Notices by Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Wednesday, 14-Jan-2026 12:40:59 JST 
Jonathan Corbet
So somebody took a couple of LWN's recent conference articles, threw them into an LLM blender with some other stuff, and produced ... this ...
https://www.webpronews.com/linux-kernels-future-tab-integrates-rust-navigates-ai-boosts-collaboration/
Google News propagates that stuff - something they have long refused to do with LWN's original material. But somehow we're supposed to continue to exist to feed material into that machine?
Sorry, having a grumpy day. -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Sunday, 21-Dec-2025 07:54:35 JST
Jonathan Corbet
Power is back on here. After two days without, one definitely appreciates the luxury of being able to flip on a light.
According to the official numbers, the peak wind gust in my neighborhood was 102mph. Suffice to say I didn't get my bike ride in yesterday... otherwise all seems well at this point, though.
[Now looking harder at vehicle-to-home power solutions.] -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Thursday, 18-Dec-2025 23:05:54 JST
Jonathan Corbet
I encountered this gathering in Japan; was really tempted to post it as another Maintainers Summit group photo but ... resisted ... -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Thursday, 11-Dec-2025 07:40:39 JST
Jonathan Corbet
So I took some grief yesterday about the "clickbait" headline on the brief Rust news I put up:
https://lwn.net/Articles/1049831/
In person, though, I've gotten far more grief for adding the "(successful)" parenthetical afterward — folks say the original was better.
Oh well, I've learned to be more careful with headlines now.
Next article: Seven Shocking Conclusions from the Linux Plumbers Conference — but #4 will warm your heart. -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Tuesday, 25-Nov-2025 17:32:35 JST
Jonathan Corbet
In 2017 Randall Munroe posted a strip called "Seven Years" about being the caregiver for a loved one dealing with cancer:
https://xkcd.com/1928/
That strip literally made me cry, it was such a clear telling of what that experience is like; much of it could have been about my own life.
Except that my own experience had a different ending.
Today he put out "Fifteen Years":
https://xkcd.com/3172/
This one made me want to cheer. What a joy to see a story that has played out so differently, so much better. I have never crossed paths with Mr. Munroe, but I rejoice in his and his family's good fortune as if he were a good friend.
Here's to many more years. -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Wednesday, 15-Oct-2025 05:36:45 JST
Jonathan Corbet
For whatever reason, I seem to have ended up with a position high on the list of people who, somebody thinks, are desperate to borrow money for their company from random people who show up offering it. It's generally at least a half-dozen phone calls and texts per day, plus all of the emails.
I'm guessing the scam is something like "we'll wire you the money right away, just give us your account number", or "the financing is all lined up, we just need you to pay an administrative fee first". I am not curious enough to find out.
It sure would be nice if all those bozos would go away. -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Wednesday, 08-Oct-2025 18:16:43 JST
Jonathan Corbet
There are days when I feel like I want to find a different world to live in; this post from Kevin Kelly has brought that feeling to the fore. Consider: Some authors have it backwards. They believe that AI companies should pay them for training AIs on their books. But I predict in a very short while, authors will be paying AI companies to ensure that their books are included in the education and training of AIs. Or perhaps...
If a book can be more easily parsed by an AI, its influence will be greater. Therefore many books will be written and formatted with an eye on their main audience. Writing for AIs will become a skill like any other, and something you can get better at. Authors could actively seek to optimize their work for AI ingestion, perhaps even collaborating with AI companies to ensure their content is properly understood, and integrated.Kevin has certainly consumed large amounts of Kool-Aid on this one. Personally, I plan to keep writing for humans, even if that is seemingly obsolete.
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Wednesday, 10-Sep-2025 08:09:43 JST
Jonathan Corbet
If you run an operation that pays freelance authors for articles, you get a *lot* of people trying to sell you the output from their slop factory of choice. These pitches far exceed the legitimate ones at this point.
Today we got a pitch for an article about the load-balancing scheduler regression caused by the sched_ext framework in the 6.11 release. Somebody has clearly put a bit more than the usual amount of attention into the sort of topic that might appeal to @lwn. There is only one little problem... that regression had nothing to do with sched_ext, which was merged in 6.12. The pitch was a bunch of authoritative-sounding bullshit; the article would surely have been more of the same.
Sometimes I truly lose hope about humanity's ability to keep its head above the flood of this stuff. -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Wednesday, 10-Sep-2025 05:37:08 JST
Jonathan Corbet
...that feeling of dread that comes when your bank starts sending cheery emails about how wonderful their reimplemented app is going to be... -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Tuesday, 12-Aug-2025 06:45:47 JST
Jonathan Corbet
The fact that Microsoft is reorganizing the management of GitHub, which it purchased in 2018, is not particularly surprising.
The fact that it is being moved into Microsoft's AI operation, though, says a lot about what GitHub is actually for now.
https://www.theverge.com/news/757461/microsoft-github-thomas-dohmke-resignation-coreai-team-transition -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Monday, 28-Jul-2025 20:59:28 JST
Jonathan Corbet
list_add(figure_out_postgresql_replication, &task_list);
list_add(Linode, &shit_list); -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Monday, 28-Jul-2025 20:59:27 JST
Jonathan Corbet
Just got a note from them saying "the storage for the physical host that your Linode resides on is in a degraded state.
Our team has determined that there is a *potential* for data loss or corruption for all services residing on it"
Oh, and also that they'll continue charging us for it anyway until we delete it. -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Friday, 11-Jul-2025 00:02:13 JST
Jonathan Corbet
It's awfully easy to get depressed about the state of the world, so an article like this one, on the speed and scope of the solar-power transition, is more than welcome.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/46-billion-years-on-the-sun-is-having-a-moment -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Friday, 27-Jun-2025 00:16:30 JST
Jonathan Corbet
The net is full of articles and pictures about Linus Torvalds meeting Bill Gates. They all gloss over the fact that Dave Cutler was also there — to the point of cropping him out of the picture. Somehow, it seems, the guy who did RSX-11, VMS, and Windows NT is relevant too...? -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Friday, 27-Jun-2025 00:13:11 JST
Jonathan Corbet
It took a long time and over 60 articles but, at @lwn, we have finally managed to complete our reporting from the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. If you want to know what is going on in those core parts of the kernel, this is the place to look.
We've put together an EPUB version of the whole set as well — good bedtime reading!
https://lwn.net/Articles/1026338/ -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Friday, 20-Jun-2025 05:00:41 JST
Jonathan Corbet
The Wayback Machine managed to capture a Linux Journal article about the Arch Linux distribution's plan to switch to "rye-init" before whatever human intelligence remains there figured out that "rye-init" does not actually exist.
The Linux Journal predates LWN by some years and was, for a long time, the definitive read for Linux users. The Don Marti ( @dmarti ) years were especially noteworthy. It is sad to see where it has ended up now.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250618001301/https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/arch-linux-breaks-new-ground-official-rust-init-system-support-arrives -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Thursday, 12-Jun-2025 04:05:42 JST
Jonathan Corbet
@ljs @ptesarik You made me curious, so I did a couple of checks ... there are all of 12 commits in the mainline with Nacked-by tags. The most productive Nakers are Christoph Hellwig and Tetsuo Handa, with three each. There are single nacks from Hannes Reinecke, Jakub Kicinski, Manish Chopra, Pablo Neira Ayuso, Rob Herring, and Tejun Heo.
All the rest of you are slacking. -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Thursday, 01-May-2025 05:46:21 JST
Jonathan Corbet
I have often complained that, even though thousands of developers are paid to work on the Linux kernel, there is not a single person whose job it is to write documentation for the kernel. The problem is wider than that, though: Alejandro Colomar, who has been maintaining the man pages collection for the last four years, can no longer afford to do it for free.
https://lwn.net/ml/all/4d7tq6a7febsoru3wjium4ekttuw2ouocv6jstdkthnacmzr6x@f2zfbe5hs7h5 -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Monday, 07-Apr-2025 22:52:18 JST
Jonathan Corbet
20 Years ago: the BitKeeper license changed, making it unavailable for kernel development.
https://lwn.net/Articles/130746/
It drove home the perils of relying on proprietary software and spurred the creation of Git - a significant event, overall. -
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Jonathan Corbet (corbet@social.kernel.org)'s status on Monday, 31-Mar-2025 01:11:38 JST
Jonathan Corbet
Today I got a cheery email from somebody who claims to be the "ethics and compliance" officer for a company called Bright Data. He wanted to have a "no pressure" conversation about the whole AI scraperbot problem. Looking at their web site, this company offers an API that, and I quote, "Bypasses anti-scraping mechanisms and solves CAPTCHAs, ensuring uninterrupted access to the most protected web sites".
After careful consideration for several milliseconds, I have concluded that I really don't have anything to discuss with this person.
But at least their claimed "100M+" of residential IP addresses that they use for their DDOS attacks are "ethically sourced".
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