Once we summit the peak of inflated expectations and the bubble bursts hopefully we’ll get back to evaluating the technology on its merits.

LLM’s definitely have some interesting properties but they are not universal problem solvers. They are great at parsing and summarizing language. There ability to vibe code is entirely based on how closely your needs match the (vast) training data. They can synthesise tutorials and stack overflow answers much faster than you can. But if you are writing something new or specialised the limits of their “reasoning” soon show up in dead ends and sycophantic “you are absolutely right, I missed that” responses.

More than the technology the social context is a challenge. We are already seeing humans form dangerous parasocial relationships with token predictors with some tragic results. If you abdicate your learning to an LLM you are not really learning and that could have profound impacts on the current cohort of learners who might be assuming they no longer need to learn as the computer can do it for them.

We are certainly experiencing a very fast technological disruption event and it’s hard to predict where the next few years will take us.

mu4e inside my Emacs session.

We can remember it for you wholesale?

I’ve generally been up front when starting new jobs that nothing impinges my ability to work on FLOSS software on my own time. Only one company put a restriction in for working on FLOSS software in the same technical space as my $DAYJOB.

Morpheus made it very clear to neo that taking the red pill was a one way trip to enlightenment. Cypher references the red/blue pill test when talking to Neo so we can assume he did the same with him. I think Morpheus is pretty clear there is no going back.

Not totally unexpected, I mean look at what brain rot does to humans.

The article mentioned there is a long history of forks in the open source Doom world. It seems the majority of the active developers just moved to the new repository.

What ever happend to the classic “reticulating splines”?

Really nice combination of data and presentation.

I helped with the initial Aarch64 emulation support for qemu as well as working with others to make multi-threaded system emulation a thing. I maintain a number of subsystems but perhaps the biggest impact was implementing the cross compilation support that enabled the TCG testing to be run by anyone including eventually the CI system. This is greatly helped by being a paid gig for the last 12 years.

I’ve done a fair bit of other stuff over my many decades of using FLOSS including maintain a couple of moderately popular Emacs packages. I’ve got drive by patches in loads of projects as I like to fix things up as I go.

I run stock on a pixel although I do have droidify installed and prefer that too the play store for most things. Especially for the freeze app where all my corporate stuff is run from.

I didn’t know who Kirk was until the assassination I have better things to do with my limited time than go on a deep dive into their history before posting any comment on the news. I kinda got the vibe when I realised that was who Cartman was based on in the recent South Park.

On mobile any particular useful compression will become on-demand hardware acceleration which can be very power efficient. I’m fairly sure webp had hardware acceleration on most chipsets these days.

Without algorithmic transparency how can you ensure it’s not a propaganda machine?

That said tilting the algorithm isn’t exclusively a TikTok problem, I would love to know how active the bots have been the last week on all the US owned social media platforms. Is there a push for division? How would we know?

There are large areas of open source that don’t rely on volunteer labour because companies with a vested interest pay people to work on them. They tend to be the obvious large projects that are continuously developed and gain new features. The trouble with something like xz is it was mostly “done” (as in it did the thing it was intended to do) but still needed maintenance to address the minor niggles, bug reports and updates to tooling and dependencies.

The foundations could do a better job here of supporting the maintainers. After Heartbleed the Linux Foundation started the Core Infrastructure Initiative to help fund those under recognised projects. I would hope the people running that could be more proactive identifying those critical understaffed components.

Edit I think it’s now called the Open Source Security Foundation: https://openssf.org/

Was it before or after Oracle acquired Sun that the fork happened? I’m fairly sure it was Oracle that passed the project across to Apache and I have no idea why the Apache foundation accepted it.

Yeah I don’t think this is an ncdu issue but something is broken with the OPs system.

I’ve long avoided npm but attacks on PyPi are a worry.

There is a difference between reviewing code and the feedback when you have the job and during an interview when trying to get a job. I’m not saying you should never expect to be pulled up on mistakes just that an interview experience is very different to the work experience.

Maybe there are ways to ameliorate the stress during the interview to get a better view of how a candidate will perform once hired but I think it’s a tricky balance to strike.

I think there is a difference in setting. Pair coding is a useful exercise but demands a degree of trust that the two of you are working together on a solution rather than one of the pair judging the other.