Recent content on Pensées de Michel

 Caveat lector 
 This post discusses tools reluctantly written with AI assistance. If you don’t entertain
using them under any circumstance, and think even reading about them legally compromise
your ability to reimplement them yourselves, stop reading now 
 
 Irish politics is refreshingly civilized by US or UK standards – so much so, in fact, that the…

 Caveat lector 
 This post discusses tools reluctantly written with AI assistance. If you don’t entertain
using them under any circumstance, and think even reading about them legally compromise
your ability to reimplement them yourselves, stop reading now 
 
 Today’s post introduces dbranch , a tool to update a Debian package in unstable, and rebuild downstream…

 Caveat lector 
 This post discusses tools reluctantly written with AI assistance. If you don’t entertain
using them under any circumstance, and think even reading about them legally compromise
your ability to reimplement them yourselves, stop reading now 
 
 Happy Friday! Of course it’s not Friday anymore in Asia, and if I finish this post in time, it’s…

 Caveat lector 
 This post discusses tools reluctantly written with AI assistance. If you don’t entertain
using them under any circumstance, and think even reading about them legally compromise
your ability to reimplement them yourselves, stop reading now 
 
 This is a follow-up to the original Sandogasa announcement . Before I ended up fedora-cve-triage to extract…
I have a more serious post coming, but I figured better not risk being confused for a bad joke (especially given the chardet controversy . 
 So instead - something I’ve been promising some people I would write about … the idea that we can classify developers based on their attitude towards (generative) AI, a.k.a. LLMs. 
 Mind you, don’t take this too seriously, and…

 Caveat lector 
 This post discusses tools reluctantly written with AI assistance. If you don’t entertain
using them under any circumstance, and think even reading about them legally compromise
your ability to reimplement them yourselves, stop reading now 
 
 I’ve spent the past few weeks of having to use LLMs to scratch some long-standing itches that,…
the old pen resists but the cursor blinks, waiting— I press Enter. Fine. 
 
 ~ Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) 
 If you know where I work, you’ve probably heard of news reports that we will be judged on AI-driven impact. I’ll let you drawn your own conclusion on how much truth there is in the reports, but you can listen to what Zuck said about AI in a recent earnings report.
hole in my sock letting spring in 
 
 ~ Raymond Roseliep, as quoted in The Christian Century ’s January 2024 issue 
 When New Year comes I told myself, ah, I missed my chance of writing down some New Year resolutions - but never mind that, there’s still Lunar New Year, and after that, Nowruz, right? 
 Both have now passed too, but it’s still Lent - for almost two…
I have informed colleagues and close external collaborators already, but today it’s finally time to make it public: as of now I am officially working out of Meta’s Dublin office 1 , and am no longer based in the US. 
 Why Ireland? 
 Some reasons I am happy to disclose publicly; for the rest, feel free to ask me to regale you in person, if we know each other; preferably over a…
Looking at what tags to use for this post, it surprised me that it’s been over two years since I posted about taking recharge (basically a short sabbatical). 
 Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose… 
 Some reorganizations happen at work, but I’m still basically working upstream on Linux distributions. I have a US passport now, which means traveling to the…
Many long-time Fedora contributors and users have fond memories of Beefy Miracle, the Fedora 17 code name, and its mascot. Major Haydn has a great writeup about it, with instructions on switching back to its Plymouth boot splash on your Fedora machine. 
 But… why limit one’s chance at “accepting the truth and beauty” (sic) to Fedora users (or, strictly speaking, to…
Over the course of 2024, I’ve been increasingly adopting Packit’s pull-from-upstream for automating some package updates. I still think it should only be used judiciously - e.g. I generally only enable it for packages that do not embed code from other projects (necessitating license audits each time) and have good test coverage (because I’ll merge the PR if the test suite and…
After about two years of on-and-off work, I’m happy to report that Nushell has finally landed in Fedora and EPEL 9, and can be installed simply using sudo dnf --refresh install nu on Fedora and your favorite Enterprise Linux distribution (I’m partial to CentOS Stream myself, but also RHEL, AlmaLinux, etc.) 
 (For those not familiar with Nushell yet, think of it as a cross-platform…
I finally got round to attending the Strange Loop conference for the first and last time (since the organizers won’t do another one) . 
 What’s in a name? 
 From an old write-up on UIUC’s website ) - this being the alma mater of organizer Alex Miller: the conference has been described as a “who’s - who of interesting people doing applied computer…
At Meta, we use sample-based profiling with perf to guide performance optimization work – otherwise we would need even more servers than the ones we already have! This 2018 engineering blog post on BOLT is still highly relevant. 
 For a primer on perf , I highly recommend reading Brendan Gregg’s perf examples page. 
 The perf source code is part of the Linux source tree; there…
It’s been over 6 years since I started working at Meta (then known as Facebook). Not going to comment here about all the controversies surrounding our products, but as an employee, I have been lucky enough to work on interesting teams that, yes, don’t do anything that give me cause to be sleepless at night. 
 One perk we have (that is no big deal to friends in Europe, but is a big…
Dear NYT, 
 Because of your
 repeated 
 transphobia and
your doubling down by silencing your internal
critics ,
I can no longer support your publication. 
 I tolerated you continuously giving the anti-choice Douthat a platform, or
Dowd’s anti-Clinton
hatred 
and your biased coverage in 2016 contributing to the decline of US democracy
(that you…
I’ve been a fan of distrobox for a while - it really makes it easy to experiment with different Linux distributions, and also to do packaging work for different distributions regardless of what’s running on the physical machine 1 . 
 It’s not only ridiculously flexible, compared to the Toolbx project that inspires it - the latter requires specially modified containers - but…
With the Twitter board accepting Elon’s buyout offer , I’ve reached the point where I can no longer maintain a presence on this network; I’ll post a link to this blog post, wipe all other tweets, and then delete the account after a week. 
 There are many reasons for this: 
 
 I don’t like to depend on the largesse of a billionaire
 
 see Now &…
I’ve been using myrepos for a while - as someone who juggles a lot of repositories, both for personal projects and as a Fedora and CentOS packager, a ~/.mrconfig synced via Nextcloud really makes checking out repositories consistently, on different computers, straightforward. 
 As the number of tracked repos grow, however, trying to remember where each repo is checked out gets a bit time…
I’m happy to announce that Lagrange ,
probably the most beautiful looking Gemini client, is now available on Fedora
and
EPEL . 
 This means that you can install it with as little as 
 sudo dnf install lagrange
 and this would work on all supported and in-development Fedora releases (Rawhide, 36, 35, 34) as well as on any RHEL / CentOS Stream 8 and 9 derivatives (RHEL,…
The first CentOS Dojo of the year is, as usual, held as a FOSDEM Fringe event . It’s virtual - again - which is a blessing and a curse. It would be fun to travel and meet people in person again once the situation permits, then again, given my family situation that would have meant I would have to skip for the next year or two anyway. 
 That being said, it was held on Hopin, which has a…
Half of 2021 is gone already! I’m back on parental leave, but want to post a quick recap of the past few months. 
 Parental leave 
 I’m out from July 15 until the end of October . 
 I am signed up to some virtual conferences this summer and fall, but do not anticipate really being there except for a few selected talks. Best way to reach me is async via Matrix or email (see…



 Wow, I can’t believe it’s been 24 whole days since my last post ! It’s been quite a productive time, and one full of surprises. 
 
 My Desktop Linux at Facebook talk happened, and the recorded video is now available in WebM and MP4 formats. Linux Unplugged and Phoronix had some nice coverage (thanks Stefano for noticing these!) 
 The changes I’m…
I’ll be presenting (and last-minute-volunteering) at FOSDEM , and some colleagues from Facebook are presenting at the adjacent CentOS Dojo on topics I’m involved in - and we’d love to get your feedback and hopefully get you involved! 
 
 Dojo, Feb 5, 15:00 UTC - Davide Cavalca will introduce the new Hyperscale SIG , a community effort to produce an optional repository to…
My blog is built using the Hugo static side generator, using a lightly forked version of hello-friend-ng . 
 Until yesterday, the only change was to strip prism.js to slim down the site (not upstreaming this yet until I could figure out a way to selectively disable it on pages that don’t need it). 
 Yesterday I sent back my first two pull requests though: 
 
 PR 257 fixing…



 4⭐ for content, 5⭐ for writing style 
 TL;DR a very enjoyable read for the Fediverse #SFFBookClub ; I breezed through it in only four days. 
 This novella is set in the near future where the climate crisis is leading to societal breakdown; with governments now overwhelmed, space exploration is led by the citizen-funded Open Cluster Astronautics and its Lawki crewed missions…
Following Carl Schwann’s post , I have now enabled comments on my blog, starting with this post. It’s surprisingly simple for someone who has not done much mucking around with Hugo before! 
 If you’re also using Hugo, here’s how I did mine: 
 
 Refer to Carl’s commit 
 Copy your theme’s relevant template, preserving the same path, to override its…
In a recent thread on Fedora’s development list, Miroslav Suchý asked about what Fedora packagers found most time-consuming, that could be simplified or better automated. 
 For me, personally, it’s rebuilding a stack of packages that Facebook develop - due to a lack of stable ABI (so it’s partly our own doing, yes), the entire stack has to be rebuilt each time. 
 There…

 This WeChat account has been permanently blocked due to using an unauthorized WeChat plug-in, non-official app, or simulator. Uninstall the unauthorized software now. If this account contains funds, tap “OK” for relevant instructions. 
 
 Readers of my last #deletefacebook post probably know of my interest in avoiding any service where the business interests of the…
As a current Facebook employee, for various reasons I would rather not get into I still need to have a personal Facebook account. 
 I do not really want it to keep a trail of my personal life to be squeezed for every last cent of advertising revenue, though. And slashing-and-burning by deleting this account and starting a new one might cause technical issues so … better not to try it.
I ran across Kev Quick’s announcement for The 512KB Club last month, and noticed that this blog, using the Academic theme for Hugo, was… a bit on the bloated side, clocking in at a whopping 748KB (including 246KB font, 206KB JS, and 190K CSS). 
 This became an added incentive for switching theme - something that’s already on the todo list after a previous theme update…



 On safety razors 
 I recently switched over from the ubiquitous cartridge razors to double-edge safety razors. The original impetus was not finding a non-charging base for my GiletteLabs Heated Razors - the battery in the stem made it too wide for most razor holders - and noticing that a lot of reviews swear by various safety razors. 
 I ended up buying the Rex Ambassador 1…



 I deleted my Instagram accounts today. The process is needlessly obscure - the flow on the app and the web interface only exposes an option to temporarily disable your account - which is an alarming anti-pattern; it is indeed one of the walled gardens I alluded to in an earlier post. 
 What was the impetus for this, you might ask? There are multiple factors I took into…
Background 
 I am writing this as a memory aid to myself the next time I have to do this, but this might make a nice addition to the Fedora ARM wiki once cleaned up. 
 I need a 32-bit ARM VM to debug some issues with armhfp image creation ; the most efficient way to do this would be to use KVM on an aarch64 host like a Raspberry Pi 4, but mine is still in storage – and WFH means…



 5⭐ for content, 4⭐ for writing style 
 I grew up in Indonesia, to Chinese Indonesian parents. As such I considered myself fairly knowledgeable about the events that shook my country in 1965 – the alleged Communist coup, the “counter-coup” that brought Gen. Suharto to power, the ban on any Chinese cultural expression - from Chinese-language books to having…



 I have been progressively getting more and more dissatisfied with the grip Big Tech firms have over our collective lives, and have been gradually pruning my use of proprietary technologies over the past months. 
 It’s quite surprising how much mental energy you save by not engaging with controversial content that algorithmic news feeds at Facebook and Twitter foist on you…
Can’t believe I managed to spend more than a year without updating this blog! In
hindsight, perhaps sticking to open-source communication channels should have
been in my 2019 resolutions… 
 I’ve been meaning to write a comprehensive status update, but perhaps starting
small and updating more often is the way to go. So here goes… 
 On WFH and moving…
It’s that time of the year again, and after a whirlwind 2018 - switching teams, a lot of work-related travel, and all those scandals in the news, it’s time to reflect on the year past and plan changes for the coming year ahead. 
 With that in mind, here are some resolutions I’m aiming for in 2019: 
 
 better work-life balance
 
 attend a conference 
…
With the recent Google announcement 
that Chrome 68 will mark all HTTP sites as insecure, it’s time to say farewell
to GitHub Pages , which I
 switched to more than two years ago, and
move to GitLab Pages . 
 Main reason being, despite
 multiple requests , GitHub still
does not support HTTPS on custom domains, without using another service like
Cloudflare…
Several months ago I discovered David R. MacIver’s impressive
property-based testing library for Python,
 Hypothesis . Having been a big
fan of Haskell’s QuickCheck – but not having much opportunity to use
Haskell in daily life – this is hugely exciting. A mature
property-testing tool, targeting a popular dynamic language … soon
afterwards…
At Traveloka , Indonesia’s leading travel
booking site, we use Phabricator for code
reviews - and as a growing company it might not be straightforward to
figure out who is knowledgeable about a particular part of the code
base and thus would be a good reviewer. 
 Inspired by Quora’s
 Moving Fast With High Code Quality 
post, we are thus implementing a review…
I’ve been meaning to switch to a statically-generated blog for a
while, and specifically to Cryogen hosted on
 GitHub Pages , for a combination of
several reason: 
 
 I am already writing my posts in Markdown for
 Ghost , and prior to that,
 Scriptogr.am 
 Overhead of maintaining a Ghost blog is hosted on
 OpenShift Online 
 I prefer Clojure to…