i'd like to highlight the current date: 6-9. nice

this is a formal invitation and allowance to be Blunt and Direct to me

Weirdly obsessed with =^.^=, Λ_Λ and ∘_∘ lately. What's the readers favorite emoticons?

Really good talk by @quintessence on the FOSDEM 2026: How to keep Open Source open without leaving our communities open to threats. Hits a gap between what feels like vague social behavior and what can be shown with data, bridges it excellently with constructive advice, all in just 27 minutes.

Especially normalization of conflict as a positive thing and capability of weaponization of anything (be it social or technical) will gnaw on me for a while.

@mhoye it's educationary in the best possible sense

@mhoye hi! your blog rocks, thanks for having it online!! can't even remember the last time a software blog felt this... human? direct? approachable?? (especially https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2026/01/02/powering-up/)

@grimalkina hi! i really appreciate the more-personal-less-professional quirks you (partly) put into parentheses, like

Agentic coding workflows create personalization of tool*behavior interactions on a scale that is hard for us to wrap our minds around (and interactions are already pretty hard for most people to wrap their heads around). That's one of the reasons you distrust simplistic studies about AI right now (me too).

But in a landscape of change, which is a landscape of heterogeneity, you are served by getting more specific. You need to unpack the mechanisms of what you really want to learn about (are they activating lat muscles? shoulders?). Or, you need to be clear that you cannot unpack those mechanisms and stand firm in the face of people trying to get you to use stupid uncontextualized outcome measures (like task-untroubled “velocity,” assuming that all the various different kinds of tasks everyone does should see equivalent speedup, which is an absurd statistical proposition. Imagine thinking that a hundred types of medicine should have the same effect on the body despite targeting completely different cells).

Depression medicine is infamously prone to placebo effects because depression (for a lot of cases; it’s a very big category, oh jfc there’s that heterogeneity again) is highly responsive to what people expect and think about.

~https://www.fightforthehuman.com/how-not-to-measure-the-roi-from-ai-in-your-software-organization/

i feel like they take a bit of pressure off me as a reader to not necessarily objectivize everything

My favorite quote:

[A biology faculty member]
said that when she teaches evolution
to non-evolutionists who, like me,
are grappling with being confronted in their views
during their first years of college,
she starts with why it's useful.
Evolution is fundamentally incredibly useful
to us as a theory.
It lets us explain so many of the things
we see better than other theories.
It coheres the evidence, like a good theory should.
It does not stop your questions or try to suffocate them.
It takes them seriously.

Gauging whether or not human knowledge work
and learning is "useful"
has become a lightning rod on social media.
However, I think there is a profound value in asking this,
if we think about useful not in capitalist terms,
but in terms of service to our communities and humanity.
Not about being transactional,
but about being reciprocal.
We should care about giving eight year olds
something to wonder at,
we should care also about
what tools we give them
that will be useful for them
for the rest of their lives.
We should care about the kinds of tradeoffs
they are weighing,
the dangers they are trying to hide from,
like a T-Rex that will see you when you move.

I have also found this to be an important tactic
for introducing humanistic narratives
to people in tech.
Why care about belonging?
Because it is fundamentally useful.
It lets us predict a huge slice
of the variance in developer productivity.
Why care about psychological affordances in teams?
Because it is useful.
It lets us predict where where we will find
more effective teams and design for them.
Put me in any empirical bake-off
for software teams in the world.
I do not feel afraid,
because just like I know about evolution and gravity,
I know about theories of psychology
that help us make sense
of all the trace measures we're seeing.
I can see individual bones
not as dragons sewn by a malevolent devil to fool us,
but as a fossil record.
The only devils I believe in anymore are here.

this was sponsored by: the realization I have literally no other way to cryptographically prove this identity

For the sake of redundancy; here's https://codeberg.org/MultisampledNight.keys in case that is down:

ssh-ed25519 AAAAC3NzaC1lZDI1NTE5AAAAICG1vqQxBSteK3NSxwXw0l8NhBQKL3oyUJfNW3PL/yOb

Ever felt like helping out while watching a talk on media.ccc.de? Consider translating the subtitles! https://c3subtitles.de/

there are many animals in the collective fedi mind. such as:

• the birb
• the borb
• the chonker
• the floofer

(the preview text i'm using atm is #[cold] fn main() { let λ = 30.0; let α = "They're there? ∀ x ∈ ℕ : x mod 1 = 0"; dbg!(λ, α); })

Hey fedi, what's the coding font you all use? Specifically interested in monospace ones, ideally having greek letters (αβγδλΔΛ) and maybe even math symbols (∀∃∈∧∨⊥)

nixpkgs might have navigated itself into having too many packages
a lot of them fail on hydra, it's impossible to tell who/if anybody uses any given package
the entire huge maintainership is flattened out over 120000 packages

https://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/sillymolecules/birds.pdf this is one of my favorite papers published in a journal

amazing OSM browser client: https://osmapp.org

fast, snappy, sensible search, pretty

where does this obligation go? that's right, in the procastination hole!

@zeno4ever Hi! Will you be at eth0? Would love to give out a drink for your work on mapall.space :3

challenge for the reader: on which game was this a review?

pretty fun game. i think i might have autism