Tootfinder

Just went through a code file and replaced "target" with "recipient" in a bunch of docs and variable names, because I had had two senses of "target" and because I want to encourage less-combat-focused thinking among potential devs (which at the moment and for the foreseeable future is just me). Zero changes to code functionality (unless I messed up) and took maybe 30 minutes. Got me thinking about the goal of software development and who would view that time as "wasted".
From a short-sighted "measure user-facing functionality" standpoint there was basically zero progress made. From a "cultivating-code-understanding-entities" perspective, there are both immediate and long-term gains. I got a chance to review the entire file at a high level which improves my understanding of things even if no changes had been made. The changes increase clarity of a lot of documentation, as well as variable naming clarity in code which deals with both senses of "target" which now has clear separation between variables that refer to targets and recipients. If there are any other devs in the future, this will help them a lot. Even if not, by increasing my own development efficacy, the expected values for project-gets-shipped and overall-project-impact just went up. I've also helped myself not introduce the same ambiguity in all my future projects, because I'll remember this time investment, and I've bent the ideological flavor of the protect towards neutral/beneficial interactions between "initiators and recipients" instead of hostile interactions between "initiators and targets".
Overall, well worth the time investment if we consider all the subtler benefits, and not just a very crude measure of user-facing behavior. (Secretly, this is also a post about LLMs.)
#programming

I removed all my #Raspberrypi from my network and #NixOS configuration.
Main reason was that I needed to reduce my side projects a bit.
The raspi's were a nice experiment but I just needed to reduce my workload a bit and their hardware and architecture don't help to make t…

Morning all! Beautiful morning here in London - blue skies and sunshine. Unfortunately, I have to be in the office 🤪
A mix of client projects, writing, coaching sessions and later, a workshop on bringing values to life.
And then? Spanish class.
My poor brain will need a rest this evening... 🧠

I know it's easy to get down on the web, but I've seen so many cool projects and blogs and personal sites and attempts to (re?)build a more human web free of corporate social media and the enshittified part of the web...
It's giving me hope that we can build an Alternative Web. The People's Web. Free of AI bullshit, free of advertisements and tracking and all that crap so many of us just do not want.

We need to start an open source autobody shop that removes all the rust from projects

Seeing all the projects go by here, and I can't understand how you all manage to get things done. That isn't, I'm afraid, a skill of mine.

A year after the Trump administration began the dismantlement of USAID,
it is initiating a new round of significant cuts to foreign assistance.
This time, programs that survived the initial purge precisely because they were judged to be lifesaving are slated for cancellation.
According to an internal State Department email obtained by The Atlantic,
the administration will soon end all of the humanitarian funding it is currently providing as part of a “responsible exi…

The Trump Administration Is Ending Aid That It Says Saves Lives
The State Department will let lifesaving projects expire because “there is no strong nexus between the humanitarian response and U.S. national interests,” according to an internal email.

The debate about AI in coding seems to be over. This applies everywhere, from community projects to large enterprises. Soon we'll be lucky if a human even reviews the code, rather than just one or more LLMs. I don't know any good programmers who still say AI isn't helpful to them. This all happened much faster than I expected.

The UltraScale IOSERDES cutting out all of the modes other than 4:1 and 8:1 is forcing me to do some truly cursed things in a project I can't yet share, but will soon.
Why do so many of my projects end up with weird gearboxes, crossings between related clocks that are not integer multiples of each other, etc?

While working through another last rites slew, I was thinking that back in the day there were a number of developers who believed they should add a lot of packages to #Gentoo, in the name of giving users a choice. Like, they were projects whose sole purpose of existence seemed to be to find every piece of software that roughly fit a specific topic, get it to build and package it for Gentoo.
Of course, the long-term effect of that is that there's a lot of unmaintained, often broken packages. "The choice" doesn't really work. Sure, users have a lot of packages to choose from — but they have to actually figure out which of these packages are actually useful (if any).
A few years ago attempting to remove packages also faced some verbal opposition. You shouldn't remove unmaintained or outdated packages, because they still work. You shouldn't remove packages that sometimes fail to build, because some flag combinations still work. You shouldn't remove packages that don't build at all, because the user can visit Forums and find some workaround to make them build 🤦. Or they'll have an ebuild handy to start working on it. And anyway, you shouldn't be removing stuff at all, but fixing it instead.
Sometimes the arguments were straight dishonest too: people literally said we need more packages to lure new users in. Like, it didn't matter to them that the packages didn't really work and that the people trying to use them will get a nasty surprise. They wanted people to say "hey, Gentoo has this software we need, let's start using Gentoo".

https://lemmy.world/post/43988094
There are going to be a lot of projects forked to remove or halt ai coming up.

New ntfy.sh v2.18.0 was written by AI - Lemmy.World
According to the release: >Adds experimental PostgreSQL support >The code was written by Cursor and Claude >14,997 added lines of code, and 10,202 lines removed >reviewed and heavily tested over 2-3 weeks This makes me a bit uneasy, especially as ntfy is an internet facing service. Am I overreacting or do you all share the same concern?

Build a 100% renewable East-West Electricity Grid
A new federal government with big promises for “nation-building” projects has the potential to deliver a climate-safe and affordable future for all of us. If we fight for it.
A publicly owned, east-west electricity grid that connects renewable energy projects is the type of ambitious project we need. It would provide affordable, secure and renewable power to people from coast to coast.

Build a 100% renewable East-West Electricity Grid - Leadnow

Do Wikipedia or Open Source projects need an AGENTS.md file that explains to “agentic AI” how to donate money from all the bank accounts and wallet apps the agent was granted access to?

In future, Open Research Europe (ORE) will no longer be open solely to projects funded under the EU Framework Programmes for Research; instead, all research institutions in the participating countries (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland) will be able to use the platform free of charge, regardless of whether their projects receive funding.

A new era for Open Research Europe
European Commission to co-fund new phase of operation for open access publishing platform.

Rhett Lewis 2026 NFL mock draft 1.0: Eagles make biggest splash in Round 1 https://www.nfl.com/news/rhett-lewis-2026-nfl-mock-draft-1-0-eagles-make-biggest-splash-in-round-1

RE: https://mastodon.social/@fsfe/116204774021832197
When reading the newsletter, I remember why I wrote

Dear Friends,
The brilliant fingerstyle guitarist Danny Gotham and I have finished most of the work on our record. A veritable bucket list of tunes, 18 in all, that cover a wide range of genres and composers, including Peter Ostroushko, John McLaughlin, David Lindley, and more.
We’d so very grateful if you click the link, check out the premiums, and support the project!

"Something happened a month ago, and the world switched. Now we have real reports." It's not just Linux, he continued. "All open source projects have real reports that are made with AI, but they're good, and they're real."
https://www.theregister.com/2026/03/26/gre…

AI bug reports went from junk to legit overnight, says Linux kernel czar
Interview: Greg Kroah-Hartman can't explain the inflection point, but it's not slowing down or going away

2026 NFL Mock Draft: Where Would Arch Manning, Jeremiah Smith Be Picked in All-CFB Draft? https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nfl/2026-nfl-mock-draft-where-would-arch-manning-jeremiah-smith-picked-all-cfb-draft

#ReleaseThursday A historic moment in the https://thi.ng/umbrella microverse!
I just re-published all 214 projects, the first release referencing their new home at @…

thi.ng/umbrella

Europe's🇪🇺 failure to scale Green Methanol production leads to a compounding failure to attract one of the most promising projects for a fossil-free future chemical industry🌱⚗️🏭
It all feels like what played out in the Solar☀️ industry. China invests early and big. More in my latest newsletter.

2026 NFL Mock Draft: Where Would Arch Manning, Jeremiah Smith Be Picked in All-CFB Draft? https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nfl/2026-nfl-mock-draft-where-would-arch-manning-jeremiah-smith-picked-all-cfb-draft

RE: https://mstdn.social/@junesim63/116254855135809842
Governments across Canada should stop funding all these dubious carbon capture projects and just throw more Canadian Beavers at the problem. A good Beaver can solve anything.
🦫

🐰 #Directus — The Flexible Backend for All Your Projects!
Turn any SQL database into a full #API with an admin dashboard — no migration, no vendor lock-in.
#HeadlessCMS

A bit under the radar, because I tend to look at technical updates (MangoWC!, Cosmic at the truly latest branch! etc), but credit where credit is due!
AerynOS:
- uses Zulip instead of Discord
- is looking at how to move to Codeberg, away from GitHub
- has a clear stance on LLM's
- tries to sponsor other open source projects
- at the same time continuously updating their platform and provided software.
Whilst going through all ups and downs of a startu…

Since my job is stable now and I have saved up some money, I have decided to stop accepting donations via GitHub Sponsors and Ko-fi. I would like to thank everyone who helped me over the years. There are people who need the help much more than me right now.
If you needed a suggestion, @… is doing a lot more than me for #Gentoo these days and will certainly appreciate your help. He's also way nicer than I'll ever be.
https://github.com/sponsors/thesamesam
https://ko-fi.com/thesamesam
To the best of my knowledge, Gentoo project does not need extra money right now, but there are other awesome projects such as Disroot or many Fediverse instances that would definitely use some help. However, in general I'd suggest towards supporting individuals rather than projects: people need money to live, and can use your donations directly, while projects are often bound by red tape.
Finally, please support human artists and craftspeople (and I'm counting human software developers in that). Donate to projects and people who resist enshittification and who refuse to use LLMs. They need the money.
Once again, thanks for all.

Wikimedia Board of Trustees approves closure of all #Wikinews projects by May 4. You may have never heard of Wikinews or haven’t visited the site in a long time which is part of the reason for the closure.

PSA: Part of the ongoing #ThingUmbrella maintenance and migration to #Codeberg, I've written a script to batch delete 20600 tags from the Git repo[1], basically any release tags older than 2023-01-01. There're still ~4600 tags remaining, covering all releases since that date. This in…

umbrella
⛱ Broadly scoped ecosystem & mono-repository of 214 TypeScript projects for general purpose, functional, data driven development

Dear Liberal partisans: “we can’t do anything about this chaos Trump is creating” is a bad look, and also completely untrue and a cop out.
Things you can do *today*
1) food and gas price controls
2) food and gas rebates/grants
3) EV, solar and wind mandates and grants
4) direct investment in electrification of fossil fuel transport and infrastructure, today. Move all existing projects on the books up to start asap.
These are just some of the things that could directly and immediately help Canadians through #theAmericanFascists oil wars.
Acting like it is 1975 and we just have to stick it out because there is no alternative is a cop out and makes you complicit.
Either we are different, or we are along for the sick ride. Which would you prefer?
🇨🇦
#canpoli #cdnpoli #usa #iranisraelUSAWar #oil #fossilfuels

New NFL mock draft: Schrager projects all 32 first-round picks based on what he's hearing https://www.espn.com/nfl/draft2026/story/_/id/48408193/2026-nfl-mock-draft-peter-schrager-insider-intel-first-round-pi…

The key takeaways from the early part of the #chardet thread (I didn't read beyond the ~30 first comments, I have my limits).
1. People there love cosplaying lawyers. Except when the other side also starts cosplaying lawyers, in which case they suddenly divert to suggesting asking professional lawyers.
2. Almost nobody there is concerned with ethics or morality.
3. There's a lot of GPL haters there. Like, they seem the kind of people who don't really care about licensing at all, just used MIT in their projects because it was cool and they heard something about license incompatibility and now bash at everything that's (L)GPL.
4. People don't get that LLMs are statistical models and can't build anything from the ground up. All they can do is remix, which implies they use existing code for inspiration.
5. The maintainer who did the rewrite is a total asshole, and is perfectly aware of it.
Honestly, I'm truly waiting for the subsidizing to end and companies start charging obscene amounts for the use of LLMs. Of course, the reality is that we're totally fucked. We have a lot of projects that adapted a lot of #slop, and people who are being increasingly addicted to this shit. The moment they can't afford it, we'd be left with lots of broken code nobody wants to maintain.
And I definitely don't want to put my effort into packaging crap if its maintainers don't even bother trying.
#AI #LLM #NoAI #NoLLM

2026 NFL Draft: Ideal top two picks for every team https://www.nfl.com/news/2026-nfl-draft-ideal-top-two-picks-for-every-team

PSA: The annual #Gentoo #Python switch planned for 2026-06-01. CPython 3.14 becomes the default, 3.11 and #PyPy 3.11 go out. The latter fills me with sadness but keeping it is unrealistic now that projects are aggressively pushing for 3.12 .
Of course, we'll continue shipping the interpreters, so you can use venvs if you like. However, that's going to become harder to use since many projects either don't ship PyPy wheels or don't work on PyPy at all without patching.
We will revisit PyPy support if a version compatible with Python 3.12 appears in reasonable time.
https://public-inbox.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/20260412164104.429630-1-mgorny@gentoo.org/T/#u
https://public-inbox.gentoo.org/gentoo-dev/58cefccb3d0758671537715f4ddb34d59c938461.camel@gentoo.org/T/#u

There's a new piece explaining "The Slow Collapse of #MkDocs": "How personality clashes, an absent founder, and a controversial redesign fractured one of Python's most popular projects."
#httpx?
Well, turns out no, not at all. It looks like encode has already crumbled and became immensely toxic.
httpx is not allowing bug reports anymore, apparently because of "absurdly skewed gender representation", whatever that means.
#OpenSource.
#FreeSoftware #Python

Oh, #GitHub is empathetic to #OpenSource projects impacted by all the #AI slop. They're willing to help, right?
#Copilot even once, and of course they're not going to let people actually block this piece of shit.
#LLM #NoAI #NoLLM #hypocrisy #Microsoft