Oct 14, 2026, 12:31 PMRE: https://woof.tech/@techokami/117439226690379216
The LLM part is bad news but it isn't the sign. It's the talking about planning succession while simultaneously complaining that nobody new wants to learn, that's the sign.
Y'all the kernel is in deep, deep trouble. We saw what happened to Perl and the kernel is in deep trouble.
Oct 14, 2026, 1:37 PMTo explain what I mean by this: for a long time the Perl community took great pride in how difficult and terse the language was. The old joke that well-written perl was indistinguishable from line noise wasn't just a joke, it was a badge of honour.
That attitude was sustainable when the internet was small and alternatives were scarce. But the moment tools appeared that prioritized things like human ergonomics (python) and human interaction (ruby) the perl community started aging out and dying.
Oct 14, 2026, 1:48 PMToday the number of people under 50 who'll reach for perl or raku or who cares what it's called as their first choice of tool for anything new is zero. In practice Perl is an esolang now.
Torvalds' position is that contributing to the kernel should be _more_ difficult for everyone else, but, through LLM usage, easier for existing kernel developers.
Ted Tso's adamant position that "you can't make us learn Rust" is the same insularity.
If the kernel was a country, we'd recognize this.
Oct 14, 2026, 2:00 PMThere are plenty of good alternatives to driving your community off a cliff like a gaggle of demographic lemmings, but if you're still convinced that mailing lists and insularity are the path to durability in this godforsaken year of our lord two thousand and twenty six then I'm not sure what words will convince you that there's nothing past the edge of that cliff but sharp rocks and seawater.
If your community isn't accessible and welcoming to new, learning participants, the clock's ticking.
Oct 14, 2026, 2:14 PMAnd for Linux as a plausibly community-managed meaningfully open as in open project, that clock is definitely ticking.
The end of this road is some corporate-funded retirement home for understaffed and underfunded projects once enough of the current devs have aged out without anyone growing into those roles, with private forks at companies that relied on the kernel, also privately relieved there's no need or reason to deal with antediluvian developer processes or bother giving back anymore.
Oct 14, 2026, 2:23 PMAnyway, funny story but remember when the discussion was about The Cathedral and The Bazaar?
There's a second axis to that graph, and it's ends are labelled "A Community" and "A Cult".
Oct 15, 2026, 2:38 PMJust to pile onto this some more:
"Ojeda said that there is a need to deprioritize these contributors, but that we still need to find talented people to join our community. That means finding ways to focus on the people who actually matter."
One of and maybe the biggest challenge we had fostering contributors that I - he said patting himself on the back - recognized early when I started at Mozilla, was in coming to terms, structurally, with the fact that free, open software had... won.
Oct 15, 2026, 2:52 PMThat is to say: Firefox 1.0. 2004. A smart kid who wants to contribute to a high-profile open source project with name recognition and global impact had basically four choices: the Linux kernel, the GNU project, the Apache webserver and Firefox; outside serious nerd circles that was basically it.
A decade later, after macports and later homebrew, the explosion of the ruby and python ecosystems, git and GitHub and the entire directional shift of the software world, that kid had 10,000+ choices.
Oct 15, 2026, 2:58 PMA thing I said a lot in that first few years is: we are competing on the experience and ergonomics of being a part of this community. Every single person out there who is smart enough to turn the crank on a compiler and figure out how to send us a patch has thousands of options. The process complexity and hard-knock oldschool open source "culture" we believe is acting as a "filter" isn't selecting for brains or talent, it's selecting for a willingness to tolerate bullshit and endure abuse.
Oct 15, 2026, 3:06 PMAnd to be explicit about this: a long-running filter that's selecting for a willingness to tolerate bullshit and endure abuse is exceedingly useful if you're a terrible manager or a sex pest, two classes of people who have notably flourished in free software for a very long time.
But when smart people have choices, and they choose not to tolerate mismanagement and abuse and stop choosing you, either you grow up or soon all you have are people who think abuse and mismanagement are normal.
Oct 15, 2026, 3:11 PMAnd you can call this oversensitive, feel-good "woke" nonsense if you want, but I've got the data and I'm right: a code of conduct, community standards and moderation enforcing them, the psychological safety of your community, these are near term competitive advantages and long term survival tools. Treating the process of getting involved and the experience of staying involved in your community like they're _a product_, worthy of usability testing and ergonomic refinement, that moves the needle.
Oct 15, 2026, 3:19 PMWe gave the entire (well, no-PII, no active secbugs, etc) contents and history of Bugzilla to some very smart PhDs at uMontreal, and one of the things they came back with was this: somebody submitting their first bugfix was relatively unlikely to submit a second, but somebody on their fourth bugfix is quite likely to get to five, and six, and stick around.
I cannot emphasize enough how much you get from up front code ergonomics and human care in the early stages of the contributor relationship.
Oct 15, 2026, 3:53 PMOn the other side of that coin, the psychological safety part of it, let me tell you: I'm the guy who killed IRC at Mozilla. I'm proud of it.
One of the reasons I'm proud of it is the mobile IRC bouncers that didn't let people delete old DMs so I got to have conversations with colleagues where they showed me pages and pages and pages of vicious scrollback harassment that they had to endure for their jobs, sitting in their phones forever.
The feature request was "I just want this to stop."
Oct 15, 2026, 4:02 PMThe move to Matrix was partly driven by their open source commitments - hi, @matrix , hey yo, love you all - but they mostly won on the strength of two things. First that their accessibility posture was not just unrivalled in terms of FOSS forums but that their team jumped at the chance to work with us improve it.
But 2nd: the moderation tools are unmatched. Nothing else comes close.
Once you have tools and process in place to ablate harassment, nobody willingly goes back to not having that.
Oct 15, 2026, 4:08 PMLike, OK, we've got clean running water now, we've got soap, we've got [checks notes] the forum management equivalent of an orbital ion cannon for dealing with the abuse or harassment of our community in our open forums., and I guess we're on our way to penicillin. We're going to be OK.
Being trusted to provide the foundations and tooling of that psychological safety to a team of the finest people I have ever worked with, and delivering on that promise, has been the high point of my career.
Oct 15, 2026, 4:15 PMBut again, there it's the same story. Matrix is still a _little_ convoluted as far as onboarding is concerned, but it beats the heck out of IRC's "learn a new OS and hope you don't get disconnected" cliffs-of-Dover learning curve, and the numbers again reflected that. Invest in community accessibility, and community safety and tooling ergonomics, and the line goes up.
Not a line made out of rageclicks, manipulation and misery, just the steady growth of a community worth being a part of.
Oct 15, 2026, 4:36 PMAnyway: the Linux kernel could have that. Any community can have that, really. But the real work is the humility of admitting you might need it.
And a lot of people - not just proud but _justifiably_ proud, for all their accomplishments and success - can easily find themselves trapped in the kind of blind spot you can only be trapped in by the atrophy of that humility, from a mere failure to welcome and foster enough diversity and dissent.
Where you can no longer change without failing first.
Oct 15, 2026, 5:00 PMAnyway: The worst thing an organization's leaders silently tolerate is what that organization becomes, and the blast radius of a single toxic contributor is huge and largely invisible. For everyone who speaks up to say this behavior isn't acceptable, there are dozens or hundreds of smart, competent people who peer into your community, see that this is how you live and move along without your ever knowing they exist, on their way to a better life somewhere else.
We don't have to live like this.
@mhoye > That amount of work cannot be done with a free LLM account. I asked whether that risked cutting off bright new developers that we would rather hang onto; Torvalds answered that the kernel project only wants serious developers. That includes having access to enough resources to function in this world.
"Linux development is only for the wealthy" has probably always been true to some extent but I'm surprised they'd just say it out loud.
Oct 14, 2026, 4:09 PM@thomaswilburn @mhoye I don't think "Linux development is only for the wealthy" is true.
Also, why contributing to the Linux kernel can only be done if you have access to an LLM? I mean, we can still develop like we did 5 years ago.
Personally I wouldn't contribute to projects that promote the usage of LLMs, but I don't see those things related.
@glaskows You may want to scroll up and read the linked article in the post I was replying to, which will answer your questions.
re: "It's the talking about planning secession while simultaneously complaining that nobody new wants to learn"
There are three people identified as "she" in that piece, and one of them was the only person to say something like "[she] said that she can identify the people who will stick around fairly quickly, and some of the new folks who have come in are excellent. For this reason, she still spends a lot of time with people sending spelling fixes. "
It's gendered labor.
@mhoye a dimension TC&TB’s author, who famously denied on libertarian / Objectivist grounds that there was any such thing as “community”, couldn’t even perceive
Oct 15, 2026, 3:13 PM@mhoye I think this is a good thread.
Oct 15, 2026, 4:45 PMThe more competent you are, the more important humility is.
Never listen to your own press. Always put yourself in other people's places. Never internalize people's praise of you and your work. Always listen to others' experiences of your work, and of you.
Yes, you have to decide who to listen to, but still.
Oct 15, 2026, 4:46 PM
@mhoye I think the availability of robo-coding also lowers the casual contributor bar for fixing the couple problems they care about in a way sufficient for their own use, while the work to contribute upstream does not. A hostile upstream culture will just mean those changes get orphaned, or more forks or entirely new projects. That is not to say this is good, but the relative costs are shifting in a significant way.
@mhoye goofiest things is that the Linux kernel has the clout to get first dibs in any kind of talent recruiting contest...
Oct 15, 2026, 4:13 PM@mhoye Is there an inventory of the capabilities you & yrs found particularly valuable somewhere?
Oct 15, 2026, 4:21 PM@owen When we got it spun up, the weapon of choice was called Mjolnir. Today, you want to look at its successor Draupnir.
You need to know a _little_ about how Matrix communications are structured and work, but relatively little. Single-action org-wide banning, per-user or per-origin, is a delight, and retroactive redact was something that a few free-as-in-speechies objected to until the day I had to clean up a goatse flood, they came around pretty quick after that.
Oct 15, 2026, 4:32 PM@mhoye Thanks.
Going off a quick read, it seems like a lot of its underlying thesis is in the direction that if you have to moderate someone in one spot, odds are they've been up to antisocial nonsense in several, and you might want to act on them without having to individually find and adjudicate them. That tracks - but am I reading it right?
Oct 15, 2026, 4:41 PM@owen During my full-time involvement, it was still true that moderators had to generally keep track of disparate acts across forums, and communicate appropriately.
Early on, this was a lot of administrative work for me - most abusers get away with it by being perfectly nice to most people - but after a while I'd built up enough credibility that people came to value the safety of their colleagues in other fora very highly.
@mhoye sounds like a really shitty place to work if that behaviour was expected. was this via a public irc server or internal only?
Oct 15, 2026, 4:11 PM@waffles The combination of the long running and deep seated cultural expectation of working in the open, the fact that for many years IRC was the only suitable tool for that and that later alternatives were almost all proprietary or otherwise closed meant we held onto it for very good, values-forward reasons, for a lot longer than we should have.
I violently agree.
Even in a closed shop environment, the money/time/effort (which ware all equivalent) you invest in on-boarding new contributors, streamlining the path to their first commit and accolades for following established processes by _following the documentation_ pays huge dividends that vastly outweigh the cost in maintaining all that stuff.
When I ran things around here, the record for a new just-graduated CS kid to his first ready-to-code-review bugfix PR was _a day_. He read the onboarding material, setup all the repositories and toolchains, self-served from the architecture and "welcome to the shitshow that is our main code repository, read this first to figure your way around" on day 1 and picked, fixed and auto-tested a bug by 10am the next day.
In his case the motivation was "I want a raise, eventually". In open source, people show up on your doorstep wanting to... begging to help. Make the experience easy and memorable and they'll stick around.
@mhoye Developers also have more choices outside the "Free Software"/"Open Source" scene now.
When all this stuff got started, the transaction costs of proprietary meant that if you started on a student/hobbyist budget and wanted to do globally useful software, free was the main option.
Now mobile app stores make non-free projects even lower hassle than free ones. And SaaS platforms aren't much harder. The overhead advantage of participating in open source went away while the downsides stayed.
@mhoye I think this is a battle we are broadly losing in civil society: from open source to the local volunteer fire department, people need to look at all the other shit going on in their life and say "this is a community I'm going to make time for". And when we look at the broader economic picture---especially in the US---I think people increasingly *have* to say "no": they don't even have a choice.
@mhoye I'm skeptical that "wants to contribute to a high-profile open source project with name recognition" should be a goal anyone should be supporting.
That's the mindset that got us into the shit we're in: FOSS as a way to get one's foot in the door for cushy tech industry careers, not as a way to take a problem you understand and care about and make things better for yourself and others.
It promotes the same kind of behavior in FOSS as the Google "breaking shit to get a promotion".
@mhoye the phrase "the people who actually matter" makes me so god damned angry.
@mhoye It seems like people are betting that open source will lose moving forward and basically bowing to their new corporate overlords. What's the point when you can just strip mine existing reserves?
I don't think this but I can see the point of view.
@mhoye I just want to remind folks that ESR was already a nazi when he wrote CATB, and the entire framing was motivated and guided by his ideologies. I'm not sure we have the unadulterated historical memories to evaluate things untainted by that.
Oct 14, 2026, 4:53 PM@mhoye like romans forgetting how to make concrete
@mhoye Linus and his posse have been elitist unwelcoming jerknobs for decades though. If an alternative were to appear, I agree that people would leave them to wither and die. But so far no reasonable alternative has appeared. *BSD, Plan9, etc have all failed to gain traction.
Oct 14, 2026, 2:26 PM@hal_pomeranz If it's up to me to pontificate, I think it will happen sooner than people might expect. It will either an explicitly anti-AI OS like NetBSD or a pure fork that focuses on a welcoming community and modern tooling.
@mhoye @hal_pomeranz hardware support is I guess the biggest stumbling block. A few years back someone in .. I think? .. the redox community was talking about running linux in a VM to use its drivers with hardware passthrough, then copying data back and forth. The *BSD world seems to have the "rump kernel" idea as a similar thing. I'd love to see something like that, I wish I still had the energy & skills to attempt to contribute :(
@hal_pomeranz @mhoye indeed, the moat of Linux was always hardware support, which was there because people got paid to make it happen. Community isn’t a competitive advantage until you have software most folks can even run on their machines. Linux being anti-community is nothing new, as you pointed out. It’s being run as a business, and from what I can tell quite a profitable one. Perl of course had nothing like that.
That’s not to defend any of that. It’s just… what it is.
@mhoye I have many deep criticisms of the modern kernel community, but conflating mailing lists with insularity might be a tough one to argue. Email is still just about the most widespread, open comms platform - most of the alternatives people jumped to instead were more or less proprietary. Isn't the issue more a failure to build better tooling on top of that platform? (Which tbf a fair amount of effort in recent years has been going into remedying.)
@mhoye the kernel is a country and it is the united states of america which is actively waging war upon another sovereign state
@hipsterelectron @mhoye you know, I keep beating parts of this drum in conversations with euros
all this "sovereign" tech talk and yet all of them do not seem to have done the slightest bit of analysis on transitive dependency chains
"sovereign distribution, built in europe on european infra" -> look under the hood -> ubuntu
one of the best examples I reach for: "what happens the day you can't reach qemu/kvm source anymore?"
@froztbyte @mhoye it puzzles me frankly particularly the rust part. rust is a microsoft fucking product now but nobody listens to packagers about bootstrap deps. i used rust for 10 years and made the zip crate the safest and fastest zip impl ever and i cannot contribute code to that system again until gccrs is complete
@mhoye @hipsterelectron @froztbyte recently I started trying to make a pure Rust Nixpkgs style bootstrap. Assuming you have a Rust compiler binary because that's a given we accept for C ++ (I think an older version of GCC was the only pure-C implementation that was reasonably modern? Less confident on that I thing there might be a C based EDG thing).
But guess what? That's nearly impossible even assuming you start with a binary! First you have to use Cranelift (still billed as experimental, doesn't ship unwinding by default because it possibly bloats binaries though I didn't encounter it) because otherwise you need C++ for LLVM. And even then you don't have an assembler which you need. So okay you write that because I don't think any currently exist.
And then I'm sure you hit some new issue but that's where I stopped for now.
Meanwhile somehow, incredibly, even with the rise of LLM produced projects redoing all kinds of things (I get it, it's a fun exercise) nobody has made a full C compiler in Rust yet. The closest is some Anthropic demonstrator that's been abandoned and isn't finished and a project @jyn started as far as I can tell.
So even if you get there and want to bootstrap from C to a whole compiler chain afterwards to get LLVM support for your Rust, too fucking bad.
I won't accept any issues people claim because you need a compiler binary I think it's arbitrary to allow the C++ compiler but not Rust, but holy shit if your language is going to be self hosting why on earth isn't that actually a full stack even on one platform?
Oct 14, 2026, 2:25 PM@fedward Sorry. We hosted a Perl users group meetup at my old shop more than a decade ago, and even then I was the only person under fifty in the room. And now, I'm not under fifty anymore.
Oct 14, 2026, 2:19 PM@mhoye Skimming the report back (https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1099594/be20382b54a9b4cd/) and I see “A properly trained LLM is a useful tool, but it takes a lot of time to reach that point.”
If that’s true, then every commit that uses one or more LLMs should include specific disclosure of what model(s) including their versions since they change ALL THE TIME, as well as the prompts used (because that matters a lot!) But they are removing “Assisted-By” tag and you have to dig thru email to find out.
@mhoye I was a professional Perl programmer for about 10 years. I don’t use it anymore, I’ve barely touched it since I left that job
@mhoye, incidentally, I was listening to a radio programme which, this week, happened to be discussing farming and the effects of climate change. There was mention of how the older people resist change and the younger ones accept it, regarding farming methods and which crops or animals do better and how these things are changing.
I'm seeing… certain similarities here; and once again, I'm reminded of how we tend to go from ”this is how it is” to “new shiny! must examine!” to “new stuff? who needs it…”
Oct 15, 2026, 4:49 PM@mhoye that means I'm zero :neobot_think: I learned Perl in 2025 and wrote new things in it specifically choosing Perl over Python because I found it simple. Cursed and annoying at times, but pretty simple all things considered.
I also do kernel dev on Linux, but due to their open toxicity to new contributors, keep it all to myself, including the security vuln(s) I find.
Don't get me wrong, I am 100% of the opinion Linux is on a one-way road towards self destruction, and once I have enough time I'll probably look into migrating to one of the BSDs, but that has nothing to do with age of the devs or users.
On a tangent, the Raku community is desperately trying to revisit and undo the Perl community mistakes. Code of Conduct, focus on friendliness, focus on newbies, fighting against willful code obfuscation. (Edit: and the Raku language itself is amazing.)
I wouldn't build a business on Raku in 2026. But if anyone is looking for a fun project language, I respectfully submit Raku and its community for consideration.
There’s a smaller analog than a nation -
My grandparents had a saying? “Three generations shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves”, meaning that it’s difficult for a family to stay wealthy longer than that because the new generations rarely act to match circumstances.
We’re only in the third or fourth generation of programming. The fat years were like adaptive radiation, there’s a new resource, let’s try everything, it all works! But eventually that ends.
Maybe that was two analogs :) @mhoye
@mhoye honestly, perl deserves to die at this point. It served a purpose for a while but that day should be long gone.