lyse @lyse.isobeef.org
 (18h ago)

Hmmm, looks like my twt hash algorithm implementation calculates incorrect values. Might be the tilde in the URL that throws something off. :-? At least yarnd and jenny agree on a different hash.

#3neip4q
lyse @lyse.isobeef.org
 (18h ago)

(#uhwlufa) @bender@twtxt.net Hmm, didn’t find anything. But you mean a giant bucketload of access_log /home/$USER/logs/access.log if=… where the condition matches the requested path for said user? Yeah, that gets annoying very quickly. :-D

#2md27jq
movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (21h ago)

(#sxlpyva) This looks like a botnet, to be honest. The IPs are all over the place. Ethopia, Brazil, Kenya, Lebanon, Netherlands, … I mean, that’s the logical thing to do, isn’t it? Do your web crawling on infected PCs. Nobody will block those, because those are the same IP ranges as legitimate requests. And obviously you don’t have to pay for computing time.

… and they all send invalid HTTP requests, all answered with HTTP 400 … How silly.

#7xy3lea
lyse @lyse.isobeef.org
 (1d ago)

(#dnzwh6a) @bender@twtxt.net Sounds about right.

I had a brainfart yesterday, though. For whatever reason I thought of subdomains, which are modeled with server entries in nginx. So, each could define its own access_log location. However, there are no subdomains in place! Searching around, I didn’t find any solution to give each user their own access log file.

One way would be a cronjob, aeh, systemd timer as I learned the other day, that greps the main access log and writes all user access log files with only the relevant stuff.

#wsnbmea
movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (1d ago)

My goodness, a new level of stupidity.

The bots are now doing things like this:

GET http://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/feednotify/datenstrahler/slinp/countty HTTP/1.1
  1. That URL does not exist.
  2. By including http://uninformativ.de in that request, this instructs the webserver to do an HTTP proxy request. Of course, this isn’t allowed on my webserver (and shouldn’t by allowed on any normal webserver), resulting in HTTP 400. And even if it were, the target would be the exact same server, making a proxy request unnecessary.

And of course, it’s not just 50 hits like this or 100 or 1’000 or 10’000. No, it’s over 150’000 in the last 2 days. All from vastly different IP ranges of different cloud hosters.

This almost looks like a DDoS attack, but it’s just completely stupid. This feels more like some idiot vibe coded a crawler.

#sxlpyva
movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (1d ago)

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.

#cm5yyoq
lyse @lyse.isobeef.org
 (2d ago)

(#onzfgpa) @bender@twtxt.net Hahaha! :-D But I actually do like their approach. I don’t know what staff should do differently when they are not involved in the channel topic. At least in the general case. Maybe in this specific scenario here they could have cross-checked domains, git repos and stuff like that. But I also reckon that it’s only fair if they treat everybody the same.

#75mxpaq
lyse @lyse.isobeef.org
 (2d ago)

(#ulrmviq) @movq@www.uninformativ.de Wow, that’s a hell lot of food! If it doesn’t spoil, it’s easily enough for the rest of your life and all your neighbors and surrounding cities, probably more. :-D

That’s a great font. I like it. It just suits the print style incredibly well. No offence, to the absolute contrary, I would not have thought that you actually designed that. It looks just so right. Hats off! :-)

#743bw5a
lyse @lyse.isobeef.org
 (2d ago)

(#wswlm2q) @movq@www.uninformativ.de Have we reached peak enshittification yet?

YouTube is completely broken for me for a week or more. The player doesn’t even load anymore. Trying to limit the search results to real videos doesn’t do shit, etc. It’s useless. But downloading the videos with yt-dlp still works like a dream.

#y4qrjra
lyse @lyse.isobeef.org
 (2d ago)

(#bwrwbdq) @movq@www.uninformativ.de Actually, @threatcat@tilde.club popped up in my own access log first. That’s how I discovered the feed. :-) So I figured that this feed author actually sees my reply. The hope is that with the next mention of my feed in threatcat’s feed, the other tilde users, who are following threatcat, are then also informed of my existence. :-)

I don’t know how tilde.club is set up. But it should be relatively easy to give all users access to their nginx access logs. Not sure if somebody already requested that or not. But I’d encourage tilde users to ask for that. Maybe also just for twtxt.txt and/or in a custom, reduced log format.

#ov6wvwq
movq @www.uninformativ.de
 (2d ago)

Android shopping list apps disappointed me too many times, so I went back to writing these lists by hand a while ago.

Here’s what’s more fun: Write them in Vim and then print them on the dotmatrix printer. 🥳

And, because I can, I use my own font for that, i.e. ImageMagick renders an image file and then a little tool converts that to ESC/P so I can dump it to /dev/usb/lp0.

(I have so much scrap paper from mail spam lying around that I don’t feel too bad about this. All these sheets would go straight to the bin otherwise.)

#ulrmviq
prologic @twtxt.net
 (4d ago)

Thank you for the encouragement and love and kind words, @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @movq@www.uninformativ.de @bender@twtxt.net @doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt and others along the way I’m not sure of their feed uris 💕 I’ll keep at it, but for the time being I will keep my distance, mostly off IRC, because I don’t have the energy to spare in that kind of engagement (what//if the worst happens, it’s so draining). I need to remember what I ever did any of this for, it was back in ~2020 and I wanted really to build small interconnected communities that any non “tech savvy” person (more or less) could also benefit from ane enjoy. Even if there are aspects of the specs we’ve built/extended over time that aren’t “perfect”™, they’re “good enough”™ that they’ve last 5+ years (I believe this is 6 years running now). I want to spend a bit of time going back to why I did any of this in the the first place, and get a little micro-SaaS offering going (barely covering running costs) so encourage more folks to run pods, and thus twtxt feeds and grow the community ever so slightly. Other than that, I plan to get the specs “in order” to a point (with @movq@www.uninformativ.de and @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org’s help) where I hope they’ll stand the test of time – like SMTP.

Thank you all ! 🙏

#ixmovba