Recent Blog Posts

I already dealt with the status of the WWW in the recent past. See, specifically, the authoritative opinion of Sir Tim Berners-Lee on that. Multiple dynamics have upset the initial idea of a distributed, democratic, and influential worldwide system, as conceived in the 90s, including the roles of BigCorps, socials, and geopolitics. What appears to be the last brick in the grave of the WWW is the current AI wave, which introduces two distinct elements of breaking an already compromised equilibrium.

Some months ago, I participated in this Mastodon poll. My thesis was that, in general, there is no presumptive quality flag that can be added to a product, whether it was created with AI-aided tools or not. My opinion sparked a small, heated controversy among some readers.

I recently finished reading Simone Aliprandi’s second edition of a book I would recommend to many people interested in either authoring software and databases or making creative works. ‘The Artificial Author’, as its title suggests, deals with the role of generative AI in creative jobs seen from a legal point of view. This massive book seeks to shed light on a central yet complex issue that, in recent years, has affected many people, not only in the IT sector but also across many sectors of the creative industry.

Here at work, we develop a series of tools for geospatial processing with multiple goals, expected maintenance durations, different scopes, generalization needs, and motivations. Note that about 10 years ago, here in Europe, a completely new approach to upstream and downstream services for Earth Observation began: ESA changed its data licenses, and distribution and access modalities entered the Big Data era.

I’m not too happy with using mobile devices as a daily driver for server connections. When one needs to use a keyboard, in many cases the appropriate device is inevitably a laptop or a desktop computer. Anyway, sometimes it happens that the mobile phone should be used as an SSH client for an emergency or to perform simple remote tasks. Possibly using an app that is usable, decently supported, and can share common configurations among multiple devices with a reasonable level of security.

Someone on Mastodon (I’m sorry, but I don’t remember who exactly) published a short post that pointed to a rather technical economic study of the impact of AI on FOSS software development [1]. It is no secret that the AI debate is highly polarized, and the enthusiasts for the current trend in AI applications in the IT domain are at least as numerous as those who are concerned/skeptical. What is certain is that no one can, in the long term, prospectively evaluate the impact of AI on society, particularly in the IT world.

More and more, recent (and not too recent) episodes [1-5] nowadays show a hard truth we already discovered in the Debian project since the end of the 90s. A key security principle in FOSS code development is ensuring the trustworthiness of all parties involved, and that’s unfortunately also the weakest part of the whole chain.

I recently learned about an opinionated flavor of the Arch distribution called Omarchy, which is basically a collection of desktop packages built on top of a rolling Arch distribution. Nothing special, but for the vocal original author of the scripting job at the base of such flavor, who is, as it happens, for many old-school self-centered geeks out there, the quite discussed DHH. I will not enter into the merits of the reasons for the dubious fame of David "DHH" Heinemeier Hansson, which basically stem from some of his past posts on X/Twitter and some of his questionable ideas.

After experimenting at home, the very first professional-grade NAS from Terramaster arrived at work, too, with 12 HDD bays and possibly a pair of M2s. NVME cards. In this case, I again installed a plain Debian distribution, but HDD monitoring required some configuration adjustments to run smartd properly.

I have already addressed the implications of modern LLMs, specifically their training, in the context of copyright and licenses for both code and original content. A 'IANAL' disclaimer applies to this post, but my honest opinion is that such training is a legitimate type of reading and learning after study, unless explicitly excluded in licenses among the licensee's rights.