Weird little guys of FOSS
As the name says: a collection of "weird little guys" of the FOSS and adjacent worlds. Massively subjective, of course, but I don't think I've seen one (that I know of) that I disagree with yet.
LinguaCelta: The Community is the Achievement; the Achievement is the Community
An article on how community is one of the important properties of where tech has taken us, and the threat that AI poses to this.
inessential: NetNewsWire Status
I was very late coming to NetNewsWire, only discovering it in the last year; it's been one of my goto RSS tools on macOS and iOS ever since. Here the author talks about the progress made in the last year.
LM Studio - Local AI on your computer
Tool for installing and managing local models. Might be worth a look.
manyfold/AGENTS.md at main · manyfold3d/manyfold
Pretty fun anti-AI AGENTS.md file.
I wonder if it works?
Dave Pearson
Me on Codeberg.
Functional Programmers need to take a look at Zig.
I really should dabble with Zig.
in which more paths are charted towards code independence - Technomancy
A post on how git forges might be, or can be.
axios Compromised on npm - Malicious Versions Drop Remote Access Trojan - StepSecurity
axios got hacked in a pretty major way, which is pretty major in that it gets used all over the place.
The Slow Collapse of MkDocs
Having run into the issue of mkdocs-material sort of spamming about Zensical when you use it, and wondering what the hell is going on, this is some great background on what's going on with MkDocs.
Glama – MCP Hosting Platform
Use this one (not so) weird trick to trick bots to admit to being bots when it comes to doing PRs.
Can coding agents relicense open source through a “clean room” implementation of code?
Simon Willison's take on the whole chardet issue.
No right to relicense this project | Hacker News
HackerNews weighing in on the chardet legal/ethical issue.
No right to relicense this project · Issue #327 · chardet/chardet
Well this is a whole furball of legal and AI issues. I think the thing that gets me here is the apparent motives of the current maint'. It doesn't matter how you cut it with the legal side of things, what they've done, for me, is a real ethical issue.
AI will write your next compiler!
The blog post that explains the background of the horrific Ocaml AI-written PR. Honestly... this feels like some post hoc rationalisation cope rather than a coming clean of an honest attempt to test something out.
I'm not convinced at all.
DWARF support for macOS and Linux by joelreymont · Pull Request #14369 · ocaml/ocaml
This has to be a classic example of what I think of as a toxic AI-spawned PR.
SPDX License List | Software Package Data Exchange (SPDX)
The list of SPDX licences. For me this is useful to find the ID so that I can add the most useful value to Python package metadata.
Open Source Insights
Handy site, backed by Google, that lets you dive into packages from different ecosystems and see what they depend on and what depends on them, etc.
linkhut
A bookmarking service that is OpenSource and also apparently API-compatible with Pinboard.
HN: Lessons I learned from working full-time on a FOSS project for 503 days
A submission to HackerNews of Rodrigo's blog post about working at and on Textual. What's pretty funny in the comments is the speculation about how Textualize would make money, which shows that some folk were speculating on the post without actually having read it.
So nothing new for HN there.
vygr/ChrysaLisp: Parallel OS, with GUI, Terminal, OO Assembler, Class libraries, C-Script compiler, Lisp interpreter and more...
A Lisp-based operating system that can be run on many machines, and under the "main" OS.
A Microcosm of the interactions in Open Source projects
Some background on how the xz backdoor situation arose.
Open Source Maintainers Owe You Nothing
A reminder that FOSS project developers owe you nothing, at least under the license. The only way you're ever owned anything is if they've directly contracted them.
503 days working full-time on FOSS: lessons learned
Rodrigo's history of working at Textualize, mention of the layoffs, and what he learned during the time.
Everything I know about the XZ backdoor
A timeline of the events in the creation of the xz backdoor.
The disappointing tea.xyz
Another week, another example of crypto spoiling things. Imagine the worst parts of Hacktoberfest only with added crypto. Yeah, it's that bad.
Monetizing Open-source is problematic
Some background on the faker.js (and colours.js) situation.
Browse good first issues to start contributing to open source - The GitHub Blog
Github are doing more to make it easier to find good issues to get you into contributing to projects. I like this idea and should make a point of looking at the possible contributions of projects I make use of a lot.