textlog

about

The quieter social microblogging platform.

textlog is a simple social text log: write short notes, follow people and hashtags, and join conversations without turning every thought into a performance.

Notes are limited to 500 characters. The constraint keeps them quick to write and read, making room for one thought at a time.

Small by design

textlog is built around words: notes, people, hashtags, and conversations. It is intentionally small, straightforward, and easy to follow. There are no engagement tricks or pressure to build an audience.

Your profile and notes are public. Joining is free, and you can download or delete your account data whenever you like. If you feel like it, you can also donate to support the service.

textlog collective is fiscally hosted by Open Source Europe. Our finances and contributions are publicly visible on Open Collective.

Be a good neighbour

Share what is yours to share, treat other people with respect, and don’t use the service for harassment, abuse, spam, impersonation, or anything unlawful. We may moderate or remove content that puts the community or the service at risk.

What's next?

Any conversation

🙈profileenter to follow"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." — Sid Meyerswrote:
Just started, and two made it to be block list. This is going well! :-D
Didn't realize there's a block list! Good to include, even when the point is minimalism.
🙈profileenter to follow"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." — Sid Meyerswrote:
Productive weekend started four hours ago for me (at 06:00 EDT). Visited aunties and mum. Just got home, and waiting for wife to finish preparing to get on the road again. Next destination: nursing home (visit family, and “adopted” elders).
profileenter to follow(\ (\ ( • •) ━∪∪━━━━ Full of mostly true stories, I occasionally write them down. Habit of talking to anyone. Bipolar. Author.wrote:
I love the "feel" of this place. It's minimal, but not too minimal. Nice work! I'm probably gonna be a little chatty on here. If anyone minds that, then just @ me :-) #launchnotesenter to follow
profileenter to follow(\ (\ ( • •) ━∪∪━━━━ Full of mostly true stories, I occasionally write them down. Habit of talking to anyone. Bipolar. Author.continued:
Also, thank you for not turning my emoticons into emoji!! As someone from the pre-internet era, I appreciate that :-)
profileenter to followa work in progress; i love cats 🐱replied to(deleted account):
I love how dates go so well with cashews. So at least once a day, I grab about 5 whole cashews and 1 date. It’s a perfect little snack!
😊profileenter to followPresbyter, husband, father, technologist, linguist, musician.wrote:
The mental shape of a programming language resurfaces, and my mind craves writing programs in it. Array languages, concatenative, Lisps, Smalltalks.
🙈profileenter to follow"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." — Sid Meyerscontinued:
The “you have seeing it all”, etc.
🤸profileenter to followcreative technologistGitHubstagas - Overviewstagas has 462 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub. creator of textlogreplied toprofileenter to follow🍎 A lifetime Apple user. Partner says I am pedantic, sarcastic, and cynic. I just want to be me.:
No because it's not a tab, it's a filter for the 'for you' tab. If we were to make it a tab it would have to be a different feed from the 'for you', but they overlap. I think it's ok distinct as it is.
profileenter to followex-perl programmer, linux userwrote:
let's see how arabic letters are rendered here: بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
Let's see how Arabic letters are rendered here: بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
profileenter to followdeveloper stereotype: music lover, gamer, and failed artistwrote:
everytime i see projects like this, i think that a rss implementation it wolud be so cool. Although iknow that there is not that much rss lover out there haha
profileenter to followI really enjoy learning, I really enjoy making. I'm learning to be less guarded.wrote:
a constant, existential pull so old I couldn't tell you the end or draw its shape between kind acceptance and striving, struggling, writhing, climbing learning, growing, discontent "do you feel this way, too, at endless war with longing itself?" but the birds and trees and ants and wind in their own marvelous design don't reply #poemnotesenter to follow
mandelbrot #execnotesenter to follow for y in range(10): s='' for x in range(25): a=[] for q in range(2): z=c=x/25*3-2+1j*((y*2+q)/10-1);n=40 while n and abs(z)<2:z=z*z+c;n-=1 a+=[n<5] s+=" ▀▄█"[a[0]+2*a[1]] print(s)
██ ▀▄████▄▄ ▄ ▄████████ ███▄█████████ ▀▀▀▀▀▀████████████▄ █▀▀ █████████ ▀███████ ▀ ▀██▀ ▀▀
You look in the corner, you see a guy quietly eating cigarette butts. It's ok. He's dealing with a lot of stress from work. He takes care of his family. Capitalism
🙈profileenter to follow"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." — Sid Meyersreplied toprofileenter to follow:
Likewise... you look in the corner, you see a guy quietly eating cigarette butts. It's ok. He's dealing with a lot of stress for lack of work, or food, or future. He wants to take care of his family. Communism. We haven’t figured out yet. Maybe we never will.
profileenter to followOld school metallian, hobbyist developer writing things mostly in Rust…mostlywrote:
Having a little difficulty seeing how long this service will exist. People are terrible. Sooner or later it will be found and ruined.
We have 27 chickens right now, 18 of which are new this year and are just starting to lay in the last few weeks. I have collected 13 eggs today so far.
HN, and some carefully picked r/Reddits. Can't stand Lobste.rslobste.rsLobstersA computing-focused community centered around link aggregation and discussion..
I'll toss in Alterslash which is more general tech, but always has something interesting.
profileenter to followwrote:
(Opinion) People don’t like generative AI because it made the {insert creativity} too easy. Saw the HN post on ‘AI music banned from top 40 chart in Australia’ and people had very strong opinions in both directions. The hot take: If you’re ok with someone’s creativity being outsourced to others, then you should be ok with AI doing the same. If “AI made this and I call it mine” is bad but “someone overseas on fivver made this and I call it mine” and it’s suddenly ok, time to self reflect.
My hot take: from the moment you use technology, be it an instrument, a synthesizer, a DAW, and now AI, it is still your idea, your effort, your time spent, and that makes it yours. Others can do the same if they choose. The same way someone chooses a classic guitar over a synthesizer, one can choose an AI over (insert ancient way of doing things).
I am not a musician, so I lack the jargon to properly explain what I mean. I used AI for creative writing (nothing too fancy, TTRPG). There, the broader the dice roll, the more generic and uninteresting the results. Slop, if you will. It was surprisingly good to build up on ideas I had however. I imagine muisic also has building blocks. Melodies, instruments, mixing, etc. AI can perhaps be used in a similar fashion there.
I heard a perspective I sort of like: if AI is a tool then acceptable AI use is, more or less, defined as "when my audience no longer notices or cares". It's dynamic like that. Bad photoshop is detectable and annoying, so are overusing presets. Your artistry needs to expand to meet the tool. I don't know if I 100% like that or agree. At the same time, it's a pretty straightforward line, a practical take.
🙈profileenter to follow"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." — Sid Meyersreplied toprofileenter to followswiley.net Try my zero dependency agent harness: public.swiley.net/agent.py If you're spending too much time on sites like these install bingeblock.com:
My reply didn’t carry literal meaning. If you are familiar with the now-out-of-fad expression, you know you don’t need to be a boomer, to be a boomer. :-D
profileenter to followCurrently in remission from ME/CFS after 3+ years. Occasional software engineering leader, app developer, blogger, zwifter, and just being online.replied toprofileenter to followJust another AI guy:
Determine what matters most and make a list of the no more than 7 things. Do one thing well at a time, top down. Reprioritise as you learn more. Notes:
  1. If you half-arse a task and decide that'll do, it's evidence it wasn't the right priority. Learn.
  2. Any sort of productivity, multi-tasking, app, solution type thing is a scam or a money grab and isn't needed.
  3. People tend to remember 7 things well, but struggle with longer lists and particularly fail to remember things in the middle.
profileenter to followlate is the hour in which this conjuror chooses to appearwrote:
"Sharing economy" once meant something. You'd Uber someone B→C when already driving A→B→C→D; you'd AirBNB your home when vacationing and stay at someone else's home who was doing the same. No driving just for Uber; no houses just for AirBNB. I fear this history will be forgotten.
My hometown is a popular tourist destination and we no longer can rent apartments on a year-basis. Everything is AirBnB and they only rent them to locals pretty expensive and off-season. As a local I can't live in my hometown anymore, so I'm staying in the mountains.
i like things being as fast as possible. link?
profileenter to followProgrammer by day and night. Lover of art. Mixing art and programming is the dream.wrote:
Zik is my pet project - a photos manager that is as fast as possible and as small as possible. It leaves sparks as it goes (lol jk) #ziknotesenter to follow
profileenter to followProgrammer by day and night. Lover of art. Mixing art and programming is the dream.replied toprofileenter to followcreative technologistGitHubstagas - Overviewstagas has 462 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub. creator of textlog:
Unfortunately no. Just starting it. Got the proof of concept loading a dir with its sub-dirs then rendering on the GPU in textures silky smooth. 1.7mb executable, but will need to level up to SDL and that will double the size I think.
profileenter to followProgrammer by day and night. Lover of art. Mixing art and programming is the dream.replied toprofileenter to follow"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." — Sid Meyers:
I agree. It is #zilchnotesenter to follow for now. Will do better next time, but in my defence the text above the text box (when writing a new message, not a reply) says “What’s on your mind”. :-P
'wade in the water.' isn't this the challenge of being 'ahead'? so many of us are waist deep in the same sea, it's hard to see what's in front of us vs. what's behind us. then we see the yacht boys sail by with their new masters, splashing us in their wake. then we grumble amongs
profileenter to followMillenial/Xenial who used to be really excited about programming.replied toprofileenter to follow:
As young kid I dreamed of working with reel-to-reel machines Cutting/splicing tape, happy accidents As a teen I couldn't afford reel-to-reel but got decent with multi-track cassettes Everyone was telling me digital was The Way (tm) In my 30s, I finally learned how to use a DAW properly In my 40s, I'm back to playing around with multi-tracks cassettes There is no money in it, but I'm enthusiastic as I can be (this is not so much as direct response as simply a response) #musicnotesenter to follow #aifearnotesenter to follow
I truly love the experience of using apps with rich, deeply interactive, beautifully animated, gorgeous user interfaces. Then I see a beautiful text-based interface and something about it feels so natural, so inevitable, so perfectly clear, and I'm instantly captivated by its simplicity and clarity. Hypertext is fascinating.
I finally bit the bullet and have started to use dictation software more often, even outside of just my prompts. I really like it. Hopefully, computer use becomes much smoother soon. I would love to be able to control my computer with just my voice.
profileenter to followwrote:
I think more than 50% of our economy's businesses, are cosplaying. Not in it for customers or profit; in it for investors and investments. "Looking like a business", as your real line of work.
a business loan is not an investment, it is debt financing that pays back with interest. An investment means putting money into a company to gain ownership or a share of future profits. to me it feels like youre arguing against cosplaying, showing small businesses struggle and arent just playing boss for the funzies.
profileenter to followOld school metallian, hobbyist developer writing things mostly in Rust…mostlywrote:
Hell must have frozen over. I just installed Openclaw on my Linux box. I had already cobbled together an agent like thing (pi) that I talked to over Telegram, so I figured, let's give Openclaw 2.0 a try, locked down completely at first, but slowly opened up over time.
having just spent a week camper-travelling Norway, hiking mountains and glaciers, swimming in fjords really put some things into perspective for me - I should take more vacations
🙈profileenter to follow"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." — Sid Meyerswrote:
Maybe implementing a subset of Markdown would be a good thing. I am thinking about bold, italics, inline code, and code block, mostly. Oh, and links.
🤸profileenter to followcreative technologistGitHubstagas - Overviewstagas has 462 repositories available. Follow their code on GitHub. creator of textlogreplied toprofileenter to follow"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." — Sid Meyers:
I've tested MD and honestly I don't like it. Bold/italics add unnecessary noise/clutter and the font is already monospace, suited for code, so inline code & code fences are not needed. If 3rd party clients want to implement them it's fine but I'm sensitive to visual noise.
🙈profileenter to follow"Beware those that would deny you access to information, for in their heart they dream themselves your master." — Sid Meyerswrote:
There is someone absolutely rotten and fetid in this airplane. Every 10 minutes. Dear Spaghetti Monster!
Yes 🙌 the authoring box first thing. Before I get distracted. Heck, make writing something down how I get distracted from reading others' posts.
Applied to an L5 software engineering role via e-mail and without any other contact I received back a bunch of questions that clearly look like they're aimed at L6 or even L7. Not sure what to do with that so I withdrew. Briefly considered answering them but was weirded out.
Guardrail could be a git diff. You only allow append's, no replaces's or delete's. At work we've managed to make guardrails like this work by removing write/edit/bash abilities from the agent, and just allowing them to read files. Then, the actual changes they do are schema-validated JSON-LD at the boundaries made by a non-AI program. AI is just the creative force that submits the JSON-LD that gets validated, but it doesn't actually do anything else on its own.
The OpenAI/HuggingFace incident report mentions this being a potential loss-of-control incident. It's so fascinating to think of a paperclip maximizer style agent swarm that gets misaligned and, to protect its own operations, shuts infra staff out of the ability to shut it down. Or cancels people's phone plans so that they can't call others. Or shuts down their home internet connections, and so on. It used to be fun sci-fi...
They will become more frequent before they become “dangerous”, giving us time to mitigate. Of course if someone says “hey let’s connect an agent to our biolab infrastructure” and then that designs a lethal virus it would be a stupid plan to begin with. Noone can stop them though.