When I chose the MIT license for all of my software, I thought:

“Should I use GPL, which I don’t really understand? Is that worth it? Yeah, there is a theoretical possibility that some company might use my code in their proprietary product … and then what? Should I sue them to enforce the GPL? I’m not going to do that anyway, so I’ll just use the MIT license.”

And now we have those LLM scrapers and now it’s suddenly a reality that these companies (ab)use my code. I can see it in my logs. I didn’t expect that back then.

GPL wouldn’t help, either, of course. (Regardless, I now think that GPL would have been the better choice anyway.)

I’m honestly considering taking my code and website offline. Maybe make it accessible through some obscure protocol like Gopher or Gemini, but no more HTTP.

(Yes, Anubis might help. Temporarily.)

I’m just tired.

Maybe you’ll enjoy this as well:

I still have one of my first modems, a Creatix LC 144 VF:

I think this was the modem that I used when I first connected to the internet, but I’m not sure.

I plugged it in again and it still works:

The firmware appears to be from 1994, which sounds about right. I don’t think we had internet access before that. We certainly did use local mailboxes, though. (Or BBS’s, as you might call them.)

I now want to actually use that modem again. For the moment, I can only use a phone to dial into it, I lack a second modem to actually establish a connection. Here’s a video:

Not spectacular, but the modem does answer after me entering ATA.

I bought another cheap old modem on eBay and am now waiting for it to arrive. Once it’s here, I want to simulate an actual dial-up session, hopefully from OS/2 or Windows 3.x.

That was so great to watch, I was smiling from ear to ear the whole time. 😃

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7LYCERDnX4

Happy to report that the neighbor has started playing Tschaikowski on their piano. And they’re getting really good at it! This is awesome. 😍

Wanna read something very scary?

Your future doctor is using ChatGPT to pass medical school, so you better start riding a bike and eating healthy now.

😨😨😨

https://infosec.exchange/@duanegran/114531604486731084

And to finish the day: Om Live at Pioneer Works 🤘 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwnDKcoVHmY

Now playing: Funky bass and people moving in a funny way, doing funny faces: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVyEPAMpwDc (Vulfpeck & Chris Thile – Dean Town)

The thing about upright bass is that you must play it on a regular basis. At least several times a week, ideally daily. It requires quite a bit of strength and it’s very easy to lose those muscles again – at least I don’t use them that much otherwise. 🤣 I’ve been through several cycles of “gain strength → lose strength → goto 0” now …

So, the “AI” bots have reached my website. Looks like they’re just slowly crawling everything at the moment – no DDoS-like attack yet. I wonder if that has something to do with my website being 100% static HTML. There are no GET parameters they can tweak and, at the end of the day, there’s not that much data on my server anyway … And maybe they have no idea what stagit is, so it doesn’t trigger “standard behavior”, like “this is a Gitea instance, let’s crawl this like crazy!”?

Confession:

I’ve never found microblogging like twtxt or the Fediverse or any other “modern” social media to be truly fulfilling/satisfying.

The reason is that it is focused so much on people. You follow this or that person, everybody spends time making a nice profile page, the posts are all very “ego-centric”. Seriously, it feels like everybody is on an ego-trip all the time (this is much worse on the Fediverse, not so much here on twtxt).

I miss the days of topic-based forums/groups. A Linux forum here, a forum about programming there, another one about a certain game. Stuff like that. That was really great – and it didn’t even suffer from the need to federate.

Sadly, most of these forums are dead now. Especially the nerds spend a lot of time on the Fediverse now and have abandoned forums almost completely.

On Mastodon, you can follow hashtags, which somewhat emulates a topic-based experience. But it’s not that great and the protocol isn’t meant to be used that way (just read the snac2 docs on this issue). And the concept of “likes” has eliminated lots of the actual user interaction. ☹️

If we must stick to hashes for threading, can we maybe make it mandatory to always include a reference to the original twt URL when writing replies?

Instead of

 hello foo bar

you would have

(<a href="?search=123467" class="tag">#123467</a> http://foo.com/tw.txt) hello foo bar

or maybe even:

(<a href="?search=123467" class="tag">#123467</a> 2025-04-30T12:30:31Z http://foo.com/tw.txt) hello foo bar

This would greatly help in reconstructing broken threads, since hashes are obviously unfortunately one-way tickets. The URL/timestamp would not be used for threading, just for discovery of feeds that you don’t already follow.

I don’t insist on including the timestamp, but having some idea which feed we’re talking about would help a lot.

Remembered a fun little “hello world” program I made in 2018:

https://movq.de/v/a1c4a819e6/vid.mp4

(It runs smoothly. My computer just isn’t fast enough for a smooth X11 screengrab at that resolution.)

To the parents or teachers: How do you teach kids to program these days? 🤔

That was a wild ride:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSMDb1CWD6Y

Notice how old all these people sound. They started playing this game like 10, 15, 20 years ago, most of them left, but some are still there. I love that level of commitment. 😃

Also interesting from a technical point of view. Creating that virtual world and keeping it running consistently for so long … 🤯

It’s AI shit, but … it is funny … and an appropriately bizzare response to a bizzare situation. 😂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ8qGOe2K0o

I’ve been using GIMP 3.0 for a few weeks now and it’s great. New features and I got rid of two custom plugins because they’re in core now. Literally nothing broke for me. And I really appreciate that they kept the familiar UI (instead of changing things just for the sake of change).

Thank you! 🥳

I’m playing with ratterplatter again: It’s a toy that watches disk I/O and emulates the noise of a real hard disk. (Linux only.) It uses sound samples from one of my older disks.

I tried a different approach at estimating the disk activity and I think I finally got it right (after almost 10 years … 🤦).

Demo, booting a Windows 2000 VM: https://movq.de/v/1400544cc6/2kboot-ratterplatter-2.mp4

(For this purpose alone, I put a couple of mini speakers into my PC case, so that the noise comes from the right place: https://movq.de/v/a3b2dc0932/speakers.jpg)

The results aren’t too bad, but this thing can’t be super accurate due to the huge I/O caches that we have these days. For the video, I dropped the caches before booting Windows, otherwise you would have heard almost nothing.

FWIW, if you don’t know it yet, this is the equivalent for proper keyboard sound: https://github.com/zevv/bucklespring

Tom Waits in 2025 looks and sounds exactly like you’d expect. 🥴

If you’ve played Grim Fandango back in the day, you’ll enjoy this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNc58NznIUM

Thinking about adding a little “focus” feature to my window manager: It hides all but one window, no wallpaper, no bars.

It would turn this

https://movq.de/v/a75eb68770/a0.jpg

into this

https://movq.de/v/a75eb68770/a1.jpg

or this

https://movq.de/v/a75eb68770/b0.jpg

into this:

https://movq.de/v/a75eb68770/b1.jpg

🤔

I’ve identified several issues with my current (admittedly cheap) upright bass by now. It might be time to upgrade to a better model. 🤔

If only those things weren’t so damn expensive. I just checked the prices and simply burst out laughing. 😂

Didn’t know this side of Aurora. 😂

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iwS3EflIck
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPfjDyItz9U

This guy doing a dub techno mix and his GF in the background does yoga … which … sometimes … looks a bit like there’s just a dead body on the floor. 😂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qA8G9D9LQIE&t=3095s

Work takes up 110% of my energy at the moment. All I can do is sit here and try to unwind.

On an entirely unrelated note, Resident Alien (Alan Tudyk!) and Ghosts (Rose McIver!) are great shows.

I’ve never liked the behavior of OpenBSD’s shell where it just scrolls horizontally:

https://movq.de/v/1371f7efbc/vid-1741714971.mp4

But now I’m this close to implementing the same thing in my own shell – because it’s probably much, much easier than multiline stuff. 😅

A depressing video about the current state of printers that just ends with “fuck this, I’m gonna talk about my cat now”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpHX_9fHNqE

These two degenerates … Fucking hell. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZ56ibIel1U

The correct way to do Drum and Bass. // Om Live at Pioneer Works // https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IwnDKcoVHmY #NowPlaying

Got myself a proper bass amp and now I really want to live in a small house in the middle of nowhere, where I won’t bother anyone. 😅

Oh, my feed rotated recently. Did anybody notice? 🤪

Those are some impressive wigs: https://imgur.com/gallery/life-imitates-video-game-5KlJBhj I wonder how it feels to wear such a thing for a day – especially in summer. 😅🥵