Hacker News (aka HN) is a link aggregator where “hackers”1 gather to discuss technology, politics, and anything which “good hackers would find interesting”. HN is a means by which its host, prominent startup incubator Y Combinator, projects soft power, promotes startups it funds, and feeds people with ideas into its incubation program. Hacker News is one of the most popular forums for discussing technology online today – perhaps the biggest.HN also has a pronounced political bias, which is growing more exaggerated with time. Many of its users have long claimed centrist or “apolitical” views.…
The role of AI tools (LLMs, mainly) in Linux is under discussion, or it was, until Linus Torvalds “put his foot down” in support of the use of AI in Linux kernel development.I can identify two major ways in which AI is used for Linux kernel development: authoring code and reviewing code. There are, at the time of writing, just over 1,200 kernel commits with an “Assisted-by” tag, from September 2025 to the present, most of which indicate patches which were written or assisted by LLM tools.The second important use of AI for Linux comes with a new code review tool called Sashiko, which generates…
The masterwork of Terry A. Davis is his eclectic operating system, TempleOS, which he worked on until his tragic death in 2018. In terms of technical excellence, TempleOS rates well in some respects and poorly in others. For example, it earns the achievement, coveted in OS dev circles, of being self-hosted.1 TempleOS is written in Terry’s own bespoke dialect of C and includes an editor, interpreter, and compiler, as well as a number of original games. In other respects, it compares poorly to many hobby OS projects, some of which have achieved significantly greater levels of technical…
I redesigned my blog! I decided to put some more personality into it this time, after over a decade of the minimalist style. This short post is just an excuse to show up in your feed reader so you can go look at it. Cheers!Also: I’m trying out fedi again. You can find me here: @[email protected].
No comment on this PR may mention the following topics:Long-term social or economic impact of LLMsThe environmental impact of LLMsAnything to do with the copyright status of LLM outputMoral judgements about people who use LLMsWe have asked the moderation team to help us enforce these rules.– Add an LLM policy for rust-lang/rust, GitHub
Back when Copilot first came out, I immediately disliked it. But I decided to give it a fair shake and tried to evaulate it in good faith. I wasn’t interested in paying for it, but they had a form for FOSS community members to apply for a free subscription, so I filled it out and gave it a shot. Once approved I spent 15 minutes (successfully) convincing it to write a Python script that printed out the lyrics to “All Star” verbatim, and haven’t touched it since.Since then, like clockwork I get an email every month informing me that my subscription has been automatically renewed.Hi there,Thank…
Kiwi Farms is a web forum that facilitates the discussion and harassment of online figures and communities. Their targets are often subject to organized group trolling and stalking, as well as doxing and real-life harassment. Kiwi Farms has been tied to the suicides of three people who were victims of harassment by the website.– Wikipedia: Kiwi FarmsAbout three years ago, a thread on Kiwi Farms was opened about me. In the years since, it has grown to about 1,200 posts full of bigots responding to anything and everything I do online with scorn, slurs, and overt bigotry. The thread is full of…
15 years ago, on December 11th, 2010, at the bold age of 17, I wrote my first blog post on the wonders of the Windows Phone 7 on Blogspot. I started blogging as a kid at the behest of a family friend at Microsoft, who promised she’d make sure I would become the youngest Microsoft MVP if I started blogging. That never came to pass, though, because as I entered adulthood and started to grow independent of my Microsoft-friendly family I quickly began down the path to the free and open source software community.Early blog posts covered intriguing topics such as complaining about my parent’s…
So apparently rsync is slop now. When I heard, I wanted to drop a quick note on my blog to give an alternative: tar. It doesn’t do everything that rsync does, in particular identifying and skipping up-to-date files, but tar + ssh can definitely accomodate the use case of “transmit all of these files over an SSH connection to another host”.Consider the following:tar -cz public | ssh example.org tar -C /var/www -xz This will transfer the contents of ./public/ to example.org:/var/www/public/, preserving file ownership and permissions and so on, with gzip compression. This is roughly the…
Vim is important to me. I’m using it to write the words you’re reading right now. In fact, almost every word I have ever committed to posterity, through this blog, in my code, all of the docs I’ve written, emails I’ve sent, and more, almost all of it has passed through Vim.My relationship with the software is intimate, almost as if it were an extra limb. I don’t think about what I’m doing when I use it. All of Vim’s modes and keybindings are deeply ingrained in my muscle memory. Using it just feels like my thoughts flowing from my head, into my fingers, into a Vim-shaped extension of my body,…
I’ve gotten a lot of flack throughout my career over my disdain towards test-driven development (TDD). I have met a lot of people who swear by it! And, I have also met a lot of people who insisted that I adopt it, too, often with the implied threat of appealing to my boss if appealing to me didn’t work.The basic premise of TDD, for those unaware, is that one first writes a unit test that verifies the expected behavior for some code they want to write, observes the new test fail, and then one writes the implementation, iterating on it until the test passes. The advantage of this approach is,…
As you may recall, circa 2022-2023 I was working on a microkernel written in Hare named Helios. Helios was largely inspired by and modelled after the design of seL4 and was my first major foray into modern OS development that was serious enough to get to a somewhat useful state of functionality, with drives for some real hardware, filesystems, and an environment for running user programs of a reasonable level of sophistication.Helios development went strong for a while but eventually it slowed and eventually halted in a state of design hell. Since Helios was my first major OS project at this…
You might have seen an article making the rounds this week, about a young man who ended his life after ChatGPT encouraged him to do so. The chat logs are really upsetting.Someone two degrees removed from me took their life a few weeks ago. A close friend related the story to me, about how this person had approached their neighbor one evening to catch up, make small talk, and casually discussed their suicidal ideation at some length. At the end of the conversation, they asked to borrow a rope, and their neighbor agreed without giving the request any critical thought. The neighbor found them…
Some time ago, I noticed some new organization called FUTO popping up here and there. I’m always interested in seeing new organizations that fund open source popping up, and seeing as they claim several notable projects on their roster, I explored their website with interest and gratitude. I was first confused, and then annoyed by what I found. Confused, because their website is littered with bizzare manifestos,1 and ultimately annoyed because they were playing fast and loose with the term “open source”, using it to describe commercial source-available software.FUTO eventually clarified their…
US politics has been pretty fascist lately. The state is filling up concentration camps, engaging in mass state violence against people on the basis of racialized traits, deporting them to random countries without any respect for habeas corpus, exerting state pressure on the free press to censor speech critical of the current administration, and Trump is openly floating the idea of an unconstitutional third term.Fascism is clearly on the rise, and they’re winning more and more power. None of this is far removed from us in the FOSS community – there are a number of fascists working in FOSS,…
In the wake of the largest supply-chain attack in history, the JavaScript community could have a moment of reckoning and decide: never again. As the panic and shame subsides, after compromised developers finish re-provisioning their workstations and rotating their keys, the ecosystem might re-orient itself towards solving the fundamental flaws that allowed this to happen.After all, people have been sounding the alarm for years that this approach to dependency management is reckless and dangerous and broken by design. Maybe this is the moment when the JavaScript ecosystem begins to understand…
I’ve been on the lookout for a scripting language which can be neatly embedded into Hare programs. Perhaps the obvious candidate is Lua – but I’m not particularly enthusiastic about it. When I was evaluating the landscape of tools which are “like Lua, but not Lua”, I found an interesting contender: Wren.I found that Wren punches far above its weight for such a simple language. It’s object oriented, which, you know, take it or leave it depending on your use-case, but it’s very straightforwardly interesting for what it is. I found a few things to complain about, of course – its scope rules are…
Last week, Armin and I worked together on the latest release of Himitsu, a “secret storage manager” for Linux. I haven’t blogged about Himitsu since I announced it three years ago, and I thought it would be nice to give you a closer look at the latest release, both for users eager to see the latest features and for those who haven’t been following along.1A brief introduction: Himitsu is like a password manager, but more general: it stores any kind of secret in its database, including passwords but also SSH keys, credit card numbers, your full disk encryption key, answers to those annoying…
Today, we’re looking at two case studies in how to respond when reactionaries appear in your free software community.Exhibit AIt is a technical decision.The technical reason is that the security team does not have the bandwidth to provide lifecycle maintenance for multiple X server implementations. Part of the reason for moving X from main to community was to reduce the burden on the security team for long-term maintenance of X. Additionally, nobody so far on the security team has expressed any interest in collaborating with xxxxxx on security concerns.We have a working relationship with…
Tech workers have long resisted the suggestion that we should be organized into unions. The topic is consistently met with a cold reception by tech workers when it is raised, and no big tech workforce is meaningfully organized. This is a fatal mistake – and I don’t mean “fatal” in the figurative sense. Tech workers, it’s time for you to unionize, and strike, or you and your loved ones are literally going to die.In this article I will justify this statement and show that it is clearly not hyperbolic. I will explain exactly what you need to do, and how organized labor can and will save your…
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