Keith Whyte @keith@tic-ac.org

If you don’t have the resources to write and understand the code yourself, you don’t have the resources to maintain it either.

Any monkey with a keyboard can write code. Writing code has never been hard. People were churning out crappy code en masse way before generative AI and LLMs. I know because I’ve seen it, I’ve had to work with it, and I no doubt wrote (and continue to write) my share of it.

What’s never been easy, and what remains difficult, is figuring out the right problem to solve, solving it elegantly, and doing so in a way that’s maintainable and sustainable given your means.

Code is not an artefact, code is a machine. Code is either a living thing or it is dead and decaying. You don’t just write code and you’re done. It’s a perpetual first draft that you constantly iterate on, and, depending on what it does and how much of that has to do with meeting the evolving needs of the people it serves, it may never be done. With occasional exceptions (perhaps? maybe?) for well-defined and narrowly-scoped tools, done code is dead code.

So much of what we call “writing” code is actually changing, iterating on, investigating issues with, fixing, and improving code. And to do that you must not only understand the problem you’re solving but also how you’re solving it (or how you thought you were solving it) through the code you’ve already written and the code you still have to write.

So it should come as no surprise that one of the hardest things in development is understanding someone else’s code, let alone fixing it when something doesn’t work as it should. Because it’s not about knowing this programming language or that (learning a programming language is the easiest part of coding), or this framework or that, or even knowing this design pattern or that (although all of these are important prerequisites for comprehension) but understanding what was going on in someone else’s head when they wrote the code the way they wrote it to solve a particular problem.

It frankly boggles my mind that some people are advocating for automating the easy part (writing code) by exponentially scaling the difficult part (understanding how exactly someone else – in this case, a junior dev who knows all the hows of things but none of the whys – decided to solve the problem). It is, to borrow a technical term, ass-backwards.

They might as well call vibe coding duct-tape-driven development or technical debt as a service.

🤷‍♂️

#AI #LLMs #vibeCoding #softwareDevelopment #design #craft

a 1990s-era Earthlink explainer that reminds us of a time when we still had the power (and the ability) to accept - or refuse #othernetworks (pic taken by @rose_alibi)

Google has news on what you will need to do for still being able to sideload apps:

* enable developer options
* confirm that you are not tricked
* restart phone and re-authenticate
* wait one day
* confirm with biometrics that you know what you are doing
* decide if you only want unrestricted installs for 1 week or forever
* confirm that you accept the risks
* enjoy the few apps that still have developers motivated to develop for a user-base willing to put up with this

https://goo.gle/advance-flow

I'm writing this in English.

Not because English is my first language—it isn't. I'm writing this in English because if I wrote it in Korean, the people I'm addressing would run it through an outdated translator, misread it, and respond to something I never said. The responsibility for that mistranslation would fall on me. It always does.

This is the thing Eugen Rochko's post misses, despite its good intentions.

@Gargron argues that LLMs are no substitute for human translators, and that people who think otherwise don't actually rely on translation. He's right about some of this. A machine-translated novel is not the same as one rendered by a skilled human translator. But the argument rests on a premise that only makes sense from a certain position: that translation is primarily about quality, about the aesthetic experience of reading literature in another language.

For many of us, translation is first about access.

The professional translation market doesn't scale to cover everything. It never has. What gets translated—and into which languages—follows the logic of cultural hegemony. Works from dominant Western languages flow outward, translated into everything. Works from East Asian languages trickle in, selectively, slowly, on someone else's schedule. The asymmetry isn't incidental; it's structural.

@Gargron notes, fairly, that machine translation existed decades before LLMs. But this is only half the story, and which half matters depends entirely on which languages you're talking about. European language pairs were reasonably serviceable with older tools. Korean–English, Japanese–English, Chinese–English? Genuinely usable translation for these pairs arrived with the LLM era. Treating “machine translation” as a monolithic technology with a uniform history erases the experience of everyone whose language sits far from the Indo-European center.

There's also something uncomfortable in the framing of the button-press thought experiment: “I would erase LLMs even if it took machine translation with it.” For someone whose language has always been peripheral, that button looks very different. It's not an abstract philosophical position; it's a statement about whose access to information is expendable.

I want to be clear: none of this is an argument that LLMs are good, or that the harms @Gargron describes aren't real. They are. But a critique of AI doesn't become more universal by ignoring whose languages have always been on the margins. If anything, a serious critique of AI's political economy should be more attentive to those asymmetries, not less.

The fact that I'm writing this in English, carefully, so it won't be misread—that's not incidental to my argument. That is my argument.

Buenas tardes #Fediverso, si están en #Latinoamérica, si no, buenos días o noches.

¿Qué tal les ha sentado la noticia de que #Google pretende, casi casi, empezar con el proceso de "Apleizarse", de empezarse a volver cada vez más privativo en cuanto al #SistemaOperativo #Android?

https://keepandroidopen.org/es/

Quiero leer sus comentarios y opiniones al respecto...

¡Llegó la hora! 🕗

#2026 es el año para Dejar Windows de una buena vez! 💻

#DejaEl10

https://dejael10.cmxsl.org

Únete a Windows 11, si no tienes problema con ser el menu de tu computación.

No somo fans de las dicotomías, sin embargo 🤔

"La computación te sirve a ti, o tu le sirves a ella"

#NoMasCaciquesDigitales.

Con #SoftwareLibre puedes aspirar a una real #SoberaniaDigital

No estás solo, acércate a los grupos de usuarios y/o en
#Mexico al #CMXSL

Back in May 2019, we said goodbye to SVN and Bugzilla and migrated to Git and GitHub [1]. SinceOpenSouce accumulated 188 repositories. 🙀

We're now making a list to decide which ones we're moving to @Codeberg and which are going to archived and left behind.

While we're doing that, we signed NLnet Labs up as a Codeberg e.V. member!

[1] https://lists.nlnetlabs.nl/pipermail/unbound-users/2019-April/006130.html

#OpenSouce #FOSS #DigitalSovereignty #DNS #BGP

theintercept.com/2026/03/05/k... #KOSA #COPPA #Internet #Infosec #Privacy #Security

Congress Is Considering Abolis...

Instead of a WhatsApp group or whatever, my two oldest friends and me have a private non-federated Mastodon instance running on my laptop for some time now

It's all private and closed so only we 3 use it to communicate and share stories with each other!

You can just disable federation and set everything private so it becomes a little intranet for friends!

#Mastodon is really amazing

#AufBauLeaks #39C3

Canopy: ✅
Pretty lights: ✅
Sound system: ✅
New tables: ✅
Cosyness: ✅✅✅
Collection of Chaotic Creatures: 💖💖💖

All that is missing now is Congress... and you! <3

Three days until #39c3 and many people are preparing their first visit at Congress. Welcome! I know many of first timers are planning to help, especially when they got a friends ticket. We do not expect anyone to do work at the event when the have a friends ticket.

Being an Angel at a chaos event is fun but please die not make your whole visit about working there - especially when you are a first timer.

I wrote post about volunteering and fitting in https://jascha.wtf/angels-at-chaos-about-volunteering-and-fitting-in/

Das SIP und das DECT-Netz sind online. Wir haben alle Informationen zur Telefonie auf dem #39c3 in einem Blog-Post zusammengefasst.
DE: https://events.ccc.de/2025/12/23/39c3-poc/

The SIP and DECT networks are online. We summarized all information about telephony at #39c3 in a blog post.
EN: https://events.ccc.de/en/2025/12/23/39c3-poc/

#AmazingTimeToMarket #DECT