Tootfinder

Lately I've been thinking about how #Gentoo is perceived by people. So often they're stuck in the "ricer" mindset: Gentoo is being built from source, so it must be ZOMG fast. And if it isn't, then what's the point?
If I were to make four points for Gentoo (to stop myself from making more), they would be:
1. Gentoo is independent.
There is no company behind Gentoo. There is no business plan. It's made and maintained by volunteers. Driven by passion and not profit incentive. And we want to keep it that way.
2. Gentoo aims to be secure.
We are maintaining our own infrastructure to reduce the risk of being hijacked. We're securing our distribution channels and mirrors using OpenPGP. We're only using Codeberg (which we really appreciate) and GitHub as mirrors (with OpenPGP commit signatures) and contribution channels. We have a dedicated security team, who works with the developers to keep packages free of vulnerabilities and our users informed.
3. Gentoo is made by humans.
We banned LLM contributions two years ago, and never regretted it. We didn't "wait and see", we took decisive action, and if we got left behind, it's only for the better. Unfortunately, in today's LLM-ridden world we can't stop slop software from being packaged in Gentoo without sacrificing our commitment to keep packages up to date, but we try to keep the worst offenders (like copywashed chardet) at bay.
4. Gentoo supports sustainability.
This may sound ironic when so many of us build everything from source, but we're actually trying to make computing sustainable. Gentoo's source-first nature makes it inherently flexible. We try our best to support a plethora of older and less common hardware. We go against the flow and still try to provide a workable system on hardware that is not supported by Rust or V8. And on top of that, we do our best to provide binary packages for a variety of configurations.
Of course, that's not all. I want Gentoo to be reliable and stable, to be oriented towards privacy by default, to be welcome and respectful.
And all these things ultimately depend on people working on Gentoo, and contributing to Gentoo. We always need more people that share these principles and want to help us achieve them.
What do you appreciate in Gentoo?

“The barrier to creating software has genuinely dropped. That is not hype. What it means for professional engineers is not that their skills are less valuable, but that the skills that matter have shifted up the stack, as they have in every previous transition.
The developers who thrived after the move from assembly to C were not the ones who could write the most clever assembly. They were the ones who understood what the machine needed to do and could express that intent clearly in a higher-level language. The developers who thrived after the move to managed languages and frameworks were not the ones most resistant to garbage collection. They were the ones who saw the freed-up cognitive capacity as an opportunity to solve harder problems.
The developers who will thrive in the agentic era are the ones who understand this as another step in the same arc and invest accordingly. Not in resisting the tools. Not in deferring to them uncritically. In developing the judgment, clarity, and systems thinking that make the tools maximally effective.
That means writing better specs. Investing in test infrastructure. Developing genuine architectural understanding rather than surface familiarity. Building the taste to evaluate output rigorously. Practicing problem decomposition until it becomes second nature.
The era of programming as primarily a keystroke activity is over. The era of programming as primarily a thinking and judgment activity has been accelerating for decades and just shifted into a higher gear.”
#AITransition
#
https://addyosmani.com/blog/factory-model/

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@jeremydmiller/116376329442402250
A really neat blog post about structural concurrency approach using Wolverine but can apply to systems thinking in general

Source: Mira Murati's TML signed a deal with Google Cloud, valued in single-digit billions, to access Google's latest AI systems built on Nvidia's GB300 chips (Rebecca Bellan/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/22/excl

Exclusive: Google deepens Thinking Machines Lab ties with new multibillion-dollar deal | TechCrunch
Mira Murati's Thinking Machines Lab has signed a multibillion-dollar deal with Google Cloud for AI infrastructure powered by Nvidia's latest GB300 chips, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.

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".

🥕 Why Mars astronauts need more than just space greenhouses
#mars

Why Mars astronauts need more than just space greenhouses
Thinking about food systems in deep space likely brings to mind something like The Martian where an astronaut is scratching barely enough food to survive out of potatoes grown in Martian regolith. Or perhaps a fancy hydroponic system on an interplanetary transport ship, with artificial lighting and all the associated technological wizardry. But a new paper published in Acta Astronautica by Tor Blomqvist and Ralph Fritsche points out that growing food is only one small part of the whole cycle of…

Debates on Degrowth: what drives us to keep growing?
Editors' note We are delighted to publish this article by Marga Mediavilla on a systems approach to degrowth. It serves to summarise a number of the issues in the Prospects for Degrowth series and also represents an echo of the methodology used in the report which was a major influence on degrowth thinking, the 1974 Limits to Growth report by Donella Meadows and colleagues.

Debates on Degrowth: what drives us to keep growing?
Editors’ note We are delighted to publish this article by Marga Mediavilla on a systems approach to degrowth. It serves to summarise a number of the issues in the Prospects for Degrowth serie…

I'm still thinking about a longer blog post about LLMs, and one of the things I keep thinking about them is how they not only cause direct harm to the community, but also make people more suspicious of one another. And then I've been pointed out this text:
"I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me."
"""
I am a writer. A writer who also happens to be Kenyan. And I have come to this thesis statement: I don't write like ChatGPT. ChatGPT, in its strange, disembodied, globally-sourced way, writes like me. Or, more accurately, it writes like the millions of us who were pushed through a very particular educational and societal pipeline, a pipeline deliberately designed to sandpaper away ambiguity, and forge our thoughts into a very specific, very formal, and very impressive shape.
"""
#AI #LLM