Ukraine is critically low on ammo, and Russia conducts 50 attacks daily, while the US Congress is holding back the aid to Ukraine.

Putin must be laughing at how much control he has over the US thanks to Trump.

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/27/europe/ukraine-battlefield-reality-intl-hnk/index.html

Great, my stash was starting to run low.

For two years, the Biden administration led an international coalition to provide military aid to Ukraine. Majorities in the U.S. and in Congress continue to support Ukraine. Now, a minority of Republicans are preparing to cut it all off.

If they do, the US is at risk of seeming not just like an unreliable ally, but an unserious ally https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/01/us-congress-support-ukraine-war/677256/

I believe Eric would hate me for any attention I call to this (which is really why I don't do this on every corner at any opportunity), but b4 is only really possible because of the work he did on public-inbox. If it weren't for all the effort he's put into it over the past few years, there would be no lore.kernel.org and no b4.

(LF has been a proud sponsor of public-inbox over the past 3 years.)

De retour à Montréal, woohoo.

Attempt to leave Detroit #2.

Got stuck in DTW on my way back home. Send cat memes.

the struggle was real

Guess what it's doing in Sou-thern Ca-li-fornia?

I am disappointed that the NAME of the 6.8-rc1 release in no way reflects The Tree or The Staycation.

I would like to clarify my earlier comment: I'm not saying LF is not supportive of my work -- in fact, I've always been encouraged to do whatever is necessary to make the Linux development community happy and productive, and there has always been solid backing for it from LF management and fellow IT team members.

However, I do have to manage multiple priorities and my #1 priority remains supporting the LF IT backend infrastructure for kernel.org (plus a few other similarly aligned projects), in addition to managing a small team of fellow IT pros. If I have to choose between working on tooling and working on something that requires attention from the infra side of things, the infra work is always prioritized for practical/operational/security reasons.

So, when I say that "my request hasn't been approved yet" I don't mean it in the sense that someone is telling me not to work on b4 or bugbot -- it just means that we haven't properly reallocated resources to allow me to prioritize tooling work -- yet. To properly request these resources, I need to present a clear vision of what we are trying to accomplish, why it makes sense to work on that (as opposed to, say, just moving things over to some large commercial forge and telling everyone to switch to that), and how this effort helps Linux development in the overall scheme of things. I'm sure we'll get there soon, I'm just explaining why we're not there yet (and hence why some cool stuff I've talked about hasn't made it to b4). :)

Sorry for the lack of progress on some of the b4 features -- I've been focusing on finishing up list migrations and planning some long-overdue infra upgrades to happen this year.

Unfortunately, my request to be able to dedicate more time to kernel developer tooling hasn't been approved yet. I need to put together a small report of what we were already able to get done with lore and b4 and what I hope to accomplish if I'm able to dedicate more time to working on it. Without that, there's a perception at LF that I'm just putting band-aids on a process that's beyond fixing and it's better to just move everyone over to GitHub/GitLab instead.

(Yes, I know that 50% of maintainers will vehemently agree with that statement, but I also know that 50% of others will just as vehemently disagree with it. My preferred course of action is iterative changes that would allow integrating forge workflows with the traditional decentralized model without having the whole thing rip apart. Now I just need to put this into words and plans.)

Why does every cautionary dystopian sci-fi tale from the past 75 years somehow become a startup's business plan?

TIL about another community on Slack who is now being asked to pay thousands to preserve basic functionality 😬

Proprietary tools that offer a lot for free, without fail, will squeeze you. And unfortunately, because of their nature, a lot gets left behind when you inevitably migrate.

When we select tools for our communities, we need to think over longer time horizons.

FOSS options like Matrix for chat and Discourse for forums are the better bet.

#Community #DevRel #OpenSource #FOSS #Matrix

There's a Russian word "zhabogadyuking" ("frog-rattlesnake-ing") which describes a situation when entities whom you actively dislike are fighting with each other.

Pardon the header bloat -- we've added ARC signing to all our mailing list messages in order to appease Gmail's new requirements.

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#zippy=%2Crequirements-for-sending-or-more-messages-per-day

Day four of no power and no Internet. This big tree is the reason. One among hundreds in the area, but this is the one that took out *our* power and Internet.

PGE (Portland General Electric) claims we should get power back by 10pm today, but the ice storm arrives today, so we'll see.

Edit: well, it looks like PGE fixed the outage by just removing me from the outage database, not by actually reconnecting power. That was the second time that happened, so I re-re-reported the outage. Not that I was hugely optimistic about the 10pm timeframe, but it looks even less likely now.

I love this soundtrack -- it's been my work music for the past few weeks.

Try the game, too, it's great. Super relaxing (if you don't have a thing against great heights).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kuug4RUjfBY

The U.S. is a “fat buffalo trying to take a nap” as hungry wolves approach, the European ambassador mused.

“I can hear those Champagne bottle corks popping in Moscow — like it’s Christmas every fucking day.”

As voters cast ballots in the Iowa caucuses Monday, many in the United States see this year’s presidential election as a test of American democracy.
But, in a series of conversations with a dozen current and former diplomats, I sensed that to many of our friends abroad, the U.S. is already failing that test.

The diplomats are aghast that so many U.S. leaders let their zeal for partisan politics prevent the basic functions of government.
It’s a major topic of conversations at their private dinners and gatherings.
Many of those I talked to were granted anonymity to be as candid with me as they are with each other.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/15/what-foreign-diplomats-say-about-u-s-politics-behind-closed-doors-00135326