The Python Software Foundation shows more spine than every single tech giant in just one single decision.

> Diversity, equity, and inclusion are core to the PSF’s values

https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-funding-statement.html

👋 Hello! GNU Guix is on @hachyderm - yay!

If you haven't heard of #gnu #guix we're a free software project that's created a hosted package manager (think homebrew or flatpak) and a GNU/Linux distribution.

GNU Guix uses the functional packaging approach pioneered by #nix and adds a user-experience and system configuration system. It uses a DSL that's based on Guile Scheme. You can use it configure your home environment, dev environments or the entire system using a declarative and transactional definition.

We hope to tell people about the project and our latest news. We'd love to engage with people around #freesoftware #guile #scheme and more general #linux topics!

F-Droid and Google's Developer Registration Decree

https://f-droid.org/en/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html

"If you own a computer, you should have the right to run whatever programs you want on it. This is just as true with the apps on your Android/iPhone mobile device as it is with the applications on your Linux/Mac/Windows desktop or server. Forcing software creators into a centralized registration scheme in order to publish and distribute their works is as egregious as forcing writers and artists to register with a central authority in order to be able to distribute their creative works. It is an offense to the core principles of free speech and thought that are central to the workings of democratic societies around the world."

#opensource #android #fdroid #freedom

I enjoyed flipping through Havlevi et al.'s recent paper on arXiv, "A Black Hole is Born", and being reminded that everything about core-collapse supernovae is mind-bogglingly extreme:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20837

As an example, the accretion rates onto the central object (initially a neutron star that collapses into a black hole) are measured in *solar masses per second*.

#astronomy #Astrodon

It's official, GNOME Calendar and the Orca screen reader together agree about the trouble we find ourselves in with climate change: "Weather collapsed."

#GNOMECalendar #Orca #accessibility #a11y #climatechange #collapse #permacomputing #Linux #Piper #texttospeech #GNOME #weather

The current administration in the US has, through various funding agencies such as the NSF and NIH, has recently suspended virtually all federal grants to my home university, UCLA (including my own personal grant, although that is far from the most serious impact of this decision), on the grounds that UCLA was “failing to promote a research environment free of antisemitism and bias”. One can certainly debate whether these grounds were justified, or whether they merit the extremely draconian damage to the very research environment that this decision is claiming to protect, but if nothing else this unprecedented decision does not appear to have followed the usual standards of due process for actions of this nature; for instance, there appears to have been no good faith effort by the administration to receive a response from UCLA to its allegations before implementing its decision.

The suspension of my personal grant has a non-trivial impact on myself (in particular, my summer salary, which I had already deferred in order to allow the previously released NSF funds to support several of my graduate students over this period, is now in limbo), and now gives me almost no resources to support my graduate students going forward; but this is only a fraction of a percent of the entire amount being suspended. A far greater concern is the impact on the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) https://www.ipam.ucla.edu/, which despite receiving preliminary approval earlier this year for a new five-year round of funding (albeit at significantly reduced levels) from the NSF, now only has enough emergency funding for a few months of further operation at best if the suspension is not lifted. (1/4)

Look, speaking as a physicist, it is hard for me to put into words how batshit crazy this is.

https://gizmodo.com/billionaires-convince-themselves-ai-is-close-to-making-new-scientific-discoveries-2000629060

« Our small team vs millions of bots » by #FSF tech team

Aside the part about LLM crawlers which is scary! 😱

The post mentions:

« More recently, automated software build systems have become an issue for us. These usually go by the non-obvious term CI/CD, which stands for "continuous integration or continuous deployment." They send automated requests to check for new code on Savannah in order to rebuild their software. They often send far more requests than is necessary, which looks and acts like a DDoS attack even though it is not intended to be. »

🤔 Ah that’s annoying…

The time of the Voyager program seems as far as the Voyager spacecraft itself.

https://www.fsf.org/blogs/sysadmin/our-small-team-vs-millions-of-bots