Notices by Ludovic Courtès (civodul@toot.aquilenet.fr)

“Unlawful by design: Exposing the human rights costs of generative AI” 👇
https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/pol40/0996/2026/en/

“While these technologies promise sophisticated automation and efficiency, they rely on data collection and model training practices that abuse privacy rights, enable discrimination, and threaten freedom of expression and thought.”

(HT yarlb)

My friends, reading the comments on GCD 008 is a full-time job!

It’s a lot of work, a lot of soul searching and questioning, but I enjoy the many thoughtful comments and the civil discussion.

#Guix folks: discussion on GCD008 “Standing up for human crafting” is now open 👇
https://codeberg.org/guix/guix-consensus-documents/pulls/13

I was reminded that the thing called “list” in Python is actually implemented as a vector, with O(1) random access and O(n) insertion:
https://wiki.python.org/moin/TimeComplexity

As a vehicle for teaching, it sounds terrible.

“[P]rograms must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to
execute”
— Abelson in SICP

“Writing code has never been the goal. Building meaningful software is.”
— Chris Lattner in https://www.modular.com/blog/the-claude-c-compiler-what-it-reveals-about-the-future-of-software

“Time travel without borders”
https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2026/time-travel-without-borders/

On the freshly implemented ability of ‘guix time-machine’ and ‘guix pull’ to download channel files without putting you at risk.

#Guix

I’ve been happily using fj.el on and off for months; I’ve tried emacs-forgejo by Thanos Apollo for the past two days (HT @csantosb) and I find it pretty amazing.

🧵

@SRAZKVT It’s “just” a layer on top of LaTeX, Lout, etc., but maybe give Skribilo a try:
https://nongnu.org/skribilo/

And for music scores, LilyPond, of course. :-)

@janneke

There’s been climate-change deniers; now there’s those who deny the ecological footprint of LLMs.

The backlash was already visible in tech circles with the fact that in recent years environmental considerations are rarely even mentioned in discussions on the pros and cons of LLMs.

The mechanism that makes it so that we no longer need to enter our LUKS passphrase twice is pretty cool:
https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/Bootloader-Configuration.html#Automatic-LUKS-Master-Key-Passing

#Guix

“[LLMs] could demystify the capabilities of a modern Linux workstation and bring them to a much wider audience.”
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/the-future-of-ai-in-ubuntu/81130

Demystifying by adding an “everything machine” as a black-box on top of a complex system? I’m skeptical.

#SoftwareHeritage, #Nix, and #Guix cited as tools to improve the #reproducibility of research artifacts:
https://cacm.acm.org/news/is-there-a-way-to-solve-the-reproducibility-problem/

@Profpatsch Yeah well, it’s a questionable categorization; I guess their goal is to distinguish between those forbid/allow/boast-about use of LLMs.

I dislike the pointing-fingers aspect of it, but I find the links to policies etc. quite valuable.

@abucci I’m also of the opinion that, even from a purely free software perspective, putting aside the many ethical concerns (environmental and social), integrating those opaque services as part of the development workflow is a problem.

I mean, “we” fought against the use of BitKeeper, and later GitHub, for free software development—among the many things people were critical about. And now all this would go through just fine?

@Profpatsch

Well-documented list of free software projects and their use of genAI:
https://codeberg.org/small-hack/open-slopware

It’s already a long list that shows what looks like uncritical adoption, both by high-profile projects (systemd, VLC, etc.) and by niche projects (GNU Mach is a prime example).

@cwebber The EmDash thing, a sort of reimplementation of WordPress “under the more permissive MIT license”, doesn’t look like a joke:
https://github.com/emdash-cms/emdash

📢 Hear, hear! #Guile birds of a feather session online on Monday, April 6th, 1PM UTC!
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guile-devel/2026-04/msg00002.html

Kudos to Olivier Dion for this great initiative—and for all the energy put into Guile!

@cwebber It’s tiring and it leads to an erosion of trust whose consequences are hard to anticipate.

When cross-compiling, Waf *requires* QEMU at configure time to do things like computing sizeof(xyz). 🤦
https://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Waf#cross-compiling

What editor do you use for your #Guix and #Guile code?

Help us improve the manual’s section on editor setup 👇
https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/html_node/The-Perfect-Setup.html