It never ceases to amaze me how today's techbros vision of the future they want defaults to fully automated leopard-face-chomping neo-feudalism rather than fully automated luxury gay space communism

Just an idea for UK/EU digital legislation.

All non-FOSS, proprietary mobile apps must have a web alternative. This will allow people to use services without relying on Apple/Google services and telemetry via a phone web browser of their choice (rather than having to download the app).

Yes - there'll be plenty of cases where this can't happen, but I think it's a good starting point.

#FOSS #Android #Apple #Google #UK #EU #Apps

When Prague decides to paint the sky…

Charles Bridge, the Vltava River, and a sunset that feels almost unreal. ✨
This bridge has watched over Prague for more than 600 years — and somehow, every evening still feels new.

📸 My Prague

#photography

I think my favorite thing about my tiny corner of this here fediverse is that silly is fine, goofy is fine, horny is fine, but bullshit is not.

I have a great love and respect for everyone who has played a part in bringing me this incredible gift.

it feels like everyone with even the most remote, faintest security inklings has been screaming 'SANITIZE YOUR INPUTS' and a bunch of folks went .. NUH UH. not only are we gonna not sanitize shit, we're gonna invent a tech that CANT TELL if something is input or output! NYEAH!

and now it runs everything

Torment Nexus™️LLC - the professionals choice.

One of the open source projects I used to (many years ago, so I am not really affected anymore) has recently decided to allow AI contributions. One of their arguments is that they judge submissions on quality, not tools used.

Back when I was an active contributor (to the project and maintainer of some other parts of the surrounding ecosystem), I got a lot of submissions that were bad.

The thing is, I absolutely loved getting these because they always came from super-enthusiastic junior people. Reviewing them and giving feedback often too much longer than implementing the feature myself. The same was usually true for the next contribution too. But that shifted over time. After a few months, I started getting patches where I didn’t find anything beyond the cosmetic that I wanted to change.

Going back further, I was one of those people when I started contributing.

Measured as code contributions over the short term, maintainers working with submitters of poor-quality PRs is a waste of time. You’re taking time away from writing code to do something that produces code more slowly.

Measured over the long term, the results are very different. Far more code in that project and closely related parts of the ecosystem has been written by people who I mentored when they came along with some bad code than by me.

It’s never a waste of my time to turn an enthusiastic and incompetent contributor into an enthusiastic and competent contributor, it’s an absolutely critical part of building a healthy project. I wouldn’t have got nearly as much out of F/OSS on a personal level if I hadn’t encountered a lot of people with the same opinion when I was one of the enthusiastic and incompetent newcomers.

But LLMs are not like that. If I spend time reviewing LLM-generated code when it would have been faster to write it myself (which, to be clear, is the case on 100% of LLM-submitted PRs I’ve seen so far), then that’s just a time sink. It’s also taking away time I could be spending helping new contributors who want to actually improve, rather than just take the review comments, feed them into an opaque system, and give me back the results.

Reading (too much) AI-news is quite upsetting if you try to square it with observed realities of what people are actually achieving (not much). Here @ludicity assures us that we are not wrong. The world of business is no longer able to meaningfully evaluate AI or even talk about it coherently: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/

I've been spending rather too much of my time reading the depressing threads on LLM use in the kernel. But I thought that this contribution from Lyude Paul worth the investment.

"For many people who need their jobs, guidelines around acceptable use of these tools beyond "a person needs to own the the code" may end up being the only thing allowing employees to be responsible with their contributions without repercussion from employers."

https://lwn.net/ml/all/3a5d891b536588e8e4fc84d60a5c8af72091d852.camel@redhat.com

The Free Software movement never escaped from its origins: the early ‘80s MIT AI Lab. Two things were true in this environment:

• Back when most computers had tens of KiBs of RAM and 1 MiB was a huge amount, programs were simple. Very few programs were so complex that one person could not completely understand them.
• The AI Lab was full of some of the most talented programmers in the world.

This meant that the only obstacles for these people being able to fix bugs and add features to any program were access to the source code and the legal rights to modify it. Once you have those, any program was understandable by that group and they could modify it however they wished.

For the next 40 years, the FSF focused on these two things. The world around them changed. These two prerequisites were never enough for most people (what do 90% of computer users do if you give them even a modest 10,000 line C codebase and tell them they can change it however they like?) and now they aren’t enough even for competent programmers.

When Linus says ‘fork it’ to folks who don’t want LLM-extruded code in their kernel, he knows full well that it is almost impossible to fork a 40 MLoC C (and Rust now) codebase that averages more than one CVE per day and have something useful.

The Free Software movement is struggling now because it obsessed over licenses, which was never a path that would succeed, and ignored the hard problems:

• How do you design environments that enable end users to modify their software?
• How do you engineer software so that it is cheap and easy for a random user to maintain a fork that meets their specific needs?
• How do you foster communities where people want to share improvements, so forks don’t proliferate even when it’s easy?
• How do you create an environment where everyone sees the benefits of user-modifiable code to such a degree that trying to sell anything that doesn’t come with these rights is commercially impossible?

Instead of tackling any of these problems, they created more complex and restrictive GPL variants. And well-paid lawyers found loopholes in them that allowed corporations to keep doing what they wanted (and even pick licenses like AGPLv3 to control ecosystems, because they give the copyright owners so many more rights than everyone else that it’s hard for anyone else to compete). They said ‘don’t worry about the complexity of the licenses, you only need to understand the legal details if you’re creating and distributing derived works’ while completely forgetting that making it possible for anyone to create and distribute modified versions of the programs was the entire point of the Free Software movement.

EDIT: Lots of people are reading this as if it’s about the kernel. I would say that the kernel is the least important part of a system for this. The layers on top, especially anything that directly interfaces with the user or controls their data, are far more important to build around these principles.

The picture a lot of people have of kernel maintainers is a picture of old school kernel maintainers (thankfully inaccurate).

That is of somebody who lacks empathy and soft skills, rudely demands trivia and treats you like a peon.

People like that don't succeed in the kernel these days, and were never worth having anyway - they cause more harm than good + are poison to communities.

Time and time again in my career I've seen it - there is no degree of technical nous that's worth having in exchange for dealing with an arsehole.

Those who remain in the community who behave like that are thankfully a dying breed, and good riddance.

I achieved a personal goal recently: contributing to @lwn which feels like a significant milestone for my writing. I consider LWN to be one of the more prestigious publications out there so I'm really grateful that @jzb took the time to work with me to get there. My article is out of subscriber-only access today, so here it is!

https://lwn.net/Articles/1077739/

RE: https://mastodon.social/@sundogplanets/116893541666491703

Fellow Californians, get on the phones to Senators Schiff & Padilla & your house rep. Demand they block this horrid ecosystem destroying venture.

Phone numbers for House and Senate offices, both voice and TTY, are available by calling the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 (voice) or 202-224-3091 (TTY)

#CA #nature #conservation

Hey all, I have a big favour to ask.

At the beginning of the week, a large client that we had 100% expected to get started with a large project this month has dropped out at the most inconvenient time for us.

My team at @neighbourhoodie and I are looking for any and all projects we might be able to help with, the sooner the better.

We are really good at turning manual and/or analogue processes into digital ones, especially, but not limited to, if parts of the process need to work while a person or device is offline.

We have proven this repeatedly by making substantial contributions to fighting a Ebola epidemic, testing the first ever Ebola vaccine and distributing the very first COVID vaccinations to all eligible Bavarians.

We are also really good at taking your prototypes and turn them into real-life, secure, reliable, fast and scalable systems that you can bet your company on for years. From UX to SRE, we got you covered.

You need a frontend for a backend service you’ve built, we got you. You need a backend for a mobile app or game you’ve built, we got you.

We also excel at designing, building and debugging distributed database systems of all sizes and shapes. If you sync your photos with tools from the large red brick company, we helped with that.

We can help migrate your infrastructures from US clouds to US hosters (within reason). Wanna move from GitHub to a self-hosted or managed Forgejo? Get in touch!

Additionally, in the past three years we helped 15+ FOSS projects from systemd, to GNOME, to PHP and PyPI, as well as Servo and Log4j with maintenance and security tasks in all sorts of programming languages and environments. We can help with yours, too.

We can also help join your team (remotely, CE[S]T) to augment any current projects you’re need accelerated.

I’m happy to answer any question you might have.

And I appreciate any leads and all boosts <3

https://neighbourhood.ie

Congratulations to all my US friends on making it to the end of your epic 250 year experiment with democracy! May the subsequent imperial phase be mercifully brief and the aftermath painless.

Happy 55th Birthday, Project Gutenberg! Let's celebrate!🎉

Project Gutenberg was founded on July 4, 1971, when Michael Hart typed the U.S. Declaration of Independence into an early internet-connected computer and shared it with friends, making it the first digital text — though its official posting date is recorded as December 1, 1971. (And happy 250th, USA.)

The Declaration of Independence at PG:
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1

#ebooks #publicdomain

Only just now realising that the wish fulfilment of having a dedicated slave or polite servant might play a bigger role in the popularity of chatbots than I expected

I can be slow sometimes, but I also always thought the constant signals of servility these systems are made to exude were obviously distasteful, even when experienced second-hand through other people's reports

#wcurl is now two years old!

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/07/03/wcurl-is-here/

Idea: For the next installment in the “Game of Thrones” franchise, base the plot on the endless IETF meltdown about non-hybrid post-quantum cryptography.

The best write-up on the technology issues is, by far, from @sophieschmieg - https://keymaterial.net/2025/11/27/ml-kem-mythbusting/ - since it has a lot of math, I was thinking someone should write a story-oriented narrative, and the GoT scriptwriters have definitely shown the right skillset.

I decided against a link to the mailing-list archive, life is too short.

The @lwn web site is currently under the most intense scraper attack I have seen yet. 1.3M unique IP addresses within the last couple of hours, and it's not done yet. The work we have done on defenses appears to be paying off, though; the server is holding up reasonably well — so far.

...just in case anybody wonders why I have a rather dim view of the whole AI industry...