I added ActivityPub to this blog I built this blog with Jikji, a static site generator I wrote myself, almost five years ago. Back then I barely knew TypeScript or modern web tooling, and I'd never implemented ActivityPub . TypeScript and modern web tooling are second nature to me now, and ActivityPub has become central to my work. I maintain Fedify , for whatever that's worth, and it bothered me…
Why craft-lovers are losing their craft Les Orchard made a quiet observation recently that I haven't been able to shake. Before LLM coding assistants arrived, the split between developers was invisible: Craft-lovers and make-it-go people sat next to each other, shipped the same products, looked indistinguishable. The motivation behind the work was invisible because the process was identical. The…
Is legal the same as legitimate: AI reimplementation and the erosion of copyleft Last week, Dan Blanchard, the maintainer of chardet—a Python library for detecting text encodings used by roughly 130 million projects a month— released a new version . Version 7.0 is 48 times faster than its predecessor, supports multiple cores, and was redesigned from the ground up. Anthropic's Claude is listed as a…
Acting materialistically in an imperfect world: LLMs as means of production and social relations This is a follow-up to last month's Histomat of F/OSS: We should reclaim LLMs, not reject them . Cory Doctorow celebrated the sixth anniversary of Pluralistic by walking readers through his publishing workflow. Among other things, he mentioned running each post through Ollama, an open-source LLM, to…
Why I don't destroy snowmen In winter, I sometimes come across stories on X about men who deliberately kick over snowmen as they walk by. It's not like destroying a snowman causes real harm to anyone. But there's something visible in that act—a certain ethical disposition either lacking or being formed. For the same reason, I don't speak to LLMs dismissively, and I avoid barking commands at them.…
Histomat of F/OSS: We should reclaim LLMs, not reject them A few days ago I read a blog post titled On FLOSS and training LLMs . It captures well the frustration spreading through the free and open source software community. AI companies show no real respect for F/OSS developers; they exploit open source licensing's idealistic principles, and the law offers little protection against having our…
My 2025 with the fediverse Last year, I wrote an article titled A year with the fediverse , and this year I find myself writing on a similar theme again. Since I've started working full-time on open source software related to the fediverse, 1 I have a feeling I'll be writing articles like this every year as long as I continue this work. Thinking Penguin Magazine Vol.0 I had the opportunity to…
STF invests in Fedify After Fedify received funding from Ghost last year , I was able to work on the project full-time for a while. Even after the contract ended, Ghost continued to provide some sponsorship through Open Collective , though not enough to work on Fedify exclusively. Ghost's CEO suggested I look for more stable funding sources, which led me to apply to various foundation-run…
Recent open source development updates I've found myself creating quite a few open source projects lately, so I thought I'd write up a status report and overview of my ongoing open source work. All these projects are interconnected in various ways. Hollo This project is actually the catalyst for all the open source projects I've created recently. After Elon Musk bought Twitter and renamed it to X,…
A year with the fediverse 2024 was truly a year where I was deeply immersed in the fediverse. I worked on various projects, both large and small, related to the fediverse and ActivityPub, and some of them received quite positive responses from many people. I'm writing this to preserve these good memories. What is the fediverse? Let me briefly explain what the fediverse is—it's a network where…
Ghost funds Fedify I am happy to announce some great news! Fedify , an open source project I've been working on since this spring, has been funded by Ghost , a global publishing platform. What is Fedify? First, let me explain what Fedify is. Fedify is an ActivityPub server framework. ActivityPub protocol is behind the technology that allows disparate social media services like the Mastodon, an…
My new blog I've had two blogs in my life. My first blog, which I started right before I graduated from high school, lasted about three years and I wrote over a hundred posts. It was initially created with a software called Typo 1 , and I moved to WordPress a few months later. I started my second blog in 2010 and wrote over 200 posts in seven years. I started it as a Tumblr, but later moved it to…
Nobody Knows 1 I watched Hirokazu Kore-eda's Nobody Knows ( 誰も知らない ) with Lisa, and I had to choke back tears several times. To put it bluntly, it was a total disaster and a systemic tragedy . Artificial structures have redundancies , so even if one or two parts fail, it usually doesn't disrupt what the whole structure is trying to accomplish. Therefore, if a structure malfunctions significantly,…