Notices by nixCraft 🐧 (nixcraft@mastodon.social)

```/bin/bash``` just turned 38.

Happy birthday, bash!

To display bash shell version press `Ctrl+x Ctrl+v`

#unix #linux #opensource

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Tutanota/115847232165161059

Microsoft just turned all Office users into AI users. Lmao. It’s now called the "Microsoft 365 Copilot" app. Get ready for fee increases and having your data opted into training by default with confusing settings. Enshittification has peaked.

This chart shows the total number of Stack Overflow questions asked each month. As you can see, AI summaries in Google and AI coding tools have nearly killed the site. It is only a matter of time before the site shuts down completely. The golden age of independent news, blogs, forums, and specialized sites like Stack Overflow is over. Whether this is good or bad, only time will tell. Personally, I think we are now restricting all internet traffic to just a few Gen AI apps https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/1926661#graph

For #caturday sharing an old meme that always made me laugh

Linux is good now. The author had enough of Windows and Microsoft shenanigans. I'm brave enough to say it: Linux is good now, and if you want to feel like you actually own your PC, make 2026 the year of Linux on (your) desktop

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/linux/im-brave-enough-to-say-it-linux-is-good-now-and-if-you-want-to-feel-like-you-actually-own-your-pc-make-2026-the-year-of-linux-on-your-desktop/

Apple will allow alternative browser engines for iPhone and iPad users (iOS/iPadOS) in Japan.

https://developer.apple.com/support/alternative-browser-engines-jp/

Apple should allow alt engine for the rest of the world too. No point holding it back.

Is it a good idea for new developers to learn ‘C’ language in 2026?

User: Hi! I'd like a wake up call.

Hotel front desk: The entire modern web infrastructure you rely on is held together by a handful of volunteer run opensource projects, and if one lead maintainer decides to delete their repository today, the global economy would stall by noon.

TIL, an open source internet search engine called MarginaliaSearch exists. It mainly for text-oriented websites, specifically indexing the 'small, old, and weird' web. You can even run it on your own server if you have 32GiB of RAM and plenty of fast SSD space for the index. This is perfect for those seeking an alt search engine, but more importantly, it teaches you how to build a search system and manage its dataset. It’s a fantastic CS learning experience to satisfy your itch.

CLI for internet speed test via cloudflare

https://github.com/kavehtehrani/cloudflare-speed-cli?tab=readme-ov-file

You know both Android and iOS have built-in password managers that come pre installed. I just don't see any reasons for these days not to use any password managers. Your financial safety is in your hands. Please take care of it.

Friend: Ugh.

Me: What now?

Friend: This bank app. Ugh!

Me: What about it?

Friend: It says the password is weak. My memory is weak too, let me keep this password.

Me: My friend, let me introduced you to KeePassXC, a free and opensource password manager for Windows/Linux/macOS desktop and Android (KeePassDX/KeePass2Android) app. There is also KeePassium for iOS which is free and has a pro version too. You can do cloud sync if you want.

Friend: Naa. That is too much work.

Me: 😶

Rex is a safe and usable Linux kernel extension framework that allows loading and executing Rust kernel extension programs in the place of eBPF. This is useful for sysadmins/IT pros, DevOps engineers and developers who wish to debug complicated server and system or software issues.

https://github.com/rex-rs/rex

In 1991, a uni student from Finland started a "hobby" project because he couldn't afford to pay expensive Unix license that could run on a commodity hardware. At the time, he told on the mailing list that his project wouldn't be anything "big or professional."

It turned out that he was totally wrong.

Happy 56th Birthday to the creator of Linux kernel and git, Linus Torvalds! May you live healthy and happy forever. Thank you for all your hard work and providing us employment and keep it FLOSS😊

Salesforce, one of the world's most valuable enterprise software companies, is pulling back from its heavy reliance on large language models after encountering reliability issues that have shaken executive confidence in the AI. 😂

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/after-laying-off-4000-employees-and-automating-with-ai-agents-salesforce-executives-admit-we-were-more-confident-about-/amp_articleshow/126121875.cms

💯 justified outrage about AI slop. Source https://bsky.app/profile/robpike.io/post/3matwg6w3ic2s

Phoenix is a new X server, written from scratch in Zig (not a fork of Xorg server). This X server is designed to be a modern alternative to the Xorg server.

https://git.dec05eba.com/phoenix/about/

This continued obsession with AI and removing human talent while daydreaming about crazy ideas despite knowing the limitations of the tools is the craziest corporate culture I’ve seen so far… 😅

Many similar projects failed within months when big banks tried to replace COBOL with modern stacks like Java. Even today, IBM is working hard to promote AI use cases for translating massive legacy codebases to modern alternatives, yet there are very few takers because banking or financial institutions are highly regulated and losing people’s money is a significant risk and bad press waiting to happen.

Microsoft is using AI to replace all their C/C++ code with Rust by 2030. Is that actually possible? What could go wrong? Microsoft’s strategy relies on a new "North Star" metric: 1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code. 😱

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/galenh_principal-software-engineer-coreai-microsoft-activity-7407863239289729024-WTzf/

Rust is good, but this approach seems incredibly difficult. Given the risk of AI hallucinations, aiming for a million lines of code per developer feels like an 'Apollo-program' level of difficulty and an excessive task 😱