Laurent Bercot

@[email protected]
864 Followers
46 Following
8K Posts

Grumpy Frenchman, C/Unix addict, author of s6 and other software at skarnet.org.

Good tech (so, probably not the tech you're thinking about), energy transition and climate change, leftist politics, psychology and self-improvement, pillow philosophy, songwriting and production, mechanisms of storytelling, video games as an art medium, shitposting.

Personal websitehttps://skarnet.org
Business websitehttps://skarnet.com
Twitterhttps://twitter.com/laurentbercot
Githubhttps://github.com/skarnet
Laurent Bercot14h ago
paul19h ago
@JustaJason007 @alexpsmith
Laurent Bercot18h ago
Tobias Fiebig18h ago
There is just... SO MUCH... wrong with this.
Laurent Bercot18h ago
mhoye23h ago
Imagining a digital archaeology doctoral thesis in 2450, a phd student carefully sifting through the computational ruins of a society in perplexity, wondering at the insane collective delusion that suddenly caused these people to all at once start rebuilding the load bearing foundations of society with tools labelled “for entertainment purposes only”, wondering what conclusions they’ll draw. A cognitive recurrence of the mass psychosis dance manias or laugh contagions of the Middle Ages, maybe?
Laurent Bercot21h ago
Show threadjbz23h ago
｢ Francesca Bria is a professor at University College London and head of Eurostat’s digital sovereignty initiative. She describes how “Palantir isn’t a private company in the strict sense of the word. It’s an arm of the U.S. national security apparatus. When European governments acquire its tools, they aren’t just buying software: they’re surrendering sovereignty.” ｣
Laurent Bercot22h ago
Show threadmia (developer mode)1d ago
@domi only got that on my tl now but this resonates a lot with my feelings on the subject

there's a thing i often point out to unix weenies: good software does not foist off the responsibility to solve a particular problem to the user. “unix philosophy” is for designing the building blocks of solutions. it is meant for developers who write software for other developers, not as a guideline for anything user-facing.

and the corposlop, yes. i didn't really get mad about it until recently but now it has become unbearable because so much of what i use has been subverted by fucking corpos. the software that was built by volunteer hackers now serves corporate needs, which are largely incompatible. this is evident even on the purely technical level: npm, cargo, pypi and so on serve no purpose for anyone but those who want a single distribution of a product that is entirely in their control. and distro maintainers HATE them. sysadmins also hate them. and corpos invented docker to have yet another layer of control because really, these days you don't sell software, you sell services.

and the software itself, as a result, is becoming everything i hate. it's getting worse, and it leaves less and less room for me to change it and contribute to it.
Laurent Bercot22h ago
Iris van Rooij 💭3d ago

"Feel free to adapt and reuse. No attribution needed (...) If you make an adaptation that you also want to share, I’d love to know about it, too."

https://irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2026/04/08/refusal-to-review/

Refusal to Review

I wrote the below email, when invited to review a paper that was partially processed by ChatGPT. As I imagine the email could be useful inspiration for others, I decided to make it available. Feel …

Iris van Rooij
Laurent Bercot1d ago
Show threadThommy1d ago
@gabrielesvelto I think it also just speaks ill of the craft of coding. Most code is trash and end users are unaware of how bad it really is (they just know that everything is unreliable but not the specific why). So it's frankly easier to replace most coders. If the code is going to be shitty anyway, might as well be shitty and fast. With art, it's at least always directly scrutinized by consumers.
Laurent Bercot1d ago
tom_geraghty2d ago

The Vasa sank in 1628 because the people who knew it would sink didn't feel able to say so to the people who could have done something about it.

We wrote up the full case study — Vasa Syndrome, authority gradients, and what the sister ship tells us about organisational learning.

https://psychsafety.com/the-vasa-disaster/

The Vasa

The Vasa Disaster A few years ago, I was working for a client in Stockholm and in some free time, I visited the wreck of the Vasa, the world’s best-preserved 17th-century ship. She’s housed in a museum built specifically around […]

Psych Safety
Laurent Bercot1d ago
Show threadJulian Oliver6d ago

@anaiscrosby After seeing ChatGPTBot blow 123 seconds on my drip-feed poison tarpit and then never come back, I got reading on how modern LLM scrapers might employ mechanisms to detect tarpits and blacklist.

During research I came across this tarpit evading scraper that provides some interesting insights into how modern LLM scrapers might do this.

https://github.com/Draconiator/Ipema

This gives me pause and has me looking at other solutions for counter-detection.

The GeoCities CSS is going nowhere.

GitHub - Draconiator/Ipema: A script designed to counter the Nepenthes tarpit - designed with the help of A.I. itself.

A script designed to counter the Nepenthes tarpit - designed with the help of A.I. itself. - Draconiator/Ipema

GitHub
Laurent Bercot1d ago

You know design is good when there's a comment in the code saying

/* First try with fake ucred data, as requested */