China Mandates 50% Domestic Equipment Rule For Chipmakers
China is quietly mandating that chipmakers use at least 50% domestically made equipment when expanding capacity, “as Beijing pushes to build a self-sufficient semiconductor supply chain,” according to Reuters. From the report: The rule is not publicly documented, but chipmakers seeking state approval to build or expand their plants have been told by authorities in re … ⌘ Read more

It Took 6+ Years For Linux’s “New” Mount API To Be Properly Documented In Man Pages
In demonstrating one of the gaps of man pages in modern times and likely having hindered the adoption of the Linux kernel’s new mount API, it took more than six years for those system calls to be properly documented within man pages. The Linux “new” mount API was introduced back in mid-2019 with Linux 5.2 and since supported by key file-systems after several years but not until weeks ago was this file descriptor based mount API sco … ⌘ Read more

Gmail Users May Soon Be Able To Change Their Email Address and Keep the Old One
Google appears to be testing a feature that would let users change their @gmail.com address for the first time, according to an official support document. The support page exists only in Hindi, suggesting an India-first rollout, and Google notes that users will “gradually begin to see this option.”

The feature would l … ⌘ Read more

Some of DOJ’s Careful Redactions Can Be Defeated With Copy-Paste
The Justice Department justified its delayed release of sensitive files by citing the need to carefully redact information that could identify victims, but at least some of those redactions have proven to be technically ineffective and can be bypassed by simply copying and pasting the blacked-out text into a new document.

A 2022 complaint filed b … ⌘ Read more

What Rules Govern Hallmark Christmas Movies?
Hallmark has released more than 300 Christmas-themed TV movies since 2000, and a detailed internal rulebook obtained by film data analyst Stephen Follows explains how the company manages to produce nearly one new holiday film per week during the final quarter of each year without the whole operation collapsing into creative chaos.

The document, referred to as Hallmark’s “bible … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Yeah, well, given that I didn’t need this for such a long time, it’s probably not an essential tool. 😅

I’ve often wanted to have an outline of text documents, though, and tagbar/ctags can do that as well:

https://movq.de/v/3c6d1a13d6/tagbar-md.png

https://movq.de/v/abc58e6d66/tagbar-latex.png

This isn’t as powerful as the “Navigator” tool in StarOffice/LibreOffice (which can be used to rearrange the document), but still pretty useful:

https://www.uninformativ.de/blog/postings/2024-05-23/0/so31.mp4

Mark Carney Criticised For Using British Spellings In Canadian Documents
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Mark Carney says that amid a fundamental shift to the nature of globalization, his government will catalyze the growth in both the public and private sector. But Canadian linguists say that’s a problem. Language experts have called out the Canadian prime minister’s growing “ut … ⌘ Read more

US judge clears release of grand jury documents against Ghislaine Maxwell
The judge granted the Justice Department’s request under a new law requiring the release of files related to Jeffery Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. ⌘ Read more

New US security strategy aligns with Russia’s vision, Moscow says
The Kremlin welcomes the starkly worded document, which does not cast Russia as a threat to the US. ⌘ Read more

New US Security Strategy aligns with Russia’s vision, Moscow says
The Kremlin welcomes the starkly worded document, which does not cast Russia as a threat to the US. ⌘ Read more

Trump’s new security strategy warns Europe faces ‘civilisational erasure’
The Trump administration releases a document saying its goal is to “help Europe correct its current trajectory”, adding that it faces “civilisational erasure” due in part to “mass migration”. ⌘ Read more

‘Cheating’ Malaysia slammed by FIFA over passports for footballers
A soccer players’ union says seven South American and European members of the Malaysian national team suspended over allegedly forged documents are “victims”. ⌘ Read more

Will a controversial water plan lead to ‘bad years’ for Roper River barra?
Documents obtained under Freedom of Information laws have revealed planned water extraction from the aquifer that feeds the Northern Territory’s Roper River could lead to “bad years” for its fish populations. ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net yeah, I’ve been reading through the documentation last night and it felt overwhelming for a minute… +1 point goes to GTS’s docs. but hey, I’ll be taking the easy route: podman-compose up -d they provide both a container image and an example compose file in a separate git repo but I’m wondering why that is not mentioned anywhere in the docs, (unless it is and I haven’t seen it yet)

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com good luck with that! Their installation requirements, and install document in general give me headache. While on the contemplating topic, I too am contemplating shutting down my ActivityPub altogether. No GoToSocial, no nothing. I am mostly a lurker, so will not miss it much.

**Previously unseen images of Epstein’s island released **
The new images come as a deadline for the broader release of documents held by the US government looms. ⌘ Read more

Secret audit reveals how big travel companies can overcharge clients
The document, prepared for the Queensland government, has been exclusively obtained by the ABC. ⌘ Read more

What would it be like to visit the proposed Hobart stadium?
From potential gridlock to an “immersive” viewing experience, let’s set aside the politics — just for a moment — and look at what planning documents tell us about the building at the heart of Tasmania’s fiery stadium debate. ⌘ Read more

Violent Conflict Over Water Hit a Record Last Year
Researchers at the Pacific Institute documented 420 water-related conflicts globally in 2024, a record that far surpasses the 355 incidents logged in 2023 and continues a trend that has seen such violence more than quadruple over the past five years. The Oakland-based water think tank’s database tracks disputes where water triggered violence, where water systems were target … ⌘ Read more

SA woman suffered permanent brain injury after hospital failed to diagnose stroke, court hears
An Adelaide woman is suing a southern suburbs hospital for $1.5 million in damages alleging she suffered a “permanent neurological injury” when doctors failed to diagnose her with a stroke, court documents reveal. ⌘ Read more

Steady rise in occupational violence incidents at Canberra’s hospitals
They were treated as “heroes and angels” during the pandemic years, but the number of occupational violence incidents against healthcare workers and staff working in Canberra’s Health Services is steadily increasing, new documents reveal. ⌘ Read more

Family sues Geelong Hospital over alleged medical negligence
Court documents allege the hospital breached its duty of care while caring for Port Fairy woman Jennifer Buchanan. ⌘ Read more

GoBlog not only has a new README file on the repository (replacing the old, cluttered, incomplete documentation) but also has a new share button implementation. No more relying on third-party services for that basic functionality! ⌘ 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/

Amazon Cut Thousands of Engineers in Its Record Layoffs, Despite Saying It Needs To Innovate Faster
Amazon’s 14,000-plus layoffs announced last month touched almost every piece of the company’s sprawling business, from cloud computing and devices to advertising, retail and grocery stores. But one job category bore the brunt of cuts more than others: engineers. CNBC: Documents filed … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Open-Sources Classic Text Adventure Zork Trilogy
Microsoft has released the source code for Zork I, II, and III under the MIT License through a collaboration with Team Xbox and Activision that involved submitting pull requests to historical source repositories maintained by digital archivist Jason Scott. Each repository now includes the original source code and accompanying documentation.

The games arrive … ⌘ Read more

GCC 16 Compiler Now Ready For AVX10.2 & APX With Intel Nova Lake
Intel’s ISA documentation was updated last week to confirm Nova Lake processors will support AVX10.2 and APX extensions after they were not officially acknowledged in prior versions of the spec and the initial open-source compiler enablement with -march=novalake also left them without those prominent ISA capabilities. Following that documentation update, a few days ago LLVM Clang updated their Nova Lake compiler support for the new ISA capabilit … ⌘ Read more

When I find out the documentation was last updated before I joined ⌘ Read more

Is Video Watching Bad for Kids? The Effect of Video Watching on Children’s Skills
Abstract of a paper on NBER: This paper documents video consumption among school-aged children in the U.S. and explores its impact on human capital development. Video watching is common across all segments of society, yet surprisingly little is known about its developmental consequences. With a bunching identificat … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I think I now remember having similar problems back then. I’m pretty sure I typically consulted the Qt C++ documentation and only very rarely looked at the Python one. It was easy enough to translate the C++ code to Python.

Yeah, the GIL can be problematic at times. I’m glad it wasn’t an issue for my application.

UC San Diego Reports ‘Steep Decline’ in Student Academic Preparation
The University of California, San Diego has documented a steep decline in the academic preparation of its entering freshmen over the past five years, according to a report [PDF] released this month by the campus’s Senate-Administration Working Group on Admissions. Between 2020 and 2025, the number of students whose math skills fall below … ⌘ Read more

Spot the difference: Leaked WA gas report changed before it was tabled in parliament
The report was tabled in parliament on Tuesday afternoon after the draft version, meant to be a confidential cabinet document, was leaked. But there are notable changes. ⌘ Read more

I used Gemini (the Google AI) twice at work today, asking about Google Workspace configuration and Google Cloud CLI usage (because we use those a lot). You’d think that it’d be well-suited for those topics. It answered very confidently, yet completely wrong. Just wrong. Made-up CLI arguments, whatever. It took me a while to notice, though, because it’s so convincing and, well, you implicitly and subconsciously trust the results of the Google AI when asking about Google topics, don’t you?

Will it get better over time? Maybe. But what I really want is this:

• Good, well-structured, easy-to-read, proper documentation. Google isn’t doing too bad in this regard, actually, it’s just that they have so much stuff that it’s hard to find what you’re looking for. Hence …
  
• … I want a good search function. Just give me a good fuzzy search for your docs. That’s it.
  

I just don’t have the time or energy to constantly second-guess this stuff. Give me something reliable. Something that is designed to do the right thing, not toy around with probabilities. “AI for everything” is just the wrong approach.

Up-to-date documentation you can talk to, for every repo in the world
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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

Japanese Volunteer Translators Quit After Mozilla Begins Using Translation Bot
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from Linuxiac:

The Japanese branch of Mozilla’s Support Mozilla (SUMO) community — responsible for localizing and maintaining Japanese-language support documentation for Firefox and other Mozilla products (consisting of Japanese native speakers) — has officially dis … ⌘ Read more

States Seek Extension of Ecommerce Tariff Moratorium at WTO
An anonymous reader shares a report: A group of states is seeking to extend a World Trade Organization agreement to refrain from placing customs duties on digital transmissions, a World Trade Organization document showed on Thursday. The proposal submitted by Barbados on behalf of a group of African, Caribbean and Pacific states proposed to extend the current m … ⌘ 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. 😂

Mark Zuckerberg Opened an Illegal School At His Palo Alto Compound. His Neighbor Revolted
Mark Zuckerberg opened an unlicensed school named after the family’s pet chicken – and it was the final straw for his neighbors, writes Slashdot reader joshuark, citing a report from Wired. The magazine obtained 1,665 pages of documents about the neighborhood dispute – “including 311 records, leg … ⌘ Read more

BuildXL Sandboxing
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YouTube Erased More Than 700 Videos Documenting Israeli Human Rights Violations
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Exxon funded thinktanks to spread climate denial in Latin America, documents reveal ⌘ Read more

How to Get Meaningful Feedback on Your Design Document
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China intimidated UK university to ditch human rights research, documents show ⌘ Read more

Security Doesn’t Have to Hurt
Do you ever wish security would stop blocking the tools you need to do your job? Surprise: your security team wants the same. There you are, just trying to get your work done, when… You need an AI to translate documentation, but all the AI services are blocked by a security web monitoring tool. You… ⌘ Read more

Advanced Documentation Retrieval on FreeBSD
I thought it might be nice to repost this considering the date.

When I originally wrote this I was planning an interview with Michael W. Lucas and at some point “leaked” this draft article to him. After about a day I got the email equivalent of a spit take and a ton of laughter.

Enjoy!

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@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 didn’t 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 I’ve 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 won’t succeed. I simply couldn’t 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. It’s 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 weren’t 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 don’t have to check the large matrix on the projector. But the project died there.

Here’s 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.

CRDT Documents in Redis with Automerge
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The Apple Compact Unwinding Format: Documented and Explained - Faultlore
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Document Forgery
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