But, he said, it took six months to set up the tool to not produce bad responses. If you are a competent developer, he said, an LLM makes a great tool, but only after that effort has been put in to set it up. He resisted suggestions to post his LLM-training materials, saying that each developer needs to go through that process separately.

I mean just because I don’t copy other people’s neovim or emacs dotfiles 1:1 doesn’t mean they’re not very helpful when putting together my own config. After all one of the great things about open source is that when you share some config or code others can benefit from it without having to go through the same struggle.

Torvalds suggested adding an AGENTS.md file that makes generating kernel code expensive. He ends every session with a lengthy cleanup pass that takes a couple of hours to run, executing tasks like ensuring that the code matches the comments. That amount of work cannot be done with a free LLM account. I asked whether that risked cutting off bright new developers that we would rather hang onto; Torvalds answered that the kernel project only wants serious developers. That includes having access to enough resources to function in this world.

I thought the point of said agents file was to increase efficiency, not deliberately make things expensive and punish people who don’t get infinite free tokens.

Linux is of course free to run dev however they want and will survive no matter what given who backs them, but it is very depressing to see someone who I’d looked up to as I got into tech take such an attitude. Making things harder for new contributors while worrying about succession also seems ridiculous.

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And here I am barely able to do basic stuff in Ghidra for CTFs. News like this makes me wonder what’s the point of it all…

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Well, besides knocking sites offline AI scrapers have also forced half the web behind captchas or anubis challenges. Which are terrible on low bandwidth, and make it basically impossible to use browsers such as lynx.

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Oh I’m not Taiwanese lol, I just shared these posts cuz I have a general interest in the topic. Managing systems / research / communicating under limited connectivity is something I ruminate on regularly, but don’t really drill outside of experimenting a bit with offline knowledge bases such as kiwix or devdocs.

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Funnily enough I posted about a previous resiliency drill here: https://lobste.rs/s/ut3ncn/measuring_taiwan_s_mobile_slowdown_with. Thread unfortunately didn’t get any discussion :(

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While Taiwan’s situation is obviously a bit extreme, I’m pretty sure there’s a lot to learn for everybody.

Internet blackouts and censorship are sadly becoming more and more common around the world, and as one blogger in Iran put it while experiencing one:

Many of our software are built on top of the assumption of good, stable, high speed connectivity, up to date hardware and the ability to babysit, update and fix the software constantly. In bad situations like this, you don’t have any of this. You might go months without being connected to the internet, you might have to use decades old hardware, and the software should be reliable enough so you don’t have to constantly babysit it.

An internet blackout where your own government will crack down on connecting to the outside world is also a rather extreme situation compared to not being able to load a bloated react app on a 2G connection or from Antarctica, but the point remains that much of the software we rely on is quite bandwidth and compute hungry.

But most orgs, outside of governmental intervention, are not incentivized to care about things like this. I feel there are some individual efforts that could be very helpful (having one’s own simplified search engine like ~technomancy does instead of just solely relying on google for example), but if everyone’s insistent on running critical comms through WhatsApp or Line or Facebook Messenger which go down with the submarine cables / us-east-1 outage, there’s not really much you can do.

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