Stefan Sperling

@[email protected]
696 Followers
734 Following
148 Posts

Posting mostly about tech stuff I'm working on but happy to read and chat about non-tech stuff too. I'm grateful to be learning so much about the world from all of you.

Tech stuff I'm working on currently includes OpenBSD, Apache Subversion, Software Heritage, Game of Trees, @gothub, and Dulwich.

Toots get auto-deleted after one month.

wwwhttps://stsp.name
languagesde/en, a little fr
citiesBerlin / Brussels
pronounshe/him/his
Stefan Sperling5d ago

Just in case anyone needs a bit of encouragement: It has always been and is still perfectly reasonable to fix bugs without LLMs. I found 7 WiFi driver bugs this evening and wrote fixes for each of them. With no more than vim-classic, grep, and debug prints.

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=178204688871868&w=2

https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=178208266083832&w=2

'small set of qwx bug fixes' - MARC

Stefan Sperling6d ago
Howard Chu @ Symas6d ago

RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@remixtures/116782299343169779

I would think we've known for a long time that any faculty you don't exercise atrophies over time. The fact that tools that let you avoid thinking erode your ability to think is completely unsurprising.

We've seen this happen many times before, not just with AI. Point&click GUIs vs CLIs, typing vs handwriting... none of this is new, none of it should be unexpected.

Stefan SperlingJun 20
Andrew NesbittJun 18

Open Source vs the Invisible Hand

https://nesbitt.io/2026/06/18/open-source-vs-the-invisible-hand.html

Open Source vs the Invisible Hand

Ten million downloads a week, one maintainer, zero dollars.

Andrew Nesbitt
Stefan SperlingJun 19
Lucie / minuteJun 19

A new MNT Pocket Reform mini laptop variant with Quasar 6490 (Qualcomm QCS6490) processor module (8GB RAM / 128GB UFS) preinstalled is now available in our shop: https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-pocket-reform

Enjoy!

Stefan SperlingJun 19

The first ever successful SAE message exchange between #OpenBSD (iwx driver) and linux hostapd has occurred. There is still some work left do but the hard part is done!

#WPA3

Cc @vanhoefm

(EDIT: By the way, this exchange was using the randomly chosen secret numbers 2 and 3. Don't tell anyone!)

Stefan SperlingJun 19

Most hilarious #OpenBSD bug I've seen in a while: The kernel can panic when pressing the CapsLock key: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-bugs&m=178186466408482&w=2

Fortunately, true hackers have mapped CapsLock to Control ​

'Panic when pressing Caps Lock in the console' - MARC

Stefan SperlingJun 17
oriJun 17
Can you tell when I enabled the bot scraping protection on https://shithub.us ?

I'm a bit proud of the approach. It's JS-free, stateless, and at least moderately annoying to handle on the scraper side.
Show threadStefan SperlingJun 17

"Bugs in the canonical implementation are bugs to fix, not behavior to preserve. A second implementation that does what the spec says rather than what the canonical implementation happens to do is correct, not deviant."

(https://epicgames.github.io/lore/explanation/system-design/)

This is very bold. And much easier to pull off in a centralized VCS than a decentralized one. And, so far, there is only one implementation - hah.

The Lore Version Control System - Lore Developer Documentation

Stefan SperlingJun 17

Epic Game's newly published Lore version control system seems interesting. Freely reusable (MIT) and no Claude commits in sight (though I am unsure about undisclosed use of llm), and purposefully built for game development.

If you are doing game development work with large file assets with Git or SVN or Perforce or sinilar today, I would recommend at least taking a closer look and keeping an eye on how this tool evolves.

Not sure if lore's roots as part of Epic's IDE for Unity will really make it a grow into an independent version control system in the long run. But the technical design highlights do sound solid to me. They are combining several design aspects taken from prior art in ways that make a lot of sense to me given their use cases.

Stefan SperlingJun 12

I have published "mergesiteset" which despite being a relatively simple script has been saving me a lot of time merging configuration files while preparing #OpenBSD upgrades in production environments: https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-ports&m=178127596851228&w=2

Don't have a site set yet? Back up all the important configuration files you have changed in a tarball rooted at / and you have one.

And if you want to use sysupgrade with your site set without running a custom installation mirror to download sets from, see https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=178128371857523&w=2

'new: sysutils/mergesiteset' - MARC