@movq enjoy your vacation! A nice read here: https://web.archive.org/web/20260603173839/https://www.theatlantic.com/philosophy/2026/06/no-artificial-intelligence-is-not-conscious/687378/, if you get bored. :-P

You know what this is?

https://movq.de/v/ef1674f6c5/bird-bird.webp

A BIRD bird! 😅

I got it as a gift from a very friendly coworker and she, in turn, got it from Maria Matějka. 😃

@bender Ugh, I don’t know. I’m having a long vacation now and I try not to think about this topic anymore. 🤣

@movq what are your thoughts after reading it?

Response by the author of rsync: https://medium.com/@tridge60/rsync-and-outrage-d9849599e5a0

@movq Yes.

Maybe management should replace itself with AI…

Okay. I have lost the “battle” against “AI” at work and I will no longer try to “fight” any of it.

It is simply what people want. They want to use it. And that’s the end of it.

And why do they want it? Because it makes their job easier. And why is that? In very large parts, it’s because we have accumulated a metric fuckton of technical debt due to decades long mismanagement. We were (and are) operating in “emergency mode” all the time. There simply was no time to clean things up or to rethink designs. We always have to go with the cheapest and quickest solution. We are never ahead of things: Earlier this year, I started an initiative and wanted to tackle some issue that I could see coming. I was shut down because this wasn’t “urgent”. Very soon after, this exact thing became that exact problem – but now, there was no time anymore to do it properly because NOW it’s urgent, so, once again, we had to go with a quick and dirty solution.

It’s always like that and I had brought it up again and again. And now we have a huge spaghetti mess that hardly anyone understands anymore.

Nobody – except AI. It can still make some sense of this and, obviously, this is useful to people.

So, any argument I make against AI is completely pointless to begin with. I’m such a fool for not having seen this earlier.

The last argument I made today was: “Look, we already have so much technical debt and spaghetti systems, we really, really must clean this up. If we throw AI on top of this now, it’ll only get so much worse.” And once more, I was shut down. My intentions were “admirable”, but “there’s no time for that”.

Okay. Good luck with that. They’ll keep doing it this way. At some point, it’ll either explode entirely and some poor soul has to clean it up, or it’ll explode and they’ll have no other choice but to throw everything away and start from scratch – assuming they can still afford that.

In other words, none of this about AI, really, nor caused by it. Our department’s massive spike in AI usage is just a symptom of the underlying management issues. And since those aren’t being addressed, nothing will change and this whole mess will only get worse.

(I blame all this on management, because, well, that’s who’s to blame. I do not have a solution for it, though – and assigning blame without constructive criticism always sucks big time. I don’t like doing this. If you had put me into that particular management position, I wouldn’t have been able to solve any of this. The thing is, though, I’m not an expert on management and it isn’t my job – I’m just the “princess” who solves your technical issues.)

@movq :-D

Years ago, I used Kate, no, not somebody’s wife, but the KDE Advanced Text Editor, to export source code files and fragments into HTML with syntax highlighting. I think that’s where I got the initial <b> idea from. There were also bucketloads of <span style='color:#644a9b;'> all over the place, even inside <b>. No CSS classes defined upfront, all colors inlined. The final rendering in the browser looked great, but the source code ugly as hell in my opinion. However, I’m thankful for hinting me at <b>. I think this kicked off everything. :-)

@movq It’s the “Lyse types the entire HTML by hand” generator. Yes, no kidding. I write articles so rarely, that I can do that once in a while. It’s fun to some degree, but also not.

After some time, I finally recorded some Vim macros to insert <b>…</b>, <var>…</var>, <span class=s>…</span> etc. around the tokens. This helped a little bit. But I was still questioning my mental state doing it like that. I also had to fix a bunch of the end tags by hand, because the word movement wasn’t enough or the end movement went too far. Quite the annoying process for sure.

But I think the HTML looks a wee bit nicer and is maybe even semantically a little bit better than having only <span>s everywhere. I find the <span class="whatever"> just soo awfully long. Of course, I never look at the code again, but knowing, that e.g. there is a <b> and it saves so many bytes in comparison, makes me happy. It is a more elegant solution in my opinion. Not by much, but better nonetheless. It’s a matter of simplicity. Admittedly, even I can’t avoid the <span>s alltogether. Oh well. On the other hand, I’m sure that this does not make any difference whatsoever. I bet, nobody and nothing, like a screenreader, analyzes the HTML for that, where this would be truly useful.

Oh! Maybe text browsers, though. It just occurred to me while composing this reply. :-) Haha, I lost my bet quickly. w3m picks up at least the <b> for keywords and builtin types, <u> for filenames and <i> for comments. Yey. No different styles for <var> and <mark>, unfortunately. elinks only renders the bold. It’s cool that I had the right intuition right from the beginning, despite being unable to pinpoint it. :-)

All the <span> hell with common syntax highlighters is a downer for me that keeps me from looking more into them. If I wrote more articles, I might rig something up with Pygments. At least that’s somehow positively connotated in my brain. Not sure if it actually deserves it, but I dealt with that in some loose form (can’t even remember) years and years ago. Apparently, it wasn’t too terrible.

To prepare the table of contents, I used grep and sed with some manual intervention in the end. The entire process can be improved. Absolutely.

You wrote your own site generator, didn’t you?

@movq Nice find!

@lyse By the way, which site generator are you using? I kind of miss having code blocks with syntax highlighting and that generic yellow highlighting thing is pretty cool, too.

@lyse lol, “garbo” 😅 Took me a moment. 🤣

@bender Hahaha! :-D

I woke up well ahead of my alarm. But fear not, I’m tired, too. :-)

@garbo What a story! :-D

@kiwu I like your enthusiasm. Go, go, go! :-)

@bender Hahaha! :-D

Holy moly, these thunderstorm clouds are blacker than black, wow! The rain smells so wonderful. Yummy!

@bender That certainly sounds much better in English, yeah. 😅

@movq hahahahaha! I’d say “Princess Grim Reaper” is more suiting. 😂

@bender It started out as me calling myself “Princess Valium” because I’m so tired and braindead today, but then someone misheard that because a garbage truck drove by, and, so … one thing lead to another. 🤪 Sadly, it kind of fits, because I’m often the one who cleans up shit. 😬

@bender LOL 😂

@movq but why? Are they that mean?! 😅

@kiwu welcome, new slave! Err, I meant, beloved employee! 😅

@prologic I do! I paginate usually 10 times on HN. Their algo is so messed up (but it works, I guess) that not doing that will make me miss a lot of good, interesting, things.

I join the tired masses. So tired, I slept through my alarm this morning (something that hasn’t happened for over 20 years, easily), and wife woke me up asking “Aren’t you going to work today?” So yeah, I could have slept for a while more this morning, for sure.

Same here, but my own fault

@kiwu In-cred-ib-ly tired. 😂

Nobody ever does 🤣

Go get ‘em! 🙌

Nice work! Threading + mentions is where it gets fun 😅 Ping me if anything in the spec is unclear 👌

Aha, my nickname at work now appears to be “Princess Garbage Disposal” (“Prinzessin Müllabfuhr”). 🤦‍♀️ 🥴

Das neue Album von Boards of Canada “Inferno” gefällt mir wirklich sehr!!1elf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mD2dZDmZQt0

@prologic @bender Thanks! Yeah, it already supports Twt Hash via twtxt-lib (both v1 and v2, when the time is right), plus most of the other features (multiline, user-agent, and metadata), and I’m working on (re-)implementing threading, mentions, and hash filtering (to make conversations easier to follow).

Here’s a current snapshot of my local version, in case anyone is interested:

https://itsericwoodward.com/images/dda03946.png

how r y’all doing?

@lyse im sure my job will be better then the hell school put me through, im ready for it!!

That reminds me, I need to update yarnd too. I haven’t done so yet 😅 Been so bloody busy with work 🥵

@lyse LOL. Always ahead of times! Lyse, the man from the future! Sic mvndvs creatvs est!

I was wondering why all the twt hashes in my replies today were still so short. I was ahead of the times. The Twt Hash v2 Epoch only begins next month.

@itsericwoordward Haven’t noticed anything either. These request numbers are well below some other software. :-)

It’s not that much traffic, of course. One hit per second on average. (Plus the images.) The nasty bots are much worse. 😅

We’re at close to 20k hits now, but it has slowed down considerably. Nobody cares about page 2. 😅

@movq Interesting read! The current state is already a very great achievement. I felt honored being able to already have followed your development along here on twtxt. :-)

That’s a cool clock, I should remind myself of my working time, too.

@bender The good thing is that it’s already pretty battle-tested. 😅 There was this dumpster fire a few years back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31114554 This was on their front page for quite a while, just look at the number of comments … 😂

@prologic woot! 🎉🎉🎉

Yay finally fixed some of those annoying “Mark as Read” behaviours/bugs 🐞

@bender Yes, but I consider this to be a flaw in the human species. Think about it, what good does it serve? What possible reason do we have to have such traits today? Survival of the fitness? pffft 😅

@movq LOL. At least now you know your infrastructure and web server can handle some traffic. Consider it a test, in addition to the fleeting recognition. 🤣

@prologic that possible in any profession. Contrary to what @prologic’s think, I don’t think it is a human weakness. That some people are absolute and despicable assholes? Yep, I agree on that.

@rrraksamam No 🤣 I think it’s a human weakness, someone born in the genes of some 🤔