Where I typically notice it, is that the text starts repeating a few handful of points.

The prompt will have been to write a story on those points, and because it doesn’t have much else to go off of, it will just shoehorn those exact points again and again.

I expect this to always be a telltale sign, because if your point can be made in the length of the prompt, there’s a rather limited amount of noise it can add to that before it would have to go off-script.

A bit like this, unfortunately: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

LLMs have made that conspiracy theory quite realistic…

F-Droid blog post on the topic: https://f-droid.org/en/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html

It was posted before Google backpedalled somewhat, if I remember correctly.

Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) is the active ingredient in most fabric softeners. However, PDMS is a silicone oil that destroys absorbent properties.

The oil in the fabric softener latches on to clothing and creates a coating. Towels absorb water, but oil repels it. When an oil coating attaches to a towel, it causes the fibers to become greasy and slippery, which hinders its absorbency. When the soapy residue of fabric softener builds up on the towel, it causes it to become stiff instead of soft.

Source: https://www.towelsupercenter.com/blog/should-you-wash-towels-with-fabric-softener/

Like a banjo?

Yeah, the latter is certainly a big part of it. The way to make it compile-safe is to use macros to generate code, so that my users can write e.g. Package::my_frontend.version and that gives them the version of their frontend package.
Writing such macros, i.e. writing code to generate code, is certainly something I haven’t done a ton of yet, because you practically cannot justify doing that in an application codebase, only in a library, so it is new stuff that I learn.

But well, you did already call it a “nice abstraction”, which is another big part where my excitement comes from and where I think, the special nerdery is necessary.
Others might build projects which are visually tangible, like a sexy GUI, or which do something tangible, for example a colleague (who I will absolutely not deny his own special nerdery) is currently building a driver for a motor. If that driver works, you can see a motor moving in the real-world. Even non-nerds can at least tell that something is happening.

But with my project, my success is that you can write Package::my_frontend instead of Package::from_str("my_frontend")?. And that if you rename the package to super_duper_frontend, that the compiler will tell you to fix the code rather than it only breaking once you actually run the build code for the frontend.
No chance of explaining to non-coders why this is exciting or even just when you’re successful.

On Monday, one of our students at $DAYJOB asked me what projects I do in my freetime. After I infodumped on her for half an hour, she asked in disbelief “And you do these in your freetime, without being paid?”.

Like, mate, did you not listen how feckin’ excited I got just then? Of course, I do these in my freetime.

To be fair, though, the last project I told her about is very dry. It’s a library to help automate CI builds. And the thing I’m thrilled to build is a compile-safe API for accessing the packages in your workspaces. Like, yeah, it does take a special kind of nerd to get excited about that…

Pretty sure, people drawing for commissions would typically use a drawing tablet… ^^’

I mean, Rust does have a pretty inclusive community…

Ah, I think, I know what you mean, that the format is supposed to be written with foolish oversimplifications that are borderline incorrect, whereas “secured by TLS” just sounds like a normal statement from an expert…

I’m guessing that was supposed to be “secured by a thin layer of TLS”…

Haha wow, my initial thought after reading your post was “signatures went away”, but then I figured I’m biased towards that being significant, because I recently was on an ancient forum that still had them.

So, instead I tried to formulate the more abstract development. I had read about it a long time ago, so I did not pull that whole comment out of my arse just then, thankfully.

But that it is then precisely signatures which elicit a reaction, that’s hilarious. 😅

And yeah, I do not miss signatures. Within minutes of reading on that forum, I had grown a disdain for some users, because they’d respond with half a sentence and then a distracting GIF in their signature. And of course, they would respond multiple times to a topic, so you could get 10+ instances of that same GIF on one page.

Unfortunately, this does mean I now need to demonstrate that by including a shitty signature:

I’m not a signature, I just clean here.

The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting. ~ Sun Tzu

Not sure, I can articulate this thought well enough, but I feel like there’s been a split between “personal” and “impersonal” social media.

Early internet forums were usually about some specific topic and pseudonyms were paramount, but each person was still given room to present themselves.
So, what I mean by that, is that forum posts had signatures, big profile pictures, as well as typically some additional information about the user, like “Rank: Lord Supreme – Joined: March 2005 – Posts: 3 trillion”.
The forums generally weren’t focused on the people, but you still knew the regulars.

Then came Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon etc., which put people into the focus. You were discouraged from using pseudonyms. You were encouraged to post pictures of yourself. You were encouraged to broadcast any random thought you had.
And while you can use these networks to read or talk about certain topics, you’re really supposed to follow people and get to know them.

And then, sort of as a counter movement again, you have your “link aggregators”, i.e. Lemmy, Lobsters, Reddit etc…
Discussions only happen when there’s a topic, i.e. a post, to talk about. You can’t just broadcast thoughts without context, but rather have to sort them into specific topics/communities.
And while there’s a tiny profile picture next to posts and we do have some regulars that are more widely recognized, most users are not.

Does it make a difference, though, if I only put acid into the pre-wash, so no detergent? I was hoping, it would get flushed out before the proper wash cycle.

I mean, I will check, if my washing machine has a separate hole to put fabric softener in. It does sound like the more appropriate place for it.

Yeah, was gonna be my suggestion, too. I get small white stains on specific fabrics and one of my shirts’ colors looked completely washed-out. And yeah, I can get rid of that with citric acid in what my washing machine calls “pre-wash”.

I’m not sure, it was just leftover detergent for me, though, because while I could wash out some of it by hand-washing the clothes with water afterwards, a lot of it stayed. So, my assumption was that it’s actually just calcium build-up, which of course also goes away with acid.

AI slop turned into ASCII art. That’s a new one…

Ah, I thought there would be a male bird involved still, but I guess that example just explains ovulation. Still quite optimistic that everyone shares the same understanding here, though…

Yeah, I virtually only use --force for moving tags around (which one could definitely argue isn’t really a thing you should be doing regularly either)…

Yeah, we always try to automate as much as possible with generic language build tooling and scripts, so that ideally the call in the runner is just a single command, which can also be triggered locally.

Unfortunately, if you want to be able to re-run intermediate steps, then you do need to inform the runner of what you’re doing and deal with the whole complexity of up-/downloading intermediate results.

--force-with-lease* 🙃