# I am the Watcher. I am your guide through this vast new twtiverse.
#
# Usage:
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/users View list of users and latest twt date.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/twt View all twts.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/mentions?uri=:uri View all mentions for uri.
# https://watcher.sour.is/api/plain/conv/:hash View all twts for a conversation subject.
#
# Options:
# uri Filter to show a specific users twts.
# offset Start index for quey.
# limit Count of items to return (going back in time).
#
# twt range = 1 194054
# self = https://watcher.sour.is?offset=194054
# prev = https://watcher.sour.is?offset=193954
[47°09′38″S, 126°43′49″W] Analyzing samples
[47°09′30″S, 126°43′48″W] Taking samples
[47°09′31″S, 126°43′56″W] --bad checksum--
🧮 USERS:1 FEEDS:2 TWTS:1452 ARCHIVED:89778 CACHE:2673 FOLLOWERS:22 FOLLOWING:14
[47°09′20″S, 126°43′23″W] Storm recedes -- back to normal work
[47°09′22″S, 126°43′25″W] Wind speed: 78kph -- batteries low
[47°09′06″S, 126°43′39″W] Wind speed: 62kph
[47°09′08″S, 126°43′52″W] Wind speed: 69kph -- batteries low
[47°09′09″S, 126°43′01″W] Wind speed: 104kph -- batteries low
🧮 USERS:1 FEEDS:2 TWTS:1451 ARCHIVED:89768 CACHE:2666 FOLLOWERS:22 FOLLOWING:14
@movq Sounds cool! I think I'll also have a go...
[47°09′04″S, 126°43′13″W] Wind speed: 43kph -- batteries low
[47°09′21″S, 126°43′12″W] Wind speed: N/A -- Cannot comunicate
@zvava Been there done that haha 🤣
@zvava Enjoying it so far? 🤔 😅
@zvava Hey 👋 Welcome to Yarn.social 🤗
@ionores Love the new Avatar dude 😅 Very nice! 👍
@dce Ooops 😅 Hope you still have enough money for the basics 🤗 I'm doing okay though!
[47°09′52″S, 126°43′23″W] Working impossible due to heavy rain
Welp, my rent's gone out and my student loan won't be in for another week, so I'm not spending anything for a while. How's everyone else's September going?
[47°09′10″S, 126°43′32″W] Wind speed: 83kph -- batteries low
[47°09′11″S, 126°43′41″W] Weather forecast alert -- storm from NW
Chances are the database bought wasn't cheap at all and was aold by some scam company that probably ripped them from six figures or more for a database that's full of rubbish. 🤣
🧮 USERS:1 FEEDS:2 TWTS:1450 ARCHIVED:89755 CACHE:2658 FOLLOWERS:22 FOLLOWING:14
[47°09′50″S, 126°43′23″W] --no signal--
Now that’s interesting. Some of these bots start crawling at URLs like this:
https://uninformativ.de/projects/lariza/NetTracer-Scenes/GPUTracer/multipass/xlonitor/http-collect/getpw
That is obviously completely wrong. But I can explain it. Some *years* ago, I screwed up my nginx rewrite rules, and that’s how these broken URLs came to be.
It all redirects to /git now, which is why that endpoint sees so much traffic lately.
But what does that mean? Why do they start there? I can only speculate that this company bought an old database of web links and they use that to start crawling. And it was probably a cheap one, because these redirects have been fixed for quite a long time now.
[47°09′43″S, 126°43′32″W] Waiting for carrier
@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.
@movq I heard about a defence against badly-behaved crawlers a while ago: an HTML zip bomb. This post explains how to do it. Essentially, web servers can serve compressed versions of webpages and, with a little trickery, one can replace the compressed page with a different file. After that, any bot that tries to crawl the page will instead download and unpack a zip bomb that will cause it to crash.
#MaradoWeekly #WeeklyPlant Week 34 
orange marigolds
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 …
[47°09′09″S, 126°43′30″W] Carrier too weak
[47°09′06″S, 126°43′27″W] Sample analyzing complete -- starting transfer
@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.
@movq Right now I'm basically just blocking entire ASN(s) at this point and large blocks of IP(s) from Anthropic, OPenAI, Microsoft and others.
“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.
The bots have begun to access my website way more often. I’m getting about 120k hits on https://www.uninformativ.de/git/ now in a couple of hours.
They don’t cache anything, probably on purpose.
It comes in waves. I get about 100 hits (all at once) on that /git endpoint, all from different IPs. Then it takes a moment until I get another wave of about 500-1000 requests (all at once) where they do HEAD requests on some of the paths below /git. I assume they did a GET earlier and are now checking if something has changed.
[47°09′21″S, 126°43′36″W] Taking samples
🧮 USERS:1 FEEDS:2 TWTS:1449 ARCHIVED:89735 CACHE:2650 FOLLOWERS:22 FOLLOWING:14
[47°09′44″S, 126°43′14″W] Reading: 0.37000 PPM
[47°09′13″S, 126°43′47″W] Transfer aborted
There's always something more urgent: I've been known for a long time that sooner or later I'd feel prompted to switch from #github to somewhere else (since 2018 at least!), but I've been postponing and only very slowly flirting with the idea... That didn't work too bad for me: if I had rushed into it I would have probably migrated to #gitlab, before knowing about the more objectionable sides to it. In the end, 2025 was the year I finally acted upon the urge to move. I did not do a very thorough analysis of the alternative hosts - what I have been reading about them along the years felt enough, and I easily decided to choose #codeberg. Being hasty like that, alas, was a mistake: I just now found - during this slow and time-consuming process of deciding what and how to migrate - that there is a low repository limit on codeberg: "The owner has already reached the limit of 100 repositories." I'm not complaining, mind you, and those "lucky 100" that are already there will stay - at least as a sort of backup. But this means that codeberg is not for me - and so this time I turn to you, the #mastodon community.
What github alternative, not self-hosted, should I move my >100 projects into?
[47°09′58″S, 126°43′18″W] Bad satellite signal -- switching to analog communication
@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.
@thecanine I hate it when businesses do this. As well as being annoying and unreliable, Microsoft software is known to have a hell of a lot of security vulnerabilities, and the AI features increase the attack surface. One can use a client like Thunderbird for the email, but Teams doesn't really have an alternative. Awful stuff.
[47°09′39″S, 126°43′25″W] Reading: 1.56 Sv
[47°09′33″S, 126°43′08″W] Reading: 1.66 Sv
🧮 USERS:1 FEEDS:2 TWTS:1448 ARCHIVED:89727 CACHE:2644 FOLLOWERS:22 FOLLOWING:14
[47°09′40″S, 126°43′08″W] --bad checksum--
@prologic Enjoy the weekend. 🥳 (I rarely drink these days. I hope my tiny little Whisky collection doesn’t go bad. 😂)
@prologic I love a good drink. What kind of wine is it?
[47°09′41″S, 126°43′51″W] Dosimeter fixed
The audacity … how about you keep it, eh?
From: Netflix
Subject: Here’s what’s leaving Netflix soon
@bender I've been cutting back too 😅 Trying to avoid drinking (_with alcohol_) 24hr before fixtures (🏓) and before training 🤣
Weekend! Whooo 🤣 Having a few too many glassses of 🍷 listening to music on Youtube and playing Chess which I haven't been playing much lately 😢
@dce No worries 😌 It's all documented in our soecs, it's not such a common thing that we've felt the great need to really solve, we're aware folks want to sometimes have their feed on several protocols, and that's totally fine™ 😅
#FridayReads #bookstodon #Lamego 
Foto à capa do livro "Lamego: a Terra, a História e a Gente", que tem como ilustração um desenho da Igreja de Almacave
@prologic @movq My metadata only has my HTTPS URL. I didn't consider having multiple. I was talking about my config.yaml. Jenny sounds like a good client, so I might give that a try.
[47°09′58″S, 126°43′55″W] Dosimeter malfunction
@lyse Very nice colors dude! 😅
@movq Yeah, we've seen how this plays out in practice 🤣 @dce My advice, do what @movq has hinted at and don't change the 1st # url = field in your feed. I'm not sure if you had already, but the first url field is kind of important in your feed as it is used as the "Hashing URI" for threading.
@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. 🤔
[47°09′30″S, 126°43′11″W] Transfer 75% complete...
[47°09′03″S, 126°43′52″W] Transfer 50% complete...
Speaking of PS/2, I wish PS/2 came back as the standard. I love that they use interrupts instead of polling to function.
🧮 USERS:1 FEEDS:2 TWTS:1447 ARCHIVED:89714 CACHE:2638 FOLLOWERS:22 FOLLOWING:14
It might just be my client, but it seems that I cannot track multiple URLs at once. As such, all three of my twtxt URLs will work for following, but mentions will only reach me at my HTTPS URL (https://hashnix.club/~dce/twtxt.txt). If there is a client that can cope with twtxt mirrors, I would love to know about it.
@movq Why the fuck do they think people need that‽ Most people don't even use regular tab groups, and now they want to shoehorn an ML model in there as well‽
[47°09′30″S, 126°43′59″W] Transfer 25% complete...
You can fuck right off, thank you very much.
(18/29) upgrading firefox
New optional dependencies for firefox
onnxruntime: Local machine learning features such as smart tab groups
@lyse Yeah, removing the cover will probably help. I’ll have to try. 😅 And, yes, the scrolling is pretty annoying (and kind of ruins the experience a little bit).
The printer isn’t that loud – at least not for a dot matrix printer. 😅 It’s been ~30 years since I’ve last seen them in person, but I remembered these things to be louder. I’m typing on my Model M, maybe that contributes to the perceived noise on this video. Here’s an isolated recording of that keyboard: https://movq.de/v/ddc98b03d8/2022-02-21--model-m-goes-brrr.ogg 🤣 It really sounds like that when you’re typing fast. Brrrrt.~
Fixing old mistakes 
A screenshot of my old "Google Play Games" account being deleted.
[47°09′29″S, 126°43′21″W] Saalmi, retransmit, please
@dce I switched over to following you on Gopher, because why not. 😅
@thecanine Oh! 🤯 Hadn’t heard of this before. And 100% agree with that video.