Drew DeVault's blog
Drew DeVault's blog - Blog
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Latest posts
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Why is Hacker News like that?
Hacker News (aka HN) is a link aggregator where “hackers” 1 gather to discuss technology, politics, and anything which “good hackers would find interesting”. HN is a means by which its host, prominent startup incubator Y Combinator, projects soft power, promotes startups it…
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AI in Linux
The role of AI tools (LLMs, mainly) in Linux is under discussion, or it was, until Linus Torvalds “ put his foot down ” in support of the use of AI in Linux kernel development. I can identify two major ways in which AI is used for Linux kernel development: authoring code and…
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The circus freaks of open source
The masterwork of Terry A. Davis is his eclectic operating system, TempleOS, which he worked on until his tragic death in 2018. In terms of technical excellence, TempleOS rates well in some respects and poorly in others. For example, it earns the achievement, coveted in OS dev…
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Vim Classic 8.3.0 released
Following up on my earlier announcement that I was forking Vim, I’m happy to announce the first release of my fork today: Vim Classic 8.3.0. I have written a release announcement for vim-classic.org, which you can read here . Happy editing!
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New blog design
I redesigned my blog! I decided to put some more personality into it this time, after over a decade of the minimalist style. This short post is just an excuse to show up in your feed reader so you can go look at it. Cheers! Also: I’m trying out fedi again. You can find me here:…
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Add an LLM policy for rust-lang/rust
No comment on this PR may mention the following topics: Long-term social or economic impact of LLMs The environmental impact of LLMs Anything to do with the copyright status of LLM output Moral judgements about people who use LLMs We have asked the moderation team to help us…
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I can't cancel GitHub Copilot
Back when Copilot first came out, I immediately disliked it. But I decided to give it a fair shake and tried to evaulate it in good faith. I wasn’t interested in paying for it, but they had a form for FOSS community members to apply for a free subscription, so I filled it out…
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Addressing the harassment
Kiwi Farms is a web forum that facilitates the discussion and harassment of online figures and communities. Their targets are often subject to organized group trolling and stalking, as well as doxing and real-life harassment. Kiwi Farms has been tied to the suicides of three…
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Rewrote my blog with Zine
15 years ago, on December 11th, 2010, at the bold age of 17, I wrote my first blog post on the wonders of the Windows Phone 7 on Blogspot. I started blogging as a kid at the behest of a family friend at Microsoft, who promised she’d make sure I would become the youngest…
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tar: a slop-free alternative to rsync
So apparently rsync is slop now. When I heard, I wanted to drop a quick note on my blog to give an alternative: tar. It doesn’t do everything that rsync does, in particular identifying and skipping up-to-date files, but tar + ssh can definitely accomodate the use case of…
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A eulogy for Vim
Vim is important to me. I’m using it to write the words you’re reading right now. In fact, almost every word I have ever committed to posterity, through this blog, in my code, all of the docs I’ve written, emails I’ve sent, and more, almost all of it has passed through Vim. My…
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The cults of TDD and GenAI
I’ve gotten a lot of flack throughout my career over my disdain towards test-driven development (TDD). I have met a lot of people who swear by it! And, I have also met a lot of people who insisted that I adopt it, too, often with the implied threat of appealing to my boss if…
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Redesigning my microkernel from the ground up
As you may recall , circa 2022-2023 I was working on a microkernel written in Hare named Helios. Helios was largely inspired by and modelled after the design of seL4 and was my first major foray into modern OS development that was serious enough to get to a somewhat useful state…
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OpenAI employees… are you okay?
You might have seen an article making the rounds this week, about a young man who ended his life after ChatGPT encouraged him to do so. The chat logs are really upsetting. Someone two degrees removed from me took their life a few weeks ago. A close friend related the story to…
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What's up with FUTO?
Some time ago, I noticed some new organization called FUTO popping up here and there. I’m always interested in seeing new organizations that fund open source popping up, and seeing as they claim several notable projects on their roster, I explored their website with interest and…
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Cloudflare bankrolls fascists
US politics has been pretty fascist lately. The state is filling up concentration camps, engaging in mass state violence against people on the basis of racialized traits, deporting them to random countries without any respect for habeas corpus, exerting state pressure on the…
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A better future for JavaScript that won't happen
In the wake of the largest supply-chain attack in history , the JavaScript community could have a moment of reckoning and decide: never again. As the panic and shame subsides, after compromised developers finish re-provisioning their workstations and rotating their keys, the…
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Embedding Wren in Hare
I’ve been on the lookout for a scripting language which can be neatly embedded into Hare programs. Perhaps the obvious candidate is Lua – but I’m not particularly enthusiastic about it. When I was evaluating the landscape of tools which are “like Lua, but not Lua”, I found an…
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What's new with Himitsu 0.9?
Last week, Armin and I worked together on the latest release of Himitsu , a “secret storage manager” for Linux. I haven’t blogged about Himitsu since I announced it three years ago , and I thought it would be nice to give you a closer look at the latest release, both for users…
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Just speak the truth
Today, we’re looking at two case studies in how to respond when reactionaries appear in your free software community. Exhibit A It is a technical decision. The technical reason is that the security team does not have the bandwidth to provide lifecycle maintenance for multiple X…