I'm not one of those oldmanyellsatcloud people that always assumes the worst of later generations. "Au contrraire", kids never cease to amaze me with their energy and creativity.

Here is a great example - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdmmBhaHVJA, by a friend's kid, Maxwell van der Werken It's in tribute of his older brother, which the family lost in a horrendous series of blunders at a local emergency room a couple of years ago. Finlay was 16 when he passed away, and Maxwell was 16 when he made this (happy birthday, Maxwell!)

It is gripping. And awesome. Go watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdmmBhaHVJA

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/117066183348062085

It cannot be stated enough that you must assume a) that your LLM got trained on code that was licensed under licenses like the GPL, and b) that your LLM will reproduce chunks of code that are large enough to be copyrightable from its training set. TL&DR: your LLM project is now covered under the GPL (or worse, AGPL, or any other random license, whether FOSS-approved or not). If you open source your code, your whole codebase might or might not be tainted by that license.

This alone is a very good reason for open source projects to not accept large (larger than 10-15 lines) LLM-coded patches at least until we see a bunch more court cases to settle what this exactly means, unless of course you don't care about licensing details like this. If you use OSS code and plan to redistribute derivative works, know that such a project's license text is not worth much anymore.

What it means for private code you plan to make money off, talk to your lawyer. You're a company, you can afford to.

RE: https://changelog.complete.org/archives/44456-celebrating-45-years-of-kermit-with-the-first-new-c-kermit-release-in-15-years-and-working-with-a-decades-old-c-codebase

The number of times that Kermit saved a project back in the '80s/'90s... When working in the pharma industry in Basel, CH, I met some people who got hired by the then big-three companies there to hook up machines. Their weapons of choice: a soldering iron and the Kermit source code in various esoteric programming languages :-). Glad to see it still alive.

Ways to make yourself impopular in this nook of the fediverse #14: write about LLMs in a way that isn't doomsday-ish. Oh well, here goes nothing.

A blog post about my experience using Claude Code almost exclusively for the last month-and-a-bit creating lots of #elixir and #lisp.

https://cdegroot.com/programming/2026/08/03/ai.html

https://coalton-lang.github.io/20260424-mine/ - Mine, a new IDE for Lisp and Coalton. Probably this mostly will land in the echo chamber, but this is a great tool for getting people into Common Lisp and Coalton (so spread the word - it's now easy mode to get going! ;-)) #lisp #commonlisp #coalton

Well, today is the day. I'm finally "sorta happy enough to pull the trigger" on publishing the book I've been working on for a very long time. It's a technical history book: by a techie, for techies (although I think that between all the code samples, there is plenty of meat for "tech-adjacent" and "tech-interested" people). It tells the story of the Lisp programming language, invented by a genius called John McCarthy in 1958 and today still going strong (to the extent that many people see it as the most powerful programming language in existence).

And this is a time for shameless self promotion, even if you don't plan on buying the book, please repost :-). Self-publishing is self-marketing, so there we go.

If you do buy and read it, please let me know how you liked it!

The book landing page, https://berksoft.ca/gol, has links to all outlets where you can buy the book,

https://thenewstack.io/ffmpeg-to-google-fund-us-or-stop-sending-bugs/ - the solution is simple. Publish under licenses that corporations hate, but are technically still Open Source. The GNU Affero Public License is my personal favorite.

Then, if Google approaches your volunteer club about dual licensing, you can setup a support contract for moneys if you want to, or, much more fun, show them how gorgeous your middle finger is.