Jonathan Corbet
Posts
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1781
Jonathan Corbet
corbet
I had the great privilege of seeing Bruce Cockburn play last night here in Boulder. Over the years, few musicians have earned as much of my respect as he has. Something like 40 years after I first saw him play, he is as good as ever.
If you get the chance to catch one of his performances, I would recommend taking it — I fear there may not be many more of those.
If you get the chance to catch one of his performances, I would recommend taking it — I fear there may not be many more of those.
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
It's awfully easy to get depressed about the state of the world, so an article like this one, on the speed and scope of the solar-power transition, is more than welcome.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/46-billion-years-on-the-sun-is-having-a-moment
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/46-billion-years-on-the-sun-is-having-a-moment
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
I guess we just can't have good — or even nominally rational — things here. No easy unsubscription for us!
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/us-court-cancels-ftc-rule-that-would-have-made-canceling-subscriptions-easier/
The weird thing in my mind is that the cancellation gauntlet can only be hurting the industry as a whole. Once somebody has spent hours trying to turn a subscription off, they will be quite hesitant to sign up for the next one.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/07/us-court-cancels-ftc-rule-that-would-have-made-canceling-subscriptions-easier/
The weird thing in my mind is that the cancellation gauntlet can only be hurting the industry as a whole. Once somebody has spent hours trying to turn a subscription off, they will be quite hesitant to sign up for the next one.
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
Perhaps it's just me, but I do find it amusing that the GNU Readline 8.3 announcement, in July 2025, gives two FTP URLs as the primary way to obtain the software. I don't remember when I last fired up an FTP client, and my web browser has long since forgotten how to do it too.
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-readline/2025-07/msg00004.html
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-readline/2025-07/msg00004.html
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
So of course they have to make an electric vehicle with a 128dB noise generator... And of course they screw it up. Sometimes I think there is no hope for the human race.
https://electrek.co/2025/06/30/ev-with-fake-engine-noises-recalled-for-not-having-the-correct-fake-engine-noises/
https://electrek.co/2025/06/30/ev-with-fake-engine-noises-recalled-for-not-having-the-correct-fake-engine-noises/
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
If you run an operation that pays freelance authors for articles, you get a *lot* of people trying to sell you the output from their slop factory of choice. These pitches far exceed the legitimate ones at this point.
Today we got a pitch for an article about the load-balancing scheduler regression caused by the sched_ext framework in the 6.11 release. Somebody has clearly put a bit more than the usual amount of attention into the sort of topic that might appeal to @lwn. There is only one little problem... that regression had nothing to do with sched_ext, which was merged in 6.12. The pitch was a bunch of authoritative-sounding bullshit; the article would surely have been more of the same.
Sometimes I truly lose hope about humanity's ability to keep its head above the flood of this stuff.
Today we got a pitch for an article about the load-balancing scheduler regression caused by the sched_ext framework in the 6.11 release. Somebody has clearly put a bit more than the usual amount of attention into the sort of topic that might appeal to @lwn. There is only one little problem... that regression had nothing to do with sched_ext, which was merged in 6.12. The pitch was a bunch of authoritative-sounding bullshit; the article would surely have been more of the same.
Sometimes I truly lose hope about humanity's ability to keep its head above the flood of this stuff.
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
It took a long time and over 60 articles but, at @lwn, we have finally managed to complete our reporting from the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. If you want to know what is going on in those core parts of the kernel, this is the place to look.
We've put together an EPUB version of the whole set as well — good bedtime reading!
https://lwn.net/Articles/1026338/
We've put together an EPUB version of the whole set as well — good bedtime reading!
https://lwn.net/Articles/1026338/
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
The net is full of articles and pictures about Linus Torvalds meeting Bill Gates. They all gloss over the fact that Dave Cutler was also there — to the point of cropping him out of the picture. Somehow, it seems, the guy who did RSX-11, VMS, and Windows NT is relevant too...?
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
US Politics
Show content
So, should you be a US person, and should you have an opinion on the wisdom of the US jumping into another foreign war, killing thousands of people, and incidentally wasting vast amounts of money, RIGHT NOW might be a really good time to convey that opinion to your congresscritters.
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5359577-trump-iran-two-weeks/
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/5359577-trump-iran-two-weeks/
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
The Wayback Machine managed to capture a Linux Journal article about the Arch Linux distribution's plan to switch to "rye-init" before whatever human intelligence remains there figured out that "rye-init" does not actually exist.
The Linux Journal predates LWN by some years and was, for a long time, the definitive read for Linux users. The Don Marti ( @dmarti ) years were especially noteworthy. It is sad to see where it has ended up now.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250618001301/https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/arch-linux-breaks-new-ground-official-rust-init-system-support-arrives
The Linux Journal predates LWN by some years and was, for a long time, the definitive read for Linux users. The Don Marti ( @dmarti ) years were especially noteworthy. It is sad to see where it has ended up now.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250618001301/https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/arch-linux-breaks-new-ground-official-rust-init-system-support-arrives
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
After years of wanting to, I finally managed to pay a visit to the north rim of the Grand Canyon. Unlike the heavily visited south rim, the north rim has little in the way of accommodations and is rather harder to get to, so it's much less busy with people. It is also at a far higher elevation with the sort of tall-pine-and-aspen forest that one does not expect so far south. Definitely worth it.
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
One of these days I'll do a routine update on a BigBlueButton server and not have to spend the rest of the day figuring out why BBB doesn't work anymore.
This is not that day.
This is not that day.
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Jonathan Corbet
repeated
repeated
Gergely "Bane of the Crawlers" Nagy
algernon@come-from.mad-scientist.clubRepeating this again, from a different perspective: when your precious AI buddy requires hitting niche forges multiple million times a day, that is a cost your precious buddy generates.
Whenever a legit human visitor's browser has to solve an Anubis challenge, that is a cost your precious AI buddy generated.
Whenever you use these tools, these are the costs you push down onto others. Your precious AI buddies cost us countless hours of CPU time, bandwidth, and incredible headache trying to fend them off.
If you are using genAI for any purpose whatsoever, you are party to this carnage.
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
"Over 70% of Business Insider employees are already using Enterprise ChatGPT regularly (our goal is 100%), and we’re building prompt libraries and sharing everyday use cases that help us work faster, smarter, and better."
...part of a memo explaining why the company is laying of 21% of its staff.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/benjamin-mullin-b99abb35_scoop-business-insider-is-cutting-21-percent-activity-7333836611815661569-g4qk/
LWN is still 100% human-written content, and we intend to stay that way. We'll see how long the world lets us do that.
...part of a memo explaining why the company is laying of 21% of its staff.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/benjamin-mullin-b99abb35_scoop-business-insider-is-cutting-21-percent-activity-7333836611815661569-g4qk/
LWN is still 100% human-written content, and we intend to stay that way. We'll see how long the world lets us do that.
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
So I just learned that May is "Open Source Maintainer Month" — I almost missed it!
What happens in Open Source Maintainer Month? It appears that maintainers get all kinds of opportunities for discounts on proprietary services. I definitely feel appreciated now.
https://thenewstack.io/how-the-world-is-celebrating-open-source-maintainer-month/
What happens in Open Source Maintainer Month? It appears that maintainers get all kinds of opportunities for discounts on proprietary services. I definitely feel appreciated now.
https://thenewstack.io/how-the-world-is-celebrating-open-source-maintainer-month/
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
For $REASONS, we ended up deciding to move the LWN.net Mastodon feed in a bit of a hurry. The good news is that we now are able to appear under our own domain as @LWN. It looks like the migration magic has dragged about half of our followers (so far) along with us; the ability to relocate like that is a nice feature.
We're still figuring out various details of how to make the new server work well; please pardon any rough edges.
We're still figuring out various details of how to make the new server work well; please pardon any rough edges.
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
20 Years ago: the BitKeeper license changed, making it unavailable for kernel development.
https://lwn.net/Articles/130746/
It drove home the perils of relying on proprietary software and spurred the creation of Git - a significant event, overall.
https://lwn.net/Articles/130746/
It drove home the perils of relying on proprietary software and spurred the creation of Git - a significant event, overall.
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
Today I got a cheery email from somebody who claims to be the "ethics and compliance" officer for a company called Bright Data. He wanted to have a "no pressure" conversation about the whole AI scraperbot problem. Looking at their web site, this company offers an API that, and I quote, "Bypasses anti-scraping mechanisms and solves CAPTCHAs, ensuring uninterrupted access to the most protected web sites".
After careful consideration for several milliseconds, I have concluded that I really don't have anything to discuss with this person.
But at least their claimed "100M+" of residential IP addresses that they use for their DDOS attacks are "ethically sourced".
After careful consideration for several milliseconds, I have concluded that I really don't have anything to discuss with this person.
But at least their claimed "100M+" of residential IP addresses that they use for their DDOS attacks are "ethically sourced".
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