I had an interesting conversation during the IETF hackathon with people getting heavily into coding with AI. To get AI to work for serious projects, they need to write down a lot of assumptions and other information, the observation being that they are now documenting things they should have written down for their junior engineers but didn't... but now that the AI needs this information, they are doing it.

Which, from an economic standpoint, is totally backwards assuming that a junior engineer costs a lot more than an AI.

Schools shouldn't be training centers for proprietary software.
https://www.korte.co/gyon
#Education #opensource

Adventures in Meshtastic

I’ve always wanted to play around with LoRa and Meshtastic to see what it can do. Thanks to a little prodding by @emacdona I bought a pair of cheap, Heltec kits.

I seriously have no idea what I am doing here, but managed to futz my way through flashing one of the devices. I let it run over night and woke up to 128 nodes discovered. Pretty interesting.

If you think that that orchestrated AIs creating Pull Requests is a problem, wait until they start trying to be LinkedIn influencers.

Phillip Hallam-Baker has defined the term "Superficial Intelligence" (SI), which better describes the artificial intelligence we are currently experiencing.

https://mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/ietf/HuQyJJHCF0y9Lrr543WQah63MQs/

I maintain pypandoc — 14M downloads/month, used by Adobe, Google, Microsoft, Apple, OpenAI and many more.

I just overhauled my sponsorship pages. If you or your company depend on open source infrastructure (you do), here's how to help keep it maintained:

💛 https://github.com/sponsors/JessicaTegner

Open source has a free-rider problem. You can be part of the solution.

#OpenSource #Python #FOSS #FundOpenSource

Today we had a fire alarm in the office. A colleague wrote to a Slack channel 'Fire alarm in the office building', to start a thread if somebody knows any details. We have AI assistant Glean integrated into the Slack, and it answered privately to her: "today's siren is just a scheduled test and you do not need to leave your workplace". It was not a test or a drill, it was a real fire alarm. Someday, AI will kill us.

Apparently I was not supposed to eat all the Girl Scout cookies. Some of these house rules are downright complicated.

I am noticing bot accounts hitting GitHub repos and approving (not merging, but approving) PRs. The GitHub docs on how to stop non-collaborators from doing this are difficult to understand. So far I have resorted to old-fashioned branch protection. Has anybody with a divining rod figured out the #github permissions to specifically address this issue?

Rust implementation of Mistral's Voxtral Mini 4B Realtime runs in your browser (github.com/trevors)

https://github.com/TrevorS/voxtral-mini-realtime-rs

#rustlang #programming #browser

There are now more RDAP queries than Whois queries:
https://blog.apnic.net/2026/02/10/the-current-state-of-rdap/

The Internet Runs on Free and Open Source Software—And So Does the DNS

https://www.icann.org/en/blogs/details/the-internet-runs-on-free-and-open-source-softwareand-so-does-the-dns-23-10-2025-en

Yes, it does!

We live an age of BS. And it is not even the old school, witty and artful BS. It’s just big-stick-in-the-poop BS.

I decided to screw around with an ESP32-C6 board I bought awhile back but never got around to playing with. So I decided to make the lights blink using Rust. That took entirely too long to figure out because a lot of the guides are out of date and the HAL has changed drastically. Out of frustration I started using Gemini but because its training data is a few months old, that was one false start after another. Then I went to OpenCode and that worked well because the tool-calling was able to iteratively get at the problem. An interesting experience.

@danyork

RE: https://mastodon.social/@danyork/115906615259034425

New version of the ICANN RDAP command line software... https://github.com/icann/icann-rdap/releases/tag/v0.0.26

#rust #homebrew #rdap

It's not just another monthly NoVaLUG meeting. I am usually just organizing, but this time I am giving a presentation on the Rust programming language. Come watch me throw down the snark on all the Rust-haters.

#rust

https://mobilizon.us/events/140c5c7c-01f3-4aaa-b218-58289c6b4449

Editing a Perl script you've never seen before in prod on a Friday before the holiday break should be fine, right?

Some of the older RFCs have algorithms specified in C and many newer ones do it in psuedocode. This one is using #rust: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-rift-kv-tie-structure-and-processing-06

Adding this to my list of things to check out. #Rust github.com/stoolap/stoo...

github.com/stoolap/stoola...