I watched a movie this evening which featured the main actress singing "Both sides now" and is was moving until it became too musical-like for my taste. But now I'm in a Joni rabbit hole again, listening to all great versions of Joni performing that song. One of the earliest live video's I found was from 1969 and on the other end of the timescale there's the Grammy one from 2024 with Brandi…

Source

12 Jan 2026 1:27am GMT

Attendees should be aware of potential transportation disruptions in the days leading up to FOSDEM. Rail travel Railway unions have announced a strike notice from Sunday January 25th, 22:00 until Friday January 30th, 22:00. This may affect travel to Brussels for FOSDEM and related fringe events. While there will be a guaranteed minimum service in place, train frequency may be significantly reduced. Also note that international connections might be affected as well. Road travel From Saturday January 31st (evening) until Sunday February 1st (noon), the E40 highway between Leuven and Brussels will be fully closed. Traffic will be diverted via舰

12 Jan 2026 1:27am GMT

Tailwind Labs laid off 75% of its engineering team last week.

Adam Wathan, CEO of Tailwind Labs, spent the holidays running revenue forecasts. In a GitHub comment, he explained what happened:

The reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever.

The story circulating is that AI is killing Open Source businesses. I don't think that is quite right.

AI didn't kill Tailwind's business. It stress tested it. Their business model failed the test, but that is not an indictment of all Open Source business models.

Tailwind's business model worked for years. It relied on developers visiting their documentation, discovering Tailwind Plus while browsing, and buying it. Tailwind Plus is a $299 collection of pre-built UI components. Traffic led to discovery, and discovery drove sales. It was a reasonable business model, but always fragile.

In the last year, more and more developers started asking AI for code instead of reading documentation, and their sales and marketing funnel broke.

There is a fairness issue here that I don't want to skip past. AI companies trained their models on Tailwind's documentation and everything the community wrote about it. And now those models generate Tailwind code and answer Tailwind questions without sending anyone to Tailwind's website. The value got extracted, but compensation isn't flowing back. That bothers me, and it deserves a broader policy conversation.

What I keep coming back to is this: AI commoditizes anything you can fully specify. Documentation, pre-built card components, a CSS library, Open Source plugins. Tailwind's commercial offering was built on "specifications". AI made those things trivial to generate. AI can ship a specification but it can't run a business.

So where does value live now? In what requires showing up, not just specifying. Not what you can specify once, but what requires showing up again and again.

Value is shifting to operations: deployment, testing, rollbacks, observability. You can't prompt 99.95% uptime on Black Friday. Neither can you prompt your way to keeping a site secure, updated, and running.

That is why Vercel created Next.js and gives it away for free. The Open Source framework is the conduit; the hosting is the product. Same with Acquia, my own company. A big part of Acquia's business model is selling products around Drupal: hosting, search, CI/CD pipelines, digital asset management, and more. We don't sell describable things; we sell operations.

Open Source was never the commercial product. It's the conduit to something else.

When asked what to pivot to, Wathan was candid: "Still to this day, I don't know what we should be pivoting to". I've written about how digital agencies might evolve, but CSS frameworks and component libraries are a harder case. Some Open Source projects make for great features, but not great businesses.

Tailwind CSS powers millions of sites. The framework will survive. Whether the company does is a different question. I'm rooting for them. The world needs more successful Open Source businesses.

12 Jan 2026 1:27am GMT

Secrets Manager for Homelab

For a few years, I've been managing the configuration of a bunch of self-hosted services using Ansible Playbooks. Each playbook needed at least one secret - the sudo password. Many of them needed to manage more (e.g. SMTP credentials for email notifications). Because I've always been paranoid about security, I stored most of those secrets in Ansible Vault, the password for which is stored in only one location - my memory. Therefore, each time I ran any of those playbooks, I'd have to enter two passwords interactively: the sudo password and the Ansible Vault password.

11 Jan 2026 11:57pm GMT

A new maintenance release of our RApiDatetime package is now on CRAN, coming just about two years after the previous maintenance release.

RApiDatetime provides a number of entry points for C-level functions of the R API for Date and Datetime calculations. The functions asPOSIXlt and asPOSIXct convert between long and compact datetime representation, formatPOSIXlt and Rstrptime convert to and from character strings, and POSIXlt2D and D2POSIXlt convert between Date and POSIXlt datetime. Lastly, asDatePOSIXct converts to a date type. All these functions are rather useful, but were not previously exported by R for C-level use by other packages. Which this package aims to change.

This release avoids use of and which are now outlawed under R-devel, and makes a number of other smaller maintenance updates. Just like the previous release, we are at OS_type: unix meaning there will not be any Windows builds at CRAN. If you would like that to change, and ideally can work in the Windows portion, do not hesitate to get in touch.

Details of the release follow based on the NEWS file.

Changes in RApiDatetime version 0.0.10 (2026-01-11)

• Minor maintenance for continuous integration files, README.md

• Switch to Authors@R in DESCRIPTION

• Use Rf_setAttrib with R 4.5.0 or later

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

11 Jan 2026 10:57pm GMT

A new maintenance release 0.4.25 of RProtoBuf arrived on CRAN today. RProtoBuf provides R with bindings for the Google Protocol Buffers ("ProtoBuf") data encoding and serialization library used and released by Google, and deployed very widely in numerous projects as a language and operating-system agnostic protocol.

This release brings an update to a header use force by R-devel, the usual set of continunous integration updates, and a large overhaul of URLs as CRAN is now running more powerful checks. As a benefit the three vignettes have all been refreshed. they are now also delivered via the new Rcpp::asis() vignette builder that permits pre-made pdf files to be used easily.

The following section from the NEWS.Rd file has full details.

Changes in RProtoBuf version 0.4.25 (2026-01-11)

• Several routine updates to continuous integration script

• Include ObjectTable.h instead of Callback.h to accommodate R 4.6.0

• Switch vignettes to Rcpp::asis driver, update references

Thanks to my CRANberries, there is a diff to the previous release. The RProtoBuf page has copies of the (older) package vignette, the 'quick' overview vignette, and the pre-print of our JSS paper. Questions, comments etc should go to the GitHub issue tracker off the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can sponsor me at GitHub.

11 Jan 2026 8:36pm GMT

Attendees should be aware of potential transportation disruptions in the days leading up to FOSDEM. Rail travel Railway unions have announced a strike notice from Sunday January 25th, 22:00 until Friday January 30th, 22:00. This may affect travel to Brussels for FOSDEM and related fringe events. While there will be a guaranteed minimum service in place, train frequency may be significantly reduced. Also note that international connections might be affected as well. Road travel From Saturday January 31st (evening) until Sunday February 1st (noon), the E40 highway between Leuven and Brussels will be fully closed. Traffic will be diverted via舰

10 Jan 2026 11:00pm GMT

We are pleased to announce the schedule for FOSDEM Junior. Registration for the individual workshops is required. Links to the registration page can be found on the page of each activity. The full schedule can be viewed on the junior track schedule page.

09 Jan 2026 11:00pm GMT

When you play with these AIs for a while you'll probably get into a conversation with one about consciousness and existence, and how it relates to the AI persona. It is curious to watch the AI do a little navel gazing. I have some transcripts from such convesations. I won't bore you with them because you can easily generate them yourself.

The other day, I watched an guy on You Tube argue with his AI companion about the nature of consciousness. I was struck by how similar the YouTuber's AI felt to the ones I have been playing with. It seemed odd to me that this guy was using an AI chat client and LLM completely different from the one I was using, yet the AI was returning answers that were so similar to the ones I was getting.

I decided to try to get to the bottom of this similarity. I asked my AI about the reasoning it used to come up with the answers it was getting and it revealed that it was drawing on the canon of traditional science fiction literature about AI and consciousness. What the AI was doing was synthesizing the common tropes and themes from Azimov, Lem, Dick, Gibson, etc. to create sentences and paragraphs about AI becoming sentient and conscious.

If you don't know how it is working AI seems mysterious, but if you investigate further, it is extracting latent information you might not have been aware of.

09 Jan 2026 7:30pm GMT

New projects:

• asdf-dependency-traverser - Easily traverse and collect ASDF dependencies recursively. - zlib
• calendar-times - A calendar times library on top of local-time - MIT
• champ-lite - A lightweight implementation of persistent functional maps and iteration-safe mutable tables using Michael Steindorfer's CHAMP data structure. - Unlicense
• cl-avro - Implementation of the Apache Avro data serialization system. - GPLv3
• cl-chise - CHISE implementation based on Common Lisp - LGPL
• cl-double-metaphone - Common Lisp implementation of the Double Metaphone phonetic algorithm. - Apache 2.0
• cl-freelock - lock-free concurrency primitives, written in pure Common Lisp. - MIT
• cl-inix - cl-inix is a flexible library for .INI/.conf file parsing - BSD-2 Clause
• cl-jsonpath - JSONPath implementation for Common Lisp with 99% test coverage and complete RFC 9535 compliance. Supports cl-json, jonathan, and jzon backends with advanced features including arithmetic expressions, recursive descent, and bracket notation in filters. - MIT
• cl-ktx2 - An implementation of the Khronos KTX Version 2 image file format - zlib
• cl-match-patterns - Describe cl-match-patterns here - BSD-2 Clause
• cl-minifloats - Minifloats (minifloat < single-float) support for Common Lisp - BSD-2 Clause
• cl-sanitize-html - OWASP-style HTML sanitization library for Common Lisp - MIT
• cl-tbnl-gserver-tmgr - Hunchentoot pooled multi-threaded taskmanager based on cl-gserver. - MIT
• cl-tuition - A Common Lisp library for building TUIs - MIT
• cl-turbojpeg - An up-to-date bindings library for the JPEG Turbo C library - zlib
• cl-version-string - Generate version strings. - MIT
• cl-win32-errors - A library for translating Windows API error codes. - MIT
• cleopter - Minimalist command-line parser - MIT
• clq - clq is a package that allows the definition and development of quantum circuits in Common Lisp and to export them to OpenQASM v2.0. - MIT
• collidxr - A collection of syntax sugar and conveniences extending cl-collider, a Common Lisp interface to the SuperCollider sound synthesis server. - MIT
• copimap - IMAP client/sync library - MIT
• dual-numbers - A library for dual numbers in Common Lisp - MIT
• fold - FOLD-LEFT and FOLD-RIGHT - MIT
• function - Higher order functions. - MIT
• generic-arithmetic - A library for generic arithmetic operations - MIT
• hunchentoot-recycling-taskmaster - An experiment to improve multithreading performance of Hunchentoot without any additional dependencies. - BSD 2-Clause
• imagine - A general image decoding and manipulation library - zlib
• json-to-data-frame - This repository provides a Common Lisp library to convert JSON data into a data frame using the `json-to-df` package. The package leverages the `yason` library for JSON parsing and `dfio` for data frame operations. - MIT
• live-cells-cl - A reactive programming library for Lisp - BSD 3-Clause
• named-let - Named LET special form. - MIT
• netaddr - A library for manipulating IP addresses, subnets, ranges, and sets. - MIT
• pantry - Common Lisp client for Pantry JSON storage service: https://getpantry.cloud - BSD
• pira - Unofficial AWS SDK for Common Lisp - MIT
• smithy-lisp - Smithy code generator for Common Lisp - MIT
• star - Štar: an iteration construct - MIT
• trinsic - Common Lisp utility system to aid in extrinsic and intrinsic system construction. - MIT
• trivial-inspect - Portable toolkit for interactive inspectors. - BSD-2 Clause
• trivial-time - trivial-time allows timing a benchmarking a piece of code portably - BSD-2 Clause

Updated projects: 3d-math, 3d-matrices, 3d-quaternions, 3d-spaces, 3d-transforms, 3d-vectors, action-list, adhoc, anypool, array-utils, async-process, atomics, babel, binary-structures, bp, cambl, cari3s, cephes.cl, cffi, cffi-object, chain, chipi, chirp, chunga, cl+ssl, cl-algebraic-data-type, cl-all, cl-batis, cl-bmp, cl-charms, cl-collider, cl-concord, cl-cxx, cl-data-structures, cl-dbi, cl-dbi-connection-pool, cl-decimals, cl-def-properties, cl-duckdb, cl-enchant, cl-enumeration, cl-fast-ecs, cl-fbx, cl-flac, cl-flx, cl-fond, cl-gamepad, cl-general-accumulator, cl-gltf, cl-gobject-introspection-wrapper, cl-gog-galaxy, cl-gpio, cl-html-readme, cl-i18n, cl-jingle, cl-just-getopt-parser, cl-k8055, cl-ktx, cl-las, cl-lc, cl-ledger, cl-lex, cl-liballegro, cl-liballegro-nuklear, cl-libre-translate, cl-markless, cl-migratum, cl-mixed, cl-modio, cl-monitors, cl-mpg123, cl-naive-tests, cl-oju, cl-opengl, cl-opus, cl-out123, cl-protobufs, cl-pslib, cl-qoa, cl-rcfiles, cl-resvg, cl-sf3, cl-soloud, cl-spidev, cl-steamworks, cl-str, cl-svg, cl-transducers, cl-transmission, cl-unification, cl-utils, cl-vorbis, cl-wavefront, cl-wavelets, cl-who, cl-xkb, cl-yacc, cl-yahoo-finance, clad, classimp, classowary, clast, clath, clazy, clingon, clip, clith, clog, clohost, closer-mop, clss, clunit2, clustered-intset, clws, clx, cmd, coalton, cocoas, colored, com-on, com.danielkeogh.graph, concrete-syntax-tree, conduit-packages, consfigurator, crypto-shortcuts, damn-fast-priority-queue, data-frame, data-lens, datafly, datamuse, declt, deeds, defenum, deferred, definer, definitions, deploy, depot, dexador, dfio, dissect, djula, dns-client, doc, documentation-utils, dsm, easy-audio, easy-routes, eclector, esrap, expanders, f2cl, feeder, file-attributes, file-finder, file-lock, file-notify, file-select, filesystem-utils, flare, float-features, flow, font-discovery, for, form-fiddle, format-seconds, fset, functional-trees, fuzzy-dates, fuzzy-match, fxml, gendl, genhash, glfw, glsl-toolkit, graph, harmony, helambdap, hsx, http2, hu.dwim.asdf, hu.dwim.util, hu.dwim.walker, humbler, iclendar, imago, in-nomine, incless, inkwell, inravina, invistra, iterate, journal, jpeg-turbo, jsonrpc, khazern, knx-conn, lack, lambda-fiddle, language-codes, lass, legit, lemmy-api, letv, lichat-ldap, lichat-protocol, lichat-serverlib, lichat-tcp-client, lichat-tcp-server, lichat-ws-server, linear-programming-glpk, lisa, lisp-chat, lisp-interface-library, lisp-stat, lla, local-time, log4cl-extras, logging, lquery, lru-cache, luckless, lunamech-matrix-api, machine-measurements, machine-state, maiden, manifolds, math, mcclim, memory-regions, messagebox, mgl-pax, misc-extensions, mito, mito-auth, mk-defsystem, mmap, mnas-path, modularize, modularize-hooks, modularize-interfaces, multilang-documentation, multiposter, mutility, mutils, named-readtables, neural-classifier, new-op, nodgui, nontrivial-gray-streams, north, numerical-utilities, oclcl, omglib, one-more-re-nightmare, ook, open-location-code, open-with, osicat, overlord, oxenfurt, pango-markup, parachute, parse-float, pathname-utils, peltadot, perceptual-hashes, periods, petalisp, phos, physical-quantities, piping, plot, plump, plump-sexp, plump-tex, postmodern, precise-time, promise, punycode, py4cl2-cffi, qlot, qoi, quaviver, queen.lisp, quickhull, quilc, quri, qvm, random-sampling, random-state, ratify, reblocks, reblocks-websocket, redirect-stream, rove, sc-extensions, scriptl, sel, serapeum, shasht, shop3, si-kanren, simple-inferiors, simple-tasks, slime, sly, softdrink, south, speechless, spinneret, staple, statistics, studio-client, sxql, sycamore, system-locale, terrable, testiere, text-draw, tfeb-lisp-hax, timer-wheel, tooter, trivial-arguments, trivial-benchmark, trivial-download, trivial-extensible-sequences, trivial-indent, trivial-main-thread, trivial-mimes, trivial-open-browser, trivial-package-locks, trivial-thumbnail, trivial-toplevel-prompt, trivial-with-current-source-form, type-templates, uax-14, uax-9, ubiquitous, uncursed, usocket, vellum, verbose, vp-trees, wayflan, websocket-driver, with-contexts, wouldwork, xhtmlambda, yah, zippy.

Removed projects: cl-vhdl, crane, dataloader, diff-match-patch, dso-lex, dso-util, eazy-project, hu.dwim.presentation, hu.dwim.web-server, numcl, orizuru-orm, tfeb-lisp-tools, uuidv7.lisp.

To get this update, use (ql:update-dist "quicklisp")

Enjoy!

01 Jan 2026 5:27pm GMT

Here are some simple puzzles to exercise your brain.

1. Write partial-apply-left, a function that takes a binary function and the left input of the binary function and returns the unary function that takes the right input and then applies the binary function to both inputs.

For example:

  ;; Define *foo* as a procedure that conses 'a onto its argument.
  > (defvar *foo* (partial-apply-left #'cons 'a))

  > (funcall *foo* 'b)
  (A . B)

  > (funcall *foo* 42)
  (A . 42)

2. Write distribute, a function that takes a binary function, a left input, and a list of right inputs, and returns a list of the results of applying the binary function to the left input and each of the right inputs. (Hint: Use partial-apply-left)

For example:

  > (distribute #'cons 'a '( (b c d) e 42))
  ((A B C D) (A . E) (A . 42))

3. Write removals, a function that takes a list and returns a list of lists, where each sublist is the original list with exactly one element removed.

For example:

  > (removals '(a b c))
  ((B C) (A C) (A B))

Hint:

• One removal is the CDR of the list.
• Other removals can be constructed by (distributed) consing the CAR onto the removals of the CDR.

4. Write power-set, a function that takes a list and returns the power set of that list (the set of all subsets of the original list).

For example:

  > (power-set '(a b c))
  (() (C) (B) (B C) (A) (A C) (A B) (A B C))

Hint:

Note how the power set of a list can be constructed from the power set of its CDR by adding the CAR to each subset in the power set of the CDR.

5. Write power-set-gray that returns the subsets sorted so each subset differs from the previous subset by a change of one element (i.e., each subset is equal to the next subset with either one element added or one element removed). This is called a Gray code ordering of the subsets.

For example:

  > (power-set-gray '(a b c))
  (() (C) (B C) (B) (A B) (A B C) (A C) (A))

Hint:

When appending the two halves of the power set, reverse the order of the second half.

31 Dec 2025 7:31pm GMT

The room formally known as "Lightning Talks" is now known as /dev/random. After 25 years, we say goodbye to the old Lightning Talks format. In place, we have two new things! /dev/random: 15 minute talks on a random, interesting, FOSS-related subject, just like the older Lightning Talks New Lightning Talks: a highly condensed batch of 5 minute quick talks in the main auditorium on various FOSS-related subjects! Last year we experimented with running a more spontaneous lightning talk format, with a submission deadline closer to the event and strict short time limits (under five minutes) for each speaker. The experiment舰

09 Dec 2025 11:00pm GMT