Technology, digital freedom, and open source advocacy.
The anti-marketing aspect of the Gemini network And why your niche should stay a niche I like Gemini. Not the Google Chatbot but the network that existed before Google named its product. If you are enough of a geek, you may want to give it a try. Creating a Bl…
The AI Pascal’s Wager Should you accept contributions generated by LLMs in your Open Source project? Let’s put aside for a moment all the ethical/ecological/societal considerations about the use of generated code (also known as "slop" if you don’t like it and…
I Don’t Want to Interact With Stochastic Parrots My AI policy is "I don’t want any kind of interaction with that thing." And this should be all you need to know. I don’t care if you call it AI, LLM, chatbot, or whateverGPT. I simply don’t want to interact with…
I Don’t Have a Smartphone… Tradução para português por Berlim …or, at least, I wish I didn’t. "I don’t have a smartphone," is what I tell people and professionals nowadays. This allows me to cut the crap about companies insisting that I install their app or re…
The Social Smolnet It might have been an email thread. Or a lobste.rs comment. It was a discussion about yet another attempt at a new decentralized social protocol. And we reached the conclusion that with blogs and email, we already had a decentralized social…
How I fought my smartphone addiction In a poignant Gemini post, Kevin Boone wrote about his anxiety to go out of his house without his phone. (This is the Gemini protocol, totally unrelated to the Google chatbot.) Phone anxiety (larsthebear.me) Web version of…
Do not apologize for replying late to my email You don’t need to apologize for taking hours, days, or years to reply to one of my emails. If we are not close collaborators, and if I didn’t explicitly tell you I was waiting for your answer within a specific tim…
Offpunk 3.0 "A Community is Born" Release For the last four years, I’ve been developing Offpunk, a command-line Web, Gemini, and Gopher browser that allows you to work offline. And I’ve just released version 3.0. It is probably not for everyone, but I use it e…
The Disconnected Git Workflow Using git-send-email while being offline and with multiple email accounts WARNING: the following is a technical reminder for my future self. If you don’t use the "git" software, you can safely ignore this post. The more I work wit…
Why there’s no European Google? And why it is a good thing! With some adjustments, this post is mostly a translation of a post I published in French three years ago. In light of the European Commission’s "call for evidence on Open Source," and as a professor o…
Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots What I like most about teaching "Open Source Strategies" at École Polytechnique de Louvain is how much I learn from my students, especially during the exam. I dislike exams. I still have nightmares about exams. Th…
How Github monopoly is destroying the open source ecosystem I teach a course called "Open Source Strategies" at École Polytechnique de Louvain, part of the University of Louvain. As part of my course, students are required to find an open source project of the…
Prepare for That Stupid World You probably heard about the Wall Street Journal story where they had a snack-vending machine run by a chatbot created by Anthropic. At first glance, it is funny and it looks like journalists doing their job criticising the AI ind…
How We Lost Communication to Entertainment All our communication channels are morphed into content distribution networks. We are more and more entertained but less and less connected. A few days ago, I did a controversial blog post about Pixelfed hurting the F…
Is Pixelfed sawing off the branch that the Fediverse is sitting on? In January 2025, I became aware that there was a real problem with Pixelfed, the "Instagram inspired Fediverse client". The problem is threatening the whole Fediverse. As Pixelfed received a l…
Don’t Do Snake Oil Writing In computer security, it is often said that the fact you don’t see any vulnerability in the code you write is no proof that your code is secure. It is proof that you are blind to all the mistakes you made in your shitty code. The les…
How I fell in love with calendar.txt The more I learn about Unix tools, the more I realise we are reinventing everyday Rube Goldberg’s wheels and that Unix tools are, often, elegantly enough. Months ago, I discovered calendar.txt. A simple file with all your d…
20 years of Linux on the Desktop (part 4) Previously in "20 years of Linux on the Deskop": After contributing to the launch of Ubuntu as the "perfect Linux desktop", Ploum realises that Ubuntu is drifting away from both Debian and GNOME. In the meantime, mobil…
Reducing the digital clutter of chats I hate modern chats. They presuppose we are always online, always available to chat. They force us to see and think about them each time we get our eyes on one of our devices. Unlike mailboxes, they are never empty. We can…