The European Open Source Awards ceremony from January 29th, in one loooong recording with yours truly showing up several times.

Most blabbing at 1h24 and onward when @gregkh was up.

https://youtu.be/KXS5KQjWjns?si=bN35SofySbhbtys_&t=150

I am losing it at how many of my peers have forgotten what software engineering is. It is not typing in lines of code.

Since we’re not superstitious, the 13th edition of KR will take place September 21–23, 2026 (black cats strictly forbidden during this edition — even on a leash… 😄). We hope to see loads of you there!

And because we want to keep offering the best possible conditions for three days of good vibes and community for everyone, feel free to support this edition by becoming a sponsor. All the info is here!

https://kernel-recipes.org/en/2026/sponsor/

reading vibecoders talk about how great vibecoding is for engineering real things is like reading bitcoiners talk about how they think money works

Being on Team Words Mean Things is difficult these days, particularly when multibillion-dollar companies put out breathless press releases saying "By using our massive language model, whose training data includes every version of GCC ever released, and having it autocorrect its own output by testing it against GCC, we managed to make a C compiler that mostly works for only $20,000 in a week and gosh I have so many feelings."

I mean, what the fuck are we even doing here.

https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler

I think it's interesting how software engineers are (among?) the most eager working class group to replace themselves with LLMs.

It's interesting because LLMs do a worse job than us, we lose ability/skill to do our job the more we use it, lose our jobs, produce worse software, are less satisfied with our work, etc.

Yet so many of my peers seem to be super excited about and advocate for it, while other working class groups at least detest LLMs if not even consider organising themselves to protect their trade/jobs from LLMs.

Are we becoming the cops (read as: class traitors) of this techno-fascist dystopia?

Looks like the AI companies have finally run out of money as they are asking various open source projects to test their closed source products for them for free. What could go wrong with giving access to an unknown tool to private code repos?

If I didn't know better, I would think this is an elaborate phishing scam, or they have run out of data to scrape and need more training material.

Gotta admire their brazenness...

As it came up in a few conversations during "FOSDEM week", here's a link to the OpenSSF blog post about why the idea of "attestation for open source projects" is, in my opinion, and others, a bad idea:

https://openssf.org/blog/2026/01/21/preserving-open-source-sustainability-while-advancing-cybersecurity-compliance/

Yes, FOSS foundations and projects need ways of getting funding, that is very important, but thinking that "attestation is how we will get that money!" might not be such a good idea given the risks involved, and the past experience for those that have attempted it.

so I like to make plaintext outlines of presentations I do. Today is a banger.

I may regret this at some point, but I felt the need to put down in writing how I feel about this moment in the tech industry.

It is not kind. You may well be insulted by it. If you are... then you really should question yourself.

https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/selfish-ai

#AI #LLM #Programming

There is no Claude, just other people's code

Michiel Leenaars for @nlnet at @fosdem

Everything you’re hearing about AI is completely true and not at all made up by sycophants

The only thing that is real is your FOMO

Also ducks. Ducks are real

Traditional #FOSDEM lunch break, club-mate and kernel CVE assignments.

Another day, another stage. Same duo.

Prediction for the potential future:

When the AI coding agent companies are just about to run out of money, down to their last few % raised as none of their customers are actually paying the real cost required to run these services, they pivot and take all of the uploaded code that was willingly sent to them, turn it into thousands of products / services to sell / rent, disconnect the public api endpoints leaving their old customers helpless as they no longer remember how to program "in the raw" and can not understand their own codebases, and compete directly against them putting their own customers all out of business which finally results in a positive income stream and "validation" of the coding agent companies previously over-hyped business valuations.

"But copyright law will prevent this!" you say...

@bagder It was an amazing honor to receive this, thank everyone so much, and for your great speech at the event.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@bagder/115980733920028429

The @europeanOSacademy‘s Excellence in Open Source Award 2026 goes to @gregkh #opensource #OSAwards #eosawards26, presented by @bagder. #linux

These two @lwn articles are prime examples of why good journalism matters and why you should pay money to make sure it thrives:

They both look beyond the shiny statements from the different parties involved and outside commentators such as @torvalds in this case and explain just how it is from a mostly neutral[1] point of view so that you can make your own judgments.

* GPLv2 and installation requirements – https://lwn.net/Articles/1052842/

* SFC v. VIZIO: who can enforce the GPL? – https://lwn.net/Articles/1052734/

[1] We are humans, and even if we try, we are never completely neutral – and a publication like #LWN that targets the FLOSS community obviously will somewhat look at things from the view of its target audience.

#gpl #Linux #kernel #VIZIO #sfc

This post by Bruce Schneier contains so many thoughtful soundbites:

> The question is not simply whether copyright law applies to AI. It is why the law appears to operate so differently depending on who is doing the extracting and for what purpose.

> Like the early internet, AI is often described as a democratizing force. But also like the internet, AI’s current trajectory suggests something closer to consolidation.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2026/01/ai-and-the-corporate-capture-of-knowledge.html

I talked for more than two hours (135 mins to be precise) about upstream Linux kernel hardening at Okayama University this afternoon. 🐧👨🏽‍💻🎙

I just uploaded my slides here: https://embeddedor.com/blog/presentations/#Enhancing_spatial_safety_Better_array-bounds_checking_in_C_and_Linux_Okayama_University_%E2%80%93Guest_talk

I really enjoyed the session. The students were amazing. They were well prepared and asked a lot of questions. 👏🏼👏🏼

#Linux #OpenSource #Education #Mentoring #Okayama #OkayamaUniversity