Omnistrate hosted an event at the Amazon office in San Francisco focused on the challenges generative AI poses for commercial open source companies. Speakers from Zep and Scalar discussed how Omnistra…
The Grand Hyatt in Seattle has implemented an AI virtual assistant to answer phone calls, replacing traditional front desk phone service. A guest attempting to resolve a misdelivered package required …
After four years at Amazon Web Services (AWS), the author is being fired and expresses relief, citing significant changes to the company since 2022. The primary reasons for their unhappiness were a ma…
The article explains that a recent port of Notepad++ to macOS was not created by the original maintainer, leading to confusion and trademark concerns. The author draws on past experiences with OpenNMS…
The article is a sarcastic, first-person account of the author's experience at GrafanaCon 2026 in Barcelona. Despite claiming to "hate" the conference, the author details that it was incredibly well-o…
The author reflects on their nostalgic history with email, starting with slow BBS-based messaging in the late 1980s before modern instant communication. They express concern that major providers like …
The article argues that open-source software is being threatened by a "death by a thousand cuts" through new regulations. It cites the European Union's Cyber Resilience Act and California's age verifi…
The article summarizes the author's experience at the 2024 All Things AI conference in Durham, NC, a sister event to All Things Open. The conference featured workshops and talks on AI, including a key…
The 2026 Monki Gras conference, organized by Redmonk analyst James Governor, is a spring sister event to the Monktoberfest and focuses on open-source community and craft. Held at the Tab Centre in Lon…
The article discusses the history and current state of MySQL, noting its decline in popularity after Oracle's acquisition but arguing it may be due for a renaissance. Despite PostgreSQL becoming the d…
After nearly four years at AWS, the author qualified for a laptop replacement and upgraded from a 13-inch M1 MacBook Pro to a 16-inch M4 MacBook Pro. The primary reason for choosing the larger, heavie…
The article discusses the author's defense of Contributor License Agreements (CLAs) and the Affero GPL (AGPL) in open source projects, arguing that CLAs serve an important role by requiring contributo…
The article describes the author's project to set up Home Assistant (HA) on a Raspberry Pi for home automation, including a panic button for his elderly father. After installation, the author encounte…
The article describes a person who emailed "Billie the Platypus," an AI email assistant created by Corey Quinn with a "burned out, cynical" personality. The author received a humorous, menacingly prof…
The article describes how attending AWS re:Invent, held the week after Thanksgiving, has disrupted the author's traditional holiday decorating routine, as the conference requires travel to Las Vegas a…
The article describes the author's trip to Zürich for NixCon, where they met with longtime friend Alex Finger, now CTO of SAP/Switzerland. They then traveled to Vaduz, Liechtenstein, to meet Kaj Arnö,…
NixCon 2025 was held from September 5-7 at the Ostschweizer Fachhochschule (OST) in Rapperswil-Jona, Switzerland, attracting nearly 500 attendees—more than double the previous year's turnout. The conf…
The article describes the author's struggle to improve Wi-Fi coverage in a detached apartment, despite using a recommended Asus ZenWiFi XT8 mesh network. After other solutions failed, the author disco…
The article describes the author's creation of a Hugo-based "planet" aggregator after migrating from WordPress, as existing planet software was outdated or difficult to implement. Using Anthropic's Cl…
The article argues that Generative AI contributes to a "post-truth" society by presenting incorrect information with certainty, as illustrated by the author's experience where a GenAI search result fa…