Trying a new laptop setup in the living room.

I am trying to use the #XMPP client profanity with the XMPP server prosody. It works, but not with OMEMO. When I run /omemo gen it seems to work and a few seconds it starts spewing the following message three to four times per second: 'Could not find own OMEMO device ID. Going to publish own device ID: 1579300267' ... what am I doing wrong? At the beginning I noticed a tiny message saying that PUBSUB was not available (and inded I don't have it configured). Is that my problem?

This is the programming future I dread, with stats to show slop since 2026-07-01:

"Almost every popular language is now substantially developed using LLMs. Particularly notable are C# and Ruby (both approximately one third of recent commits) and Julia (over half!). The languages that stand out in retaining their humanity are Chicken Scheme, Perl, Lua, Clojure, and – perhaps surprisingly for a project so closely associated with Oracle, a company who have gone all-in on hyperscale data centres and “AI” in everything – Java."
All our houses are built on sand now, by @threedaymonk

Was für ein Gruselkabinett: Die Rechtsextremen und ihre Steigbügelhalter. Ein lange Aufzählung der Leute hinter der AfD- und der BSW-Fraktion in Sachsen-Anhalt samt den unschönen Dingen, die man so weiss. Gestalten, mit denen ich nichts zu tun haben wollte. Brrr!

Remember that we treat script kiddies like criminals who break into computer systems with the help of tools, even if they don't understand what they are doing or the damage they are causing. We should be treating the people running AI "agents" the same way. It's a tool. They're using it to damage other people's computer systems. That seems pretty easy for me to understand.

I am thoroughly enjoying the podcast by Baldur Bjarnason, specially that episode where he talks about the importance of long form video. If I see a short video, I can be enthusiastic about it and agree wholeheartedly with the presenter and I still cannot reproduce the argument made. The long form video (or podcast) is more at the speed of arguments rather than flashes of imagery and faces. I feel like I can reproduce the argument, like I just did. 😄

Out of the Software Crisis
by @baldur
“from wherever you get your podcasts from”

How to block a domain that you haven’t interacted with as a regular fedi user: visit the site, right click on the date of an offending post from the public timeline and copy the link. Then, on your instance, search for this link. It imports the offending post into your server and now you can block the user or the domain. Sadly, it also puts the offending post into the public timeline of your server.

How to fediblock on a single-user GoToSocial instance: I visit settings and do it via the admin panel to protect my bot accounts as well.

Don’t be the smug strangers saying “why are you surprised?” Think it and move on. As a written reply on fedi, it makes you sound like a cynical know-it-all and nobody likes to have such people in their replies.

This reminder due to seeing somebody having to ask their readers to stop doing it. This is not the first time I’m seeing it.

I collected some more fedi etiquette on this post:
https://alexschroeder.ch/view/etiquette

First fedi block for me: nicecrew.digital domain. One look at the public timeline convinced me that reporting wasn’t going to help.

What I learned when my wife had major surgery was that the people who haven’t had major surgery (or grave illness) have no idea. And once you’ve been there, there’s like an underworld of people in the know with whom a conversation about the fears and complications is easy. Suddenly I realised how most people (and us included) had been living in a fairy tale without knowing. Those who have been affected experience such a wall of not understanding that they keep to themselves. The effect is that the affected shield the clueless and so the divide is perpetuated.

The result is – hopefully – that I try not to take anything for granted, and that I try not to presume much about the people I meet. A lot of baggage is invisible.

If you don’t know about it perhaps people aren’t telling you. Enjoy youth and health while you can!

It's a shame to find that HTML 2.0 was documented as an RFC and later versions were not. Specially when you're sitting at an airport and you'd prefer to be offline.

I made a new release of Oddμ, also known as Odmu.

To me, wiki is brutalism in content management. It’s the simplest, most bare-bones way to write hypertext that I can think of: visit a page, click the edit link, there’s the text, there’s where you put the words, save, and – bam! – it’s live. Oddmu is like that. Whether you use the wiki as a blog, a micro-blog, a digital garden, a memex, a Zettelkasten or as a collaborative wiki is up to you. It can also be a static site generator or an Obsidian replacement, if your needs are simple.

Oddmu now uses a SQLite database. The database tracks the following:

• the pages, so that SQLite’s full text search can be used;
• the hashtags, so that these no longer require all the data to be in memory;
• the image descriptions, so that the alt texts can be highlighted separately;
• the links, so that backlinks are easy to compute.

Restarting it rebuilds the database but of course I also hope that there’s nothing to corrupt the database in the first place.

#Oddμ

Sometimes I wonder: if my wiki has no features except editing Markdown pages, is it “an alternative to Obsidian”? 🤔 I mean, if 100% feature parity were required, then the question is meaningless. So at what level is it recognisably an alternative to Obsidian?

This is disappointing. The Ljubljana botanical garden writes: “Tiny flies called biting midges that inhabit the damp, shady rainforest are the only pollinator able to navigate the complex cacao flower.”

I cannot in good conscience eliminate chocolate from this world.

We are in Kranjska Gora. It looks a lot like Switzerland. Slivovi cmokhi are plum dumplings. I like it, here.

I maintain a feed aggregator that is used to generate a static web site. That is, you subscribe to some feeds and run my program to download the feeds and generate a HTML file.

Typically, if all the feeds are on a certain topic, this is called a "planet". I also maintain such a planet for role-playing games: RPG Planet. If you use it for a bunch of blogs you're interested in, you could call it a blog roll. I have one of these as well, although it's badly maintained: Blogs.

As you can tell, these sites look a bit weird. This is on purpose:

New items appear at the top and old items disappear at the bottom. When it’s gone, it’s gone. There is no count of unread items. The goal is to fight the fear of missing out (FOMO).

Each item looks similar to every other: headline, link, an extract, maybe a date and an author. Extracts contain but the beginning of the article’s text; all markup is removed; no images. The goal is to make the page easy to skim. Scroll down until you find something interesting and follow the link to the original article if you want to read it.

I like this a lot.

The question is, however, where to get the subscription list from. I edit the OPML files by hand. If you visit the two sites linked above, you'll find a link to the files in case you want to import them all into your preferred feed reader. I don't recommend this, however. Whenever I have tried it, I have been overwhelmed and ended up deleting them all again. This is one of the reasons my personal subscription list is so badly maintained.

Recently, however, I learned about the human.json project by @contact from @ploum@mamot.fr. This is a file you can add to your website. The idea is that you do this if you are a human and you "vouch" for other humans by linking to them. If you do this, and you install the browser extension, sites "in your network" of humans get a kind of semaphore light:

🟢 Green — directly trusted or 1 hop away
🟡 Yellow — 2 hops
🟠 Orange — 3+ hops
🔵 Blue — has human.json but not in your trust graph yet
⚪ Gray — not participating

Of course there are questions. Scammers will put up such files, eventually. But the web of trust is there and I like that.

And here's what I did today: I added a feature to my program so that you can point it to a site like your own and it will traverse the graph for up to 2 hops (the first two items on the list above) and check if there's a feed to be found. If so, the feed is written to an OPML file.

And now you can use the OPML file to subscribe to all your friends (1 hop) and friends of friends (2 hops). And you can do that for a community of web nerds and run a "planet" based on this friend of a friend system.

I think it's neat.

Of course it's not for everybody. There's a reason FOAF didn't go anywhere. That was a way to note who your friends were. Listing your friends is a bit cringe. Listing your friends is also doxxing yourself. It makes you an easy victim of network analysis. This can be troublesome if you're an activist. Look around. The surveillance bros of the entire world are waiting to gobble up this information. But if you're using the fediverse you're already following people. If you have a public blogroll, you're already announcing to the world a part of your network is. You're already dancing like nobody is watching. Fuck the surveillance bros! Awoooooo!

Anyway. The program I maintain is called Planet Jupiter :jupiter: and it stands in the tradition of software such as Planet Venus, Planet Pluto and others. This one is mine and it's written in Perl. 😅

Today I learned via WEBMASTER@ a manifesto for everyone by @brennan that the first webmaster was Stanford librarian Louise Addis. The PDF also has screenshots of what the oldest web used to look like. With "line mode browsers" and telling people how to click links to download documents, and setting DISPLAY environment variables for X11 to work. Amazing.

Holy cow, what happened? I idly wondered why I hadn't heard from the AI scraper bots in a while. Apparently they went away? Or they're busy getting garbage?
#ButlerianJihad

The feeling when you're peeling stuff with a knife (in this case, me peeling ginger) and looking at your finger, thinking that safety is important and perhaps I shouldn't be cutting towards my finger (and you know where this is going, content warning: tiny self harm ahead!) and you think of something else for three seconds and cut your finger.

I always try to remind myself that if I have a tiny voice whispering something in my head, I usually regret not following its advice. 😬