Pepper & Carrot, Episode 39: "The Tavern" is finally out!

This 11-page webcomic is a standalone episode that you can read in five minutes. It's about courage and an experiment with sound in the comic medium. Translations are already available. We've got English, Français, Deutsch, Español, 中文, Nynorsk, and Toki Pona, thanks to some great contributors. And a big thank you to my 1106 supporters for giving me the time to create this one.

https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/webcomic/ep39_The-Tavern.html

#webcomic #krita #peppercarrot

free software without progressive politics is just free labor

End of Japanese community at Mozilla due to the introduction of AI-based translation.

The community members have expressed disappointment and frustration that their long term volunteer efforts and local knowledge were being replaced by machine translation, which they felt did not match the quality of human provided support.

This is why Mozilla sucks so much, they are going crazy like rest of the industry.

Source
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/forums/contributors/717446

Added screenshot in case Mozilla decided to remove it

# DHH and Omarchy: Midlife crisis – Rust in Peace

https://blogs.gnome.org/alatiera/2025/11/06/dhh-and-omarchy-midlife-crisis/

"But until I see a male writer asked that question, I am going to respectfully decline to answer it.”

Source:
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2018/07/lauren-groff-on-florida-as-a-state-of-mind/

Back from vacation, I caught up on discussions about the kernel and had nice chats with my @igalia colleagues.

At the end of the day, I published a blog post about my Kworkflow talk at Kernel Recipes 2025 with speaker notes and live demo script. So that, you can check what I presented in more details.

https://melissawen.github.io/blog/2025/11/03/kworkflow-talk-at-kernel-recipes-2025

This blog post also reminded me how fun the #KR2025 days were.

""[…] In this article, we will do a deep dive into […] showing off #eBPF’s ability to poke deep within the #Linux #kernel internals to answer questions about the state of the running kernel.

The subject of our investigation is #netfilter, […] Which of the rules in my firewall ruleset caused the drop of a particular packet?

The goal of this article is to demonstrate how to answer this question. We can use this same approach to answer a myriad of questions about the kernel and to hook into pretty much any arbitrary point inside the kernel.""

https://developers.redhat.com/articles/2025/11/03/using-ebpf-attribute-packet-drops-netfilter-rules (written by @toke)

#LinuxKernel

I studied Artificial Intelligence for four years, and I am not touching LLM AIs with a ten-foot pole.

It's not really about the insane electricity demands, the water usage, tho that's a good reason. It's not even, if I'm honest, about the disastrous effect on the sum of all human art and knowledge.

It's because a) I've studied enough AI to know it's a trick, a sort of linguistic illusion, and b) I've studied enough everything else to understand that I'm not immune to such illusions.

Running a package update on my Arch system and it ends with:

(666/666) upgrading xdp-tools

Spooky indeed 👻 😱

My submission to the Competition Bureau of Canada about the new and current Android restrictions, https://competition-bureau.canada.ca/en

Google has announced that it will stop permitting me from writing my own apps for Android unless I both register with them and seek their approval on an app-by-app basis.

I purchased Android because it was sold as "open source", rather than Apple's monopolistic "closed garden".

I have numerous non-Google apps, including the "Tailscale" network security program, and another to tell me when the next TTC bus will arrive. I've also written a toy Sudoku app for friends.

Google promises to keep me from down-loading these, and already makes it surpassing difficult by requiring a workaround, one which which is sarcastically called "side-loading", using a wired connection to my development machine.

Google has already banned programs to warn Americans about "ICE" raids at the request of the US government, and should not have the ability to do the same to Canadians at the US's behest.

It is, in my opinion, unacceptable for Google to impose these barriers on Canadian Citizens. For any other device, I can install a program I like by pressing a button on a web page. And I and other Canadians can write their own programs, and put them on a web page.

(see also https://keepandroidopen.org/)

Now this is ridiculously catchy.

And yes, I bow to my socialist vampire overlords 🙇‍♂️

TLDR; The PSF has made the decision to put our community and our shared diversity, equity, and inclusion values ahead of seeking $1.5M in new revenue. Please read and share. https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-funding-statement.html
🧵
https://www.python.org/sponsors/application/

I can somewhat empathize with wanting to "keep tech free of politics":

Many of us were drawn to tech because of a strong feeling of agency, and something that (for all it's emergent properties) is feasible to comprehend.

Alas.

As we grow up and mature, I think that's not a position that can be held to without appearing either negligently or intentionally naïve.

Any non-trivial tech is build by (and for) communities.

How we form those - and with whom - *is* political.

Sorry.

Worth your time:

https://terminal.ahumanfuture.co/posts/2025-10-17/the-world-is-something-that-we-make/

(can't recall link source; apologies if it was you!)

All modern digital Infrastructure

Thank you #xkcd

The Milky Way over Monument Valley
Credits: Tom Masterson
#nature #space #astrophotography

This is the Big Lie of #OpenSource.

(It is also bizarre for DHH to be quoting an LLM in this matter, but I digress)

Tech communities are *already* fractured. There is no "big tent". Instead, what happens is a slow brain drain. Troll-friendly spaces built on top of offensive edgelord culture inherently degrade over time…a shrinking pool of expertise as those with diverse perspectives & backgrounds go silent.

DHH is king of a noisy yet dying world. And ultimately the ecosystem always suffers.

Newsletter: Anatomy of a crypto meltdown

October 2025 brought the most dramatic crypto flash crash of all time, but it was only a dress rehearsal for the systemic crisis the industry is building toward.

https://www.citationneeded.news/anatomy-of-a-crypto-meltdown/

#crypto #cryptocurrency #USpol #USpolitics

Hacker gets annoyed at Amazon’s Kindle apps, reverse-engineers the Kindle web reader’s protocol (which basically sends each page as a set of glyphs in a deliberately broken variant of SVG). Such obscurity, much security.

https://blog.pixelmelt.dev/kindle-web-drm/

Today I learnt that a German complained that #cyberpunk2077 used the wrong manhole standardisation. It's beautiful.