02 May 2026

feedPlanet Grep

Mattias Geniar: Finding Dutch audio across streaming services

We have 4 streaming services at home: Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video, and Apple TV+. Try finding which films and series are actually available with Dutch audio.

02 May 2026 1:33pm GMT

Frank Goossens: Gelezen; “Mijn Lieve Gunsteling” van Lucas Rijneveld en “Vuur” van John Boyne

"Mijn Lieve Gunsteling" en "Vuur" zijn allebei boeken over misbruik van jonge tieners door volwassenen. "Gunsteling" van Lucas Rijneveld (ook gekend van "De avond is ongemak") is prachtig geschreven, maar het graaft door de ogen van de pleger héél diep in de getormenteerde psyche van zowel slachtoffer als pleger. Het bleek daardoor voor mij bijna ondragelijk emotioneel intens en ik heb de 363…

Source

02 May 2026 1:33pm GMT

Dries Buytaert: AI rewards strict APIs

An astronaut explores a surreal landscape beneath rainbow-colored planetary rings, symbolizing the journey into AI's transformative potential for Drupal.

Every framework's API surface sits on a spectrum, from strict (typed interfaces, schemas, service containers) to loose (string keys, naming conventions, untyped hooks). Strict APIs cost more upfront: more boilerplate, more to learn before writing code. Loose APIs shift that cost later: more ambiguity, more reliance on naming conventions, and more bugs that are harder to detect and fix.

AI changes who pays. Boilerplate and learning curves don't slow agents down. What slows them down is missing feedback: code that runs but does the wrong thing, errors that don't point to the cause, conventions that have to be guessed. Magic-name binding, untyped hooks, unvalidated configuration, and conventions the code doesn't enforce produce exactly those failure modes.

Magic strings break the loop

For example, both Drupal and WordPress have long used magic-string hooks. In Drupal, you write a function like mymodule_user_login. WordPress uses a related pattern: a string action name passed to add_action(). In both cases, the binding is a string the language can't validate.

Get the name wrong and the system silently skips your code: no error, no warning, nothing in the logs. The function just sits there, unloved.

The signature is a convention, not a contract: the documentation says the user_login hook receives a $user object, but nothing enforces it. To your IDE or a static analyzer like PHPStan, it's just a function. They don't know it's wired into the platform's login flow, so they can't warn you when it's wrong.

A typed alternative makes the binding explicit. With a PHP attribute like #[Hook('user_login')] on a registered service, the class must exist, the method signature is type-checked, and the container wires the dependencies. IDEs, static analyzers, and AI coding agents can follow the chain from the attribute to the implementation.

For AI agents, this keeps the feedback loop tight instead of turning it into trial and error. That means they can move faster, spend less time debugging, and use fewer tokens.

At DrupalCon Chicago this March, AI coding tools migrated a Lovable-generated site into Drupal in hours. The strict APIs kept the agent on track.

A bet made before AI existed

This didn't start with AI. Drupal 8, which we shipped in 2015, introduced Symfony's routing, services, and event dispatcher, replacing large parts of the procedural hook system. Since then, we've kept reducing magic hooks. The attribute-based approach (#[Hook('user_login')]) landed in Drupal 11.1 and helps remove more of the remaining procedural-only paths.

Hooks aren't the only place Drupal has been getting stricter. Drupal stores a lot of configuration in YAML, which was one of the loosest parts of the system. A multi-year validation effort has been tightening that.

When an agent generates a content type definition or editor configuration, validation catches missing keys, invalid values, and broken references before anything is saved. The agent gets a precise error pointing to the exact field, instead of a runtime failure. That tight feedback loop is what makes Drupal a strong CMS for AI-assisted development.

Drupal made this bet early, and it was painful. The Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 transition broke backward compatibility and took years to recover from. But it left the platform much stricter. More than ten years in, we're still making Drupal stricter.

Meanwhile, WordPress made a different bet, prioritizing backward compatibility over stricter APIs. That kept the platform stable for a long time. It also kept the looseness.

Those trade-offs now determine how efficiently AI agents can work with each platform.

What was style is now speed

What used to be a stylistic choice is now a speed and cost problem. Loose APIs mean more debugging and guesswork. Strict APIs mean faster, more precise feedback. This was always true for humans. It's now also true for AI agents. But today that cost shows up in tokens.

02 May 2026 1:33pm GMT

feedPlanet Debian

Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in April 2026

02 May 2026 9:08am GMT

01 May 2026

feedPlanet Lisp

Joe Marshall: Echoes of the Lisp Listener

The Lisp Machine Listener had an electric close parenthesis. When the user typed a close parenthesis, and this was the close parenthesis that finished the complete form at top level, the form would be sent to the REPL right away with no need to press enter. Here's how to get this behavior with SLY:

(defun my-sly-mrepl-electric-close-paren ()
  "Insert ')' and auto-send ONLY if we are closing a top-level Lisp form."
  (interactive)
  (let ((state (syntax-ppss)))
    (insert ")")
    ;; Safety checks:
    ;; 1. We were at depth 1 (so we are now at depth 0)
    ;; 2. We aren't in a string or comment
    ;; 3. The input actually starts with a paren (it's a form, not a sentence)
    (when (and (= (car state) 1)
               (not (nth 3 state))
               (not (nth 4 state))
               (string-match-p "^\\s-*(" 
                               (buffer-substring-no-properties (sly-mrepl--mark) (point))))
      (sly-mrepl-return))))

Another cool hack is to get the REPL to do double duty as a command line to the LLM chatbot. When you type RET in the REPL, it will check if the input is a complete lisp form. If so, it will send the form to the REPL as normal. If not, it will send the input to the chatbot. Here's how to do this:

(defun my-sly-mrepl-electric-return ()
  "Send to Lisp if it's a form/symbol, or wrap in (chat ...) if it's a sentence."
  (interactive)
  (let* ((beg (marker-position (sly-mrepl--mark)))
         (end (point-max))
         (input (buffer-substring-no-properties beg end))
         (trimmed (string-trim input)))
    (cond
     ;; If it's empty, just do a normal return
     ((string-blank-p trimmed)
      (sly-mrepl-return))
     
     ;; If it starts with a paren, quote, or hash, it's definitely a Lisp form
     ((string-match-p "^\\s-*[(#'\"]" trimmed)
      (sly-mrepl-return))
     
     ;; If it's a single word (no spaces), treat it as a symbol/form (e.g., *package*)
     ((not (string-match-p "\\s-" trimmed))
      (sly-mrepl-return))
     
     ;; Otherwise, it's a sentence. Wrap it and fire.
     (t
      (delete-region beg end)
      (insert (format "(chat %S)" trimmed))
      (sly-mrepl-return)))))

Install as follows:

;; Apply to SLY MREPL with a safety check for the mode map
(with-eval-after-load 'sly-mrepl
  (define-key sly-mrepl-mode-map (kbd "RET") 'my-sly-mrepl-electric-return)
  (define-key sly-mrepl-mode-map (kbd ")") 'my-sly-mrepl-electric-close-paren))

01 May 2026 5:29pm GMT

Tim Bradshaw: Making CLOS slot access less slow

Access to slots in CLOS instances is often very slow. It's probably not possible for it ever to be really fast, but the AMOP MOP does provide a way of making it, at least, less slow.

How slow is it?

Here are some benchmarks for accessing fields in objects of various kinds, using SBCL. All of these tests do something equivalent to

(defclass a ()
  ((i :initform 0 :type fixnum)))

(defclass a/no-fixnum ()
  ((i :initform 0)))

(defmethod svn ((a a) n)
  (declare (type fixnum n)
           (optimize speed (safety 0)))
  (dotimes (i n)
    (incf (the fixnum (slot-value a 'i)))))

(defmethod svn ((a a/no-fixnum) n)
  (declare (type fixnum n)
           (optimize speed (safety 0)))
  (dotimes (i n)
    (incf (the fixnum (slot-value a 'i)))))

They then call svn (or equivalent) with a large value of \(n\), do that a number of times \(m\) and then divide by \(2 \times n \times m\) to get an average time per access (incf accesses the slot twice).

For SBCL 2.6.3.178-a190d9710 on ARM64 Apple M1, seconds per access:

These numbers vary slightly, but this gives a good picture of what is going on. In particular you can see that slot-value within a method specialised on the class is more than 70 times slower than access for a structure slot, but if you can use standard-instance-access it is only about 6 times slower: standard-instance-access speeds things up by a factor of about 10, which changes CLOS slot access performance from laughably slow to merely pretty slow.

A macro

I've written a macro, called with-sia-slots which is like with-slots but uses standard-instance-access. It therefore has all the constraints imposed by that, but it is significantly faster than with-slots or slot-value. It has some overhead, as it has to dynamically compute the slot locations: this is better done outside any inner loop. This means that, for instance, you probably want to write code that looks like

(with-sia-slots (x) o
  (dotimes (i many)
    (setf x (... x ...))))

which will mean you only pay the overhead once.

The above tests don't use with-sia-slots, as I wrote them partly to see if something like this was worth writing. However on a current (at the time of writing) SBCL with-sia-slots is asymptotically about 10 times faster than with-slots as demonstrated by these tests.

Up to package names it should be portable to any CL with an AMOP-compatible MOP. It can be found in my implementation-specific hacks, linked from here.

01 May 2026 3:43pm GMT

feedPlanet Debian

Dirk Eddelbuettel: binb 0.0.8 on CRAN: Maintenance

The eight release of the binb package, and first in two years, is now on CRAN and in r2u. binb regroups four rather nice themes for writing LaTeX Beamer presentations much more easily in (R)Markdown. As a teaser, a quick demo combining all four themes is available; documentation and examples are in the package.

This release contains regular internal updates to continuous integration, URLs reference and switch to Authors@R. The trigger for the release, though, was a small updated need when very recent pandoc versions (as shipped with RStudio) are used which require a new variable declaration in the LaTeX template files in order to process uncaptioned tables. The summary of changes follows.

Changes in binb version 0.0.8 (2026-05-01)

  • Small updates to documentation URLs and continuous integration

  • The package now uses Authors@R in DESCRIPTION

  • Newer pandoc versions are accommodated by adding a required counter variable in the latex template file

CRANberries provides a summary of changes to the previous version. For questions or comments, please use the issue tracker at 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. You can also sponsor my Tour de Shore 2026 ride in support of the Maywood Fine Arts Center.

01 May 2026 1:34pm GMT

Junichi Uekawa: A rainy day starts May.

A rainy day starts May.

01 May 2026 2:31am GMT

29 Apr 2026

feedPlanet Lisp

Yukari Hafner: On Lisp, LLMs, and Community

https://studio.tymoon.eu/api/studio/file?id=3892

In 2015 in London I attended my first European Lisp Symposium. I was 21 at the time, and while this wasn't my first time abroad on my own, it was still a pretty stressful affair. I remember it still pretty clearly to that day: meeting Robert Strandh, Zach Beane, Didier Verna, Daniel Kochmański and many other people I'd previously admired from afar through many discussions on IRC. It was an important event for me, and was the first time I'd felt like I was in a group of people I could talk with about my interests and ambitions.

Last year in 2025 I was the local chair for ELS in Zürich. It was a stressful time and I don't remember much of it other than how the stage looked, the food, and me rushing all over to get supplies and take care of other emergencies. I barely talked to anyone because I was either rushing about, stressed, or too tired.

In that time, my life has changed significantly. Over the years I took on more and more organisational roles for ELS itself: remaking the website, handling the transition to a hybrid online conference, handling the live streaming on-site, and last year being local chair.

But for other parts of the broader Lisp community I gradually changed in the opposite direction: I stopped religiously reading the #lisp/#commonlisp IRC channels. I left the Lisp Discord. I stopped replying on and ultimately altogether reading the /r/lisp subreddit. I stopped blogging about what was going on both in other places and with my own projects.

All of these changes happened over time as I found myself with less tolerance for things that annoyed me and wasted my time and energy. The endless debates about why there wasn't a new standard, the constant humm-hawwing about what """the community""" should do, why Lisp wasn't more widely used if it's so great, someone starting yet another project that was already done instead of contributing to an existing implementation, and so on and so forth.

And then I found myself thinking today: "gee, I'm not very excited to go to ELS'26, huh? Whatever happened?" I've already booked my flight and hotel, and I'll be there anyway, partly because I have to for organisational reasons. But now that I'm thinking about how I feel, I can't say for certain if I will be back next year, too. Both for financial and emotional reasons.

In recent years I've found myself more and more disconnected with male-dominated spaces in general. I don't feel at home in them. I'm already not a very social person and struggle with any kind of gathering that has more than 6 people, but a lot more so still if it's mostly men. Not necessarily because I feel like I'm in any kind of danger, but simply because I don't feel like I belong. And... you know, that's sad. Obviously me leaving won't make the situation better for the other women that do attend, but that's the dilemma with all of these situations: unless the organisation creates intentional pressure to correct the situation, it will inevitably only reinforce itself.[1]

And then there's what I can, in the nicest way, only describe as "The LLM Situation," though I will be increasingly un-nice going forward. As of early this year SBCL has happily accepted patches that are authored by or with the use of LLMs, and the maintainers have rebuffed complaints about this practise. The mailing list has also gotten its fair share of useless blather by apologists and pointless drivel dreamed up by LLMs that only wastes everyone's time, to the point where I had to just stop reading it altogether. A few maintainers of other significant projects seem to also have embraced the capitalist wasteland mass exploitation machine that disguises itself as "technology."

On the other side of things as the lead developer of Shirakumo I've decided to put out a blanket ban on all of this garbage. I do not care if LLMs work at all, or if they will ever work, or whatever. The usability of LLMs is completely irrelevant. By using them you are happily handing over the single last remaining shred of your human spirit to the capitalists to help them burn everyone else and the world with it to the ground.

I think back to the impromptu "LLM roundtable" discussion that took place at the end of ELS last year, along with the usual apologist bullshit that was spread in the ELS Signal group at the time, and some of the lightning talks that were shown. And as I think about this, I am filled with trepidation about the coming conference.

Obviously I have no idea what it will be like yet, and I have no idea what the programme will be, nor what people will be there, or what the general vibe is going to be. But nevertheless, I really hope I won't have to "crash out" as the kids say. I already lost my mind last year, seemingly being the only one that wanted to hold a firm stance against this wave of shit at the time.

So what does this all mean going forward? Well, for just now, nothing. I'll continue to be in the places I have dug out myself: mastodon, the shirakumo lichat/libera channel, my patreon, and other small, purpose-driven communities. But it's very possible I'll be leaving ELS behind me permanently after this year, cutting off even the last part of the community that used to be most of my world.

Regardless, I will still be working on my Lisp projects. If nothing else, one of the nice things about the looming tower of software I've built over all these years is that I am in control of the vast majority of it, and replacing any particular part I didn't write should it get enshittified is not that big of an endeavour.

Make no mistake though: I will continue to be increasingly outspoken and annoying about political matters that I consider important and relevant, and this will also be visible in the software I write, be that in licensing, ecosystem integration, or documentation.

I hope that more people will speak out publicly about their stance. It's important to show what you stand for, even if you're just a small part. What is considered "normal" and acceptable is only ever a matter of what people get to see, regardless of how prevalent that stance is among the population. Currently people are getting to see a lot of folks proudly and loudly making trash and littering it all over the place. This normalisation is dangerous, because it makes the average joes think it's OK for them to do it too, or even that they should be doing it.

Just the same way as any other social movement, you 🫵 play a role in it, and your voice matters. Whether you use your voice for the betterment of humans, for the betterment of the ghouls feeding off of us, or silently let the ghouls feed off of us.

See you at ELS'26 in Kraków!

  1. A very dramatic but clear demonstration of this principle is found in the "Nazi Bar" anecdote. People that don't feel comfortable will just leave, even when there is no explicit and obvious push for them to do so.

29 Apr 2026 5:12pm GMT

25 Apr 2026

feedFOSDEM 2026

All FOSDEM 2026 videos are online

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

29 Jan 2026

feedFOSDEM 2026

Join the FOSDEM Treasure Hunt!

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

26 Jan 2026

feedFOSDEM 2026

Call for volunteers

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