RSS Parrot

AI in Linux

https://drewdevault.com/blog/AI-in-Linux/

Published: July 23, 2026 00:00

The role of AI tools (LLMs, mainly) in Linux is under discussion, or it was, until Linus Torvalds “put his foot down” in support of the use of AI in Linux kernel development.I can identify two major ways in which AI is used for Linux kernel development:…

The circus freaks of open source

https://drewdevault.com/blog/Circus-freaks-of-FOSS/

Published: June 5, 2026 00:00

The masterwork of Terry A. Davis is his eclectic operating system, TempleOS, which he worked on until his tragic death in 2018. In terms of technical excellence, TempleOS rates well in some respects and poorly in others. For example, it earns the…

Vim Classic 8.3.0 released

https://drewdevault.com/blog/Vim-Classic-8.3.0/

Published: June 2, 2026 00:00

Following up on my earlier announcement that I was forking Vim, I’m happy to announce the first release of my fork today: Vim Classic 8.3.0.I have written a release announcement for vim-classic.org, which you can read here. Happy editing!

New blog design

https://drewdevault.com/blog/New-design/

Published: May 20, 2026 00:00

I redesigned my blog! I decided to put some more personality into it this time, after over a decade of the minimalist style. This short post is just an excuse to show up in your feed reader so you can go look at it. Cheers!Also: I’m trying out fedi again.…

Add an LLM policy for rust-lang/rust

https://drewdevault.com/blog/LLM-policy-for-Rust/

Published: May 15, 2026 00:00

No comment on this PR may mention the following topics:Long-term social or economic impact of LLMsThe environmental impact of LLMsAnything to do with the copyright status of LLM outputMoral judgements about people who use LLMsWe have asked the moderation…

I can't cancel GitHub Copilot

https://drewdevault.com/blog/I-cant-cancel-Copilot/

Published: May 1, 2026 00:00

Back when Copilot first came out, I immediately disliked it. But I decided to give it a fair shake and tried to evaulate it in good faith. I wasn’t interested in paying for it, but they had a form for FOSS community members to apply for a free…

Addressing the harassment

https://drewdevault.com/blog/Addressing-harassment/

Published: April 21, 2026 00:00

Kiwi Farms is a web forum that facilitates the discussion and harassment of online figures and communities. Their targets are often subject to organized group trolling and stalking, as well as doxing and real-life harassment. Kiwi Farms has been tied to…

Rewrote my blog with Zine

https://drewdevault.com/blog/Rewrite-with-zine/

Published: April 19, 2026 00:00

15 years ago, on December 11th, 2010, at the bold age of 17, I wrote my first blog post on the wonders of the Windows Phone 7 on Blogspot. I started blogging as a kid at the behest of a family friend at Microsoft, who promised she’d make sure I would…

tar: a slop-free alternative to rsync

https://drewdevault.com/blog/rsync-without-rsync/

Published: March 28, 2026 00:00

So apparently rsync is slop now. When I heard, I wanted to drop a quick note on my blog to give an alternative: tar. It doesn’t do everything that rsync does, in particular identifying and skipping up-to-date files, but tar + ssh can definitely accomodate…

A eulogy for Vim

https://drewdevault.com/blog/Forking-vim/

Published: March 25, 2026 00:00

Vim is important to me. I’m using it to write the words you’re reading right now. In fact, almost every word I have ever committed to posterity, through this blog, in my code, all of the docs I’ve written, emails I’ve sent, and more, almost all of it has…

The cults of TDD and GenAI

https://drewdevault.com/blog/Cult-of-TDD-and-LLMs/

Published: January 29, 2026 00:00

I’ve gotten a lot of flack throughout my career over my disdain towards test-driven development (TDD). I have met a lot of people who swear by it! And, I have also met a lot of people who insisted that I adopt it, too, often with the implied threat of…

Redesigning my microkernel from the ground up

https://drewdevault.com/blog/Hermes-from-the-ground-up/

Published: January 12, 2026 00:00

As you may recall, circa 2022-2023 I was working on a microkernel written in Hare named Helios. Helios was largely inspired by and modelled after the design of seL4 and was my first major foray into modern OS development that was serious enough to get to a…

OpenAI employees… are you okay?

https://drewdevault.com/blog/OpenAI-employees-are-you-okay/

Published: November 8, 2025 00:00

You might have seen an article making the rounds this week, about a young man who ended his life after ChatGPT encouraged him to do so. The chat logs are really upsetting.Someone two degrees removed from me took their life a few weeks ago. A close friend…

What's up with FUTO?

https://drewdevault.com/blog/Whats-up-with-FUTO/

Published: October 22, 2025 00:00

Some time ago, I noticed some new organization called FUTO popping up here and there. I’m always interested in seeing new organizations that fund open source popping up, and seeing as they claim several notable projects on their roster, I explored their…

Cloudflare bankrolls fascists

https://drewdevault.com/blog/Cloudflare-and-fascists/

Published: September 24, 2025 00:00

US politics has been pretty fascist lately. The state is filling up concentration camps, engaging in mass state violence against people on the basis of racialized traits, deporting them to random countries without any respect for habeas corpus, exerting…

A better future for JavaScript that won't happen

https://drewdevault.com/blog/An-impossible-future-for-JS/

Published: September 17, 2025 00:00

In the wake of the largest supply-chain attack in history, the JavaScript community could have a moment of reckoning and decide: never again. As the panic and shame subsides, after compromised developers finish re-provisioning their workstations and…

Embedding Wren in Hare

https://drewdevault.com/blog/Hare-and-Wren/

Published: August 20, 2025 00:00

I’ve been on the lookout for a scripting language which can be neatly embedded into Hare programs. Perhaps the obvious candidate is Lua – but I’m not particularly enthusiastic about it. When I was evaluating the landscape of tools which are “like Lua, but…

What's new with Himitsu 0.9?

https://drewdevault.com/blog/Whats-new-with-himitsu/

Published: August 8, 2025 00:00

Last week, Armin and I worked together on the latest release of Himitsu, a “secret storage manager” for Linux. I haven’t blogged about Himitsu since I announced it three years ago, and I thought it would be nice to give you a closer look at the latest…

Just speak the truth

https://drewdevault.com/blog/Speak-the-truth/

Published: June 30, 2025 00:00

Today, we’re looking at two case studies in how to respond when reactionaries appear in your free software community.Exhibit AIt is a technical decision.The technical reason is that the security team does not have the bandwidth to provide lifecycle…

Unionize or die

https://drewdevault.com/blog/Unionize-or-die/

Published: June 9, 2025 00:00

Tech workers have long resisted the suggestion that we should be organized into unions. The topic is consistently met with a cold reception by tech workers when it is raised, and no big tech workforce is meaningfully organized. This is a fatal mistake –…

The British Airways position on various border disputes

https://drewdevault.com/blog/BA-on-border-disputes/

Published: May 5, 2025 00:00

My spouse and I are on vacation in Japan, spending half our time seeing the sights and the other half working remotely and enjoying the experience of living in a different place for a while. To get here, we flew on British Airways from London to Tokyo, and…

Resistance from the tech sector

https://drewdevault.com/blog/Tech-sector-restistance/

Published: April 20, 2025 00:00

As of late, most of us have been reading the news with a sense of anxious trepidation. At least, those of us who read from a position of relative comfort and privilege. Many more read the news with fear. Some of us are already no longer in a position to…

A Firefox addon for putting prices into perspective

https://drewdevault.com/blog/Price-perspective/

Published: April 4, 2025 00:00

I had a fun idea for a small project this weekend, and so I quickly put it together over the couple of days. The result is Price Perspective.Humor me: have you ever bought something, considered the price, and wondered how that price would look to someone…

Using linkhut to signal-boost my bookmarks

https://drewdevault.com/blog/Using-linkhut/

Published: March 27, 2025 00:00

Notice: linkhut has started to use generative AI tools upstream. Consequently, I have withdrawn my endorsement of the project.It must have been at least a year ago that I first noticed linkhut, and its flagship instance at ln.ht, appear on SourceHut, where…

Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face

https://drewdevault.com/blog/Stop-externalizing-your-costs-on-me/

Published: March 17, 2025 00:00

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…

A holistic perspective on intellectual property, part 1

https://drewdevault.com/blog/On-intellectual-property/

Published: February 13, 2025 00:00

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…

Join us to discuss transparency and governance at FOSDEM '25

https://drewdevault.com/blog/Transparency-and-governance-FOSDEM/

Published: January 23, 2025 00:00

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…

FOSDEM '25 protest

https://drewdevault.com/blog/FOSDEM-protest/

Published: January 20, 2025 00:00

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…

No billionaires at FOSDEM

https://drewdevault.com/blog/No-Billionares-at-FOSDEM-please/

Published: January 16, 2025 00:00

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…

Neurodivergence and accountability in free software

https://drewdevault.com/blog/Neurodivergence-and-accountability-in-free-software/

Published: September 25, 2024 00:00

In November of last year, I wrote Richard Stallman’s political discourse on sex, which argues that Richard Stallman, the founder of and present-day voting member of the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), endorses and advocates for a…

Rust for Linux revisited

https://drewdevault.com/blog/Rust-in-Linux-revisited/

Published: August 30, 2024 00:00

Ugh. Drew’s blogging about Rust again.– YouI promise to be nice.Two years ago, seeing the Rust-for-Linux project starting to get the ball rolling, I wrote “Does Rust belong in the Linux kernel?”, penning a conclusion consistent with Betteridge’s law of…

So you want to compete with or replace open source

https://drewdevault.com/blog/So-you-want-to-compete-with-FOSS/

Published: July 16, 2024 00:00

We are living through an interesting moment in source-available software.1 The open source movement has always had, and continues to have, a solid grounding in grassroots programmers building tools for themselves and forming communities around them. Some…