Jonathan Corbet
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
I have heard of similar things happening at other companies. Call me old fashioned, but to me it seems that a company that judges its employees based on how many AI tokens they consume has badly lost its way.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/05/amazon-employees-are-tokenmaxxing-due-to-pressure-to-use-ai-tools/
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/05/amazon-employees-are-tokenmaxxing-due-to-pressure-to-use-ai-tools/
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
I'm back from LSFMM+BPF (and a rather longer sojourn in Europe). Still tired. I'm now well into the process of writing articles about the discussions I was part of, which is a lot of typing. In the immortal words of Ringo Starr: "I'VE GOT BLISTERS ON MY FINGERS!"
LSFMM remains one of the most intense, technically challenging, and interesting events in the kernel space, and this year's gathering didn't disappoint. It was, though, somewhat overshadowed by the rounds of layoffs happening in the industry. There were developers present who had lost their jobs, or feared losing their jobs, or were working for companies that have decreed that they are no longer interested in upstream development. That added to the general sense of darkness that overlays much of life these days.
Things will get better soon, right?
LSFMM remains one of the most intense, technically challenging, and interesting events in the kernel space, and this year's gathering didn't disappoint. It was, though, somewhat overshadowed by the rounds of layoffs happening in the industry. There were developers present who had lost their jobs, or feared losing their jobs, or were working for companies that have decreed that they are no longer interested in upstream development. That added to the general sense of darkness that overlays much of life these days.
Things will get better soon, right?
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
@paulmckrcu @ljs Weird ... I would think that a full-house model would be an *ideal* time to flee the country... :)
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
@monsieuricon what is this "snow or rain" thing of which you speak? It sounds wonderful...
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
re: very lengthy response where i have to reverse engineer of the article's inverse-coded statements
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@hipsterelectron @bkuhn @lwn @conservancy Wow. I must confess that I have almost no clue of what you are trying to communicate here. Other than you didn't like the article, that is.
Which articles do you claim we have purged? You should certainly be able to point to them in the Wayback Machine?
Which articles do you claim we have purged? You should certainly be able to point to them in the Wayback Machine?
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
@archiloque Well, the coreutils 9.7 release fixed a relevant bug: "'cat' would fail with "input file is output file" if input and output are the same terminal device and the output is append-only. [bug introduced in coreutils-9.6]" But the cat-related news has been rather scarce since then.
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
It's almost enough to make me want to get a cat.
https://soranews24.com/2026/03/27/japan-now-has-a-special-desk-for-people-who-work-at-home-with-a-pet-catphotos/
https://soranews24.com/2026/03/27/japan-now-has-a-special-desk-for-people-who-work-at-home-with-a-pet-catphotos/
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
I see on HN that John Bradley, the creator of xv, has died:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47534086
The real announcements, alas, come from sources that I am unwilling to link to.
Xv, an image viewer/editor, is one of those tools that hit a peak of usability that really hasn't been matched since. It supports a wide range of image-manipulation functions, and has an interface that gets the job done quickly. I've sort of moved away from it over the years, but I still keep it around.
RIP, John, you made something good.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47534086
The real announcements, alas, come from sources that I am unwilling to link to.
Xv, an image viewer/editor, is one of those tools that hit a peak of usability that really hasn't been matched since. It supports a wide range of image-manipulation functions, and has an interface that gets the job done quickly. I've sort of moved away from it over the years, but I still keep it around.
RIP, John, you made something good.
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
@monsieuricon @ljs I agree ... and we are absolutely unprepared for it.
I've been getting a bunch of stuff from this creature:
https://lore.kernel.org/all/20260321181511.11706-1-rito@ritovision.com/
Somehow I'm supposed to accept 1000 lines of uncommented JavaScript and Jinja2 - to run in the browser of everybody who pulls up the kernel docs - from a new contributor who summoned it from a machine.
I grow weary of this timeline sometimes.
I've been getting a bunch of stuff from this creature:
https://lore.kernel.org/all/20260321181511.11706-1-rito@ritovision.com/
Somehow I'm supposed to accept 1000 lines of uncommented JavaScript and Jinja2 - to run in the browser of everybody who pulls up the kernel docs - from a new contributor who summoned it from a machine.
I grow weary of this timeline sometimes.
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
@ljs Interesting, I didn't see that this entity had graduated from wanting to be the lib/ maintainer to generating memory-tiering modules for DAMON. Quite the flexible guy! And here I was getting irritated because "he" thought that sending Acked-by responses to random typo-fix documentation patches was somehow helpful...
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
@MarkBrigham Colorado front range. Much of the western US is in deep trouble this year, though.
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
Today I got an email from a local farm saying that they will not be doing a community supported agriculture (CSA) program this year because they don't think there will be enough water to grow food.
Need I say this is not a good sign?
Need I say this is not a good sign?
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
@WesternInfidels I've seen stories of maintainers who have found themselves talking to a contributor who is just relaying questions to the LLM and feeding the answers back. Haven't been there myself, yet, so far as i know...
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
@jani People are clearly not using the Assisted-by tag; I've seen a lot of examples of that in recent days. In many cases people seem to be unaware of the rules. The human inclination to not read our documentation continues, but it appears that the LLMs don't bother to read it either.
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Jonathan Corbet
corbet
An interesting post on BLDGBLOG points out a problem with the US petroleum reserve that had never crossed my mind: this reserve was only designed to last through five empty-and-fill cycles.
"The Financial Times calculates that we are already at the cavern’s ninth historic drawdown, suggesting that 'catastrophic structural damage,' including dissolution of the salt caverns, is now a viable risk."
https://bldgblog.com/2026/03/contextual-collapse/
"The Financial Times calculates that we are already at the cavern’s ninth historic drawdown, suggesting that 'catastrophic structural damage,' including dissolution of the salt caverns, is now a viable risk."
https://bldgblog.com/2026/03/contextual-collapse/
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