Margaret Hamilton was a hero of humanity, of science, of what the human race can do when it sets its mind on something other than destruction and hatred. May she rest in peace.
saw someone on HN say they will never contribute to Nura again since we ban LLM generated contributions (they had receipts too, they had contributed in the past)
their argument was that having done device porting manually before, doing it with an LLM was something like 10x faster
having seen the various LLM driven ports going around, we can't deny that LLMs are capable of doing kernel bringup, finding a functional implementation, and making many more attempts to trial and error than we humans are.
of course, this doesn't come without a cost, as with most technical advancements this cost is mostly offloaded onto those without the resources to prevent it -- the under educated working class and the global south, those who will be most affected by droughts and worsening climate change
this is reason enough to disengage from this technology, at least the implementations of it that cause most of this harm, but there is another more devious issue that i haven't seen mentioned a whole lot
in the same way that huge retail chains and global shipping extract wealth from small towns, LLMs extract knowledge from communities
the Nura wiki and other infrastructure was unusable for days at a time due to web scraping, and now imposes a proof of work on visitors (which also prevents access from old devices)
now that this data is in accessible models, people who aren't active in our community can use an LLM to port a device, to generate their own private documentation, they can enable devices in the mainline kernel or contribute to other upstreams if their LLM patches are accepted. People that may normally have become active members of the Nura community instead engage with a chatbot operated by big tech, which of course uses their chat history for training new models
As maintainers, for us to allow LLMs into our community would in my opinion be the beginning of the end, as our community knowledge base would be gutted, developers would become burnt out and disillusioned, and our culture would be erased.
I've been gathering my thoughts on the use of LLMs for writing (prose).
My conclusion is that despite all the amazing things they *can* do, writing is not one of them.
I hope both can converge, at the moment wired configs live in QMK and wireless in ZMK IIRC, so I use the two
(I packaged the qmk tool in Debian, not zmk yet)
an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Please take the time to rest if yall are struggling with stuff, it can make a huge difference.
Today Igalia turns 25.
In September 2001, ten engineers from the University of A Coruña started a company with no outside investors, no managers, and no intention of ever appointing any.
There are now close to 200 of us, spread across the world. The arrangement has not changed: no managers, no shareholders, and everything we build left where anyone can use it.
Here is to the next twenty-five.
https://igalia.com/2026/09/21/Twenty-Five-Years-Upstream.html
In fact we organized a "rail ticketing challenge" to demonstrate the actual problems passengers face. Teams competed to find the best tickets for real world scenarios we posed to them … and discovered how difficult it can be. One policy maker summed it with their exasperated "but how were we supposed to know that…"
Over the past few months, I have found myself under the spotlight on kernel mailing lists. What started as targeted discussions quickly turned into advocating for the kernel community to respect the mostly silent crowd of developers and maintainers who do not want to fully embrace AI usage. It appears this didn't go unnoticed, as shown by Jon Corbet's talk at Kernel Recipes. (1/5)
Now, for something completely different: https://notes.pault.ag/why-write/
while not my usual programming (or RF) fare, this post has been in the back of my head for a while now. I have finally put some words down after re-reading some 1940s era philosophical writing I couldn't let go of.
please enjoy with post with the love and intent I have imparted on it.
This post received a lot of comments and reactions, which is great!
It also proved that my little Raspberry Pi Zero W, powered by NetBSD, could handle the load.
Now - to help me test how much load it can tolerate - please boost and react to this post! 🚀
#FediTest #littleFedi #OwnYourData #NetBSD
RT: https://rpi0w.stefanomarinelli.it/objects/01a03e3d-1e73-7928-b396-db17b7f0f60b
for whoever needs to hear this: you're not alone. i'm not vibecoding any of the software i write. i'm writing it by hand, but i've leveled up my emacs with eglot/lsp. i'm modernizing my stacks and use languages with excellent compilers. i think about how to do more with less. i'm trying to combine the best human-written libraries and modules and assemble them with minimal boilerplate. i enjoy reading your manuals and references. i believe in robust, secure, human-written software.
