I always hated being told to show my working as a child, but it took me until recently to understand why it annoyed me so much.

Some thing in a sequence of reasoning steps are obvious. A small number of them are obvious to everyone. Some are obvious to me. A (probably overlapping) set are obvious to you but, typically, they are not the same set.

Over the last few years, I've had a lot of conversations with really smart people where they got stuck on something I consider to be so obvious it doesn't need explaining, and then they skip over the next three reasoning steps that I thought needed very careful explanation because they consider those to be obvious.

A huge part of effective communication (especially in teams with diverse expertise) revolves around understanding which steps in your working you need to show. Showing all of them will just bore your reader. Showing the ones that you think need to be shown will work only if your reader has the same background as you.

I was at small house party a few months ago and some guy was there talking about his New App. Being curious I asked. LLM coding assistant.

Told him what I thought: stuff’s dogshit.

He got upset and claimed it was helping people. I simply said “no” and then said that to every other bullshit claim he offered. Someone eventually told me “hey you have to be nice” so I laughed in their face because the thing is..

No, I fucking don‘t. Why the fuck would I be nice to people who are destroying one of the greatest works of art humanity has ever produced: the internet? Because from the foundations to (almost) everyone on it, it’s so obvious to me that the internet is art. It does not just simply contain it, or provide a medium for it, or facilitate it’s propagation, it is art. Though it certainly is all those other things as well.

The internet is gift to the idea that knowledge should be, must be available to everyone.

Me, two weeks ago:

"Strange days indeed; imagine listening to a carpenter describe themselves as "hammer-first."

"But do you... build houses?"

"Incidentally, yes; but our main focus is on hitting nails with hammers."

Microsoft today:

"AI is now a fundamental part of how we work," Liuson wrote. "Just like collaboration, data-driven thinking, and effective communication, using AI is no longer optional - it's core to every role and every level."

https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-internal-memo-using-ai-no-longer-optional-github-copilot-2025-6

A thing I'm quite tired of seeing in technical spaces are exceptions being made for engineers because they are "smart". Widely known as the brilliant asshole.

This is code. It can be difficult, doing it well is even more difficult. It's also table stakes for this job. Especially when it comes to OSS. We are not so unique that we can't be replaced with another coder. I have replaced myself with very competent engineers at Meta in my work with btrfs.

What makes "smart" engineers is their ability to work with other people. This fantasy that "ideas" are how we communicate and the best idea wins, the most technical argument wins, is simply not true. You get your code in because you know how to communicate. Does that include technical arguments? Of course it does. But if you bring that technical argument to the table with "I can't believe you were so stupid to do it this other way, you should all thank me for being here" you are going to be far less successful.

That doesn't make you smart. To me, "smart" includes all the things necessary to accomplish your task as quickly and efficiently as possible. Part of that for us is coding, but the larger part is communication and the relationships we build with each other by being consistent with how we communicate and treat other people.

I work with the smartest people in the world. They are smart because they can code. They are smart because they are kind and gracious with their communication. They are smart because they build community in the work that they do.

If your community is a developer of 1 and nobody wants you around, it doesn't matter how good of a coder you are. You have failed at one of the core tenants of your job. In the real world, with real stakes, real bosses, real accountability, you would be fired. And that would be the correct outcome.

The power of OSS is the fact that it's many developers working on a thing. We all witness the power of this every day, but still cling to this fantasy that it's one smart asshole that keeps the whole thing together.

We are all replaceable in OSS. That's the beauty of it. It will outlast every once of us.

It just occurred to me that Free, Libre, Open Source Software is inevitable (outside rare niches).

Yes, it takes time. But eventually, some FLOSS that's "good enough" arises. And network and scale effects make it easier everywhere with every win.

And once the switch has happened — have you ever heard of someone going back to proprietary software? No? Me neither.

It's a one way street.

And thus, the proprietary world keeps shrinking.

#OpenSource

This graph is the one I'm most excited about: the lifetime of security flaws in Linux is finally starting to get shorter (and the number of fixed flaws continues to rise).

https://hachyderm.io/@LinuxSecSummit@social.kernel.org/114750428620118674

@Catvalente

Danish: "Hvad fanden?"
Swedish: "Va fan?"

(Literal translation of both: "What the devil?")

I need the phrase (or its equivalent in everyday casual speech) of “What the fuck” in as many languages as possible.

Go.

Your reminder I once discovered a similarly qualified male coworker made like 20k more than I did and it only happened because he was willing to discuss it with me.

"each individual kid is now hooked into a Nonsense Machine"
Edit: I got those screenshots from imgur. It might be from Xitter, with the account deleted or maybe threads with the account not visible without login? 🤷
2nd Edit: @edgeofeurope found this https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1809325125159825649.html
#school #AI #KI #meme #misinformation #desinformation

New blog post: "Putting the cart before the AI"

I guess it was inevitable that I would have to write something about AI. I am not sure if I have anything incredibly unique to add to this topic, but I nevertheless feel like I should put a stake in the ground.

https://blog.tohojo.dk/2025/06/putting-the-cart-before-the-ai.html

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled ... was convincing internet communities to switch from email lists / IRC / another open standard to Slack / Discord. The latest example of a “it's only free while we say it's free" is CNCF’s / Kubernetes's Slack - https://github.com/kubernetes/community/blob/master/communication/slack-migration-faq.md - who it appears have *4 days* to backup their history (for a server with 100,000s of users)

Neither Slack nor Discord are reasonable, serious, professional, options for open community discussion. They are either too expensive, and/or involve inappropriate advertising. And who knows when Discord will start pulling this kind of behaviour, too, requiring large communities to pay?

The problem is today when anyone says "can't we just use an email list?" they are pooh-pooh'ed as being horribly out of touch. Hence why even the linked FAQ describes Discord as the only likely exit plan for Kubernetes. What a mess.

I really must insist that you experience this marketing.

#Trains #Amtrak #Friday https://urbanists.social/@legofwoofus/114719276818121145

Remember when people were typing one word and then blindly accepting the next one from autosuggestion because it was a kind of fun and silly thing to do?

We now have a whole industry built around it.

Again I stand by what I said.

"I can't believe I even have to talk about these people. That's how ridiculous it s."

We have the equivalent of the scientologists running the field of AI with untold amounts of money and power and we're the ones who have to do point by point rebuttals of their eugenicists dreams.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-commentary/billionaires-psychology-tech-politics-1235358129/

@splitbrain
So it's working? 😅

I went to a talk lately that was mostly about something else, but the speaker came out with:

“If you only remember one thing from this talk, remember this. Everyone in this room who likes helping people, raise your hand.”

Every hand, or nearly every hand, went up.

“If you like asking other people for help, keep your hand up.”

Almost every hand went back down.

“As you can see, people like helping you. When you ask for help, you’re making them feel good, even if you don’t like asking.”

I’ve genuinely forgotten the rest of the presentation but I won’t forget that.

You don't have to put on the red light.

A few people have asked me recently questions along the lines of ‘how mature is #CHERI as a technology?’ The analogy that I usually use is the 386’s memory management unit (MMU). This shipped 40 years ago, at a time when most desktops did not do memory protection, though larger systems usually did. Similarly, most systems today do not do object-granularity memory safety.

The 386 shipped after the 286 had tried a very different model for the same goal and had failed to provide abstractions that were usable and performant. Similarly, things like Intel MPX have failed to provide the memory safety guarantees of CHERI and thins like Arm’s POE2 have failed to provide the kind of useable programmer model for fine-grained compartmentalisation model that CHERI enables, yet both technologies have shown that these are important problems to solve.

The 386’s MMU had a bunch of features that you’d recognise today. Page tables were radix trees, for example, just as they are on a modern system. It wasn’t perfect, but it was enough for Linux and Windows NT to reach Bill Gates’ goal of ‘a computer on every desk’, at least in wealthy countries (and the cost of the MMU was not the blocker elsewhere). For over 20 years, operating systems were able to use it to provide useful abstractions with strong security properties.

It was not perfect. Few people thought, in 1985, that PCs would run VMs because they barely had enough memory to run two programs, let alone two operating systems. But the design was able to evolve. It grew to support more than 4 GiB of physical memory with PAE, to support nested paging for virtualisation with VT-x, and so on. It made some mistakes (read permission implied execute, for example) but these were fixed in later systems that were able to provide programmers with the same abstractions.

And this is why I’m excited about the progress towards the Y (CHERI) base architecture in RISC-V, and why I believe now is the right time for it. There’s a lot of CHERI that’s very stable. Most of the things from our 2015 paper are still there. A few newer things are also now well tested and useful. These are an excellent foundation for a base architecture that I’m confident we can standardise and that software and hardware vendors can support for at least the next 20 years.

At the same time, in #CHERIoT (and some other projects) we have a few extensions that we know are validated in software and very useful in some domains (in our case, for microcontrollers) but not as useful elsewhere. Some of the things we’ve done in CHERIoT would be terrible ideas in large out-of-order machines, but would be great to standardise as extensions because they are useful on microcontrollers, and some might be useful on some accelerators. It would be great if these could share toolchain bits.

There are also some exciting research ideas. I’d be much less excited by CHERI if I thought we were finished. 40 years after MMUs became mainstream, people are still finding exciting new use cases for them and new ways to extend them to enable more software models and that’s what a new foundational piece of architecture should provide. I firmly believe CHERI has the same headroom. After Y is standardised, I expect to see decades more vendor and standard extensions that are doing things no one has thought of yet, but which would be impossible without CHERI as a foundation.

Video of my DevConf.cz talk, "Beware of the kernel RTNL mutex" is available in the room stream, starting at 53:20

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BBwN-fzEtAs&t=3220s