Recent Blog Posts

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.

I just finished reading the delightful book by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, titled This is for Everyone, published this year. It is a trip, long, almost 400 pages, about the origin and evolution of the World Wide Web, seen by those who conceived and pushed it from the start. The entire first part of the book is dedicated to the history of the web, the W3C, and the Web Foundation's operations as we have known them in the first 30 years of its development, from 1989 onwards.

I lately dedicated some time to setting up my own substitute server for Guix on a foreign distribution. This post is about that experience, after verifying that such a process is currently quite underdocumented. A substitute server is clearly a required step in order to cultivate a personal or unofficial/alternative channel for Guix, at least if one has more than one box (and possibly one physical location) to manage.

A few weeks ago I gave a lecture for the Spatial Ecology course to introduce a handful of junior and not-so-junior researchers from various domains to the not-so-nice world of scientific computing environments.

I recently read a post by Jack Poller about the end of FOSS optimism in creating software in recent years. His thesis is that the myth that the more eyes that look at a piece of software, the higher its quality, is indeed a myth, and that nowadays it is also a dangerous illusion when we concentrate the analysis on security. Commercial software, on the other hand, has processes and resources dedicated to managing security, which in these times of active AI use could make the difference.

A few days before today, 21 years ago, I sent this message to the debian-devel-announce mailing list to solicit helpers in packaging and to oversee the geospatial software stack included in the main Debian archive. After so many years, still there.