02 Jun 2026

feedPlanet Grep

Mattias Geniar: More time to think

I'm finding myself thinking longer about the code I write and the features that get developed, than I did before the agentic coding era.

02 Jun 2026 2:40pm GMT

Lionel Dricot: Qucocoma Philippe Samyn ?

Qucocoma Philippe Samyn ?

J'apprends avec tristesse le décès de l'architecte Philippe Samyn, un esprit incroyable aux idées fulgurantes avec qui j'ai eu de longues et passionnantes discussions.

Car l'architecture était pour lui une porte d'entrée vers une compréhension plus globale du monde. Comme lorsqu'il m'a asséné :

- Le monde entier ne tourne qu'autour d'une seule et unique unité, qui est le cœur de tout.
- Euh, le dollar ?
- Tu me déçois Lionel ! C'est le joule bien entendu. Tout tourne autour du joule. Produire, stocker, échanger des joules. La monnaie internationale devrait être le joule ! Les puissants sont ceux qui exploitent la différence entre le dollar et le joule, les faibles ceux qui fournissent des joules pour rien ou si peu.

Ou cette discussion qui me revient régulièrement où il m'exposa que l'architecte devait construire des « ruines utiles ». Car un bâtiment ne va être utilisé que 50, 100 ou 300 ans. Mais ses ruines durent parfois 10 ou 100 fois plus longtemps. Certaines ruines dureront autant que la planète ! L'essentiel de la vie d'un bâtiment se fait à l'état de ruine et il faut le prévoir dès la conception.

Avant de le rencontrer, je n'avais jamais envisagé les choses sous cet angle. Ce qui m'a frappé en généralisant son discours, c'est à quel point le fait de tenter d'oublier l'étape des ruines est la maladie qui pourrit l'humanité tout entière à tous les niveaux.

Nous produisons, nous tentons de produire plus et plus rapidement sans jamais nous préoccuper de ce que nous allons faire de toute cette production. Nous en sommes au point d'automatiser la production d'images, d'écrits et de code informatique avec les chatbots sans nous poser la question des ruines que nous préparons.

Depuis plusieurs années, chaque fois que j'ai envie de me procurer un bien matériel, je me pose consciemment deux questions : « Où vais-je le ranger ? » et « Comment vais-je m'en débarrasser ? ». Penser consciemment à cette question au moment de l'achat rend l'achat en lui-même extrêmement anxiogène. Philippe Samyn avait lui poussé cette réflexion jusque dans la conception des bâtiments.

Mais l'ingénieur architecte était également un artiste attaché à son œuvre. Lorsque mon épouse et moi avons un jour critiqué « son » Aula Magna, bâtiment emblématique de Louvain-La-Neuve coincé entre un cinéma et un hôtel, il nous a déroulé, des larmes pleins les yeux, le plan de Louvain-la-Neuve tel qu'il l'avait imaginé et comment l'Aula Magna aurait du s'intégrer dans une superbe perspective bien plus vaste et cohérente. Une boule de colère et de tristesse dans la gorge, il nous a expliqué comment son projet avait été complètement dénaturé en n'en prenant qu'une partie et en l'encadrant d'autres immeubles qu'il trouvait hideux.

Philippe Samyn m'avait fait l'honneur de me compter parmi les bêta-lecteurs de l'œuvre de sa vie : un ouvrage exhaustif sur l'architecture et la société humaine, projet qu'il avait intitulé: « Qucocoma, Quoi Comment Construire Maintenant ».

Je lui avais prédit que cette œuvre risquait de ne jamais être achevée tant elle était ambitieuse, qu'il fallait absolument la publier par petite partie sous peine de laisser cette tâche à ses héritiers.

Je ne pensais pas avoir raison si tôt…

Philippe Samyn s'est éteint, mais le territoire reste à jamais marqué par ses idées.

À propos de l'auteur :

Je suis Ploum et je viens de publier Bikepunk, une fable écolo-cycliste entièrement tapée sur une machine à écrire mécanique. Pour me soutenir, achetez mes livres (si possible chez votre libraire) !

Recevez directement par mail mes écrits en français et en anglais. Votre adresse ne sera jamais partagée. Vous pouvez également utiliser mon flux RSS francophone ou le flux RSS complet.

02 Jun 2026 2:40pm GMT

Dries Buytaert: Contentful and the limits of "Buy European"

This morning, Salesforce announced its plan to acquire Contentful.

Congratulations to Sascha Konietzke, Paolo Negri, and the whole Contentful team. They spent 13 years building Contentful into one of Europe's most visible enterprise software companies. Salesforce buying Contentful is real validation of the product, customers, and team they built.

The deal makes sense for both Salesforce and Contentful. Salesforce has long had a CMS-shaped hole in its product offering, and Contentful fills it with a mature, enterprise-ready SaaS product.

Contentful last raised money in 2021, at a valuation of more than $3 billion, when SaaS valuations were near their peak and enthusiasm for headless CMS was at its highest. Since then, valuations have come down, and developers have become more pragmatic about when a headless CMS makes sense.

To me, the more important question isn't whether the acquisition makes strategic sense (it does), or whether every Contentful investor got the outcome they hoped for (probably not). It is what the acquisition means for digital sovereignty.

Before I go further, let me be clear about where I'm coming from. I founded Drupal and still lead the project, and I co-founded Acquia, a company built around Drupal, where I'm still the Executive Chair. Drupal is an Open Source CMS that competes with Contentful. So when I argue that this deal raises important questions, you should factor in that Open Source is both my life's work and my livelihood.

Contentful is a German company, Contentful GmbH, registered in Berlin. For over a decade it has been a flagship European software company.

If the acquisition closes, it becomes part of Salesforce, a US corporation, and falls under US law.

For many of Contentful's customers, this acquisition will be a non-event. For governments, public institutions, and regulated industries, it exposes a harder truth: a vendor being European today is no guarantee it stays European tomorrow.

A practical example is the US CLOUD Act. Many people may not know about it, but it becomes relevant anytime a non-US vendor is acquired by a US company.

In plain English, the CLOUD Act means that US authorities can require any US company to disclose data it controls. That can apply even if its data is stored in Europe, managed by a European team, or running on European infrastructure.

This is not a hypothetical concern. The law came out of a dispute between Microsoft and the US government over emails stored in Ireland. US Congress changed the law while the case was pending, making clear that US providers can be required to produce data stored abroad.

That does not make Contentful a bad company. It does not make Salesforce a bad owner. And it does not take anything away from what the Contentful team built.

But it shows the limit of "Buy European". Contentful spent 13 years as a trusted European vendor, and one board meeting is enough to put it under US law.

That is where Open Source matters. Drupal customers running on Acquia, my own US-based company, are also exposed to US law. But because Drupal is Open Source, they have alternatives: they can move to a European hosting partner, self-host, or fork the code. A Contentful customer cannot do the same.

The Contentful team deserves credit for what they built. Few European software companies have reached its scale and size. But this is also a reminder for Europe. For software that governments, public institutions, and critical industries depend on, sovereignty must survive any acquisition.

That is the point of The Software Sovereignty Scale and The Sovereignty Prerequisite that I submitted to the European Commission as feedback on their Cloud Sovereignty Framework.

Open Source is the only way to guarantee long-term choice, control, and governance over your code, data, and infrastructure.

Special thanks to Tiffany Farriss for her review of this blog post.

02 Jun 2026 2:40pm GMT

feedPlanet Debian

Ben Hutchings: FOSS activity in 2025

This was a particularly busy month for me in terms of Debian contributions.

It started with a week in Hamburg for the MiniDebConf. I talked to many colleagues face-to-face and worked on various bugs and maintenance tasks. I'm pleased to have finally found the time to reproduce and fix the boot-time crashes in the parallel port subsystem that have been reported many times recently.

A series of easily exploited kernel LPE (local privilege execution) issues were published this month, mostly with very little coordination with distributions. Salvatore and I had to upload fixes for these at roughly weekly intervals. All of these fixes needed to be applied to 4 different upstream branches (currently 5.10, 6.1, 6.12, and 7.0) and 7 Debian branches (including backports).

02 Jun 2026 2:17pm GMT

01 Jun 2026

feedPlanet Lisp

Joe Marshall: Regression

Last year I wrote some Lisp related AI apps. There was a syntax highlighter that used the LLM to determine how to colorize and highlight syntax, and a prompt refiner that takes a wimpy LLM prompt and creates more elaborate prompt from them.

I took the apps down last week. They were `vibe coded' and therefore approximate and had bugs (but that's to be expected), but they had a security hole where you could hijack the LLM processing with your own prompt turning my app into an open relay using my API key. Last week I discovered that my AI spend on video creation was becoming serious. This is odd because I never create AI video. It turned out that my app was being hijacked by a proxy in Luxembourg and was generating videos on my dime.

So I shut down the apps. I knew they had the potential of being abused, and I was willing to tolerate a small amount of abuse, but it didn't occur to me that syntax highlighter could be hijacked to generate gigabytes of video at my expense. Future applications will be careful to obtain the API key from the user.

01 Jun 2026 7:00am GMT

feedPlanet Debian

Amin Bandali: Free software activities in May 2026

Hello and welcome to my May 2026 free software activities report. A lot's been going on in my life offline so I took a bit of a hiatus from doing these reports, but I've had a fairly productive month of May so I thought it'd be nice to do another one for this month.

GNU & FSF

  • GNU Emacs:
    • ffs-0.2.2: I finally polished and published my ffs package for GNU Emacs on GNU ELPA. Many thanks to Protesilaos for rounds of code review and feedback for improving and polishing the package in preparation for submission to GNU ELPA.
    • bug#81101: Trying to visit https://www.emacswiki.org in EWW I noticed it fails with a Somebody wants you to give them money error due to the anti-bot challenge being served with a HTTP 402 (Payment Required) response. So I landed a patch 12eec781ed6 to no longer do that. Thanks to Emacs comaintainer Sean Whitton for reviewing and approving my proposed patch.
    • bug#81107: I noticed that in EWW, unlike <input type="submit"> HTML buttons, <button> elements were not tab-stoppable, leading to poorer usability and accessibility. So I landed a patch ec3d662de0b to fix that. Thanks to Emacs comaintainer Eli Zaretskii for reviewing, providing feedback, and accepting my proposed change.
    • Emacs Chat with Sacha Chua: I joined Sacha for a new episode of her Emacs Chat podcast, where we talked about Emacs and life. I gave a quick tour of my Emacs configuration, discussing at length my configurations for EXWM (Emacs X Window Manager) among other topics like Emacs's facility for visually indicating buffer boundaries in the fringe by setting indicate-buffer-boundaries and my convenience configuration macros.
  • maintainers@: I started the next long-overdue round of emails to GNU package maintainers to confirm the contact information we have on file for them and get a brief status update about their packages. Emails are sent in small batches to keep the workload of handling the responses manageable for assistant GNUisances.
  • GNU Spotlight: I prepared and sent the May GNU Spotlight to the FSF campaigns team for publication on the FSF's community blog and the monthly Free Software Supporter newsletter.

Debian

I've begun the work toward updating the Jami package in Debian unstable again, which means I need to package new releases of its direct and indirect dependencies. For OpenDHT, I need to update RESTinio, and to do that I first need to package expected-lite and sobjectizer for Debian:

  • #1120837: ITP: expected-lite - expected objects for C++11 and later
  • #1137609: ITP: sobjectizer - C++ implementation of Actor, Publish-Subscribe, and CSP models

I've been working on packaging both and hope to have them uploaded to the archive in the next days and weeks.

That's it for this month's report.

Take care, and so long for now.

01 Jun 2026 2:30am GMT

31 May 2026

feedPlanet Debian

Russell Coker: Links May 2026

Ron Garrett wrote an interesting blog post about the mathematical possibility of abiogenesis [1].

Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting blog post about the way the current antics of right wing extremists are forcing permanent changes in society away from the old systems [2].

William Angel wrote an insightful blog post comparing the costs of a Macbook and the Openrouter hosted service for LLMs [3].

The Register has an informative article about the threat that management systems built in to Intel and AMD CPUs pose to data sovereignty in EU owned cloud providers [4]. But this is just the first stage of building sovereign clouds, all significaant cloud services run at least 2 types of CPU and adding EU manufactured CPUs at a future time will be easy.

Benn Jordan made an interesting YouTube video about the infrasound problems caused by data centers, we need FOSS to measure infrasound [5].

amarok on the Purism forum made a great post about how to setup profiles in Firefox for different uses [6].

fralb5 wrote an informative post on the Purism forum about how to use a Librem 5 (or any other FOSS Linux phone) to firewall spyware on an Android phone [7].

Michael Prokop wrote an interesting blog post about debugging input event problems on Linux which turned out to be due to an analogue headphone connection [8]. This gave me some useful pointers to investigating an input device problem which is probably very different.

Patrick Boyle made an insightful youtube video about the ridiculous IPO of SpaceX, it seems like a scam from start to finish [9].

Anarcat wrote an insightful blog post about the LLM apocalypse comparing it to the horsemen of the apocalypse [10].

The Wikimedia Foundation (that runs wikipedia.org among other things) is sacking union organisers and trying to corporatise the organisation which means stealing the donations from the community [11].

Tianon Gravi wrote an informative blog post about containers, Debian, and Docker options [12]. We need a lot more work on these sorts of things in Debian.

Memory Tagging and how it improves C/C++ memory safety is an interesting paper from Google researchers giving an overview of the benefits of tagged memory hardware for pointer validation on SPARC and ARM64 [13].

In 2013 a faulty beer fridge motor acted as a spark gap transmitter and blocked mobile phone service for several Melbourne suburbs [14].

Related posts:

  1. Links April 2026 Charles Stross wrote an interesting blog post about the apparent...
  2. Links February 2026 Charles Stross has a good theory of why "AI" is...
  3. Links March 2026 Krebs has an interesting article about the Kimwolf botnet which...

31 May 2026 12:08pm GMT

feedPlanet Lisp

Joe Marshall: CLRHack: Meta-object Protocol

Metaobject Protocol (MOP) Implementation in CLRHack

The Metaobject Protocol in CLRHack is a high-performance implementation of the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS) integrated into the .NET 8.0 Common Language Runtime (CLR). It provides a complete meta-compilation pipeline that bridges the gap between dynamic Lisp semantics and the static CIL (Common Intermediate Language) execution model.

Core Architecture

The MOP is implemented through three primary layers:

  1. The Metaobject Hierarchy (C#): A set of foundational classes in LispBase representing classes, methods, generic functions, and slot definitions.
  2. The Runtime Engine (MopRuntime): A centralized orchestrator that manages class finalization, method combination, dispatch caching, and instance allocation.
  3. The Compiler Bridge (Lisp): Transformations in ast.lisp that translate high-level CLOS forms (defclass, defmethod) into optimized runtime calls.

Instance Representation

Because the CLR type system is strictly single-inheritance and statically defined, CLRHack decouples Lisp-level inheritance from C# inheritance. All CLOS instances are represented by the StandardObjectInstance class, which contains:

The Dispatch Pipeline

Generic function invocation is the most complex part of the implementation. When a generic function is called:

  1. Cache Lookup: The DiscriminatingFunction first checks a thread-safe dispatchCache using an InvocationCacheKey (a stack-allocated struct) to find a previously computed effective method.
  2. Applicability & Precedence: If the cache misses, the runtime computes all applicable methods and sorts them based on specializer specificity and the Class Precedence List (CPL).
  3. Method Combination: The ComputeEffectiveMethod logic builds a nested execution chain following the Standard Method Combination rules:
    • :around methods are called first, with call-next-method progressing to the next around method or the main chain.
    • The main chain executes all :before methods, the primary method, and finally all :after methods in reverse order.
  4. Fast Invocation: The resulting effective method is compiled into a Func<object[], object> that uses direct delegate invocation to minimize overhead.

Challenges and Solutions

1. Thread-Safe Non-Local Exits (call-next-method)

Challenge: call-next-method and next-method-p require access to the current invocation's state (the remaining methods and original arguments). Passing this state through every function call would break compatibility with standard Lisp function signatures.

Solution: CLRHack utilizes [ThreadStatic] fields in MopRuntime to store the currentNextMethods and currentArguments. This ensures that even in highly concurrent environments (like a web server), each OS thread has its own isolated invocation context, allowing call-next-method to function correctly without state leakage.

2. Forward References and Lazy Finalization

Challenge: Lisp allows classes to refer to superclasses that haven't been defined yet. The runtime must handle these "zombie" classes without crashing the JIT compiler.

Solution: The system implements a ForwardReferencedClassMetaobject. When a class is defined, it is automatically finalized (computing its CPL and slot layout). If a superclass is missing, a forward reference is created. The EnsureFinalized protocol ensures that inheritance is resolved and slot locations are assigned the moment the class is first instantiated or used in dispatch.

3. Performance Overhead of the "MOP Bridge"

Challenge: A naive implementation of slot-value or generic dispatch using C# reflection or linear searches is orders of magnitude slower than native C# member access.

Solution: Three distinct optimizations were applied:

4. Bootstrapping the COMMON-LISP Package

Challenge: Core CLOS functions like make-instance must be available as symbols in the COMMON-LISP package before user code runs, but they rely on the MOP runtime being fully initialized.

Solution: A MopRuntime.Initialize() method is injected into the entry point (Main) of every generated assembly. This method interns the necessary symbols and binds them to GenericFunctionClosureAdapter objects, ensuring that the MOP is "alive" before the first line of Lisp code executes.

Vibe coding the MOP basically involved feeding chapters 4 and 5 of the Art of the Meta-Object Protocol into the LLM and telling it to make an implementation plan. It came up with a twenty-step plan to bootstrap CLOS. I then spent the rest of the day instructing an agent to take on each task of the twenty-step plan in sequential order. At the end of the day, I had a working MOP

This is the end of my series of posts on CLRHack.

31 May 2026 7:00am GMT

30 May 2026

feedPlanet Lisp

Joe Marshall: CLRHack: signal and error

Implementation of SIGNAL and ERROR in CLRHack

In CLRHack, the condition signaling system is implemented in the Lisp.HandlerControl class within the LispBase library. It leverages .NET's [ThreadStatic] storage to maintain a per-thread dynamic stack of active condition handlers.

SIGNAL Implementation

The Signal(object condition) method performs the following logic:

  1. Retrieval: It fetches the activeHandlers list for the current thread. This list is a chain of [LispBase]Lisp.Handler objects maintained by handler-bind.
  2. Iteration: It iterates linearly through the list from the most recently bound handler to the oldest.
  3. Type Matching: For each handler, it calls IsType(condition, handler.ConditionType).
    • If the condition is a symbol, it checks for symbol equality (supporting simple symbol-based conditions).
    • If the condition is a .NET object, it checks if the handler's type is assignable from the condition's runtime type (supporting interop with system exceptions).
    • It treats the symbols T or EXCEPTION as catch-all types.
  4. Handler Invocation: If a match is found:
    • Recursive Signal Protection: Before calling the handler function, the current handler list is temporarily shadowed. activeHandlers is set to cell.rest (the handlers bound outside the current one). This ensures that if the handler itself calls signal, it won't trigger itself recursively.
    • Execution: The handler's Closure is invoked with the condition object as its argument.
    • Restoration: A finally block ensures the original activeHandlers list is restored if the handler returns normally.

    ERROR Implementation

    The Error(object condition) method build upon Signal:

    1. Signaling Pass: It first invokes Signal(condition). If a handler performs a non-local exit (e.g., via handler-case), the Error method never returns.
    2. Debugger Entry: If Signal returns normally (meaning all handlers declined), Error calls EnterDebugger(condition).
    3. Interactive Debugging: The debugger:
      • Prints the condition and a list of available restarts (retrieved via RestartControl.GetActiveRestarts()).
      • Provides a prompt for the user to select a restart, launch the system-level debugger (Visual Studio/Rider), or abort.
      • If a restart is selected, it is invoked interactively (potentially gathering arguments from the user).
    4. Final Fallback: If the debugger is exited without invoking a restart, Error throws a C# Exception to ensure that execution does not continue on an invalid path.

    Notable Implementation Decisions and Edge Cases

signal and error complete the Common Lisp condition system implementation for CLRHack

30 May 2026 7:00am 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