Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Shifts Bulk of Philanthropy, āGoing All In on AI-Powered Biologyā
The Associated Press reports that āFor the past decade, Dr. Priscilla Chan and her husband Mark Zuckerberg have focused part of their philanthropy on a lofty goal ā āto cure, prevent or manage all diseaseā ā if not in their lifetime, then in their childrenās.ā
During that decade they also f ⦠ā Read more
KDE Plasma 6.6 Shaving Off 100MB Of Memory Use, Fixing DrKonqi Crash Reporter Crashing
KDE developers were off to a busy start for the month of November. A lot of feature activity continues happening for Plasma 6.6 while a lot of bug fixing is still going on for Plasma 6.5 and related KDE components⦠ā Read more
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! Iām going to bed, but Iāll have a closer read/think tomorrow š¤
@prologic@twtxt.net Letās go through it one by one. Hereās a wall of text that took me over 1.5 hours to write.
The criticism of AI as untrustworthy is a problem of misapplication, not capability.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 āAI literacyā, 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 āAI literacyā, isnāt it?
My text went one step further, though: I said that when you take this requirement of āAI literacyā 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 ā okay, fine, a draft is a draft, itās 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 donāt feel like a draft that needs editing.
Can you, as an expert, still use an AI draft as a basis/foundation? Yeah, probably. But hereās the kicker: You did not create that draft. You were not involved in the āthought processā behind it. When you, a human being, make a draft, you often think something like: āOkay, I want to draw a picture of a landscape and thereās going to be a little house, but for now, Iāll just put in a rough sketch of the house and add the details later.ā You are aware of what you left out. When the AI did the draft, you are not aware of whatās missing ā 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.
Skill Erosion vs. Skill EvolutionYou, @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 Geminiās 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, youāre something else. You should not be hired as a programmer or a mechanic.
Yes, that is āskill evolutionā ā which is pretty much my point! But the AI framed it like a counter-argument. It didnāt understand my text.
(But what if thatās our future? What if all programming will look like that in some years? I claim: Itās not possible. If you donāt know how to program, then you donāt know how to read/understand code written by an AI. You are something else, but youāre not a programmer. It might be valid to be something else ā but that wasnāt my point, my point was that youāre not a bloody programmer.)
Geminiās calculator example is garbage, I think. Crunching numbers and doing mathematics (i.e., ācomplex problem-solvingā) are two different things. Just because you now have a calculator, doesnāt mean itāll free you up to do mathematical proofs or whatever.
What would have worked is this: Letās say youāre 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, thereās a little gaslight-y detail: A calculator is correct. Yes, it could have ābugsā (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), itās just a statistical model. So, this modified example (āaccountant with a calculatorā) would actually have to be phrased like this: Suppose thereās an accountant and you give her a magic box that spits out the correct result in, what, I donāt know, 70-90% of the time. The accountant couldnāt rely on this box now, could she? Sheād 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 doesnāt make sense. It just spits out some generic āargumentā that it picked up on some website.
3. The Technical and Legal Perspective (Scraping and Copyright)The AI makes two points here. The first one, I might actually agree with (ābad bot behavior is not the fault of AI itselfā).
The second point is, once again, gaslighting, because it is phrased/framed like a counter-argument. It implies that I said something which I didnāt. Like the AI, I said that you would have to adjust the copyright law! At the same time, the AI answer didnāt even question whether itās okay to break the current law or not. It just said ālol yeah, change the lawsā. (I wonder in what way the laws would have to be changed in the AIās āopinionā, because some of these changes could kill some business opportunities ā or the laws would have to have special AI clauses that only benefit the AI techbros. But I digress, that wasnāt part of Geminiās answer.)
tl;drExcept for one point, I donāt accept any of Geminiās ācriticismā. It didnāt 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, itās just a statistical model).
And it framed everything like a counter-argument, while actually repeating what I said. Thatās gaslighting: When Alice says āthe sky is blueā and Bob replies with āwhy do you say the sky is purple?!ā
But it sure looks convincing, doesnāt it?
Never againThis took so much of my time. I wonāt do this again. š
@movq@www.uninformativ.de I am genuinely curious as to why you think Geminis summarization and the categorization of your gopher post was and is as you say misunderstood?
I asked this very genuinely because before reading @bender@twtxt.netās comments and Gemini summarization I actually went and unplugged your post into flood gaps go for proxy, and then listen to the text intently with my own human ears š
Nvidiaās Jensen Huang Says China āWill Winā AI Race With US
Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang has warned that China will beat the US in the AI race, thanks to lower energy costs and looser regulations. From a report: In the starkest comments yet from the head of the worldās most valuable company, Huang told the FT: āChina is going to win the AI race.ā Huangās remarks come after the Trump administration maintained a ban o ⦠ā Read more
we.loveprivacy.club yarn instance down? š¤ I've been getting a 502 the last couple of days.
@prologic@twtxt.net that poke will go no where. It is 502d. š
@kiwu@twtxt.net wanna trade? I would be willing to become celibate to go back to my 20s, and believe me, if there is something I donāt want to do is becoming celibate, so that ought to tell you something! š
@prologic@twtxt.net Nothing, yet. It was sent in written form. Thereās 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 ā truthfully ā very few areas where AI could actually be useful to me.
There are going to be many discussions about this ā¦
This is completely against the āspiritā of this company, btw. We used to say: āItās the goal that matters. Use whatever tools you think are appropriate.ā Thatās why Iām 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.
Linux 6.19 Will Finally Support Intelās Adaptive Sharpness Filter āCASFā With Lunar Lake
Going all the way back to early 2024, Intel Linux engineers have been working on supporting an Adaptive Sharpening Filter new to Lunar Lake. While Lunar Lake later launched in September 2024, the Linux patches for this feature remained under review and discussion. Besides the Intel driver implementation itself for Lunar Lake and newer, it also ushers in a new DRM sharpness property to help standardize such functionality ⦠ā Read more
@kiwu@twtxt.net I wouldnāt go that far haha 𤣠Iām not sure Iām all that wise š
@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, give it a shot. At worst you know that you have to continue your quest. :-)
Fun fact, during a semester break I was actually a little bored, so I just started reading the Qt documentation. I didnāt plan on using Qt for anything, though. I only looked at the docs because they were on my bucket list for some reason. Qt was probably recommended to me and coming from KDE myself, that was motivation enough to look at the docs just for fun.
The more I read, the more hooked I got. The documentation was extremely well written, something Iāve never seen before. The structure was very well thought out and I got the impression that I understood what the people thought when they actually designed Qt.
A few days in I decided to actually give it a real try. Having never done anything in C++ before, I quickly realized that this endeavor wonāt succeed. I simply couldnāt get it going. But I found the Qt bindings for Python, so that was a new boost. And quickly after, I discovered that there were even KDE bindings for Python in my package manager, so I immediately switched to them as that integrated into my KDE desktop even nicer.
I used the Python KDE bindings for one larger project, a planning software for a summer camp that we used several years. Itās main feature was to see who is available to do an activity. In the past, that was done on a large sheet of paper, but people got assigned two activities at the same time or werenāt assigned at all. So, by showing people in yellow (free), green (one activity assigned) and red (overbooked), this sped up and improved the planning process.
Another core feature was to generate personalized time tables (just like back in school) and a dedicated view for the morning meeting on site.
It was extended over the years with all sorts of stuff. E.g. I then implemented a warning if all the custodians of an activitiy with kids were underage to satisfy new the guidelines that there should be somebody of age.
Just before the pandemic I started to even add support for personalized live views on phones or tablets during the planning process (with web sockets, though). This way, people could see their own schedule or independently check at which day an activity takes place etc. For these side quests, they donāt have to check the large matrix on the projector. But the project died there.
Hereās a screenshot from one of the main views: https://lyse.isobeef.org/tmp/k3man.png
This Python+Qt rewrite replaced and improved the Java+Swing predecessor.
Cool. I think Iāve improved this abit. Update going out shortly⦠Also added optional support for displaying gravatar(s) if you supply your email address (optional of course).
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Go complain to the BeerCSS š» developers š¤£
And maybe I should go back to using GUI designers. Havenāt used those since the Visual Basic days. š¤ It wasnāt pretty, but you got results very quickly and efficiently.
(When I switched to Linux, I quickly got stuck with GTK and that only had Glade, which wasnāt super great at the time, so I didnāt start using it ⦠and then I never questioned that decision ā¦)
@prologic@twtxt.net Hmm, Iāll have to take a look. Appears to be Go only, doesnāt it?
Iām not quite sold yet on the idea of āimmediate modeā GUIs. š¤
@bender@twtxt.net You are totally correct! The thing is: The Caveman within was thinking how minimal can one go before things start to get too uncomfortable? And if cavemen werenāt supposed to be too self-conscious about their spelling, I could have just ssh remote echo "$(date -Is)\tTwt Twt Mother-Lover! š¤£š¤£" >> /path/to/twtxt.txt and called it a day.
@prologic@twtxt.net That sounds horrible. š I wouldnāt want to own such a car. (My plan is not to buy a new car after my current one finally broke down entirely.)
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org First time I heard about eCall. I donāt think I like this. 𫤠Feels like another attempt at going for complete surveillance. Yes, yes, itās about āsecurityā/āsafetyā ⦠it always is.
@prologic@twtxt.net Iām pretty sure thatās going to happen at some point or has already happened. š Is this āthe dark webā? š
It happened.
āCan you help me debug this program? I vibe coded it and I have no idea whatās going on. I had no choice ā learning this new language and frameworks would have taken ages, and I have severe time constraints.ā
Did I say ānoā? Of course not, Iām a ānice guyā. So Iām at fault as well, because I endorsed this whole thing. The other guy is also guilty, because he didnāt communicate clearly to his boss what can be done and how much time it takes. And the boss and his bosses are guilty a lot, because theyāre all pushing for āAIā.
The end result is garbage software.
This particular project is still relatively small, so it might be okay at the moment. But normalizing this will yield nothing but garbage. And actually, especially if this small project works out fine, this contributes to the shittiness because management will interpret this as āhey, AI worksā, so they will keep asking for it in future projects.
How utterly frustrating. This is not what I want to do every day from now on.
@bender@twtxt.net So far so good š Iāll let you know how things go though!
@prologic@twtxt.net Oh, thatās cool! :-) Feeding magpies seems to be an Aussie thing, the Cutting Edge Engineering Australia videos usually also include a cute magpie feeding clip.
@bender@twtxt.net Off you go to the magpie hunt! We wanna see Florida pies!
Today, I experimented with Linux Capabilities as a continuation to my Unix Domain Sockets research from a few months ago: https://lyse.isobeef.org/caller-information-via-unix-domain-sockets/#capabilities
I learned that I donāt know hardly anything and there is heaps more to explore. Tomorrow, I will do the same in Go and see how that feels.
Now I feel the urge to go around looking for one of āmy ownā to share. š I love crows, ravens, magpies, all of them in the corvidae family.
@zvava@twtxt.net No HEAD requests, but regular GETs with If-Modified-Since request headers if possible: https://git.mills.io/yarnsocial/yarn/src/branch/main/internal/fetcher.go#L270
Okay, I give up. The āshopping listā app⢠on my phone broke for no reason whatsoever, there wasnāt even an update. Iām going back to pen and paper.
@thecanine@twtxt.net content warning please! I had to go home and change, if you catch my drift. LOL. Well done!
(#abcdefghijkl https://example.com/tw.txt#:~:text=2025-10-01T10:28:00Z), because it can be simply hacked in to clients currently on hashv1 and provides an off-ramp to location-based addressing
I like that property (an off-ramp to location-based addressing), so I think I could live with that approach. ā
(Iām not sure why weāre using text fragments, though. Wouldnāt that link to the first occurence of 2025-10-01T10:28:00Z? Thatās not necessarily correct. And, to be proper URLs that Firefox and Chromium understand, it would also need to be written as 2025%2D10%2D01T10:28:00Z. The dash carries meaning, sadly. I think all this just creates needless complication. How about we just go with https://example.com/tw.txt#2025-10-01T10:28:00Z?)
Cycling is fun in itself, but doing it to perform a task is extremely satisfying. It feels so good to load up the cargo rack with groceries, or to opt for a bicycle instead of a car to go visit a friend. Biking with a purpose makes my desire to live green feel much more tangible.
I think Iām just about ready to go live with my new blog (migrated from MicroPub). I just finished migrating all of the content over, fixing up metadata, cleaning up, migrating media, optimizing media.
The new blog for prologic.blog soon to be powered by zs using the zs-blog-template is coming along very nicely š It was actually pretty easy to do the migration/conversation in the end. The results are not to shabby either.
Before:
- ~50MB repo
- ~267 files
After:
- ~20MB repo
- ~88 files
Pretty happy with my zs-blog-template starter kit for creating and maintaining your own blog using zs š Demo of what the starter kit looks like here ā Basic features include:
- Clean layout & typography
- Chroma code highlighting (aligned to your site palette)
- Accessible copy-code button
- āOn this pageā collapsible TOC
- RSS, sitemap, robots
- Archives, tags, tag cloud
- Draft support (hidden from lists/feeds)
- Open Graph (OG) & Twitter card meta (default image + per-post overrides)
- Ready-to-use 404 page
As well as custom routes (redirects, rewrites, etc) to support canonical URLs or redirecting old URLs as well as new zs external command capability itself that now lets you do things like:
$ zs newpost
to help kick-start the creation of a new post with all the right āstuffā⢠ready to go and then pop open your $EEDITOR š¤
@bender@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de Thank you! Not sure what I end up putting in there, but Iām sure I will find some tools to go in. :-)
Yes, this was a flat piece of sheet metal. It went together like a cardboard box, just much slower and with timbers clamped down to get a straight folding line. I donāt have a sheet metal brake, so I just carefully hammered the piece bit by bit. Like in this video by the Sheet Metal Dude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYgEfWEMXk0
@prologic@twtxt.net No, this is a Linux manpage from the man-pages project: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/man/man7/ascii.7
I do have an idea whatās going on. Could be an unfortunate interaction between the table preprocessor tbl and the man macro package. š¤
Task for this weekend:
https://movq.de/v/b05a7ce782/vid-1758959332.mp4
When you call man ascii, you get this nice table, but thereās a weird vertical line at the bottom. That line is supposed to be a vertical rule and is supposed to go from the bottom of the table all the way to the top.
Letās see if I can debug this. (Not getting my hopes up at this point, but Iāll try.)
@movq@www.uninformativ.de See hereās the thing⦠I just donāt fucking gt this whole āleftā vs. ārightā shit⢠anymore. None of it makes any sense whatsoever. When my wife tries to explain it to me itās completely the opposite to what you just said just now š± ā So from here on, Iām just going to keep things simpleā nuttersā and ānormalā š¤£
@prologic@twtxt.net you doing this reminded me of mkws, and Adi. Good times, we have seeing so many people come and go. It is kind of sad, when I think about ājjlā, and Phil, and the many othersā¦
I am feeling āmushyā today. Ugh, ageing sucks.
@alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it Yeah I think weāre overstating the UNIX principles a bit here 𤣠I get what youāre trying to say though @zvava@twtxt.net š If I could go back in time and do it all over again, I would have gotten the Hash length correct and I would have used SHA-256 instead. But someone way smarter than me designed the Twt Hash spec, we adopted it and well here we are today, it works⢠š
Please donāt hate me today; Iām a bit grumpy and have too many reasons to be upset:
- 2 counts of pushing and trying to get the simplest things done at work (that for some reason are made more difficult than they should be)
- This whole Chat Control bullshit
- And some other person things going on that have been ongoing for 72 days and counting š¤¬
@zvava@twtxt.net Going to have to hard disagree here Iām 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) Iām sorry youāve completely lost me! Iām old enough to pre-date before Linux became popular, so Iām 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 āthingā⢠youāre replying to and forming a chain of other replies (a thread).
Iām 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 āMagic Dateā for which our clients use the modified function(s).
@alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it My problem is I donāt see a world where we donāt employ some form of cryptography to use as keys for threads in databases and other such things honestly. Iām not going to use url#timestamp as keys.
I just created a zs blogging template which Iām going to use for https://prologic.blog and I might starting writing long-form again soon⢠š So far the ābloggingā template/engine (if you weill) is quite simple. It comprises essentially of an index.md a prehook and a few utilities:
$ git ls-files
.gitignore
.zs/config.yml
.zs/editthispage
.zs/include
.zs/layout.html
.zs/list
.zs/months
.zs/now
.zs/onthispage
.zs/posthook
.zs/postsbymonth
.zs/prehook
.zs/scripts
.zs/styles
.zs/tagcloud
.zs/taglist
.zs/years
archives/.empty
assets/css/site.css
assets/js/main.js
index.md
posts/hello-zs-blog.md
posts/on-tagging.md
posts/second-post.md
tags/.empty
I was trying to say (badly):
Thatās kind of my position on this. If we are going to make significant changes in the threading model, letās keep content based addressing, but also improve the user experience. Answering your question, yes I think we can do some combination of both.
@movq@www.uninformativ.de better than in the US. Our lasts only 10 years, and you need to go through the vision test, and, of course, pay). Recently they added a little gold star denoting āreal IDā compliance, and we had to pay $10 to get the old one replacedāout of the regular renew āscheduleā.
In here it is all about control, and money.
@alexonit@twtxt.alessandrocutolo.it Yhays kind of love you!! Stance and position on this. If we are going to make chicken changes in the threading model, letās keep content based addressing, but also improve the use of experience. So in fact, in order to answer your question, I think yes, we can do some kind of combination of both.
I corrupted my SQLite test database with sed -i s/⦠$(find ā¦). Clearly, I found too many files. Thatās the signal to go to bed.
@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz nope, not normal. Something birdy (because why to use fishy all the time?!) is going on.
[2025/09/11 12:56:01.816] ā please set config.host when trying to run "bbycll". How to bypass that tiny hurdle?
Woot, thank you! Using a config.json like this:
{
"host": "localhost:31212",
"protocols": ["http"]
}
Indeed did the trick! I know it isnāt production ready, but I wanted to see with my own eyes, locally, how did it look. :-) I like where you are going! It is looking very nice, and polished. Canāt wait for an alpha, beta, and release!
I have a feeling that learning to play electric double bass through an amplifier was a big mistake.
At the core, this is an acoustic instrument. If you play it through an amp, you will instinctively only do the bare minimum to get some sound going, because the amp does the heavy lifting. But itās just not right.
This is a very physical instrument. It needs a lot of force and strength ā in comparison, an electric bass guitar is almost flimsy and delicate. I need to āfeelā whatās going on and thatās just not the case when using headphones.
I feel like I wasted ~3 years. 𫤠But maybe itāll get better from now on ā¦
Hmm, gnu.org is slow as heck. Shorter HTML pages load in about ten seconds. This complete AWK manual all in one large HTML page took a full minute: https://www.gnu.org/software/gawk/manual/gawk.html Is there maybe some anti AI shenanigans going on?
In any case, I find the user guide super interesting. My AWK skills are basically non-existent, so I finally decided to change that. This document is incredibly well written and makes it really fun to keep reading and learning. Iām very impressed. So far, I made it to section 1.6, happy to continue.