Recent Blog Posts

Following a post detailing my email setup across multiple personal boxes, I'll summarize an outline of my approach for managing data across multiple workstations and individual profiles in this post. This system (or collection of tools and workflow) has evolved over time and continues to adapt to various needs and scenarios, offering high flexibility and control for my use cases.

My last post dealt with some ideas about copyright that need more in-depth analysis. First, as it was common in the old good days, IANAL applies to this post and the whole topic. The final results of current litigations in courts that touch on some of the primary companies involved in the whole AI thing could ultimately differ from what is now the common sense point of view (mine). This post could become rapidly obsolete, so another disclaimer is due for this aspect, too.

My last post captured the attention of my old fellow Sandro 'strk' Santilli on Mastodon, who sent a provocation about the whole AIAD thing. So, the challenge is accepted.

Like many other developers, I recently started using some LLM-based AI systems as helpers for coding in a few languages. I'm not a fan of VSCode, and I prefer a more traditional approach to coding: I hate to cope with code completion servers and use one of my preferred editors, Vim or Emacs. Navigating by tags is more than enough for me. That said, this is the summary of my current experience in the new world of AI-aided approach to coding (i.e., AI-aided development or AIAD for brevity).

I recently read with interest the post where Hector Martin resigned as Asahi Linux leader. As possibly well-known, Asahi Linux is the very first Fedora-based distribution where all the hard work to support the Apple ARM M* chip series in the Linux world found its way.

Some time ago, I eventually listened on YouTube to a year-old interview by Guido Penta with Salvatore Sanfilippo (aka Antirez) about the art of development in the current age. I agree with some points, specifically that in many cases, multiple developers work for their whole work life on boring/marginal activities. One of them, IMHO, is the entire front-end effort in developing web-based applications, a development task that nowadays could be broadly and proficiently managed mainly via AI to reduce human intervention to minimal parts and architectures.

Being an ancient mariner in the virtual ocean of the Big Network, I started using emails at the very beginning of the Internet era (at least here in Italy) on a SunOS pizza box, which I used at the time as my primary workstation. That was a giant step ahead for me because my first serious use of email in 1991 was on a Digital VT220 terminal under VMS OS and its MAIL client (who remembers the old times of DCL?). At that time, I started using Elm as my Mail User Agent, a software that stopped being developed in the first few years of this millennium.

In a previous post, I suggested that people should escape from big company-based social networks and find refuge in the Fediverse. The reason for that is simply to avoid being constantly considered a profitable customer, being profiled, and continuously bombed from advertising campaigns or sponsored posts. In brief, the purpose is returning to the original spirit of the big network of peers of the 90s.

Recently, I participated in a brief thread on Mastodon about how to maintain relations with people that have been built around a social network, specifically through Facebook. This is not different for Instagram, X/Twitter, TikTok or whatever you prefer.

One of the coding projects I currently maintain is Autodir, a not-so-known little daemon based on autofs that can be used to create automagically users or group directories at their first use. It is specifically helpful when some kind of shared accounts system is adopted for multiple hosts and the related home directories need to be created optionally and on demand. Well, I recently moved the old repository from SourceForge to GitHub, and that has also been the occasion for me to update the old Docbook howto document for Autodir initially written by the original Autodir developer, Venkata Ramana Enaganti. I mostly maintained the project as a Debian package in the last 20 years or so, with only little interest in feature improvements: it basically just works, and that's more than enough for my use cases.