Obviously these tricks do not actually magically give you complete understanding of all the code on their own. They are inroads, they are gaps in the armor that you can wedge the tip of a crowbar into.

You need to think of source-available reverse-engineering as a process like a Metroidvania. You start out with very few abilities, and large map full of unknowns and hazards. But progress is always about finding the next ability to unlock more parts of the map. You find an ability, that lets you find an ability, that lets you find an ability, maybe some boss fights sprinkled through, but that's the process. It's breadth-first search where there is no actual wrong answer for what your next discovery should be. ANY knowledge becomes a tool to get the next available piece of knowledge.

Understanding other people's code is hard, and while a lot of the process is language-agnostic, each language has different tricks, and C really requires having some tricks because the freedom afforded by the language can be used for shenanigans.

Obviously the first place you look is type definitions, because "show me your data, and I won't even need to see your algorithms" is still an excellent first-order heuristic. This is frequently not enough in C, since fields might be used in multiple and/or non-obvious ways, and ownership semantics can be pretty implicit outside the author's head.

You know what always works, if the code exists to stare at? Looking at the function to free a type. That's the money, that's where the implicit ownership thinking was encoded.

It's probably the best confirmation I could get about not being a chaser, that I'm willing to alienate swathes of the transfem Rust community (most of whom I'm actually chill with) because I stand by my "RIIR is viral disrespect" principles, even knowing not everyone draws the "usage vs evangelism" line I do.

At this point I instantly mentally categorize it as reply guy behavior. I don't mean that in a totally gendered way. But I mean it's kind of this energy, so if that gives you gender dysphoria then maybe don't show up in my mentions expecting to have everybody else conform to your preferences.

Before LLMs, the greatest, most widespread pollutant of the software development psychosphere was "rewrite it in Rust."

I have explained this enough times while sober that I shouldn't have to defend it to some drive-by rando while full of Steel Reserve. And yet!

@MaddieM4 This isn't a dig at everyone who uses Rust. Plenty of Rust users aren't like that. But if you do feel targeted by this, consider changing your behavior, and then you won't feel targeted anymore. It's so simple, it just might work!

Systems programming software: (is mostly written in well-specified, simple languages for which multiple implementations exist, allowing you to pivot from one vendor to another if needed)

Software industry: (is pivoting hard to the destruction of the commons through matrix multiplication)

Certain people who end up in my mentions: "HURRY, GUYS! We need to rewrite everything in a complex incompletely-specified language with one viable implementation/package ecosystem, controlled by a single team that includes AI boosters, and is currently in the news for DHH vibing in it. No time to lose, it's for the secure future of computing."

While most of this thread is very revealing and traditional sealioning from someone using the fig leaf of a "nuanced, moderate position" to justify selling out the software commons, I have to admit that "our permissive LLM policy is for weaning people off of using them" is a novel take I haven't heard anywhere else. Props for that, I guess! Too bad it's at everybody else's expense.

https://mastodon.opencloud.lu/@paolo/117518911250763421

So yes. Paulo and the rest of The Document Foundation have solicited money with a blog post called "Yes, no AI is now a feature", put on the posture of a principled stand, and shipped slop to everyone who keeps up to date via their package manager. And yes, if that was your money, given on the premise of that simulated principled stand, you have been defrauded. I stand by that statement more strongly than ever.

Oh and I have to keep saying this, but I do not want to hear a fucking word about how "projects need committee leadership, that would solve these problems" when COMMITTEE-LED PROJECTS DO THIS CONSTANTLY.

While usually being irreplaceable because of infrastructure investment in ways that individual-led projects are usually not.

I hate to have this chip on my shoulder but I'm so done at this point.

Okay. If the LibreOffice promotional posting about their "keep AI optional so people can do office stuff without it" stance was persuasive to you, and you gave them money, you have been defrauded. And you should demand your money back. And we should all be ever more skeptical of carefully-worded "nuanced stances."

No money for quislings.

https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/117510420175177743

https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/09/03/yes-no-ai-is-now-a-feature/

If you contrbuted anything to Debian or Bevy or the Linux kernel, you have a more valid claim to "look what they took from you" memes than any Greek statue PFP motherfucker alive.

If people contributed to a project with the understanding that it would contain LLM contributions, that's their prerogative, and some people are fine with that. But the reality is that most of these projects are older than that. People invested their effort on a different social contract, and it was changed out from under them. It's like relicensing but more consequential.

I think that's a much bigger theft than scraping. Scraping doesn't steal our communities.

The idea that you can develop software or policy with the help of LLMs *and* have anything worth hearing to say about the gratis software ecosystem is laughable.

Should we get our thought leadership on climate change from the CEO of BP? Maybe he can fly in on his private jet to lecture us about how fossil-fuel-producing algae are the future of energy. Maybe I can get a T-shirt as swag! They've got polyester!

As little sand grains of useful antifascist resistance, I think it's our social obligation to tune these clowns out, deride the very idea of their authority, and warn each other about the controlled opposition that's expecting us to show up as an audience. Sorry if any of these men (and it's always men) were heroes of yours when you knew less about them. But here we are now. No credibility, no quarter, show them the door.

Truth is, there's a lot you could worry about, but it doesn't actually serve you. Yes, stuff that's in your power, do your best with that. But it's important for us small creatures pulling our zipper through the fourth dimension to have the ability to shrug about the stuff that'll just... go how it goes. I'm not religious, but I do think the Serenity Prayer is one of the best expressions of wisdom we've managed to hang onto in my part of human culture.

Also, every time I see a Minimalist era video by Bonsai Trees, it breaks my brain all over again that they really were literally children when they made this music.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pAv90Zo_EI

What I want is to see the future like the oracle from... well, Oracle, by Tigernite. A future where every is so different and not everything turned out, but we also learned that we were strong enough to survive it. And that we're not so different across time, together in the loneliness.

Humans I can see through the mist
You've got the wrong name
A language that you can't understand
From a time you can't explain

Do you ever get the feeling
That you're the last of your kind?
Your fauna's demise
You're left to fossilize
Because they left you behind

When you feel like nobody cares,
Remember that I do.
And when you feel the earth beneath your feet
Remember I can feel that too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2E4tojWDpk

There's a friend I owed it to, to listen to more Muse, and it's been kind of a discovery process! Like, when I think of this band, the stereotypical style in my head bounces between a few other examples I can point to on The 2nd Law, a bit of Explorers and a bit of Liquid State. But there are a few songs on here where it really feels like, "damn dude you wanna be Freddie Mercury so bad, I had no idea. Can't complain, you wear it well." But it's very Queen. Panic Station is one of those songs.

Truth be told, the whole album is about uncertainty about the future, and particularly the drive to see it pessimistically, maybe even misanthropically. Which is not unfair, but not a good way to look at the world with love, feeling why it's worth protecting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcuMa23mhHM

I'm going to really miss my morning walks. But when I'm recovered and back on my feet, it will be nice to be able to do them again, with more energy! And other, more demanding exercise too. And not always struggling to work my way up to competence. After awhile, you get very tired of being tired. I'll miss some of the turning of the leaves, but not all.

The trash can here really reminds me of the robot from A Grand Day Out, with the color and beat-up aesthetic.

I did see one of the #WalkBunnies! It's hiding in the third picture, but you can see its ears.

RE: https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/117311106218081864

Get ready to uninstall KDE. I didn't want to jump to conclusions about the Akademy bullshit, but the slop contingent of the devs are trying to shut down any kind of feedback from the people who will be stuck consuming their products.

Okay, things I constantly talk about that probably belong in a pinned post for new followers.

* Raised in a cult (SDA), was vegetarian until my first date, threw up a lot of sushi in a Barnes & Noble that day.
* Still married the guy from that date. Didn't go well. Not with him anymore.
* Atheist, but I try not to be the hostile kind.
* Polyamorous, pansexual lesbian dominatrix, dating lots of trans people.
* I'm working on a programming language called Prone. I tag posts about that with #pronelang.
* I'm recovering well from surgery! Not totally disabled anymore.
* I try to go for a walk every day, and I take pictures and share the music I was playing on my headphones. Sometimes I go for road trips and share pictures from those too.
* To the extent I have the energy to act on it, I'm a creative polyglot, making videos, music, writing novels, etc. In practice my main outputs are memes and blog posts and social media snark.

Actually, you know what? @kde this kind of slide is what you get when you invite speakers who think AI is the future and make it a core topic of the talk. You get the Omarchy logo being treated like an equal seat at the table, a distro which explicitly exists to soak up the funding and vice signals of fascists and entrench their presence in the open source community. This wasn't even the slide that was JUST the Omarchy logo at full-slide size.

You're an extremely important piece of infrastructure for the free ecosystem. You really can't afford to be playing in these circles. If you start treating AI as if it's the morally neutral inevitable future, or endorsing those positions with conference talks, you won't like what you become, and you'll leave a lot of people with no place to go.

Between this and the AI-native talk, you're probably hearing from a lot of terrified and angry people, many less polite than me, who need to know why you're letting these people in your house. You deserve that.