Nils Ballmann

66 Followers
111 Following
2.6K Posts

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

fedi: *oh no the fascist california law will make linux illegal unless you insert your id into a floppy drive, enable secure boot and sign away your soul via tpm*
systemd: *just adds an optional field for birth date*
fedi: *oh you microslop conspiracy nazi scum*

My #Wikipedia request for comment just closed, finally banning #AI content in articles! "The use of LLMs to generate or rewrite article content is prohibited"

Kudos to all who participated in writing the guideline (especially Kowal2701) and the whole WikiProject AI Cleanup team, this was very much a group effort!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_articles_with_large_language_models/RfC

Wikipedia:Writing articles with large language models/RfC - Wikipedia

Signal Boost: If you are willing to fix any of the #Wayland related issues I describe in https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2026-01-04-wayland-sway-in-2026/, I am willing to sponsor the hardware you need for it, e.g. high-res monitor, GPU, PC, etc. and/or pay a bounty for the fix itself.

See https://lobste.rs/s/5pkjai/wayland_set_linux_desktop_back_by_10_years#c_4cpf8q for details and reach out; thanks in advance.

My goal is that #Linux works better, but I can’t do it alone. Let’s improve it together!