I actually worked at the same place as Andrew Tridgell, over a quarter-century ago. I got to know a few of the OzLabs folks during their immediate post-IBM years, and always had the highest respect for them in that way where you feel acute impostor syndrome when they're in the room.

Tridge almost walked backwards into implementing the Windows SMB protocol (he was just debugging some funny NetBIOS extensions IIRC). But his paper on the #rsync algorithm was groundbreaking, and actually writing the tool to implement it was brilliant. It's become one of those tools like #curl that just forms one of the major structural supports of the modern Internet. I still remember the day that the SSH transport became the default, and I remember being able to thank him in person when he came to the San Francisco office (although IIRC by that point he'd handed control of rsync over to mbp).

I remember at my next job he came to a summit of folks working on print driver/spooler software. When he pointed out that some problems were effectively a cache-consistency algorithm, we all kind of put our fingers to our temples and said "Oh wow, you're SO right!" He was always insightful and sharp, while being gentle and approachable.

I write in the past tense because I haven't crossed paths with him in two decades, and only know what I see him put out. A friend of mine in Australia noted that he hasn't posted to the Canberra LUG list since 2020, thanking someone for congratulating him on receiving the Medal of the Order of Australia. He's very much alive, but from what little I see I grow concerned for him.

In 2024 he took over maintenance of rsync once more. The 3.3.0 release was the last one from the previous maintainer, and Tridge is currently working on 3.4.x releases.

Well... Tridge and #Claude, it seems: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@JeremiahFieldhaven/116654345332213390

The issue tracker for rsync has recently lit up with regressions, showing features that worked reliably for almost 30 years are suddenly coming crashing down in 3.4.2 and 3.4.3. People are scrambling to find ways to pin rsync to known-good versions. The considerate, incisive mind I briefly knew is letting the stochastic parrots do his work for him, and it just seems so astonishingly *unlike* the person I met back in the day.

I am still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I hope all is well for him, but I will not cast aspersions on his goals or his abilities. No, instead I draw this conclusion:

If TRIDGE of all people can't handle #LLMs without a slopocalypse, no one can.

That means you. That means someone you admire who is intelligent and careful and considerate. Not even someone whose opinions on technology you respect a great deal.

No one.

LLM advocates still don’t seem to be able to comprehend that ordering the machine not to ‘make stuff up’ doesn’t help. It doesn’t know when it’s making stuff up, and it couldn’t change that even if you told it to. (In fact it’s always just making stuff up, and is only ever true by chance.)

Part of why I’m so negative about them is that their advocates simply do not understand how they work and do not seem to want to.

https://mas.to/@carnage4life/116653425489923041

So my systems recently updated to rsync 3.4.3, and as soon as that happened my backup system - which does incremental backups using multiple --compare-dest= arguments - started to fail on anything but a full backup.

Revert to 3.4.1 and it works.

So I go look at the source in GitHub to see what might have changed, because there doesn't seem to be anything relevant in the changelog.

Since 3.4.1, 36 commits by "tridge and claude"

Oh for fuck's sakes.

I’m deeply uncomfortable with Microsoft attempting to weaponise their extensive law enforcement contacts to arrest people who post zero days in the products.

It comes after the researcher was kicked off GitHub (owned by Microsoft), Gitlab (a Microsoft partner), after they were doxxed on Twitter and had their MSRC - Microsoft vulnerability reporting portal - account disabled.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/msrc/blog/2026/05/a-shared-responsibility-protecting-customers-through-coordinated-vulnerability-disclosure

Wikipedia went from "do not cite" to "the last trustworthy source on the internet" in the past 25 years and now it looks like they want to throw it all away because they want to break a union.
The largest community driven project in the world, relying directly on volunteers, and they still do not see the value of their own people.

I hate capitalism

Big Tech’s Anti-Labor Playbook Has Come for Wikipedia | by Jake Orlowitz | May, 2026 | Medium
https://medium.com/@jakeorlowitz/wikipedia-is-doing-the-capitalist-thing-56a393232943

One of those moments where you look back at your previous voting record during the #Blair years (never voted #Labour during this era) and the protests you went on, including the big 1 million anti-war march on London…and think yup, zero regrets.

The man was a neoliberal Thatcher wannabe then and now just wants the UK to live up #Trump and the techbros collective arsehole.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/may/26/tony-blair-labour-abandon-net-zero-support-donald-trump