Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face

This blog post is expressing personal experiences and opinions and doesn’t reflect any official policies of SourceHut.

Over the past few months, instead of working on our priorities at SourceHut, I have spent anywhere from 20-100% of my time in any given week mitigating hyper-aggressive LLM crawlers at scale. This isn’t the first time SourceHut has been at the wrong end of some malicious bullshit or paid someone else’s externalized costs – every couple of years someone invents a new way of ruining my day.

Four years ago, we decided to require payment to use our CI services because it was being...

Device-Generated Commands at Vulkanised 2025

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=8FCgLGa76yU

A month ago I attended Vulkanised 2025 in Cambridge, UK, to present a talk about Device-Generated Commands in Vulkan. The event was organized by Khronos and took place in the Arm Cambridge office. The talk I presented was similar to the one from XDC 2024, but instead of being a lightning 5-minutes talk, I had 25-30 minutes to present and I could expand the contents to contain proper explanations of almost all major DGC concepts that appear in the spec.

I attended the event together with my Igalia colleagues Lucas Fryzek and Stéphane Cerveau, who presented about lavapipe and Vulkan Video, respectively. We had...

Why fastDoom is fast

UNIX maximalism and minimalism

The latest nixers newsletter linked to an article with the same title as this thread.
After reading it, I'm prompted to ask: is the trend to rewrite so many utilities in Rust or Go an example of minimalism, or of bloat?
I'm tempted to say the latter, because I don't care for the toolchains they bring along. Any time I look at the git repository for some tempting project and see references to cargo, I say no thank you. I dislike that almost as much as cmake.
(It's taken me years to grudgingly accept autotools. But...

A holistic perspective on intellectual property, part 1

I’d like to write about intellectual property in depth, in this first of a series of blog posts on the subject. I’m not a philosopher, but philosophy is the basis of reasonable politics so buckle up for a healthy Friday afternoon serving of it.

To understand intellectual property, we must first establish at least a shallow understanding of property generally. What is property?1 An incomplete answer might state that a material object I have power over is my property. An apple I have held in my hand is mine, insofar as nothing prevents me from using it (and, in the process,...

Join us to discuss transparency and governance at FOSDEM '25

Good news: it appears that Jack Dorsey’s FOSDEM talk has been cancelled!

This is a follow up to two earlier posts, which you can read here: one and two.

I say it “appears” so, because there has been no official statement from anyone to that effect. There has also been no communication from staff to the protest organizers, including to our email reaching out as requested to discuss fire safety and crowd control concerns with the staff. The situation is a bit unclear, but… we’ll extend FOSDEM the benefit of the doubt, and with it our gratitude. From all of the volunteers...

FOSDEM '25 protest

Update: Dorsey’s talk was cancelled! See the update here.

Last week, I wrote to object to Jack Dorsey and his company, Block, Inc., being accepted as main track speakers at FOSDEM, and proposed a protest action in response. FOSDEM issued a statement about our plans on Thursday.

Today, I have some updates for you regarding the planned action.

I would like to emphasize that we are not protesting FOSDEM or its organizers. We are protesting Jack Dorsey and his company, first and foremost, from promoting their business at FOSDEM. We are members of the FOSDEM community. We have variously been speakers, devroom organizers,...

Совмещаем Ассемблер и Си в одном проекте

Здравствуйте, на связи nikhotmsk с очередным потоком сугубо-технических мыслей. В своей прошлой статье я обещал не использовать жаргонный язык и улучшить читаемость статей. Так вот, сообщаю, что из этого ничего не получилось. Поэтому если вы ничего не поймете, то это значит, что у вас не хватило знаний, как говорил персонаж из книги - "Чтобы что-то узнать, надо уже что-то знать". Но расстраиваться не нужно.

Глядя на главную картинку вы уже почувствовали неладное. Да, я программирую для старинного компьютера ZX Spectrum. Того самого, который построен на чипе Zilog Z80, и у которого графическая память, пожалуй, самая запутанная среди всех ретро-машин. Но наша...

No billionaires at FOSDEM

Update: Dorsey’s talk was cancelled! See the update here.

Jack Dorsey, former CEO of Twitter, ousted board member of BlueSky, and grifter extraordinaire to the tune of a $5.6B net worth, is giving a keynote at FOSDEM.

The FOSDEM keynote stage is one of the biggest platforms in the free software community. Janson is the biggest venue in the event – its huge auditorium can accommodate over 1,500 of FOSDEM’s 8,000 odd attendees, and it is live streamed to a worldwide audience as the face of one of the free and open source software community’s biggest events of the year. We’ve platformed...

Year-end donations round, 2024 edition

Just in time before the year ends, I’ve gone ahead with my round of personal donations for 2024. I highly encourage you to do something similar and support the free and open source software and organizations that make a difference to you.

This year, my personal list consisted of:

Signal as every year, because I use it daily.

Calibre eBook Management, which my wife uses a lot.

The Gnome Project, which is my desktop environment these days.

LibreOffice because I use it very frequently and I think it’s a critical piece of software for the desktop.

Pi-Hole because I have one set up in my home network...