 November barring any delays) and today’s batch of x86 platform driver updates is bringing some new hardware support as well as some notable consumer device fixes/improvements… ⌘ Read more

#DCPS25

Streaming going on here:

https://commons.ngi.eu/event/digital-commons-policy-summit-2025/#WebStreaming

The EU “19.11.2025 COM(2025) 837 final 2025/0360 (COD): Digital Omnibus” Regulation Proposal is out, and it it we have:

• “proposed simplification measures” watering down personal data protection
  
• There are two terms, “open format” and “formal open standard” with different definitions - none “open enough”
  

I’m sure there is a lot more to digest from it, so here you go:

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/library/digital-omnibus-regulation-proposal

@prologic@twtxt.net I couldn’t have phrased it any better than @bender@twtxt.net. :-)

Twice or three times the money as before sounds a bit suspicious to me. Of course, I could be wrong, but I always was under the impression, that your last jobs weren’t all that badly salaried. If the new offer is really paid this highly, it might be a shit job. For me, money isn’t everything, I’d rather opt for a lower income where the job is fun than hating to go to work every day. But if the new job ticks all boxes, go for it. :-)

Also: Consult your pillow, don’t rush it.

found this guy in a parking lot, but he has no idea that im going to give him the best life possible ⌘ Read more

Oracle is Already Underwater On Its ‘Astonishing’ $300B OpenAI Deal
An anonymous reader shares a report: It’s too soon to be talking about the Curse of OpenAI, but we’re going to anyway. Since September 10, when Oracle announced a $300 billion deal with the chatbot maker, its stock has shed $315 billion in market value.

OK, yes, it’s a gross simplification to just look at market cap. But equivalents to … ⌘ Read more