I'm overall pretty happy with my experience on Mastodon - except for the situation around long threads. With the default UI getting 20+ fragments in reverse order with other random bits inbetween is bad enough that it makes me unfollow or mute people. Especially odd to me if the people in […]

How do people deal with the now very common compromises of packages you might use? So far on my radar is: - Lock versions/hash - Configure update cooldowns - Using nitrokey so at least GPG/SSH key can't be extracted - Run terminal used for editor and builds under systemd-run/bubblewrap with […]

I had just caused a service outage by triggering a deployment on Digital Ocean which tried to checkout a git repo from Github, but failed due to another Github outage. Unfortunately the DO build process didn't realize the checkout failed and happily continued the build+deployment despite the […]

Question to folks who create release notes including stuff like: - chore: Update depXY to 0.11.4 - chore: Update depXY to 0.11.3 - chore: Update depXY to 0.11.2 - chore: Update depXY to 0.11.1 Why?

Today I had to change ~100 function calls to use a different function in Python. The signature was complex enough that I didn't trust regex, so I picked up my old friend comby (https://comby.dev/) . But it took a few attempts to get the pattern and […] [Original post on social.fussenegger.pro]

The legal dispute between Unknown Worlds and Krafton is almost better than the Subnautica Below Zero story https://courts.delaware.gov/Opinions/Download.aspx?id=392880

In discussions around LLM I've heard the argument that it's a tool like for example a Navi. That comparison felt off, but I couldn't articulate why. In the latest You're not so smart episode they touched on that - making the distinction between cognitive off-loading (Using a navi, but still […]

This article currently makes the rounds: https://ergosphere.blog/posts/the-machines-are-fine/ One part that puzzles me a bit is this: > Schwartz can use Claude to write a paper because Schwartz already knows the physics. His decades of experience are the immune system that catches Claude's […]

Received a survey from the Austrian Institute for SME Research. One question was asking for reasons that AI isn't used more/sooner. Options were things like costs, lack of know-how, regulatory concerns etc. but no option to say that it doesn't work as advertised or that you haven't seen […]

Starring at an if statement with a condition that spans 7 lines and includes 5 function calls I wonder if the rise of opinionated formatters was the first step towards conditioning programmers to no longer care about how code looks like.

I've been using ZubanLS for a few months now and I'm overall pretty happy with it. Worth checking out if you're looking for a python language server: https://zubanls.com/

Hadn't seen this one before: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-autocomplete-doesnt-just-change-how-you-write-it-changes-how-you-think/ > Overall, the study participants who saw the biased AI text shifted their positions toward those espoused by the AI. > Interestingly, the people […]

The sampling profiler coming in Python 3.15 looks pretty interesting. Been a while since I've been looking forward to a new feature in Python. https://docs.python.org/3.15/whatsnew/3.15.html#whatsnew315-sampling-profiler

Forking vim because of contributors and maintainers use of LLMs seems a tad bit irrational to me. If the concern with LLMs are ethics related - the fork won't change any of those. If the concerns are quality related: Helping out with reviews would probably be less effort than maintaining a […]

RE: https://social.fussenegger.pro/@mathias/113306189980501063 Jackpot. But it was also me who added the test case using a mock :(

Why is it that even in articles that are somewhat critical of LLM use for programming, they state that they do indeed improve productivity as a matter of fact? Are there by now any studies that actually confirm that? So far I've only seen some where the improvement was estimated - sometimes […]

I had almost forgotten about Microsoft Access or Dreamweaver. Good times. https://www.ivanturkovic.com/2026/01/22/history-software-simplification-cobol-ai-hype/ > translating human intent into working software is fundamentally difficult. The gap between natural language specification and […]

Gotta give it to Claude Code developers: they are exceptionally brave. I would’ve been straight up embarrassed to show stats like this. Reminder: Claude Code is a thin CLI client that reads input from your terminal, sends it to Antrhopic servers and prints back the response.

I always had a strong aversion to dealing with intermediates if doing the thing directly is easier and faster. Looking at the examples here makes me wonder if being in management for too long rewires your brain into a delegate mode or something? Also - I thought ChatOps never took off because […]

Starting Monday with Sphinx builds failing locally because I'm getting rate limited with a JS challenge by either the CDN or readthedocs when fetching the intersphinx artifacts Could we please finally conclude that LLMs are a net negative and move on? Getting tiring dealing with stuff like this

Some interesting numbers in this article: https://flowchainsensei.wordpress.com/2026/02/04/the-software-quality-and-productivity-crisis-executives-wont-address/ > What struck me most about the CrowdStrike incident wasn’t that it happened—any system can have bugs. What struck me was the […]

The job of engineers is not to deploy some technology but to build robust, reliable and sustainable (in all meanings of that word) solutions for real world problems based on requirements directly derived from people's needs. Even for an engineer technology comes second at best.

In the days of AI crawler bot protection everywhere: Is there a sanctioned way to do linkchecks to ensure project documentation doesn't contain any broken links? `sphinx linkcheck` is running into 403 errors from wikipedia if the documentation contains a few references to it.

I was hoping disabling issues on Github would make existing issues still available on direct URL and on search but have them read-only. Instead it removes them. Now I wonder if the better option is to keep them enabled and set up an auto-close action and lock all of them?

The topic to forbid social media for people younger than 16 has also reached Austria and I'm a bit surprised how many people are in favor, and how flat the reporting is. No mention of any concrete impact - e.g. that it might mean that to use YouTube and similar everyone'll have to be logged in […]

Why there’s no European Google? And why it is a good thing! My answer to the European Commission "call for evidence on Open Source." https://ploum.net/2026-01-22-why-no-european-google.html #geminiprotocol link: gemini://ploum.net/2026-01-22-why-no-european-google.gmi

> We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of […]

I still don't really know how to best deal with Windows support in my more popular projects. I don't really care about it. Actually, given how things are going with it being spyware and the political situation I'm sort of incentivized to add a note that it isn't supported. Setting up CI would […]

Today's debugging adventure: Couldn't match type: Foo Bar with: Foo Bar Expected: Either String (Foo Bar) Actual: Either String (Foo Bar) Same src location for both. Error only happens on `cabal repl` with the test module. `cabal test` passes Project involves using alex & happy for lexing and […]

Is there some context or nuance to this that I'm missing? Why would the EU consider giving the US direct access to national police databases only to maintain the visa-waiver program? With the current political circumstances you'd think they ought to announce a travel alert instead […]

I'm not sure what to make of the trend of using an editor to install software. People maintaining distributions do a great job packaging software and package managers are quite mature with features like package signing, rollbacks, update hooks, etc. Why do people prefer having a plugin shell […]

Something bugged me about a lot of more modern interfaces but I couldn't put my finger on it until I read this: https://tonsky.me/blog/tahoe-icons/ > The main function of an icon is to help you find what you are looking for faster. > Perhaps counter-intuitively, adding an icon to everything […]

Interview of concept artists about the use of AI: > outsourcing [...] to AI “robs you of discovery, as it will likely more or less give you exactly what you asked of it.” > “[...] going through archives and real world references will allow you to stumble upon things you have never thought of […]

In a podcast I listened some time ago it was mentioned that one effective way to get people to adapt their behavior to be more environment friendly is to have them write a letter to their youngest relative. The letter should explain what they're doing to help ensure their relative will have a […]

With Mozilla doubling down on AI, maybe now would be a good time to experiment with some web greenfield projects and rethink HTTP, HTML, CSS, JS. I often get the impression that web dev is stuck in a local maximum and suspect if we looked at current requirements it would be possible to come up […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@VeroniqueB99/115696222055258372 New goal for next spring. Drawing a dragon 🐉

Today's trying to research a topic has me wondering how feasible it would be to build a community curated search index with hard rules to exclude SEO spam, AI slop content or any sites that share your data with 1284 partners.

Between chat control and https://noyb.eu/en/digital-omnibus-eu-commission-wants-wreck-core-gdpr-principles I get the impression the current EU Commission is increasingly working against the interests of EU citizens or companies.

RE: https://social.fussenegger.pro/@mathias/114472864662745128 Ran into https://www.ufried.com/blog/ironies_of_ai_1/ today which also draws some parallels from the paper to agentic AI automation

Turns out a Raspberry Pi 5 is pretty good for reproducing rare timing related test failures that happen on CI but never reproduce on my main desktop machine. Third time now that it helped get a lead on a bug. And I only tried using it for this because I had messed up an order and found myself […]

Question to other maintainers who have added AI policies, either just "please disclose its use" or prohibit like https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Project:Council/AI_policy. Do people follow them? How can you tell? Besides the ethical aspect, what increasingly bothers me is that when I review a PR […]

async-profiler is a little gem that keeps on giving. The latency tracing improvements are looking great: https://github.com/async-profiler/async-profiler/discussions/1497 And the heatmaps are one of my favourite profiler result visualizations […]

Pretty sure I'm guilty of writing like this https://anniemueller.com/posts/how-i-a-non-developer-read-the-tutorial-you-a-developer-wrote-for-me-a-beginner

I recently followed along https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZhIWonhTGM but using Haskell instead of Rust (because why not) It surprised me a bit seeing how similar the two languages are in many aspects. That also got me to wonder a bit about the popularity of Rust. Do former Python programmers […]

All these years using the JVMs `-agentlib:jdwp=` to debug remote instances it never occurred to me that there's also a `launch=` option to trigger a command once it is ready to accept connections. Can use this to launch a little wrapper that calls dap.run() using the idea's from […]

Good news: We no longer have to feel guilty for binge watching a show or binge reading a book: > Binge-watching may help viewers build mental worlds where stories continue even after finishing the series. And these tales may help them cope in times of stress […]

What are good examples of companies with solid and fair business models? Without enshittification tendencies, dark patterns or other customer hostile shenanigans.

This talk by Guy Steele about Growing a Language is incredible. Starts a bit odd but after ~10 minutes you finally get what's going on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lw6TaiXzHAE

"We simply don’t know to defend against these attacks. We have zero agentic AI systems that are secure against these attacks.[…] It’s an existential problem that, near as I can tell, most people developing these technologies are just pretending isn’t there." […]

Pen and Paper¹ are still among the most important tools in my toolbox so this article resonates a lot with me: https://medium.com/@rehmanmomin/the-unfashionable-art-of-actually-learning-things-0cc7359dbb88 1: As eink variants - a remarkable & supernote nomad.