@zvava Good question. This is the spec, I think:

https://twtxt.dev/exts/metadata.html#nick

It doesn’t say much. 🤔

In the wild, I’ve only seen “traditional” nick names, i.e. ASCII 0x21 thru 0x7E.

My client removes anything but r'[a-zA-Z0-9]' from nick names.

@lyse Omg, that is great. 😃

@lyse I didn’t know they had a name, to be honest. When I/we last had a dot matrix printer, I just sat alone in the basement and made these. 😂

@bender Sigh. So it’s just me. Again. 😂

@lyse Yeah, I’ve corrupted a Git repo or two doing that … 🥴

@zvava I was about to suggest that you post some examples. By now, we’re pretty good at debugging hashing issues, because that happens so often. 😂 But it looks like you figured it out on your own. ✌️

@prologic I completely forgot about that topic … 😂🥴

(Yes, she’s the one who did that Wisky bit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HDBSm2s18s )

@lyse Ouch 😲

@dce Nope. 😃 What’s that genre called? Sounds like old horror movies from the 70'ies (or it could be a soundtrack to Salad Fingers, if anyone remembers that).

@kat I hope so 😅

@lyse 🔥🔥🔥

@dce I’ve never heard of weirdcore before, but it’s kind of intriguing. 😃

@dce The difference in brightness is pretty big. When the Moon is completely inside of the Earth’s shadow, you can see the red tint:

https://movq.de/v/7b4c323c0c/

As soon as direct sunlight returns, even just a little bit, the Moon looks mostly normal again.

Yeah, it’s probably overkill. 🙈

Oops, maybe I should have posted a reminder. 🥴

@dce By the time you posted your twt, the red phase was already over. 🙈 Stellarium has a pretty good simulation of the whole thing.

@lyse Nice! And I didn’t look out the window at all. Was watching eels. 😂

@bender The person actually reached out to me. It’s all good. ✌️

@dce Oof, that’s surprising. I wouldn’t have expected that to be so slow. 😳😳😳

@lyse You might enjoy this one: https://github.com/TheMozg/awk-raycaster

@lyse @dce It’s pretty cool, I won’t argue that, but also really simple, to be completely honest. 😅 The BIOS already provides all you need to send data to the printer:

https://helppc.netcore2k.net/interrupt/bios-printer-services

The BIOS actually does provide a great deal of things, which, to me, was one of the most surprising learnings of this project (the project of writing a little 16-bit real-mode OS, that is). It often doesn’t feel like I was writing an operating system – it felt more like writing a normal program that just uses BIOS calls like we would use syscalls these days.

(I’ve also read a lot of warnings, like “don’t use the BIOS for this or that”. Mostly because it tends to be very slow.)

Right, now that I’m reading some comments: I was initially assuming that they would actually make it impossible for distros to provide a 32-bit build (intentionally or unintentionally). But maybe that’s not the case and distros can just continue to ship a 32-bit Firefox …

@dce Which Thinkpad specifically is this? “Late-2010s” doesn’t sound very old, to be honest, I wonder why OpenBSD is giving you so much trouble. 🤔

@lyse Oh no! 😱😱😱

@lyse Weather’s great at the moment, isn’t it? I like it when it’s cloudy, dark, chilly. 😊

@bender I switched back to groff a few weeks ago. 🤪

@zvava Hooray for more twtxt clients 🥳

@lyse (Haha, every time I read the word “Gophers”, I have to stop and remind myself that this is about Golang. 🤪)

@lyse I usually only have my GPS tracker with me. That trip yesterday was probably a one-time thing. 😅 It was fun, but I’d rather not carry so much stuff around. 🥴

@dce Glad you liked it. 😅

@bender Right. 😂 groff, Markdown, groff. Justified, unjustified, justified.

@bender Oh, there’s an easy explanation. But maybe some mysteries are best left unexplained. 😃 If you want to solve this riddle: The solution is in the phlog! Somewhere! 😅

@bender The address is/was correct but probably got mangled by the Markdown renderer. Let’s try again in a code block:

gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2025/2025-09/2025-09-03--roophloch.txt

@thecanine I’m seeing those Clippys everywhere now. 📎

@bender Yeah, the acronym is funny. 😅

Wandering through the woods for 8km … gopher://uninformativ.de/0/phlog/2025/2025-09/2025-09-03--roophloch.txt

@klaxzy I’ve had many SD cards die in Raspberry Pis. Really annoying. I’ve eventually switched to using a read-only rootfs. 🫤

@prologic I’m doing that now as well, but I don’t think this is a good solution. This is going to hurt “self-hosting” in the long run: I cannot afford true self-hosting where I actually do host everything here at home – instead, I must use a cloud provider / VPS for that. It is only a matter of time until my provider starts doing AI shit as well (or rather, the customers do it) and then what? I get blocked, e.g. I can’t send email to (some) people anymore. This is already bad and it’s going to get worse.

@lyse Didn’t know that, either. 😂 The one guy even tried to test this theory with a Polaroid? And “confirmed” it? What the heck. 🥴

@dce Yeah, I’ve read about that approach. Sounds clever. Truth is, I’m too tired. 😢 I don’t want to spend too much of my time fighting assholes.

I’ve now started blocking entire cloud hosters. Sorry, not sorry.

As expected: Didn’t last long. They’re coming from different IPs now.

I’ve read enough blog posts by other people to know that this is probably pointless. The bots have so many IPs/networks at their disposal …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QBEKlIV_70E

@prologic Yeah, I’ve blocked some large subnets now (most likely overblocking a lot of stuff) and it has died down.

I’m not looking forward to doing this on a regular basis. This is supposed to be a fun hobby – and it was, for many years. Maybe that time is just over.

“But all your stuff is MIT licensed! They are allowed to do that!”

Haha. As if they would care. They crawl everything they get their hands on.

Besides, that’s not true, the license states that the copyright notice must be retained. “AI” breaks that. They incorporate my code and my articles in their product and make it appear as if it was their work.

Why do I care about this?

1. The load will become a problem at some point.
2. These crawlers and the current “AI” in general are breaking the rules. I am supposed to be paying for every little thing, I get sued for “piracy”. But apparently, these rules only apply to me. If I had more money, I could break them. Fuck that.
3. I simply don’t want it. Period.

This probably means that I can no longer host my own website. I don’t want to deploy something like Anubis, because that ruins the whole thing: I want it to be accessible from ancient browsers, like OS/2 or Windows 3.11.

I’ll keep an eye on it for a while. Maybe try to block some IPs.

Sooner or later, I’ll take the website down and shift everything to Gopher.

It doesn’t pose a problem for my server’s performance – yet. But if more bots/companies start doing this, my website will go down from the load.

@lyse Best logo ever made. 😅 (It’s partially proprietary software. Just for Epson scanners, I think? Not sure.)

@lyse Yeah, that was a lot of fun. 😃 Now let’s wait and see if I ever get to actually use this. 😂

@thecanine We don’t use Microsoft at work – but similar products of other big companies. They’re all doing the same. The core product gets worse and worse, because they focus so much on vomiting “AI” over everything.

It will die down eventually. I hope.

@prologic Enjoy the weekend. 🥳 (I rarely drink these days. I hope my tiny little Whisky collection doesn’t go bad. 😂)

@dce Ah, oh, well then. 🥴

My client supports that, if you set multiple url = fields in your feed’s metadata (the top-most one must be the “main” URL, that one is used for hashing).

But yeah, multi-protocol feeds can be problematic and some have considered it a mistake to support them. 🤔