“I don’t know how to stop the bully [US gov’t] from beating people [oil states like Venezuela] up for their lunch money [oil energy] —but what if lunch [energy] was free, and no one was carrying lunch money?”
Great allegory by @billmckibben.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy
billmckibben.substack.com/p/just-possi...
Just possibly it's the oil?
Wanna know what the #Linux core developers discussed recently on this years #kernel #maintainers summit?
Then check out the great @lwn coverage from the event now freely available:
https://lwn.net/Articles/1049982/
It includes:
* Toward a policy for machine-learning tools in kernel development – https://lwn.net/Articles/1049830/
* Best practices for linux-next – https://lwn.net/Articles/1050027/
* The state of the kernel #Rust experiment (aka the session where it was decided that the experimental stamp is coming off) – https://lwn.net/Articles/1050174/
* Better development tools for the kernel – https://lwn.net/Articles/1050177/
* Development-process discussions – https://lwn.net/Articles/1050179/
Wanna know what's in store for #Linux 6.19, which is expected on February 1, 2026?
Then check out these great @lwn articles that are not freely available:
* The beginning of the 6.19 merge window – https://lwn.net/Articles/1048869/
* The rest of the 6.19 merge window – https://lwn.net/Articles/1049424/
Tangential thought:
A really funny thing is almost everything good about Rust comes down to when it was written. It has excellent LLVM integration because it was written right after LLVM happened. It has a good build system because the build system was written after pip and npm. It has great libraries because all the libraries were written between 2020 and 2024 and so they're all modern. Not sure where I'm going with this but it makes me wonder how Rust will age.
"How Rust will age". Heh.
With today being Christmas, here is your annual reminder to be nice to newbies in your spaces.
There is going to be a very sudden influx of people who are just getting into the spaces you occupy because they got a gift that acts as their gateway into that activity. Maybe you're into photography and someone just bought them their first ever camera body, or you're into music and someone bought them their first guitar, or you're an audiophile and someone bought them their first really nice headphones, or you're big into TTRPGs and someone just bought them their first ever core rulebook.
Whatever the specific activity and gift, these people are going to have no idea what they're doing, they're going to ask a lot of obvious questions, they're going to make a lot of rookie mistakes, and there's going to be a lot of them.
I cannot stress this enough: BE NICE TO THEM.
Few things will ruin someone's enjoyment of something faster than trying to join its community and getting such a rude first impression that their conclusion is "People who like this are kind of assholes. I don't think I want to do this if it's going to involve getting yelled at." Craigslist and eBay and FB Marketplace will be filled with mint condition gifts being resold to attest to this in the coming months.
You were there at the very first step once. Be the person for them that you wish you had back then. (Or if you were lucky enough, the person you did have who fostered your love of it!) Make this something they'll love just as much as you do, not something they'll want to sell and get away from as soon as possible.
Be the reason this Christmas starts a lifelong passion for them, not the reason they decide to abandon something that they would've loved because people made them feel bad for needing a helping hand.
Another thing that helped me was to start with something other than a complete beginner’s tutorial.
The Rust for C Programmers book is a great resource for someone with existing C experience; it explains the core Rust concepts concisely and in a way that makes it easy to lookup things as needed.
The other resource that was very helpful was the Blessed.rs curated list of common crates.
3/
It's not just economic power, it's digital coercion. We have to get our institutions weaned off of US-based software and platforms, including Microsoft, Meta, Google, Xitter, and more. Open source is the answer! https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/dec/12/danish-intelligence-accuse-the-us-of-using-economic-power-to-assert-will-over-allies
Some reporting on excellent news about:
the physics professor who became Uruguay's energy secretary, and within five years had the country on 98% renewable energy.
and economically it was a smash hit
the cost of electricity production decreased by roughly half compared to fossil-fuel alternatives, and the country attracted $6 billion in renewable energy investments
Going forward,
He hopes to help 50 countries move to renewables over the next ten years. He said, "We want to prove that an energy transition can be possible in different geographies and can work in different national energy and political contexts."
This is a really excellent non-fiction piece by @WeirdWriter about a writing group with a tech bro:
https://sightlessscribbles.com/the-colonization-of-confidence
It is a distilled essence of the social and cultural damage AI/LLM is causing, how AI promoters are cynically destroying people's confidence in their own humanity, while simultaneously trying to ridicule and other people who point out that AI is bullshit. (And this isn't even mentioning the environmental consequences.)