Similar to last month I have given more intention to some of the interesting things that I have stumbled across in my feed reader or the fediverse. Rather than just a quip, boost, or reply, I have wanted to consolidate these thoughts with more permanance here to my blog.

Chris’ talk below at North Bay Python was, as his always are, well-delivered and worth consideration.

The conclusion that he draws towards the end is similar to something I was noodling last year:

At some point somebody, somewhere, is going to have to actually understand how things work.

Chris makes the point, as he typically does, much more thoughtfully and with a stronger philosophical base.

Had some discussions with the delta-kernel-rs developers after they mistakenly added a ton of new files to tests/ blowing up test cycle times. Another community member shared this great overview about not using Cargo integration tests.

Catching up on Daniel’s thoughts on Data Quality and reconsidering the domain. The generation of slop has resulted in renewed discussions of “but how do we ensure correctness?” which is a great question to be trying to answer, but I am still rather disappointed with the state of the art for data quality tooling.

I recommend this blog post which has some good citations for negative AI behaviors affecting free and open source communities.

This is going to be a difficult problem to solve, more difficult than the email spam problem we have been unable to solve after 30 years of working on it.

This is also a very important problem, we are currently in an age where we have access to information that most people couldn’t even dream of 30 years ago. We also have disinformation that combines some of the worst aspects of authoritarian regimes throughout history combined with the worst aspects of cult brainwashing. If we lose access to the information but the disinformation remains (or get worse) then the result will be terrible.

I really enjoy Planet Debian as an aggregator of an international set of voices from the Debian community. I get exposed to so many different view points from around the free software ecosystem, which I really value. This past week I read this blog post by a debian maintainer which I was so flummoxed by I wrote out my thoughts on the topic here

Streaming tar over SSH is one of the more novel Unix tricks I don’t get to use much anymore. Drew Devault shared some helpful tips for using it without needing to use incantations of rsync(1).