Tootfinder

The state of #Python ecosystem right now: almost everything is slop. Some projects are complete vibe-coded slop (autobahn, chardet, cryptography). Some projects are disguised slop ("Coding agents shouldn't co-author themselves.")
There is only a handful of human projects left (Flask being one bright example). And they're being killed. They're being killed by the neverending slew of slop pull requests. They're being killed by all their dependencies becoming slop. They're being killed because this whole ecosystem has became such a complete cesspit that you have zero motivation to do anything.
EDIT: and honestly, this is only going to get worse. When you kill the incentive to work on projects, you only get more slop. Maintainers give in, and more projects become slop. Or they give up, and projects get forked unto slop.
#NoAI #NoLLM

For a quarter century, the U.S. only saw measles outbreaks when infected travelers brought the virus in from abroad.
The resulting waves of measles didn’t last more than a year.
Those days are gone.
Measles began tearing through the dusty plains of West Texas in January last year,
and since then, all but a handful of states have seen cases.
Two unvaccinated Texas girls and an adult across the border in New Mexico died before the West Texas outbreak seemed to …

What ProPublica Found in the Genetic Code of America’s Measles Outbreaks
The U.S. eliminated measles a quarter century ago, but to keep its “measles-free” designation, officials will have to make a strong case that measles is not continuously spreading within its borders. Our analysis shows how difficult that could be.

Tell the city administrator that infrastructure co-ordination is NOT optional and there will be one group responsible, no discussion, no debate, here is your order. That group checks with the departments, province and utilities on what is coming up for the next 12 to 18 months. Also, if there is an emergency they are consulted so that ALL parties are informed.

I've been talking before why money won't solve the burnout problem. But let's for a minute assume that you really wanted to help people maintaining #FreeSoftware by paying them. The problem is that:
1. You have to pay them a living wage.
While all monetary help is appreciated by developers, they need a living wage. Not "that should prevent you from starving to death" but the kind of money that can support a honest (but not lavish) lifestyle: pay the bills, feed your family, cover other living costs such as repairs, clothes, appliances, and let you save enough for future emergencies.
It's simple as that. If you can't do that, they're going to need a dayjob. If they're lucky, it won't collide with their #FLOSS work. If they're not, it will kill them. Or they'll fall somewhere in the middle, slowly burning out until they can neither maintain their projects, nor work.
2. You need to guarantee that the payouts will continue.
People need security. They're not going to stay unemployed, let alone quit their job or turn down a job offer, unless they either have good guaranties or substantial savings (or they're in a really bad shape and wouldn't be able to handle the job anyway). The job market is hell, and people just know that when the payments stop, they may not be able to find a job soon, let alone a good job. Even "passively" looking for a job can burn you out.
So yeah, one-off payments and pinky swears won't do. And it isn't even a matter of whether we can trust you; it's a matter if you'll actually be able to continue paying us. And honestly, I don't really know how to solve that. Perhaps by paying up front, but for how long? Finding a job may take more than a year, finding a good job may be once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
3. It can't end up being a job.
Perhaps most difficult of all, these payments can't really come with explicit obligations. I mean, that's the whole point: you want to support FLOSS, not turn it into a corporate project. You want the maintainer to remain free and enjoy the work. That is unlikely to happen if their livelihood is now dependent on your satisfaction. And even if it isn't, I for example would still feel indebted to whoever's paying me to do FLOSS, even if they really didn't expect anything in return, and would fall into a spiral of guilt-inflicted burnout if I failed to maintain the software satisfactorily.
#OpenSource

HEY HEY HEY all you CONCEPT ARTISTS!!! Submit your art from all those gorgeous game projects here to the annual Concept Art Awards. All international human-made projects are welcome: https://www.conceptartassociation.com/caa-2026

2026 Concept Art Awards — Concept Art Association

<rant> AI bros need to stop fucking saying they used AI to create something "from scratch", it's never from scratch, that isn't how LLMs work
during the few days when fable was out some claude fans said they used to recreate Minecraft "from scratch", except:
1. Claude's training data includes all open source projects on Github
2. there are several open source Minecraft clones on Github
yeah I too could create Minecraft "from s…

One last example:
The first LLM code example that really made my eyes pop was early after the release of GPT, when somebody got it to combine Breakout with Conway’s Game of Life (a truly delightful idea). It worked!
Funny thing: the Breakout code and the Life code had a •completely• different style and flavor. Red flag. In about 15 minutes of web searching, I was able to find one of the projects (can’t remember if it was the Breakout or the Life half) which it had copied wholesale, with just a few variable renames. And the other half? It was in Python, but it used dictionaries where it really should have used objects — tons of `thing["prop"]` where it should have said `thing.prop`, and lots of other un-Pythonic stuff besides. It was a machine translate of code from another language, very likely Javascript.
The entire thing was a plagiarized Breakout and a plagiarized Game of Life, one transpiled, and all stuck together in a single run loop. To be fair, figuring out how to (1) run both halves of the logic from a single loop and (2) count the Life cells as Breakout bricks is work I'd cheer on from a second-semester intro CS student! It's not, however, quite what's being sold by these companies.
6/

It’s ok, it’s not like we’re all going to die or anything (only billions, not everyone). @… https://slrpnk.net/post/39707961

Three big pumped storage projects agreed. All in Scotland.
First hydropower projects in Great Britain in 40 years given go-ahead | Hydropower | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jun/26/firs…

First hydropower projects in Great Britain in 40 years given go-ahead
Three pumped storage hydroelectric power station sites in Scotland on list of 16 long-duration electricity storage plans

Can I just say I hate that "Canada Strong" has gone from political pitch to clumsy two-worded adjective?
Quoteth the Prime Minister:
""If you have a bit of extra money, we'll make it easy for you to invest in the fund to help build Canada strong for all,".
Aaauuuggghhh
Just use regular words.
Also, naming your Sovereign Wealth Fund after your own partisan nomenclature is a great way to ensure it doesn't live past the current political party in power.
Not everything has to be a slogan!
#CanPoli #CdnPoli

"So instead of eliminating (opens in new tab) 118.3 million permits (opens in new tab), the Air Resources Board will distribute them for free to companies on the condition that they pledge to invest in clean energy projects."
So how will the pledges be enforced, I wonder? I've seen over 30 years of "Here's how we will go green" "commitments" from companies like BP (remember Beyond Petroleum), Shell, BHP Biliton, etc - all reneged
So how wil…

A California environmental board voted to cut $202M from SF’s eco-friendly transit
Muni stands to lose hundreds of millions with changes to a state program that funds public transportation by charging firms for permits to emit carbon.

"So instead of eliminating (opens in new tab) 118.3 million permits (opens in new tab), the Air Resources Board will distribute them for free to companies on the condition that they pledge to invest in clean energy projects."
So how will the pledges be enforced, I wonder? I've seen over 30 years of "Here's how we will go green" "commitments" from companies like BP (remember Beyond Petroleum), Shell, BHP Biliton, etc - all reneged
So how wil…

A California environmental board voted to cut $202M from SF’s eco-friendly transit
Muni stands to lose hundreds of millions with changes to a state program that funds public transportation by charging firms for permits to emit carbon.

Applications for the Secure Program Synthesis Fellowship by Apart Research are now open; you have 10 days to apply. I've listed two of my projects here; one more is heavily based on my work; and the rest are all fun too! Please feel free to share.
https://apartresearch.com/fellowships/

The Secure Program Synthesis Fellowship - Apart Research
Apart Research is an independent research organization focusing on AI safety. We accelerate AI safety research through mentorship,
collaborations, and research sprints

I wonder if most OSS projects adopt vibe coding, will all of them eventually try do be an everything app?
Because the gospel that AI enthusiasts preach is essentially that there’s no technical debt anymore, so why not fuck scopes and make all software do everything?

Interested in all of the many "PNT" (Positioning, Navigation and Timing) projects the government is investing in. They're also bringing back eLoran, as a hedge against GNSS disruption, which they basically abandoned a decade ago - but it's a different world now.
https://www.

UK Armed Forces better protected with new jamming-proof navigation tech
UK Armed Forces personnel will be better protected from enemy interference with navigation systems through the development of innovative new technology.

Trump has blamed everything
– from “national security”issues, the deaths of birdsand whales, and cancer
– in his decades-long campaign against windfarms.
But as the Trump administration continues to undermine the industry, what worries workers most are their jobs.
Since taking office for a second term, Trump has issued an executive order aiming to halt all wind-energy leases and permits,
attempted to issue stop-work orders on wind projects under construction,

‘Why take those jobs away?’: the unionized workers decrying Trump’s war on wind
Workers proud of their efforts to grow renewable energy say US president pursuing ‘personal vendetta’ at their expense

I've been working on a theory that my biggest issue at work is the demarc. When I was in telecom, we all knew just where the demarc was and who was responsible for what before and after. Now it seems every project has demarcs between departments or persons, and they all disagree on where that is. I keep getting sucked into projects that need me only to move a file from A-B because person A thinks is not their job to give the file but B doesn't think its their job to go get the file.…

Android transparency logs (https://developers.google.com/android/binary_transparency/overview) now include 1st Party Apps and Mainline Modules:

Android Binary Transparency  |  Google for Developers
An index page for all Android transparency projects.

@… thanks.
Logically: anyone who chooses to reject FreeBSD on that basis may also choose to reject all projects that use OpenZFS. I can not recommend such sweeping rejections.
Two of the three commits:
― range_tree: use zfs_panic_recover() for partial-overlap remove · openzfs/zfs@6495daf — <

I no longer think E-Methanol is a good idea ⚡⚗️
I am not saying this lightly. But it's hard to argue with thermodynamics, and making energy-rich molecules from nothing but CO₂, water🌊, electricity⚡ faces some hard truths.
Recently, a significant project developers for E-Methanol⚡⚗️, Liquid Wind💧💨, filed for bankruptcy.
E-Methanol⚡⚗️ & other CCU/E-Fuels/PtX/PtL processes all have one problem: they need so much clean electricity that it's questionable if this is pl…

Should we give up on E-Methanol and CO₂ utilization?
Liquid Wind, a Swedish developer of E-Methanol projects, filed for bankruptcy. While Green Methanol is an important climate solution, is it time to ask whether making it from nothing but CO₂, Water, and Electricity is the right approach?

Sources: Google told Meta around March it couldn't offer all the Gemini capacity Meta wanted to buy, disrupting and delaying some of Meta's internal AI projects (Financial Times)
https://www.ft.com/content/c5d52f72-71ef-40bc-bad3-61afdba8b378

Thank you very much to all the #freesoftware projects that allowed me to do, what I do now.
Thank you for educating me, giving me tools to work with, giving me the opportunity to give back, to feel validated, thank you.
#opensource

This seems way more sensible (I think the calculation is a bit off because of the really long start time), but now that it got going it seems reasonably fast.
These are all git projects, so TONS of tiny files.

RE: https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/116662938576982814
Vielen Dank an @… für diese Ini…

Our NFL draft-day mock: Yates' final predictions for all 32 picks, plus Kiper's notes https://www.espn.com/nfl/draft2026/story/_/id/48543956/2026-nfl-mock-draft-final-intel-predictions-yates-kiper-round-1

RE: https://dice.camp/@realms/116459545804565917
I'd argue that "AI"-based development creates a bigger attack surface on closed source/proprietary software than open source software:
1. It's more likely that internal software development uses LLMs as they're most affordable to companies; leaving them more vulnerable to prompt injection and other types of attacks targeting LLM use.
2. It's more likely that internal commits aren't vetted as much (or even purely vibe-coded) as ones in open source projects.
3. It's more likely that attacks on open source projects are discovered quicker.
Also a reminder that the "Mythos" thing—like all the other doomerist things coming out of "AI" companies—is a marketing stunt to get Anthropic free press coverage.

Sometimes I do wonder if the only ethical thing let to do is to delete all your projects, and do your best to have them disappear from public space. Of course, that won't stop people from making your complicit in their acts of planetary destruction entirely, but at least you're trying…
And that's coming from me, a person who considers destroying knowledge and craft an unthinkable crime.
#NoAI #NoLLM

RE: #canpoli