oops typo tagging @sxb@tilde.club

i’m aging … before my very eyes

@xsb oh no … I’m in a normal brightness room, not quite direct blinding daytime, and light theme looks good

dark mode forevah!

catppuccin latte was great for that. the muttrc color file i found on github, not so much

weird thing: i’m open to light themes now. partly maybe aging eyes, but for sure bc my last home office was so sunny

anyway, i just tried catppuccin in mutt, and didn’t like itas much. and that’s what i prefer on my laptop term

s/but/and/ – though loyal already implies unquestioning

after years of loyal but unquestioning solarized usage, dracula theme feels so good

stoked to have cobbled together a mutt config that feels mostly-right

ngl, little relieved that while reading computer things instead of going out for a quick push on my skateboard, it must have rained briefly

(#5dyjtqa) @movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah ! 👍 I’m trying to build my first micro-SaaS and get more lay-people to protect their own inboxes and identify 🤣 – Hopefully it all works out 💪

(#o67gqfa) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org It’s possible to run the validator locally (my blog generator scripts do that):

https://validator.w3.org/nu/about.html

That way you don’t forget. 🥳

(#5dyjtqa) @prologic@twtxt.net FWIW, I love the idea and I do the same with my email domains. It’s the most effective way to fight spam, IMO. 🥳

(#mok2vtq) Double congrats, @thecanine@twtxt.net! \o/

I’m not a fan of the gemtext limits. This being only a single page (which probably doesn’t get updated a whole lot), the efforts of having two dedicates files are not all that big, or so I’d at least naively imagine.

I always recommend checking the W3C validator results, even though I’m very guilty of not doing that myself. It just doesn’t occur to me in the heat of the moment. I reckon if I were writing HTML on a more regular basis, I would pick up on making that a real habit. Anyway, your HTML being generated, you probably can’t address the findings, though. So, might not be even worth the time heading over to the validator.

From a privacy point of view, personally, I would definitely host the CSS myself. Other than that, nice link collection. :-)

I just successfully used my own SnipMail service with a real business, whoohoo! 🥳

(#vzc3qtq) @eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club I’ll make a release this weekend (today)

(#vzc3qtq) Also welcome back 😆

(#vzc3qtq) @eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club What version are you running btw? It’s probably time you upgraded and time I released a new version finally 😂 If you’re running a version that’s pre-SQLite-cache, then yeah I’m not surprised. The SQLite cache version is honestly much better 🤣

Replacement wifi adapter for my main laptop arrived today…5 days early!

(#es2jiwq) @prologic@twtxt.net He’ll be probably back in a few days or weeks I reckon. It’s not the first time that his raspi (or what hardware does he use again?) is down. :-)

(#s62fiaa) @bender@twtxt.net All good. ✌️ It’s just that I’ve been through several iterations of this (on other platforms), AI output back and forth, pointing out what’s wrong, but in the end people were just trolling (not saying that’s what you had in mind), because apparently that’s “fun”.

(#oa65m7q) Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I’m going to bed, but I’ll have a closer read/think tomorrow 🤞

(#oa65m7q) @movq@www.uninformativ.de It’s formatted just fine 🤟

(#oa65m7q) This is formatted poorly on twtxt.net, so here’s a plain text file: https://movq.de/v/971c5a125d/wall-of-text.txt

(#f4xwmia) … and now I just read @bender@twtxt.net’s other post that said the Gemini text was a shortened version, so I might have criticized things that weren’t true for the full version. Okay, sorry, I’m out. (And I won’t play that game, either. Don’t send me another AI output, possibly tweaked to address my criticism. That is besides the point and not worth my time.)

(#f4xwmia) @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.

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 “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.

Skill Erosion vs. Skill Evolution

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.

3. The Technical and Legal Perspective (Scraping and Copyright)

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.)

tl;dr

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?

Never again

This took so much of my time. I won’t do this again. 😂

(#dmis2va) @bender@twtxt.net We could – It’s just never became “strong enough”™ of a demand that I ever extended the possibility of supporting other mime types.

(#wmnfghq) @bender@twtxt.net Same I only have one registrar too (OnlyDomains).

(#wmnfghq) @bender@twtxt.net It’s not even available on my registrar anyway 🤣

(#wmnfghq) @bender@twtxt.net Makes me wonder whether somethingarather.zip is a good primary domain for the service I’m building? 🤔

(#wmnfghq) @bender@twtxt.net I think that’s where it sends the capture verification requests. It’s based on PoW, so it has to perform validation somehow. It actually looks pretty decent as far as a way to prevent spam/abuse of forms on the open web (e.g: Waitlist on SnipMail).

Thoughts/Opinions on Cap 🤔

The modern, open-source CAPTCHA

Lightweight, self-hosted, privacy-friendly, and designed to put you first. Switch from reCAPTCHA in minutes.

(#f4xwmia) You do raise very good points though, but I don’t think any of this is particularly new because there are many other examples of technology and evolution of change over time where people have forgotten certain skills like for example, changing a car tyre

(#f4xwmia) @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.net’s 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 👂

hi @lafe@tilde.club and thank you!

(#34cy36q) What is this about? I don’t run my Gopher proxy anymore 😅

hello, @threatcat@tilde.club!

(#kspztjq) @bender@twtxt.net It’s sad. Remember that Munich once ran the LiMux project. 😞

We could build a strong IT sector in Germany or the EU, but we just don’t want to.

(#34cy36q) @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @bender@twtxt.net I’m not very knowledgable regarding the two points you mentioned, hence I didn’t include them in my list. But, yeah, from what I’ve heard, it doesn’t look good.

hello, @threatcat !

helooooooo @sxb@tilde.club!

Just testing out twtxt!

Props to him on nailing messaging tho. Essential activist skill, and he’s crushing it

ENSHITTIFICATION the book I guess lays out a framework, but the references are all his own covered territory

Kinda hit a wall w/ messaging tho. In the last few months I read INTERNET CON and CHOKEPOINT CAPITALISM, and listened to the CBC podcast

OK, glad I made the drive. Seeing Doctorow speak with the same speed + enthusiasm you hear on his audiobooks + interviews is pretty cool

(#5i5mhvq) Hmm anyone got a contact detail for Andrew? @eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club – The emails/contacts I have have all bounced 😭

(#tfdxx6q) @bender@twtxt.net Hmm anyone got a contact detail for Andrew? @eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club – The emails/contacts I have have all bounced 😭

(#5i5mhvq) @aelaraji@aelaraji.com I’ll poke @eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club