Nils Ballmann

66 Followers
111 Following
2.6K Posts
so just to be totally clear AI is "democratizing" programming by taking something that used to free to do and making it so you pay a subscription fee to an American corporation to do it while being barred from ever actually understanding how it works, am I getting that right?

For many people, the #Linux vs #Windows vs #Mac debate is a privilege — it assumes you can choose. But working with the Computer Upcycle Project, I've seen the real choice is often Linux vs no computer at all.

~95% of donated computers are "too old" for Windows 11 or macOS. Linux installs on them anyway, adding 10+ years of life to machines #Microsoft and #Apple called trash.

This isn't Linux vs Windows. It's Linux vs e-waste.

Do you want to look up a Swiss train connection directly on your terminal, no browser needed?

Necrom4 has written a TUI for SBB
https://github.com/Necrom4/sbb-tui

#bahnbubble #Schweiz #SBB

We are now officially using @forgejo! The Fedora Forge is ready for contributors to start migrating to. Cutoff for switching from Pagure is by Flock to Fedora 2026.

New chapter :)

➡️ https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/the-forge-is-our-new-home/

#Forgejo #Fedora #OpenSource #Linux

The forge is our new home. – Fedora Community Blog

While Pagure.io has been a vital part of our community for many years, the time has come to retire our homegrown forge and transition to this powerful new tool.

Fedora Community Blog

So, for anyone who cares, here's a long-form response, personally and from my POV as head of #Teckids, regarding the discussion around birth date in #systemd:

https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2026-March/052087.html

[systemd-devel] Fundamental concerns regarding the "birthDate" field in userdb

We can remove strncpy() from the Linux kernel finally! I did the last 6 instances, and dropped all the implementations:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/kees/linux.git/log/?h=dev/v7.0-rc2/strncpy

Over the last 6 years working on this, there were 362 commits by 70 contributors. The folks with more than 1 commit were:

211 Justin Stitt <[email protected]>
22 Xu Panda <[email protected]>
21 Kees Cook <[email protected]>
17 Thorsten Blum <[email protected]>
12 Arnd Bergmann <[email protected]>
4 Pranav Tyagi <[email protected]>
4 Lee Jones <[email protected]>
2 Steven Rostedt <[email protected]>
2 Sam Ravnborg <[email protected]>
2 Marcelo Moreira <[email protected]>
2 Krzysztof Kozlowski <[email protected]>
2 Kalle Valo <[email protected]>
2 Jaroslav Kysela <[email protected]>
2 Daniel Thompson <[email protected]>
2 Andrew Lunn <[email protected]>

Thank you to all of you! (And especially to Justin Stitt who took on the brunt of the work.)

kernel/git/kees/linux.git - Various feature branches

My biggest problem with the concept of LLMs, even if they weren’t a giant plagiarism laundering machine and disaster for the environment, is that they introduce so much unpredictability into computing. I became a professional computer toucher because they do exactly what you tell them to. Not always what you wanted, but exactly what you asked for.

LLMs turn that upside down. They turn a very autistic do-what-you-say, say-what-you-mean commmunication style with the machine into a neurotypical conversation talking around the issue, but never directly addressing the substance of problem.

In any conversation I have with a person, I’m modeling their understanding of the topic at hand, trying to tailor my communication style to their needs. The same applies to programming languages and frameworks. If you work with a language the way its author intended it goes a lot easier.

But LLMs don’t have an understanding of the conversation. There is no intent. It’s just a mostly-likely-next-word generator on steroids. You’re trying to give directions to a lossily compressed copy of the entire works of human writing. There is no mind to model, and no predictability to the output.

If I wanted to spend my time communicating in a superficial, neurotypical style my autistic ass certainly wouldn’t have gone into computering. LLMs are the final act of the finance bros and capitalists wrestling modern technology away from the technically literate proletariat who built it.

heise online

News und Foren zu Computer, IT, Wissenschaft, Medien und Politik. Preisvergleich von Hardware und Software sowie Downloads bei Heise Medien.

heise online
heise online

News und Foren zu Computer, IT, Wissenschaft, Medien und Politik. Preisvergleich von Hardware und Software sowie Downloads bei Heise Medien.

heise online

I did a cool dumb thing using #Krita (openSUS) and #Inkscape (fedorable)

openSUS is not an original idea, but I didn't see anyone make a good shareable version

fedorable is an original idea using the floof emoji from @volpeon

#Linux #Fedora #openSUSE #Furry #Logo