En plots was er de drang om iets te schrijven. Het is niet nagelezen, het is gewoon mijn gedachtenstroom vandaag, op mijn blog. Klinkt het niet, dan botst het, en dat is ook oké!



fertiliteit

Ik kwam daarnet deze video tegen van de Financial Times:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6lFXmDk-tps

Het gaat over de correlatie tussen smartphonegebruik en het aantal kinderen dat geboren wordt. Hun theorie is dat het aantal vrouwen dat kinderen krijgt daalt, omdat ze meer in de smartphone-influencer wereld leven dan dat ze mensen in levende lijve ontmoeten. Ze maken ook direct de stap naar meer zelfmoordgedachten bij hevig smartphonegebruik.

De paper zelf is van april dit jaar en kan je hier vinden (wel 63 bladzijden):
https://homepages.uc.edu/~moscoshn/Personal_webpage/papers/Smartphone_web.pdf

Ik ga ervan uit dat de cijfers kloppen, dat er inderdaad een correlatie is tussen het invoeren van de smartphone in een land, en de problematiek om een partner te vinden om kinderen mee op de wereld te zetten. En het klopt uiteraard dat iemand die verslaafd is aan Instagram/Tiktok/... een ander beeld heeft van 'de gewone mens' dan iemand die nooit naar deze media kijkt. Maar er is meer aan de hand.



veiligheid

Er is veel angst vandaag, meer dan in de jaren 80 toen de criminaliteit veel hoger lag. (Noot: Er zijn nu meer aangiftes van misbruik, maar het gebeurde vroeger wel vaker denk ik.) De media, zowel de klassieke als de sociale media, lijken mensen uitsluitend in emoties te duwen: bang, bedroefd, boos en soms een keer blij. Wees bang voor mannen, voor terrorisme, voor hoge prijzen. Bedroefd voor ongevallen met kindjes. Boos op Poetin en China, en Israel. Cijfers en statistieken tellen niet meer, de anekdotes vol emotie krijgen alle aandacht. Waar in de jaren 80 de krant nog schreef: "Er zijn 700 bedrijven failliet gegaan deze maand, en 900 nieuwe opgericht!" wordt alles na de komma vandaag niet vermeld. Mensen bang maken levert immers meer 'clicks' en 'views' op.

Zie bijvoorbeeld vandaag op VRTNWS over 'Marie' en 'Katrien', ik durf het geeneens te lezen na 'Valerie' enkele dagen geleden. Ik was kapot na dat Valerie-verhaal, zucht. Die journalist had dat wel verdomd goed geschreven, de beste horror kan er niet tegenop!! Dat soort gruwel verhalen voor vrouwen, veroorzaakt door mannen, is de laatste twintig jaar schering en inslag. Alsof het in mannen-genetica zit.

Lezen op eigen risico:
https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2026/06/22/getuigenis-stiekem-genomen-naaktbeelden-fora-en-justitie/

Het deed me denken aan het huidige onveiligheidsgevoel dat (vooral jonge?) mensen hebben. Ja er was ook criminilateit en wreedheden en misbruik in de jaren 80, maar we zagen dat maar eenmaal per dag op TV, tijdens het nieuws om 19u30. Als dat al in het nieuws kwam. Vandaag de dag is er minder criminaliteit in België(*), maar al wie vaak op een smartphone kijkt (incluis de vrtnws app), wordt er wel veel meer mee geconfronteerd. De TV had natuurlijk ook dat effect, maar dat was toch veel langzamer, veel gradueler en jarenlang enkel 's avonds in familiale kring. De smartphone is er als je wakker wordt, als je op de WC zit, als je op de bus wacht, als je niet kan slapen, kortom altijd, en zeker al die tijd die je *alleen* doorbrengt.


(*) Ik vind geen goeie cijfers over de evolutie van het aantal misdrijven per jaar sinds de jaren 50-60-70-80 tot nu.
https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/2023/06/21/studie-nicc-criminaliteit-in-belgie-daalt/



vertrouwen

Toen ik pas mijn rijbewijs had (1989), heb ik honderden lifters meegenomen. Zo goed als altijd tieners, de helft of meer waren meisjes. Zeker in mijn unief periode dat ik vanuit Leuven vrienden afzette in Zoersel, en dus vrijdagavond laat via Sint-Antonius, Westmalle, Oostmalle naar Wechelderzande reed. Ik heb die rit zelden alleen moeten doen, en vaak waren dat leuke gesprekken. Ik had zelf ook jaren gelift, honderden keren meegereden met vreemden, nooit was er enige spanning. Ik heb in vreemde auto's gezeten terwijl de eigenaar een winkel binnen ging, sleutels erop of zelfs met draaiende motor. Dat vertrouwen hadden de volwassenen toen in een onbekende zestienjarige. Logisch dus dat ik een 'pay it forward' mentaliteit had toen ik zelf een rijbewijs had. Gisteren was een vriendin hier heel de dag klimaatvluchteling, die rijdt nog rond met haar auto. Ze zei dat het al twintig jaar geleden was dat ze nog een lifter had meegenomen. Er zijn ook gewoon geen lifters meer.



cancelcultuur

Er zijn uiteraard veel alternatieven zoals Uber/deelwagens/deel-whatever, maar toch. Dat soort vertrouwen in elkaar is weg. Maar dat heeft evenveel te maken met mobiliteit als met de smartphone. Toen wij vroeger 'uit' gingen was dat vaak naar fuiven van 'Union Servet' in Pulderbos/Westmalle/Sint-Antonius. Daar was je dan, op een fuif met een paar honderd mensen, maar ook met je vrienden, je buren, je klasgenoten, de mensen van de harmonie, ... m.a.w. je was in een super veilige omgeving. Je kon als vrouw het 'risico' nemen om met een stoere/stoute man te dansen want je wist dat als die iets te ver ging, dat zowel jouw vrienden als zijn vrienden tussenbeide zouden komen. Je hield elkaar in 't oog, wie gaat met wie buiten, je kende van vele mensen de ouders en wist waar ze woonden. (En die ouders kenden ook uw punten van uw laatste test Frans of wiskunde!)

Dat is op twee zaken een groot contrast met vandaag: Ten eerste ben je op een Tinder/Bumble/Breeze-date vaak alleen, in een vreemde omgeving, wat niet goed is voor je veiligheidsgevoel. Ten tweede is er de cancelcultuur en kan elke misstap leiden tot een eeuwige verbanning. Als op de Servet-fuiven vroeger iemand het uithing, dan kwamen zijn vrienden er wel tussen, en waren die slecht gezind op hem, of toch ene, omdat die hem naar huis moest brengen en dus vroeger weg was van de fuif. Maar... die gast kwam de week nadien wel terug, en kon daarbij aantonen dat die zich wel kon gedragen en nen toffe zijn en een lief vinden.



smartphone

Ligt dat aan de smartphone? De smartphone kan handig en nuttig zijn, zonder schadelijk te zijn. Je kan er je busabbonement op zetten, allerhande betalingen mee doen, mooie foto's nemen, je agenda erin zetten, je moeder mee bellen, de weg naar elkaar vinden in de stad, een taal studeren, boodschappenlijst in spreken, en nog een dozijn andere leuke, toffe, boeiende, leerzame, nuttige dingen.

Maar dat wordt, in uren per app gerekend, nauwelijks gedaan. Of dat is toch wat ik zie als ik eens in de bus of in den tram zit, of in een wachtzaal. Ik zie mensen scrollen, scrollen, scrollen, door een eindeloze scroll van video's, drie a vijf seconden per video en hup devolgende, video's die absoluut niks te maken hebben met hun familie, hun vrienden, of uberhaupt enige link hebben met echte mensen. Gooi er nog een hoop reklame tussen (mooi in beeld gebracht hier: https://youtu.be/e9dZQelULDk?t=141 ). En ja, dan leef je niet langer in een wereld van gewone mensen, dan leef je in een fantasie.



doemscenario

Is dat erg? Is de wereld naar de knoppen? Nee dat denk ik niet. Al wat hierboven staat, verraadt gewoon mijn leeftijd. Het is van alle tijden dat ouderen zeggen dat de wereld naar de knoppen is, dat kinderen niet meer luisteren naar hun ouders, dat regels niet meer gevolgd worden.

Nee, onderschat de jeugd niet, die overleven dat wel. Het is een nieuwe wereld, eentje die angst inboezemt, maar het komt wel goed. Dingen veranderen nu eenmaal, en dat geldt ook voor die overweldigende verslaving aan sociale media op de smartphone: op een dag is dat gedaan. Vandaag niet, morgen waarschijnlijk ook niet, maar op een dag is dat geschiedenis en gaan mensen weer bij elkaar zitten.

Het ging even heel snel en dan heb ik het niet over de nieuwe technologie, maar over de nieuwe verslaving aan sociale media. Deze verslaving heeft iedereen op snelheid gepakt, en de impact is enorm, zowel op wereldvlak als in persoonlijke interacties met mensen. Ik geloof dat het omgekeerde ook kan. Ik geloof dat mensen in staat zijn, op een dag, om die smartphone te gebruiken voor de nuttige en leuke dingen, en niet meer om oneindig te scrollen in een fake wereld.

30 Jun 2026 6:03pm GMT

We watch websites for a living at Oh Dear , so I figured I knew roughly how often things break. The data set me straight on which outages are worth worrying about.

30 Jun 2026 6:03pm GMT

Un petit mot de nos sponsors…

Comme pour les stades ou les équipes cyclistes, il est important de nommer les vagues de chaleur et les canicules selon les sponsors qui ont rendu cela possible. C'est après tout la moindre des choses.

Ne dites plus « la vague de chaleur de mai 2026 » ou « la canicule de juin 2026 » mais « la canicule Bolloré 26 » et « la canicule TotalEnergies 26 ».

Avouez que « TotalEnergies 26 a déjà fait 115 morts » en gras dans la presse, ça fournit une belle visibilité médiatique au sponsor !

Du coup, Patlabar s'est improvisé public-reléchionne pour les sponsors et a fait de chouettes stickers à imprimer et à coller là où le rappel est le plus utile. J'espère qu'il va leur envoyer sa facture.

La canicule de juin 2026 vous a été offerte par TotalEnergies.

Il a également fait les stickers pour celle de mai :

La canicule de mai 2026 vous a été offerte par Bolloré.

Et il prévoit déjà celle de juillet :

La canicule de juillet 2026 vous a été offerte par Lafarge.

En 2026, TotalEnergies a clairement écrasé Bolloré. Lafarge pourra-t-elle tenir le niveau ? Rien n'est moins sûr, les supporters lancent déjà les paris.

Pour les prochains stickers, vous pouvez suivre Patlabar sur Mastodon:

• @patlabar sur Mastodon

PS: À propos de sponsor, l'équipe cycliste Israël-Startup Nation avait, en 2025, subit les foudres du public sur la Vuelta, entraînant son retrait de l'épreuve et le changement de sponsor pour 2026. Je me demande si on verra un jour des protestations similaires pour des équipes comme TotalEnergie ou Uno-X, qui sponsorisent le vélo en vendant de l'essence.

30 Jun 2026 6:03pm GMT

The still-very-new logging package tl was just updated for the first time at CRAN. The tl package wraps the (also very new) rspdlite package to offer a lightweight and consistent logging interface from both R and C++ that enjoys being 'tiny, fast, capable' thanks to spdlite. With tl we follow the same idea that our spdl package introduced: a simple consistent interface via just the tl:: prefix and the appropropriate logging level. In other words tl::debug("Alert: foo now '{}'", foo) will work from both R and C++ (given a variable foo, and, in the case of C++, an extra semicolon) and log if the current level is 'debug' or higher, and skip logging if not.

This release adds a fallback when compilation does not use the (required) C++20 standard, expands the README and adds a initialization helper function reflecting a preferred default logging level from either an environment variable or a global option. We are also working on adding tl to an example package as a simple illustration, more on that hopefully soon.

The NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.0.2 (2025-06-30)

• Added badges to README now that package is on CRAN, add NEWS file

• Condition the provided header on C++20 use, offer fallback

• Add an exported initialization function picking up a logging level from either an environment variable or a global option, see '?init'

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

30 Jun 2026 5:02pm GMT

No matter that the hype cycle wants you to think, the renewable energy transition is the biggest thing happening in tech and it's happening faster and faster. Despite being neck deep in it personally with offgrid solar projects, most recently solar hot water, increasingly it becomes clear I'm watching from the sidelines.

In Australia, everyone gets 24 kwh of free daytime electric power now. That's without installing any solar panels of their own, the grid just has that much excess capacity. All it takes to save $thousands per year (and avoid emissions) is to schedule some big loads like the hot water heater and EV to charge during the day. To save more, drop in a home battery that charges for free and powers the home through the evening.

In Germany, a 2 kwh plug-in home battery costs $350 and the electric company will pay you $130 per year to plug it into your wall. There are similar offers throughout Europe.

In Cuba something something geopolitics, oil blockade, belt and road => suddenly 1GW of solar farms with another gigawatt on the way.

I'll soon visit South Carolina where with no subsidies whatsoever from a decidedly renewable-unfriendly government, it made sense for my dad's house to get a whole home battery and double the solar array. The resulting system will be able to power the well pump and probably also the whole geothermal HVAC system through the kind of month-long grid down events that happened in Hurricane Helene.

Myself, well, I've got a by modern standards small 4 kwh home battery that powers my house offgrid, and I've recently installed a heat pump hot water heater. That's after about a decade pondering what solution to use for solar hot water, to replace an aging and horrible propane instant water heater. I've in the past considered everything from evacuated tubes to special direct drive inverters to DC resistive MPTT dump loads. The solution turned out to be just a big enough solar array, and plugging in a 120v hot water heater that needs only 500 watts in heat pump mode. Plus a small amount of code to manage when it runs.

In the time I was thinking about that, economies of scale and tech improvements just wiped all those other possibilities off the map, it's not economical to install and maintain a separate evactuated tube heat collector when a pile of solar panels costs so little and when electric hot water has gotten more than 200% efficient.

I also recently completed my permanant EV charger installation, with a new inverter and conduit and proper wiring, and increased the car's charge rate to 2 kw. Eliminating the need to charge anywhere except at home except on road trips.

Coordinating when these two big loads run, to maximize solar production and ensure that the house battery is full at the end of the day was ... not hard at all actually? The car charger amps can be dialed up and down to match incoming solar power fairly well, and leave some room for the hot water heater. They both operate as more or less dump loads. More or less because neither one can be cycled on or off very fast (to avoid wear and tear on the car's contactor and the heat pump's compressor), so it makes sense to leave them on and skate through short cloudy sections of the day, as long as the house battery doesn't get too low.

How low is too low for the house battery? Depends on the time of day. The code it's currently using, which may get tweaked over winter:

    -- When the battery is charged enough to run major loads that may prevent
    -- charging it further.
    --
    -- This varies with the hour of day. Early in the day, the battery does not
    -- need to be as full to be considered well charged, since there is
    -- still plenty of time for it to charge up. Later in the day, with less
    -- time to charge, it needs to be more full.
    wellCharged :: Hour -> Percentage
    wellCharged (Hour hour)
            | hour < 9 = Percentage 90 -- night
            | pmhour <= 0 = Percentage 50
            | pmhour <= 1 = Percentage 60
            | pmhour <= 2 = Percentage 70
            | pmhour <= 3 = Percentage 80
            | pmhour <= 4 = Percentage 90
            | otherwise = Percentage 95
      where
            pmhour = hour - 12

More complicated is, what to do it there's solar power to run one or the other, but not both? This is starting to get into the territory of microgrids now, or of demand response programs, so there's a whole industry or three out there doing industry things geared at the kind of no-brainer solutions I mentioned earlier. From what I've gathered, all of them involve proprietary protocols and gear.

What I've done is to read the state of the hot water heater and car, and prioritize hot water over the car. Except, if the car is below 10% it urgently needs to charge.

And I found a really simple way to decide when to run the low-priority load: Just check if the house battery's current charge will be considered wellCharged in an hour. So if it's 2 pm, the battery needs to be 80% charged to run the lower-priority load, and if it dips below that, that load will turn off but the high-priority load will keep running down to 70% battery.

Unfortunately, getting any information out of my hot water heater relies on a vendor API server that is often down on weekends, and reverse engineered the web page of my EVSE[1] to control it, to say nothing of the nightmare of getting the car's state of charge from The Cloud.

Anyway, I'm pleased with having easily tweakable code and how far I've taken this offgrid, and everything I've learned doing so, but like I said, I'm clearly observing from the sidelines over here while the most significant thing for all of us is going on over there. You might appreciate my code or method, but you'll eventually be plugging in a home battery or signing up for a free daytime power tarrif from your electric company, or having professionals install a whole home system for climate resiliance.

So my question is, where does free software fit into all this? There are things like Home Assistant that do productize the kind of thing I'm doing enough to be useful more widely. But still niche. Meanwhile there are inverters and batteries that phone home to China, and every consumer facing install is either "use this device" or "integrate these 3 proprietary devices".

I don't think focusing on these negatives is really useful though, I'm more trying to understand where all this is going and then maybe get out ahead of it in some useful way with free software. Your thoughts welcome.

[1] Obviously OpenEVSE exists, but it didn't meet my needs hardware wise. And I could set my EVSE to use an OCPP server but it was easier to do the screen scraping than find an appropriate one, and I have the feeling I would not appreciate learning any more about OCPP, in the same way I really don't want to know a lot about web browsers' tag soup mode.

30 Jun 2026 4:10pm GMT

This is amusing, a flaw in the crypto-currency Zcash allowed generating Zcash from nothing and there's no way to know if anyone did that [1].

Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article for Locus Magazine about corporate valuations and why companies claim SciFi technologies [2].

Charles Stross wrote an interesting retcon of James Bond [3].

Trakkr.ai has an intresting post comparing political bias in LLM models, the site has lots of other comparisons of models too [4].

Wouter Verhelst wrote a blog post about his tested usage of LLMs for code generation and the conclusions about what it will do to the FOSS development process, not a lot of new material but he put a lot of good ideas together in one place [5].

Here is the git repository for the programs used for the ssh-audit.com site, really good setup for checking ssh configuration [6].

The isaiprofitable.com site is periodically updated with the profit/loss totals for AI companies, no surprise that every company is losing money apart from NVidia and NVidia are investing in the other companies [7].

Elvira Bary wrote an informative article about Russia's inability to build or design anything good [8]. Looks like we are at risk of another Chernobyl…

Lev Lafayette wrote an interesting blog post about the Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer with over 10,000,000 cores [9].

Point Free wrote an interesting blog post about running the Gemma 4 LLM which is 25G of data at a usable speed on a Xeon system with DDR3 RAM and no GPU [10].

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/2cxx2e6h
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/2cxotle7
• [3] https://tinyurl.com/2bgapt88
• [4] https://trakkr.ai/bias
• [5] https://tinyurl.com/22s2fome
• [6] https://github.com/jtesta/ssh-audit
• [7] https://isaiprofitable.com/
• [8] https://tinyurl.com/26p4lkr4
• [9] http://levlafayette.com/node/808
• [10] https://point.free/blog/gemma-4-on-a-2016-xeon/

30 Jun 2026 1:53pm GMT

Lately I've been playing with writing a chatbot library in Common Lisp.

My previous gemini bindings were getting unweildy. I wanted to add the ability to run LLMs on my local machine but it turned out to be really kind of kludgy, so I decided to start from scratch with multiple back ends in mind.

I've got it to the point where in supports multiple back ends, so now I can prompt local LLMs from Lisp.

Recently I added the ability to recursively launch chatbots that can call each other. Since the chatbots do not share their contexts, this greatly reduces the context bloat of thet main chat because it can spawn off subtasks to a minion and not pollute the main context. This also allows you to create a federation of chatbots, each of which specializes in some topic and is overseen by a controlling chatbot that talks to the user.

Chatbots can be serialized and checkpointed, so if one is carrying out an agentic task and Lisp crashes, when we restart the agentic tasks are restarted as well and pick up where they left off.

IT turns out that recursive chats are a useful abstraction once you figure out how to use them. Basically any prompt you may issue may also want to be issued by an llm and this enables that to happen. It allows you to run subprocesses that would otherwise put junk in your context, for example reading the contents of a lange number of files. If you put that into a rocursive chatbot, it could slurp up the files into its context without adding tokens to the parent chat.

You can use a recursive chat as a `smart component'. The recursive chat can have a specialized system instruction and can preload its context with relevant information specific to it. It's context doesn't get diluted by the caller's context

28 Jun 2026 10:52pm GMT

I saw that there was some argument over how much slower slot access is than struct access, so I just decided to measure it naively. I made a two slot sruct and a CLOS version of a CONS cell with car and cdr slots and I ran LTAK using regular lists, `lists' made from CLOS conses, and `lists' made from structs. Here are the results:

D:\repositories\clos-benchmark>sbcl --script run-benchmarks.lisp
Benchmark: ltak over native cons cells, CLOS my-cons nodes, and my-cons-struct nodes
Inputs: x=15 y=9 z=4 repeats=35

Scenario                   min-ms     mean-ms      max-ms      ratio
--------------------------------------------------------------------
native standard               0.129      0.146      0.186
clos standard                 1.346      1.365      1.475       9.37x
struct standard               0.172      0.175      0.179       1.20x
native optimized              0.068      0.069      0.073
clos optimized                0.411      0.414      0.419       6.04x
struct optimized              0.068      0.069      0.073       1.01x

In this naive use case, structs are same as native cons cells, but CLOS objects are one ninth the speed of a struct or cons cell if you just use it unoptimized, and one sixth the speed if optimizations are turned on.

But the CLOS instance is more functional than the cons cell in mimics. For instance, I could add a slot to the class and all the instances would be lazily updated with the new slot. I can also subclass the CLOS class and the selector functions will continue to work. Finally, I can redefine the CLOS closs while I'm developing it and all the instances will be uppdated. THe machinery to keep all this running is costing us our factor of 9.

But this might be worth the cost if we are running on a network where the bulk of the time will be transmitting the answer down the pipe once it is computed. Taking a few extra milliseconds to compute the answer might be worth the convenience features of CLOS.

25 Jun 2026 4:11pm GMT

Back in the day, the US government had a program called SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) that funded small businesses to do research and development. I recall sitting in our dorm in college, reading through a giant printed catalog of SBIR grants just to amuse ourselves by brainstorming solutions over bad pizza.

.

So, I got curious the other day: what does the SBIR landscape look like now?

I can tell you right now: do not even try to read an SBIR solicitation on your local machine. You are opening yourself up to a world of absolute, unmitigated pain.

You might think, what harm could there be in simply opening a file?

Well, in the modern compliance panopticon, any manipulation of digital information that comes from the govenment has the potential to spawn CUI (Controlled Unclassified Information). CUI is basically a digital pathogen; once you download that file, *anything whatsover* derived from it, including notes and metadata, instantly becomes CUI by association. The moment you read an SBIR on your computer, you've infected your system, rendering you subject to a nightmare of Byzantine federal regulations.

These days, the amount of beurocratic red tape surrounding CUI is insane. To even look at the file legally, you need a dedicated, air-gapped machine completely disconnected from the internet, conforming to a massive, expensive slew of NIST standards covering everything from hardware-level encryption to strict access controls. Alternatively you could contract with a cloud company that offers a pre-certified "CUI-compliant" environment.

And assuming you actually shell out the cash and jump through the hoops to set up this digital containment zone just to read a PDF, you must meticulously audit and account for every single action you take in its presence. Under current federal auditing logic, you are explicitly assumed to be attempting to defraud the government unless you can produce a mountain of paper proving otherwise. Want to bring in a partner to bounce ideas around? You can't just "know a guy." You have to navigate a labyrinth of federal subcontracting regulations.

I had intended on amusing myself by reading some SBIRs and daydreaming about solutions that might involve Lisp (an impossibility in the modern enterprise stack for entirely separate, depressing reasons). Instead, I quickly discovered I did not even own the physical hardware required to even read an SBIR without running afoul of federal regulations.

I wanted to read some clever and inspiring engineering proposals. I ended up reading a lot of very dry and boring compliance regulations.

18 Jun 2026 11:48am GMT

All video recordings from FOSDEM 2026 that are worth publishing have been processed and released. Videos are linked from the individual schedule pages for the talks and the full schedule page. They are also available, organised by room, at video.fosdem.org/2026. While all released videos have been reviewed by a human, it remains possible that one or more issues fell through the cracks. If you notice any problem with a video you care about, please let us know as soon as possible so we can look into it before the video-processing infrastructure is shut down for this edition. To report any舰

25 Apr 2026 10:00pm GMT

Are you ready for another challenge? We're excited to host the second yearly edition of our treasure hunt at FOSDEM! Participants must solve five sequential challenges to uncover the final answer. Update: the treasure hunt has been successfully solved by multiple participants, and the main prizes have now been claimed. But the fun doesn't stop here. If you still manage to find the correct final answer and go to Infodesk K, you will receive a small consolation prize as a reward for your effort. If you're still looking for a challenge, the 2025 treasure hunt is still unsolved, so舰

29 Jan 2026 11:00pm GMT

With FOSDEM just a few days away, it is time for us to enlist your help. Every year, an enthusiastic band of volunteers make FOSDEM happen and make it a fun and safe place for all our attendees. We could not do this without you. This year we again need as many hands as possible, especially for heralding during the conference, during the buildup (starting Friday at noon) and teardown (Sunday evening). No need to worry about missing lunch at the weekend, food will be provided. Would you like to be part of the team that makes FOSDEM tick?舰

26 Jan 2026 11:00pm GMT