LINUX Unplugged - 676: Fork Around and Find Out

Episode Date: July 20, 2026

Linus delivers a blunt verdict on AI in the Linux kernel, Chris finds the remote Linux desktop that finally works, and Brent gives his notes system a serious rebuild.Sponsored By:Jupiter Party Annual Membership: Put your support on automatic with our annual plan, and get one month of membership for free!Managed Nebula: Meet Managed Nebula from Defined Networking. A decentralized VPN built on the open-source Nebula platform that we love.Support LINUX UnpluggedLinks:Web Boost — Send us a boost via sats or USD💥 Gets Sats Quick and Easy with Strike📻 LINUX Unplugged on Fountain.FMJupiter Garage SWAGAppleTalk 1985-2026 Memorial StickerSorry, I only open regular files StickerClanker Therapy Session 1 - Member's Stream — We’re taking the hype out of agents and showing the workflows that actually help. Join us for a hands-on walk-through of our Hermes multi-agent setup, how we let agents manage systems safely, and how we introduce them to a new Home Assistant instance without letting them run wild.Clanker Therapy Session 1 Highlights - YouTubeKeynote: Linus Torvalds, Creator of Linux & Git with Dirk Hohndel, Founder, DH Consulting - YouTubeLinus Torvalds tells AI haters to fork off - The RegRe: Linking Patchwork with Sashiko? - Linus Torvalds — AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one.sashiko — Agentic review of Linux Kernel code changesSilverBullet — SilverBullet is a Programmable, Private, Browser-based, Open Source, Self Hosted, Personal Knowledge Database.logseq — A privacy-first, open-source platform for knowledge management and collaboration.Big update: Logseq is splitting into two versionsLogseq public roadmapLogseq DB Version DocsLogseq DB Version ChangesNixbook OS — A set-and-forget modern operating system designed for simplicity, speed, and peace of mind.odysseus — A self-hosted AI workspace for chat, agents, research, documents, email, notes, calendar, and local model workflows.fwtop — Real-time router/firewall traffic visualizer TUI for Linux (interfaces, conntrack, firewall drops)hister — Hister is a private search engine for the pages you visit and the files you keep. It indexes their full contents so you can find information again from the web interface, terminal, or an AI assistant connected through MCP.3D[S]tageVibesArtemis Qt — Artemis Qt is an enhanced cross-platform client for NVIDIA GameStream and Apollo/Sunshine servers. It brings the advanced features from Artemis Android to desktop platforms.Apollo — Sunshine fork - The easiest way to stream with the native resolution of your client device.RustDesk — Open-Source Remote Desktop with Self-Hosted Server Solutionsrustdesk - GitHub — An open-source remote desktop application designed for self-hosting, as an alternative to TeamViewer.NoMachine — The fastest and highest quality remote desktop you have ever tried.Sunshine — Self-hosted game stream host for Moonlight.Moonlight PC — GameStream client for PCs (Windows, Mac, Linux, and Steam Link)

Summer routines live or die by how easy they are. And honestly, if something takes too much effort, I'm out. That's why Grooons is my go-to. It's my one daily pack of gummies covering my greens, vitamins, and minerals. Plus, it has six grams of prebiotic fiber, which is more than two cups of broccoli. No mixing powders, no giant pills, no hassle. I just rip open the pack and I'm done. They taste good and they make it easy to stay on top of my health, even when life gets busy.

Save up to 52% with the code podcast at grooens.co. That's code podcast at g-r-un-s.com. Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris. My name is Wes. And my name is Brent. Well, hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show today, Linus put his foot down on AI in Linux kernel development.

We'll cover his blunt message he had for developers. And then we're going to talk about reworking the note stack. Brent and Wes are coming at me with a whole new hot stack. And then I'll do a quick remote Linux desktop showdown. I went through some of the more recent remote Linux desktop options, came away with what I think is a clear winner. They're going to round it out with the great boost, I guess, the boosts, the picks, and more. So before we get there, just sort of save me mumble room.

Time appropriate greetings, everybody. Hello, hello today. Hello, there. Hello, thanks. Hello. A strong crew today. That's important. I'm going to pull on them.

I'm going to get through it. I'm going to get through it. The other thing that's going to help me is my friends over at Defined networking. go to define.net slash unplugged and meet managed nebula from defined networking. It is the easiest way to build a fast, resilient private network on the open source nebula platform. It is rock solid infrastructure. And now every new network includes a free managed lighthouse. So you could just get connected, your first machines.

I think they're using IPV6 too, real easy, smooth. And of course, you can still run your own houses to have your own control too. So you can kind of take advantage of theirs if you want, use only yours, or do a mix of both. That's really powerful. Owning your own infrastructure at the network level is ultimately important and powerful. So you can get started with 100 hosts for free. This is not like anybody else. No credit card required.

Go to define.net slash unplugged. Check out a totally different way to do mesh VPN. Go to define. Dot net slash unplugged. And a big thank you to Define for sponsoring the unplugged program. Speaking of sponsors, we probably should have addressed this earlier, maybe a week or two ago. But this is sort of, we don't really think often to talk about. talk about the mechanics of the show.

But then we publish it and we go, oh, we should probably talk about this. So people that have been listening for the last few months know that we're experimenting with dynamic ads. And we're kind of doing that in place of when we don't have an ad that's been directly sold, like a deal where I'm coming on and I'm doing the host read. They don't, you know, it, my preference is the host read ads. But the ad world has changed. And dynamic is the way it goes because the buyers prefer it that way. is the customers prefer it.

So what we're going to experiment with is shortening the pre-show or like the pre-roll that you hear if you get a dynamic ad. I think we're going to, we haven't done this yet, but I think we should shorten that to 60 seconds. And then, um, Roger. In the mid-roll ads, it'll be like ads that are in the show. Those will be about 90 seconds because that's what the typical length is. And then there'll be ads at the end of the show. And it does help the show if you listen to those.

However, if you are tired of ads, we do have the member version, which offers the same fully produced show by Drew, but with just no ads. And you also get the bootleg, if you like, which typically doesn't have ads, or it has like a shortened version of them. And we're going to try to dial this in. We do like your feedback on this. We're paying attention. And it's new. Yeah, very new for us as well. I resisted this for a very long time.

So I'm now paying the tax of not really paying attention to this. and I'm learning on the go, on the fly. We have been really kind of tight, really since the beginning of the year, tighter than we really even talk about publicly. And so we're trying to find the right balance here to make this work. We're going to adjust some of it,

and we encourage your feedback. We encourage you to listen because it does help the show or sign up for a membership if you're sick and tired of it. And if you have any questions, shoot it in and we'll try to answer. But that we just wanted to mention it. We probably should have mentioned a couple of weeks ago as we began experiment.

doing more with this. And it's a learning process. So thank you everybody. We really haven't had any complaints or anything like that, but we just wanted to talk about it. Now, before it became like an elephant in the room. And something that's exciting to see, because I'm hoping we're going to make it, is the Texas Linux Fest call for papers have reopened. Yeah, that's right. Just a short little window here. It'll close on July 22nd. Oh, yeah. But if you missed the first one, you got a shot now. They have also released the first round of approved talks, too. So you can kind of see what is already there if you need to calibrate off that. And specifically, they're looking for things in observability, automation, infrastructure, databases, or software development. That's pretty great. I'm hoping we can

make it. We don't really have all our plans in yet, but we always try to make that one. Yeah, I believe it's at the beginning of November this year. Okay. Okay. All right. So get that on your calendars, and we'll try to join you. This week, Linus made news with a bomb he dropped on the Linux kernel mailing list. And I think to really kind of wrap our head around this, we should go back a couple of weeks because what we're seeing right now are the headlines and the takeaways from this one post in the mailing list that has a lot of other stuff in it too. But Linus has recently been on a bit of a world tour, actually, sitting down with Dirk and

talking about his thoughts on AI. And what we have is a couple of series of clips that are over the last about 60 days. And you can actually hear Linus's thoughts evolve in that 60 days. and this is about 60 days, the timeline before this big bomb that was dropped on the mailing list that everybody's talking about this week. So we wanted to go back to that because it started, it really started with Linus being a lot more kind of contemplative on the pain points of AI and all this. So he sits down with Dirk Handel often at these open source summits. And there was just a couple that happened recently. And some of these clips, our members have already heard in the bootleg because we played this a few weeks for them. But now it's relevant to this week's episode.

plus there's been new stuff since then. So we're going to catch you up on all of it. So let's start with this. Linus starts with what he thinks right now is the most painful aspect of AI development. Again, I have a hard time seeing everybody because I have the lights in my face. Very bright.

But how many people here use actually AI for coding? Yeah. Pretty much. So I have a love-hate relationship. with AI. I actually really like it from a technical angle. I love the tools. I find it very useful and interesting, but it is definitely causing pain points. And the big pain points in Linux traditionally, and I suspect in most projects, have not been so much the code itself, but has been when you're forced to change how you're forced to change how you're

you work and people get into a rut. People know this is this is how I work and and this is how I like working and then something comes along and for me it was like a long time ago around 2000 I had to change how I worked because I did not scale anymore for the project as Linux was growing and that was I still remember it being one of the more painful episodes in kernel development and it was literally 25 years ago. And I think we're seeing some of the same effects now with AI where it kind of forces people to get out of their comfort zone. So we've had a lot of social issues with the AI generated bug reports but also code and there's

it's not a Linus doesn't scale like it was 25 years ago. Now it's people don't necessarily scale and it takes a while to learn how to use the tools in a maybe responsible isn't the right word, but in a way that actually works with the community and works with the other developers. And we are definitely seeing some of the pain. One of the pain points recently has been the security mailing list where when people find bugs with AI, a lot of the time. I mean, a lot of bugs can be security issues. And I've said for years, decades, that a security bug is a bug, but the other side of that is a bug is often a security bug, and you may not even realize it. And people think that when they find a bug with AI, the first reaction

seems to sometimes be, let's send it to the security list because this may have security implications. And the security list for the kernel was overrun by duplicate reports, by tens, hundreds of people running AI, often the same AI tool, and getting slightly different results, often with the same underlying cause, but we were flooded by people sending bugs. And then you have this list with fairly few people on it, because it's all supposed to be super secret and we spent all our time just forwarding these reports to to other the other developers who knew that area better and we made the policy change that basically if you find a security or any bug with AI you should basically consider it to be public and

just because if you founded the AI a hundred other people also founded with AI and And obviously that when it comes to things that really are security issues, you may not want to make the exploit public, right? Don't go and say to the world, hey, this is how, and this, by the way, I want to make it very clear this is not just about the Linux kernel. When you find an exploit for any piece of software, don't be that guy or that gal who then crows about it publicly and say, look hey I could bring down this big company or whatever just let people know what the problem was and don't necessarily tell them exactly how to make somebody's life really miserable on a Friday afternoon right so we are seeing some pain points with AI and and it's not that the technology is bad and I personally really

enjoy it but But there's like the social issues that it causes have yet to be all worked out, I would say. The conversation kind of goes on. They talk a bit more about some of the tooling. In a more recent conversation that happened after that, Linus touches on the, expands a little bit more on some of the pain points they've had with LLM development. I want to point out for the record, we made it 26 minutes into this conversation without talking about AI and LLMs.

I think I think this will be the only talk in this conference that gets to that but of course we should talk about this because we did the same session or totally different but same setup session a month ago in Minneapolis and one of the things that a lot of people picked up on

was that on stage you said that you see LRMS as just a tool which I completely agree with and you made this interesting statement that you say it offers an incremental efficiency of a 10x. And a lot of people said, oh, Linus thinks that LLMs make everything 10x better. And so I was curious.

That 10X was not scientific, right? That was pulled out of my ass number, obviously, just to clarify. There was two questions down. Okay, so this was a intuitive number that you came up with to rephrase what you just said. But so how much of this true added value that LLMs provide? We just talked about this. The core code gets more eyeballs, but the LLMs can apply the same scrutiny, the same algorithm, the same logic testing ability to all of the code.

How much do you think that the LLMs really create productivity advancement for not you personally, but for the Linux kernel community? So right now we're at kind of the point where hopefully it creates more productivity than it takes away. We certainly saw more junk being generated by LLMs than we saw useful code up until early this year, basically. And even now, it's taking a lot of resources from developers because you get these bug reports. I mean, I don't know how many of you have seen this pattern in your own work. I bet it happens, or I know for a fact that it happens outside the kernel too, where you get bug reports that look entirely valid, and it actually can take quite,

a lot of effort to figure out that, no, that was just hallucination. And it can actually be a huge drain on resources when it takes humans a lot of effort to figure out that, hey, this machine generated report was not true. And so Linus goes on to say that he does think there is some long-term good. And he kind of articulated this in the previous chat as well. Don't get me wrong. This may sound negative to a lot of people, but I actually, I think it's all very good. When AI finds a bug in any source code, that is a short-term pain. But long-term is you found a bug. We fixed it. The end result is better for it. So I'm actually, this is part of why I actually really enjoy AI, and I'm,

But again, I want to stress that the conflict is not that AI is bad. The conflict is then that there are some social choke points and social pain points that come with this new tool that we have 35 years of code, that it sometimes finds issues that we did not find. And it's going to take us some time to just work through the new issues that are found. So I'm actually very positive about this whole thing. I think finding bugs is great because the real problem is all the bugs you didn't find. I also picked up that he seemed to note that there has been some improvements in some of the bigger

and more important areas. At the same time, what has definitely happened in the last couple of months is that we are getting a lot of really good bug reports. of the good ones require more than just the LLM though. They require a person that then goes through the report that was generated by the AI and make sure it was valid. And then also acts as the go-between, between the developers who fix the problem. And we've had to push back quite a bit on people in the sense that if you find a bug with an LLM, It's not enough to just ask the LLM to make a bug report and then throw it over the fence to us.

We want to see a suggested patch. We want to see the human who ran the LLM act as a kind of back and force that we have somebody who can talk to and discuss the issues with because sometimes the patch is a simple one-liner that is obvious, but quite often it ends up being, hey, we didn't think about that issue and we will need to reorganize some code and fixing this properly is going to take a bit of effort. And then you really want to have the person who sent the original report involved in the developers coming back and saying, hey, this is a suggested fix. What does your LLN think about this? Okay, I think that gives us kind of a more expanded view on Linus' thoughts around AI. So everything kind of shifted on July 14th in a Linux media mailing list discussion.

And it wasn't like a discussion around a conventional release or anything like that. It was, I guess, a thread that concerned connecting a patchwork of open source reviews, like a different set of that have been like a gentically reviewed, like a whole patch set. Yeah, so they're connecting some existing tools, right? So there's a bunch of tools in the kernel so that when you submit a patch, there's automated review of it, tests get run, things get built, and then you get feedback sent to you and also to the mailing list, maybe to the maintainer that says, like, hey, the program found these things, you know, kind of like linting or running a basic set of unit. There's various versions of analyzing the software automatically to see if, like, it is, you know, before a human even has to get to it to try to lower the maintenance burden. Okay. Especially when you consider, like, Linux tree maintainers, their job is ingesting a giant stream of potential patches and trying to make sure that they're doing so in a well-done, rigorous way. And so, Sashiko.

Sosiko, okay. Yeah. So it's not a proposal. It's operational already. It's just this is more about more plumbing on the actual, you know, connecting it more to the, like, making it more permanent fixture of the ongoing development process. Right now it's been a tool sort of more on the side. And so this is a discussion around that. Yes.

And Linus decides to chime in. Well, it starts because people are talking about, let's add this to the thing. And then someone... Objects. Yes. Yeah. So Laurent, a developer comes into, and we can get the deeds here, but, yeah, developer comes in to basically say, like, shouldn't this be an opt-in thing? Isn't that the normal default of what we do?

And then that gets into a whole discussion around, is that a viable model? and then ethical concerns get brought in, and it becomes a question of, you know, if I don't want to be made, I don't want to be forced to use an AI tool, and then the whole debate expands around there. Yeah, and then that's when Linus times them. Yes.

Yeah. Linus writes, I realize some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer. Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects. And if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open source thing and fork it or just walk away. AI is a tool and like other tools we use, and it's clearly a useful one.

It may not have been that clearly even just a year ago, but that no longer is in question today. There are other questions around AI, like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end. But, quote, is it still useful? That's no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used it. Yes, it can also be somewhat of a painful tool, both for maintainer workloads and from it just keeps finding embarrassing bug standpoint. But the solution is not to put your head in the sand and sing la, la, la, la, I can't hear you at the top of your voice like some people seem to do. The solution is to make sure those LLM tools help maintainers, that's his atollets, help maintainers instead of just causing them pain.

There is no question on that side. we're not forcing anyone to use it, but I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people using it. And no, AI isn't perfect, but Christ, anybody who points to the problems with AI had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time because it's not like the natural intelligence is always all that great either. The kernel project has been and will continue to be about the technology.

sure the social angle of working on open source is important and often very much a motivating part of the project but in the end it is a side benefit not the point of the project again his emphasis not the point of the project this is not his emphasis some kind of social warrior project never has been never will be in the colonel community we do open source because it results in better technology not because of religious reasons. And so we make decisions primarily based on technical merit, not fear of new tools. That is a pretty strong, clear stance. What's your reaction to that, Brent? Is that stronger than you expected? Wow. After hearing the comments from Linus? Well, I think it's more clearly laid out here. Like I found in his clips on stage, he was a bit more exploring with the crowd, like saying,

oh yeah, yeah, we're using it. These are the experiences the project's having. But here he clearly states both his personal kind of view, but also just a very clear stance from the project. And I think a stance that you haven't seen very often in other projects, especially not, you know, written in Linus-like words as he does. But the thing that really hit me here is one of these last sentences in the kernel community, we do open source because it results in better technology, not because of religious reasons. And we've seen a couple projects in the last few years fall victim. Maybe that's a strong word, but fall victim to some infighting in the community just because of differences in philosophy of how the project should be run.

So in a way, having Linus say, yes, this is exactly how it is. and this is how the project believes this should be implemented is a very clear voice about, you know, how everyone should be following. And there's not much room for pushing back, I think. Yeah, we've seen Linus take, and I don't know what the right, but we've seen Linus take a technical over religion argument when it came to GPL2 versus GPL3.

It's been a consistent position for him for a long time. Wes, what is your reaction here to really framing this as, look, the usefulness is proved? If you don't think these things are useful now, then you're just clearly not using them. It came up again in the thread. Some folks pushed back on, you know, we're saying like, you know, we shouldn't compare these things. You know, these existing tools we have are deterministic. You can debug it. These LMs are a black box and they can hallucinate.

And then Linus agreed that they were different, but he kind of flips it. And he says, you are correct. The AI generate reports are usually much superior. and more flexible. They actually find real non-trivial problems. Yeah. So there's sort of even more. I will say it's worth noting that this is a big thread with lots of maintainers.

It's not just these folks, right? So there's Roman Gushkin, who's a Google Colonel engineer who built Shishiko and was sort of working on it. Laurent Pinchart, who sort of started the objection part of this, a Linux media contributor. And then Linus, but Ted, a whole bunch of regular kernel contributors are in there. and that's where it's becoming, you know, like they've been talking about around, does this particular tool work even? About a 20% false positive rate,

80% to 90% true positives on real patches, and only two maintainers seemingly in the whole thread reported real output problems. Everyone else seems to, is using it and likes it Ted, Stephen Rostadt, Sean Kara, Bottomleap, Bonzini, they all say it catches real bugs and that the noise is manageable. So we're seeing, you know, it's important to remember that the colonel is like Linus and then a whole bunch of lieutenant tree maintainers, right?

And so what's happening is different maintainers are already enabling this and thinking that they may have different rules around, do you have to use the tool or not? But they are already seemingly to commit the like, this is worth it for them as a tool that they want to see used in the code they're maintaining. Yeah, that decision has been made. And, you know, so the debate becomes should we be using AI assisted development? in free software. And Linus had an analogy. He had a vegetarian analogy. He says being vegan because you think meat is murder is fine.

But vegans don't expect the rest of the colonel community to stop eating meat. I think it comes down to, like I can understand the position of I don't want to be forced to use this tool that I disagree with. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And it's not mandatory. And so that's where what use, I think, matters a lot in the structure of what is happening here, right? So it's like, I think folks can have sympathy for your boss.

you use a tool and you're supposed to hit a velocity target and you've got a ship-ship. You know, like there's all kinds of stupid stuff that is just bullshit. But in this case, that's not what's happening, right? Like, what's happening is an automated tool that is open source. I don't know what inference provider they're using or whatever, but it's a Rust tool. It's open source. All of the prompts are there that, you know, the normal open source process sort of applies there. And then it's finding, at least by the people that are going to ultimately decide if your code is accepted,

real bugs that humans don't find that are quality, and then it's sending it to you. So it's not you have to use it to make your code. It's not you have to have a certain tool on your system that you authored the commit with. It's you may be forced by the maintainer to respond to the output of this tool. Yes.

And then where that gets tricky is you can imagine the case where like I don't want to have to sort through this slop that has stuff that's false positives, and I can understand that. But the flip side is where it gets harder because what happens if the tool finds a real bug that you now refuse to engage with? Which is going to become more and more likely as they improve as they get better. Which I think connects to Linus's point. Firstly, I think folks, like there is very much a sort of a moral and a social and an altruistic sense to open source.

I don't want to negate that at all. That's some of the stuff that drew me to it. But there is also this technical side, but it's also sort of almost a game thing. theory side, right? It's like a strategic bet on how to build software that you yourself need, right? Like Google and Microsoft are not altruistic entities. They're doing it because there's a strategic thing and that's sort of a bet. And that ties into sort of, it's also a methodology to develop software as much as it is a philosophy around software. And that is the side I think Linus is trying to articulate. And then he's also saying that we have methods to adjudicate

things like, you know, the kernel community does have a code of conduct now. So we can sort of talk about interpersonal conflict, things like that. And of course, there's the, there's a, the whole system of maintainership is set up to adjudicate code quality on that sense. But there is no system in place to evaluate individual ethical claims. Once, once that's in there, like, how do you, that's an individual thing. There is no system in place to do that. There's colonel is not set up to do that. So we can't, right. That's where a lot of this is coming from, I think. It's, it's really a mechanism thing. Touching on that, it makes me remember, to remember a bunch of Russian nationality developers were booted off the project for kind of shady reasons?

Well, just as the sanctions or whatever went in during the Ukraine war. And we were kind of arguing, well, maybe it's not the project's place to say, who can and can't contribute because it should fall on more technical merits than it should. on social ones. This is another example of there's these sort of social lines. And that one I think you could argue it was partially imposed on them, in a sense.

So there's some research out there that shows that going by numbers that are reported by developers. I think it's interesting that there is sort of this false positive rate. It's like an LM thinks it found a bug. There's also in this specific tool case where because it sees patches,

sometimes it might find real bugs but in code that wasn't what you just added or touched. So there's some noise in that sense Yeah. But it looks like a lot of like the, so the rate is about a 20% false positive. But what is interesting is it's like what they're developing like what the developers call a gray zone nitpicky small theoretical stuff that nobody really kind of tends to care about. And when you look at the stuff that's like the real important stuff, the hit rate is more like 80, 90% of true positives for the actual critical things that get submitted.

So it's an interesting thing is if you look at what's coming in according to self-reported numbers by these developers. the stuff that is important tends to be accurate. And the stupid stuff that's just like low-hanging stuff tends to be where the slop is at. The challenge is really separating the two, isn't it? And tuning it and seeing it. It'll be interesting because this will, in effect, provide some real data out there

if you want to mine it to see how this changes over time. I did think there was some signal here in just seeing that, like, they're, you know, Chris Mason, the Butter of Fass developer has been contributing to some of the prompts that are getting used here. And then Jonathan Corbett at LWN took a look and called them some of the, like the prompts that get fed into this 11 stage super, it's quite the process, called them some of the best documentation on Colonel Patch Review ever written. He expressed a little, you know, sadness around that, around that like we couldn't write it until we were writing it for a machine.

Yeah. But it seemed to think that there was a lot of really good stuff in there. Huh. That is funny how that works, huh? here's the question I have for anyone in the audience who is on the side of we shouldn't be using AI in free software. I'd like to hear from you because I think A, that's a point that should get voiced more. But B, I'd like to know where you stand on if an LLM-assisted tool finds a legitimate security issue, submits it to a project that is anti-AI, anti-LM,

what should that project do? Should they just ignore the security patch? Should they go try to recreate it from scratch? That's a ton of work. That's probably more work than going through their submission. So I'd like to know if you're out there and you're not really pro-AI use and free software, how would you solve that little particular problem that's obviously going to come up? What do you do there?

What happens if a real bug is found, somebody sends in a patch that's AI-assisted or L-LM-generated, and that project, do they refuse to engage with it? What should they do? I don't know what the options there are for them. Because that seems like that's going to be a thing is the projects that close the door to this, two things happen. Number one, they're going to get folks that are submitting bug reports that may be actually useful in some cases that they're going to ignore. But number two, and I've talked about this before on the show, and so I'll make a brief, is they're not going to participate in the dialogue. And the state of free and open source AI is at a critical junction right now.

Sure is. And it could really use our community out there, advocate. for what we believe in and what we want to see. And instead, a lot of our community is, like Linus says, putting their heads in the sand. As a result, a lot of money from Anthropic and Open AI and others has knives out for open source AI. And we're going to see a concentrated effort as the open source AI models catch up to the frontier models, quote unquote. They have such a financial position to protect that they're going to turn to lobbying efforts and things like that. And it's going to be like the 90s again with free software, but now in the intelligence field. And only this time, we don't have a stallman out there.

We don't have a free software foundation out there for AI. In fact, for the most case, they're all just ignoring and rejecting it. And so ironically, they're going to end up with worst case scenario AI because they're not participating in the dialogue. And I've said it before, so I don't need to go on about it. But I hope some people have been realized or come to realize since Linus made that post. Because I think what Linus has tried at least saying for the Linux kernel is the decision is made, these are useful. Now it's on you if you want to use it or not. But from a project standpoint, we're not debating the usefulness anymore.

It's a tool. And our sovereign individual developers on their own prerogative are implementing and using these tools because they want to. and that is now the official state, the official position of the Linux kernel. You have to wonder if that does move some people and maybe get some people more actively involved in the free software side of AI. I do think I even saw in that mailing list, read some folks saying, you know, like folks who had their own ethical concerns, but also sort of were forced to reach a conclusion of like, well, at this point, you know, not using it is worse than using it even with those concerns. It's like that game theory scenario. Yeah.

I know it sucks. Welcome to the world of technology is this is not the first time we've been here. I've been taking my Berkeley Life Nitric oxide support daily. And it's been pretty easy to stick with because it's just too after a meal. Even I can remember that. You know, initially what caught my attention, right, is the connection between nitric oxide, blood flow, cardiovascular wellness, energy, and just vitality overall. But I have sleep apnea.

And so my sleep is just not where it should be as a base, and that kind of stuff, it compounds over time. So I've been especially interested in finding simple, proactive ways to support my energy and my wellness. What I'm really liking about Berkeley Life and what makes it stand out is the ability to test your own levels at home. The strip's taken me about 15 seconds to use. I tested before I began this, and my levels were very low.

Like, oh, but I got a baseline to work with, at least, right? So I've been continuing to monitor, updating my numbers, I like what I'm seeing, and I like having something measurable instead of just wondering if the supplement is doing anything, you know I'm tracking that data. That's the appeal of the no-starter kit. You get the nitric oxide support supplement

along with the test strips, so you can follow your own progress over time at home and with me. So go to BerkeleyLife.com and use the promo code Linux 15 to get 15% off your first order. That is, B-E-L-E-L-E-O-I-F-E-com and use the promo code

Linux 15 to get started. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. The product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Well, that's strange. The title of this little section says, Notes with Wes and Brent. Hey, I know that guy. And that's because it's been a, well, what would we say, multi-week journey of reassessing what notes mean to us in our life and times.

And we touched on this a little bit in the members feed. week. And I think it went into a great bit more detail than we even expected. We were just like, I think Chris was like, hey, I heard you talking about notes recently. And then there went 10 minutes worth of really interesting discussion. So, but it's been another week. And Wes, you've been diving into notes. I've been diving even more into my notes. So where should we start? Should we give like maybe a detailed summary of what we were talking about last week? I wanted to start. if you guys don't mind. Because I think the real story is why this all started

was because you had a Next Cloud disaster. And I also recently experienced a Next Cloud disaster. I was viewing a very important text file. I clicked it just to view it in the text edit, didn't save. And it wiped the file out just by viewing it. And then it immediately closed and saved that. And it was a very important file. I had it in backup, but just viewing it, wiped it out.

It turned out to be like a little bug where, like, you know, basically. Some kind of race condition. A race condition, yeah. And wiped out one of my most important notes, and I realized right then and there, I'm not using Next Club for notes anymore. But I want to know what happened to you,

and I think because that is what caused you to spiral into redoing your entire notes. Oh, my gosh. Why do I do this? So I've been using NextCloud. I looked at the calendar for about something like 10 years now and notes for that amount of time, and it's been the number one application,

I would say definitely on NextCloud that has been important for me over the years. But even more broadly, it's probably the ecosystem I use the most every single day. So if you took away a bunch of tools of mine, notes would be the one thing that, like, is a capture of my knowledge,

the place where I think about things, the place where I keep, you know, tricks and tips and stuff. So some people don't use notes as much as that, but I'm a note fiend. So, you know, kind of like tabs. And what I have noticed happening recently is a slight erosion of my trust in the sinking process of my notes over the last many months, I would say. But it's just like keeps suggesting.

So it wasn't as drastic as your experience, Chris, but for me it's these little tiny paper cuts and these little, micro warnings I kind of see them as because I would have like one note over here that'd be like, oh, I thought I wrote a little detail there and it's kind of missing on my laptop. And then I go to use my phone and it, you know, I'm out in the world and I want to refer to something that I left on there 30 minutes ago and all of a sudden it's not sinking. And it hasn't synced for many hours. And so the things I was relying on having with me at all times are just kind of not there. And so you got to find some other way to get it.

So I had enough of those experiences that my otherwise deep trust in this note system, as PJ will definitely back me up on as I've been trying to convince him to use this thing forever, because I trusted so much in it has now been eroded to the point where I was like, well, I think I have to solve this a different way because I looked for, you know, was it a config set and was it some weird files I had in my infrastructure that are causing problems? it a bug I can report or something like that? And for months, I've been looking and trying to try different methods and play around. And I came to no clear explanation.

So that's been a frustrating. You were giving this a shot. You were trying not to move. Well, 10 years. If you've been using NeoVin for 10 years and all of a sudden, you know, a key binding goes away and you just can't live without it. So this is after a long journey how you reluctantly end up. Dada with Obsidian. Don't give all the sauce away, right?

And I don't even know if that's the final landing point because I'm a little hesitant. So you started flirting with Obsidian. You're a little nervous because it's not free software, but it is Markdown Bay. So you're going to look at it. Yeah. All right. I was basically looking for a couple things, maybe absolute needs. One is Markdown backed,

because I can't do databases. I don't know how those work. But also I'm using it on various devices, right? And I want to use Kate on my desktop, and I want to use something that's just like fairly fast on the phone. So it has to have a phone fast way to use it. That's super important for me. Maybe like 50% of the importance.

But also like a really good search. That's surprisingly difficult to find in some of these apps. So I scour the land. scape trying to find, you know, something that's open source, something that's quite mature, as still developed actively, something that, you know, hits all these other points. And once you put all those filters on, and there's not much out there, and turns out, Obsidian kind of falls in that category quite nicely. And I had hesitated to even look at it or even consider it.

Meanwhile, everybody else is raving about it. So I reluctantly installed it. Everybody's doing it. Yeah, I know. Well, I contrary, and I don't want to be everybody, but it turns out, well, they're kind of right. I mean, there's a reason why people like it. However, it did provoke feedback from listener Kai, right? Indeed.

Dear Lopteam, and specifically, dear Brent. I'm a semi-long-term listener and core contributor. Hey, thank you. I just finished episode 675, where you were considering LogSeek and Obsidian. But it sounds like you've missed that LogSeek has moved away from Markdown files, and are switching to a graph database approach. The LogSeek Markdown version, OG, as they call it, will only receive security updates in the future.

Oh, wow. I am currently also reconsidering my note-taking application. Obsidian just doesn't feel right for me, and I'm currently taking a closer look at Silver Bullet. The beauty. It runs on your server in a centralized place, and you access it from your devices by connecting to the server. The files are cached and synced locally,

so you can use it even when there is no internet connection, though they are starting to work on local applications. applications as well. I haven't tested it in depth yet, though I believe that you and I share the same taste. So maybe this is something you could check out as well. You know, Wes, I believe you and I came across Silver Bullet not too long ago? Yes, and are kind of looking around for various note-taking applications for show notes. Yeah, for show notes. We were looking this as a potential way to do our show notes. Yeah, so it's MIT license, server-hosted, browser-based, your data stays on your machine, is playing markdown files, live preview, markdown enter... I'm liking this. By-direction

links. A built-in query. language, S-L-I-Q, and a lew a scripting environment that lets you program your notes, which is very cool. Run queries, build widgets, automate workflows, all from inside your pages. And the pages or the plugins run in sandboxed web workers, so you can have extensions that can be secure without sacrificing power. Okay. All right. So I... So to me it seems a little complicated, but maybe not when you actually look at what it's doing.

Silver Bullet. By the way, silverbullet.md.m.D. if you'd like to check it out, listeners. Ah, that's clever. Yeah. I kind of felt it landed somewhere in the middle. Like, it's extremely powerful if you know what you're doing. You don't have to use those features. It has some nice easy wins, like bi-directional wiki links and those kind of things that I haven't been using that were kind of like on my mandatory list, even though that's not what I was using.

Built and to-do items is nice too. Yeah, it has all these, like, well-thought-out, quick, like, access features. features. There's a nice video where one of the main developers goes through kind of a tour, and you can tell they're passionate about it, and there's some cool stuff. I thought of Wes right away with some of the power of using scripting languages, Lua specifically, to just make your notes programmatic, and that seems like a wonderful thing for us nerds around here in this room. Yeah, it almost makes it closer to something like a Jupyter notebook. or something, which is interesting.

Reminded me a lot of text-based accounting. Mm-hmm. I like that comparison. Okay, so here's what I want to know, Brad, is what is it not? It doesn't sound like it worked for you. You can clearly not use it right. How'd you pick up on that? There's like a big butt hanging here, and I want to know what it is.

Well, the big one here is, but it's only a web app. Like, it runs in a browser. I don't know if people like... And you want a mobile app. You want a mobile app, too. Yeah. It's a big mobile app guy. And you know it, is this the kind of thing people pin?

Is this the kind of app you would pin? Yeah, I guess you could pin a tab on that. Yeah, you could definitely put a tab on that. You have to teach me. Brandy won't open 10 new windows like some kind of entropy enthusiast. Now, what I'm wondering is, are you willing to hear the LogSec sales pitch? Because I think, Wes, you've stuck with it, right? Oh, yeah.

That's saying something, because it's been a couple of years. Yeah, a few years. Yeah. I don't use it for, like, absolutely everything. But, yeah, I got some real data in there. So, Brent, I mean, would you, could we be interested in putting you in a nice logsec today? I also thought it would be a good, just because there is a big change. going. I thought it was just a time to check in as well.

Like, you know, it's not up front. It's not going to be for everyone. It's a different, it's a very different model. Can you tell me about the change in your words and what you think about this database change they're doing? Yeah, so it's, one way to think about it is it's more of almost like less of an upgrade and more of a different product. Yeah, it seems like it. It's a block level

graph database with typed properties. You get data log queries and an AI agent API. It also happens to be a note-taking app. Okay. So they're pivoting for the agentic future. Well, I mean, In some sense, but this was sort of always an evolution because, like, in the obsidian model, just as an example, not, but just sort of, like, you inherit a hierarchy from the operating system, right? Yeah.

You're sort of like, you have a folder tree. You have marked down in there. You probably have it all organized. Yeah. It's all folders and whatnot. Yeah. Which I kind of, I do like to some degree. Yeah, that's not, that's not bad.

I'm not saying anything's wrong with that. But this is a different way to think about how you might want to organize things. And so the old version of LogC, you. sort of was a mix where it had markdown files on disk but it was never a great fit for really what the best representation and use of what LogSQL

was good for was I thought so now with the LogCDB version it's a SQLite database. I would also argue I get why people don't like databases for storing stuff. If you are using agents I think that's perhaps less of a concern because they're pretty good at getting data in and out of things

and they have no problem manipulating SQLite for you. So or turning a SQLite dump back into structured text files or things like that. But you're no longer a prisoner of the file system. Pages are UUID addressed entities with titles. No folders, no paths. Basically, the hierarchy is at the block level, including create parent-child,

but then any other hierarchy you want, you're not limited to a tree. You build whatever graph you want with the graph primitives that are built right in. And then, of course, it does come with an MCP, It comes with a CLI. Okay. Of course, it has really nice search. Plus, it has the query language.

It includes data log lets you do stuff. So, like, if you want to write a query that isn't supported by however the search works, as it stands now, you have full access to, like, the underlying data model. It does provide a read-only markdown mirror. Oh, that's interesting. So, like, you don't have to worry about that side of it. You can't edit those files and have it sync back, but you can totally read, yes. Yeah, you can view. Yeah.

It has a mobile app. app that's new. It's all very new. So a lot of the biggest critiques right now is like it's moving fast. It's a big change. And I think maybe the folks behind it haven't super articulated what I think is kind of the exciting vision for where it could be going. It seems notable that in May they raised $4.1 million. Wow. Yeah. So I think they're going to be around for a minute working on this. And that knowledge graph seems to be the thing that got them the funding. It is AGPL. So you can pay them $5 a month if you want them to handle the sink. But you can hope. It's pretty reasonable.

And the new stuff, which I haven't tried this yet, but the new sync is real-time sync. Oh. Huh. That is really nice. It does come up when I'm moving between machines sometimes. And it is super new. So like some folks with super giant libraries have had some issues importing them, but they does support importing from the previous version.

Okay. Yeah. So I think it's sort of like as we were talking about in the pre-pre-sh, the members show, we, some of the biggest, maybe one of the competitors to a personal knowledge system is like the fact that if you have something like Hermes, it's building a thing that's like has Markdown files that it's indexing to search and injecting and like, you know, a lot of these agent memory systems or QMDs or whatever are sort of half of part of like, you know, building structure on top of Markdown.

And so I think where this is interesting is you could log seek presents another point on that continuum, especially like I was trying out last night and the MCP is really nice. It's very well done. It's not perfect yet, but it has pretty much everything. you need. And so you can read the files if you want. You can read it and do searches through the MCP. It's just that the thing that the main thing that changes is the right path goes through the database. Yeah. Which is, I mean, for a long-term tool. Probably not a bad idea. More efficient. Also, I noticed they have a C-L-I as well. C-L-I, yep.

A Mac client and a Windows. Do they have a Windows client? Yeah, they have a Windows client, I think. Okay. I got a couple of questions here, Wes, since you over the years seem to have really connected with this ethos, if I say that. What do you find is the perfect kind of information to store in this? Because I realized when we were having these discussions about like, well, what is notes even, that I was trying to store very different types of information in the same place to have it accessible in the same ways. And maybe that's not a very good idea. So perhaps there's a way to store the right kind of information in something like LogSeek

and store the other kind of information somewhere else that's more suitable. Oh, boy. That sounds complicated. I know. That's why I was leaning away from it. But West seems to think this is really good for something. So what is that? Why not everything?

Well, I think I tend to keep, like some stuff like per project stuff tends to live in like a repo that I have for a project. So, I mean, not that there's not notes or thoughts or ideas about that that might be in there. But it tends to be that kind of stuff. It's sort of its ideas, maybe things I want to investigate, you know, things I've learned. about stuff, notes for a future me going through or redoing something. And I find that what is really nice is that you can just

enter information and then start building links to it. And it's very easy to go navigate that. So I don't worry as much about having a strict hierarchy because it always felt like part of what limited me was classifying it up front like that. And this means I don't really have to. I can just

put information in and sort of the structure emerges. Yeah, I do sometimes spend a lot of time figuring out, okay, where does this live? What, yeah, like, classifying it is. But I, I wondered if, like, there's some kind of upfront discipline every time you're making a note to try to tag it or tag a block or, like, can you explain a little bit of the, I don't know, daily work flow on, like, hygiene to make sure the notes actually link and stuff? What's the thing I need to learn to make this work well?

Well, I think you just kind of play with it. Like, you could have an orphaned thing, but, you know, there's auto-cuit. complete on the tags. So as long as you have, as long as your variance in the tags that you do isn't so crazy. And then you can kind of go check, especially now if you had an agent in there, you could go do some sort of quick audit. Can I ask you about that, Brent? Sure. Is that, is your intention to have an agent have access or edit these? Well, when we first started this discussion, it wasn't, I think, partly because I wanted to have some protected space where this was like blessed information that I had, you know, cross-reference with documentation or

had used in anger and was like the golden command or whatever it is that solved that problem. And I feared that letting an agent kind of have access to that would mix the information in a way that I felt was impure somehow. But you guys challenged me. And so I've been using agents like crazy to make a like a Carpathie LLM wiki thing. And I've been freaking, oh, why did you guys get me into this? So for weeks now, I've been playing with this. And it's totally amazing. So I'm starting to change that perspective.

So with that consideration, to me, it seems like LogSec looked at what Obsidian is doing for agents and said, oh, we can we can do better than that. I mean, this is with the MCP and a CLI, you really could truly brain dump and then have the agents start connecting the dots. They're actually really good at that kind of context stuff. So you could have it post facto. and, you know, obviously propose it before it makes the changes. But post-factor, you could say go through and link things, and I've done this. That's why I can speak to this is I wasn't very good at linking my stuff together. Like, you know, some people that go into like obsidian and they have these awesome, like, I don't know, like point graphs or whatever.

Like this incredible cluster of notes. Mine are just like dots all disconnected, just like stars in space. Yeah. And so, you know, I was very bad at that. But the agents are able to go through and very effective. notice the commonalities. They're like your librarian almost. I had a thought on your question too

about the tagging versus and as a relation to directories. I think, so one version is you can just do the same thing where like you were going to say which where in the treatise it go could be which is the first tag I had. But then the thing you don't have to do is fight about the relative

importance. You don't have to be like, oh well, should it be in this one or this one? Because you just add both. Okay. All right. Yeah. And then the other thing too is like it's sort of nice if you have an agent in front of it

you could capture notes in telegram you could capture them in Kate wherever you want and then the agent could go through and save them using this database this block system the agent could be one that files it for you and then retrieves it for you. The one limitation right now is there isn't a headless

MCP so it requires the window to be running but there's no I was taking a look at the code there doesn't seem to be any technical limitation there just isn't plumped up that way yet so so check on Wes's GitHub to see next week if we got something. Something to consider. I mean, you've got me

thinking about it. Like, it might not be very much, but I think it's a fun way to at least make you rethink some of how you think about and relate to the knowledge you're trying to store. Yeah, if you're looking for a knowledge system, yeah, that is. All right, so LogS-S-E-Q. But it definitely now, it maybe also makes it a little

clearer because it's definitely now not, decisively not competing for. I have an existing markdown infrastructure that I want a thing that can upgrade it to a graph. They're totally separate now, so. And we've got some feedback from our dear Olympia Mike. Howdy, J.B.

team, I've been quiet since Linux Fest Northwest, but definitely not idle. Lots of stuff has been happening thanks largely to people in this community. First, Nick's book, 2605 is officially out. With flakes? With a new installer.

Hey, new installer's cool. Yeah, Flakes. Good question. And that inherited upstream changes that allows new users to choose their file system on install. Cool. Oh. And it has a progress bar that doesn't appear to get stuck at 46%. That's a big upgrade.

That's nice. Yeah, I like that. In Nick's book itself, the channel, okay, that answers it, has been bumped to 2605, a new version of cinnamon, a collection of default-free wallpapers and fixes to Etsy scale, so multi-user systems have more consistent. That's a nice touch. This has all been aggressively tested and working well. If you have a Nixbook, you'll automatically get this within a week, or if you want it now, you can just run upgrade and reboot from your start menu. Love that. So cool.

The new installer can be downloaded from NixBookOS.org. Also, the Computer Upcycle Project has officially won its first grant as well. The City of Olympia has chosen the Computer Upcycle Project as one of 60 nonprofits to fund this year and awarded us. $15,000. Congratulations. Fair about deserved. This will be used to purchase chargers, SSDs, and branded laptop bags,

along with continuing to fund the development of Nixbook. We're also committed to hosting monthly workshops in Olympia aimed at the tech curious and youth to show them hands-on, and how to take the old laptop and turn it into a Nix book. All this makes me super excited and happy about the future of Linux and getting more people involved and aware

of what's possible. And of course, I'll urge them all to be listeners of this year podcast. Thanks again to everyone who has donated, supported, or simply cheered on Nick's book and the nonprofit. This community really does make anything possible. That is so sweet. And it feels with the price of hardware right now more important than ever that there's something like this out there.

And I wonder if it could be a model for other areas because, you know, Mike's doing a lot. That's incredible. But it'd be great to see if like another organization like this could pop up, say, like on the East Coast and then pop up in the UK and pop up in Canada. You know, you know, just sort of sprout. I think that'd be really neat to see But in the meantime, Olympia Mike is doing incredible work, and I do appreciate the update. We sure do.

It's nice to hear. Thank you, sir, and keep up the good work and keep us posted on it. With that, gentlemen, let's do a couple of boosts. And now it is time for the boost. And Greg, the lawyer, is back. He's our baller booster with 100,000 cents. Well, Greg, the lawyer did.

He said, love the discussion on making a clanker OS. I've been using Claude to maintain my flake for a while and it's nearly flawless. I now get a dedicated Hermes profile set up for the task. My Hermaze runs on a Debbie and VM. I would love a clanker stream on how you have

yours running on Nix. I really... Nix combo stream. I feel like I missed the boat. I set up just the most amazing EV camping, routing. Like, you know, all the years I've been road tripping, I've been collecting like what my idea of a perfect app would be.

you know, wildfires, cellular signal, closures, everything I've ever wanted to know in one thing. And I finally built that. I should have streamed it. Should have streamed it. Look at stream a tour. I feel when we maybe get back and we get our feet underneath us, Greg, I feel like it's going to be time for another clanker stream.

We've probably gone too far, but we just, we got stuff coming up. We're doing a little trip to Canada up to Brentlandia. So when we get back from that, I think we've got to pin some tabs. We're going to start cooking. We're going to pin some tabs and we're going to start cooking on a clanker stream. That's the mission. Thank you, sir. Appreciate that, Baller boost.

BTC is my 401K boost sin with 3,998 sats. I like you. You're a hot ticket. Oh, no, seems my lightning note can't reach Brent or the JB node. But here's some more for you. No, thanks. And a catch-up boost to provide value while my AlbiHub was down and streaming sats were depleted.

Well, thank you. So, BTC, I saw that boost come in live. I said, oh, what's going on? Went over. Yeah, Tor was totally down, and that node's on Tor. Totally offline. Yeah. I was like, oh.

I wasn't monitoring tour. I was monitoring the Lightning Damon. I was monitoring the Bitcoin Damon. I was monitoring the booth. Not monitoring tour. So I got that fixed. Thank you very much. BTC is my 401k.

Odyssey Westra's here with 2,550 sets. Put some macaroni and cheese on there too. Hey, could you guys look into Odysseus, that PewDie Pie thing he made? I know he's probably a little more jank compared to something. like Hermes, but, you know, he's still worth looking into since the popular YouTube is building it and deploying it. It might be something worth looking into. That could be fun. Yeah.

We've been talking about building a gigantic test harness bench. Something like that. And that could be a good one. Thank you, Odyssey. Nice to hear from you. Autobrains here with 5,000 sats. Tough little shit. Little.

I did it. I took the plunge and I signed up for an intro computer programming course. Oh. Until now, I've just been. a dabbler in writing scripts. The course is about Python. Nice. Nice choice. It's asynchronous online at my university. Cool. It's well done.

It's a good blend of bite-sized chunks of written and video content with homework and quizzes. Nice. How do you guys, have you guys taken lots of computer programming courses what worked especially well for you and what inspired you? Oh man. The only official computer course I've taken,

I think, other than like training courses on like, here's a crash course on PHP. I did one of I did a crash course on Python But the only actual official Training I took Was basic I'm an old man

And yet I've never seen you write basic How is that? Well I wrote some cool basic programs Let me tell you what You Basic was my friend If it helps visual basic was my first programming language I hated visual Okay so

What about you? Yeah well before I ended up getting a physics degree I was a CS major So I took the first two or three years of most of those classes I would say... Everything Simpson's been self-taught? Yeah.

Wow. I think, no, I did one MOOC-style functional programming course and a machine learning course. But that was a long time I'm going to do. Back when we called it machine learning. Yeah.

Yeah, that's how long ago it was. What usually helps me me is sort of trying to chase the thing that I'm most curious about. Like, that doesn't work. Some things you just have to grind through. That's always going to be the case. but, you know, finding things that motivate you that you're curious,

that make it feel more like play than like work. And if you can try to keep, do whatever you can, sometimes it's worth a little, like you don't want to over fixate on your setup and not the actual work, but it is worth a little bit of investment just to try to keep the feedback loop as quick as possible because that helps keep it feeling like play. Yeah, I agree. That's good advice.

I was doing exactly that last night, where I will confess that I stayed up all night, never went to bed at all because I was so deep in the flow of like playing and chasing curiosities and like learning all sorts of stuff and breaking things and fixing things. You still showed up late for the stream. Like how does that work? Like you're up. Well, like, I don't know. We all stayed a slower and I'm on a different time zone.

It wasn't even any squirrel-based excuses. I know. Usually there's no squirrel-based reason. Yeah. We were all up late last night. I was up late last night. I replumbed. I have blue bubble sun.

up and I was replumbing it and then I was working on some of the EV road trips. I was up way too late too. We all know. You're your version of late? My version of later. Yeah, that's true. My version of late's like midnight. Mine's like 40.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Marvin 42 came in with $42 in Fiat fund coupons. The answer to the ultimate question. Here's a few bucks to help pay for refactoring HyperVive. I just found out that the Dendrick Nix idea a few days ago and have been trying to get Hermes to use it. I'm still struggling with the concept and it wants to build everything monolithic or make each setting of fun.

I'm for better skill shopping. Oh, fun update. Thank you, Marvin. That's so good. The dendretic nick stuff is interesting. I think that might be something I have to poke at more. Thank you. That's a great boost too.

Anonymous boosts in with 25 Fiat fun coupons. Oh my God, this drawer is filled with broolopes. A long time listener, first time booster. Hey. Thank you from Austria. Awesome. Boost! you for the first time boost.

Appreciate that. GEM LePont is here with 10thia. Thanks for all the hard work you guys put into this show week after week. Next time you're headed out east, come have a good barbecue with us in KC was at Kansas City. We would love that. That sounds ideal. No complaints here. Someone just needs to get a certain van working.

Oh, I can do that. I just need a reason, you know. Just give me a reason. A little bit of cake. Yeah. I'm in. I don't think I've ever really properly had it. My biggest exposure has always been to Texas barbecue.

I'm open-minded. We need to do a barbecue tour. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. High-five connoisseurs here with $5 in Fiafong, Coupon. How are you all thinking about the secession planning now that there are agents? A whole good question. I imagine my family could get an agent to handle much of the Homeland Maintenance after I'm gone. Fascinating.

Wow. Do you remember that episode we made and then we were like a couple projects trying to tackle this? But we came to the conclusion that it's just a very hard problem. A secession agent. This is good. Cool. Start building, I say. I mean, there's something there. Just imagining the chat GPT thing behind a window they break in case.

Yeah, break in case it or like a telegram chat thread that's like set up, but don't use, Wes. I mean, it gives a whole new meaning to Sol.m.D. doesn't it? Oh, okay, we've got to move on. It's getting dark. Wes, you want to take our first? Yeah, member free booze. Yes. A bear comes in with two member free boosts. By the way, I had to re-sign up for Jupiter Party.

not sure what email I used. Oh, yeah, that's, that happens for sure. Thanks for having the web boost with USB. I'm not into Bitcoin or sets, but I love the shows. Thank you very much. Here's a little utility that I have been vibe coding for Linux-based routers and firewalls. I'm using iOS boxes, but it works on any Linux instance using IP chains. Cool.

FW Top. This looks really good. It's got a great toey. Python, MIT licensed. Oh, very colorful and pretty to-y. You are right. Time router firewall traffic visualizer for the terminal. Wow.

Inspired by B-TOP. You nailed it. It looks so good. This is impressive. Huh. And a release three days ago? Very nice. That's really sweet.

That is so what we need is you need to vibe up a flake.nix. We'll give a shot. Thanks for the support. Yeah, thank you very much. And thanks for signing up again. Appreciate that. Well, Mr. Pickles is here with. A free member's boost.

You should provide API keys to members. We have three, 3090s, and use about two billion tokens a month. Oh. Oh, 3090s, as in invidias. Oh, yeah, right. I don't even, you know, I just block this out of my mind because. I also had a pick, Histler, a full-text indexer for every website you visit. Whoa.

Great for finding a thing you read about a month ago, but can't recall. Holy smokes. This is like recall, but just less creepy. It indexes their full content so you can find information again from the web interface terminal or an AI assistant connected through MCP. Huh.

I guess it's by Adam Taubber, Aski Mu, who also made Searax, or Checks. Maybe not the NG one, but the one before. No kidding. Collie and a bunch of other smaller projects. Wow. Yeah. No kidding. That's such a neat find.

Thank you, Pickles. Appreciate that. I'll take the king. King Arthur is back with a member boost because I'm the win. Is not a king voted into parliament as one doesn't vote for one's king? Rather the lady of the

lake bestows Excalibur to the one worthy to rule over Britain. Of course. I do not require a sound clip or a member boost, only specific boost for those who can bestow one, two, five, five, three sats to you in the future. Oh. What is that? Twelve.

Does it require a map or just some kind of culture? I think it's related to the other. The overall. It must be. Yeah, we have some homework. Thank you, King. Appreciate you.

L.P. Bootsin. I'm just starting to dig in for NixOS, but I got confused from the start. It's okay. What's the difference between declarative NixOS versus the community one?

Huh? Which one is the best for a VPS versus desktop laptop? Oh, you must mean Determinate Nix. Ah. That's a complete, maybe. Okay, so Determinate Nix is,

yeah, it's like, yeah, okay. It's like, I guess you would call it a distro of Nix? A spin of Nix? A fork of Nix? Yeah, somewhere in there. Yeah.

With some tools and installers that are designed for, you know, enterprise use and whatnot in there. Perfectly fine. I think, though, probably for most people, unless they know they need to terminate Nix, they probably just want to use Nix. Yeah. Yeah, it offers some extra stuff, but you probably won't need or necessarily even care about a lot of that until you are more experienced Nix user or you're trying to use it for some, like, production sort of purpose? What about Wes? What about if he, what about if he wanted to... to install it on an existing distribution.

Yes. So for that, the determinant Nix installer is great. I think so too. And then I also, it also means like, this decision doesn't matter for the most part as much as you think it is.

So if you're going to install it there, just reach for whatever. As long as you get Nix, it'll work. If you're going with NixOS, then you're probably just going to get like the standard NixOS install media and then you're just going to get

the plain upstream NixOS anyway. And either way, they'll all build your Nix packages. So for that, you'll be just fine. The amount of overlap is overwhelming. Like there's a very tiny slice of notable differences, but most of it as a beginner. You just learn.

All right. Help me break this down. Dance tango writes. Chris, you considered a dedicated camera, a camera without AI that fixes the image. Is that really something for you? Do you remember what they're speaking about? Yeah. I think we had a caller.

Oh, we're talking about dedicated pocket cameras. Or a dedicated like music player or something like that. Mm-hmm. So the question is, a camera without AI that fixes, oh, the camera without AI that fixes the image. Is that something for you? Well, I would think if you were going for like a pocket camera, you probably want, you don't want something manipulating the image, right? You do that after the fact if you want to do it. Right.

Yeah, that's what I would think. How much of a purist are you? That's a good point, though. Like with the camera phones, you're not really getting a true picture. You're getting like an interpretation that's pretty close. You always did. You always did. That's true.

Well, Paul comes in with our last member boost. Half listened to the bit about analog cameras. Two years ago, I've started taking pictures of concerts with the Nintendo 3DS. Awesome. It's far more engaging for me than taking them with my phone. If you're interested, you can see them on 3D stage vibes.AT. Let me know if you want to know more. That is definitely a vibe.

So you were only half listening, and yet you sent us some cool photos, thank you. That's pretty great. That's pretty great. I'm looking at them right now. 3DS stage vibes. They're surprisingly good. How? Yeah.

Yeah, for a 3DS, right? It came out better than you... Yeah. There's a philosophy in the photography world that says, the best camera you have is the one you have with you. So if you've got a 3DS, you start shooting with that thing.

And why don't you have a 3DS? I've actually got a dead one. I need to replace the battery of. I really would like to get it working again. Jeff. Thank you, everybody, who boosted the show. We had 12 of you stream sats as you listened. You sat streamers.

you collectively stacked 25,726 Satoshi's. Not too shabby at all when you bring it together with the Fiat booths and all the traditional boosts and converted it all to SATs. Our grand total for this week's episode is 265,638 Satoshes. We tell you the numbers so that way we're transparent. You know what the show makes. You can decide what you think the value of the show is. We put it out there and we ask if you give value from it and want to keep it going.

Prevent the fate like the Linux magazines have seen. You can do it. at boost.jupiterbroadcasting.com or with a podcasting 2.0 app. If your boost is above 2,000 sats, we'll read it on the air. You can also just stream sats. You can boost below 2,000. You still put in our show notes and we read it ourselves. And have a nice little chuckle, usually, because they're usually quite nice. Well, we really appreciate, of course.

You can get a membership at Linuxunplug.com slash membership or support the whole network at jupiter. Party. Keep the thing going and get the bootleg or the ad-free version of the show and have that support on autopilot, and then you get access to the free member boost at boost.chupitabro broadcasting.com. Thank you, everybody. All right, so we're doing something a little different for the pick segment, and I'm going to make it quick because I'll tell you right up front,

Moonlight and Sunshine are the way to go. Sunshine runs on the remote computer, captures the desktop, and encodes using your GPU or CPU if you don't have a GPU. And it's more like a video stream. It's really designed for remote gaming, which means a modern composited desktop actually performs almost natively. You can even do things like use OBS. And if you had to, you could even edit video.

Even over a relatively weak connection. And that's kind of where you were playing with some of this, right? The idea of like, well, we've evaluated a ton of different ways to handle remote studio production over the years. Rust Desk has been a real solid go-to. But on Wayland, it requires someone at the console to authorize the connection. Which is kind of a no-go. Cannot do that. Mesh-tastic is a community favorite.

But I don't need fleet inventory, file transfer, process management. a dashboard. I don't need any of that. And I also don't need it to solve the proxying, the remote, because I'm going to use mesh networking. So I've solved the network aspect already. And there's a lot of tools that bundle a bunch of that stuff together. Yes, yes, yes. So what I really like about Sunshine is that the hardware video encoding, if you have it, even with just a basic Intel laptop GPU, is really impressive. It's fine on the CPU, too. I have one system here. We have to do on the CPU. But everything works. HDR sound all comes through

so you can hear the desktop audio as you're in the remote session. It works with plasma and gnomes animations, hyperlands, I animations. You can watch videos. It has multi-monitor support. So all of it's really, really nice. And of course, it has Wayland support,

as well as X-11 support, which matters a lot. What's the downside? Well, the downside is that you have to set up sunshine on one end. You have to set up Moonlight, which is a desktop application, and then you pair them once. And once they're paired once, you can connect. But the downside, you do have to do that one-time pairing.

So there's a little bit of setup. Especially before, maybe you are in a remote situation. But the handy thing is, is the pairing UI is a web interface. So you can probably, if you're on the mesh network, just bring up the remote web UI, put in your pin and pair that one from a remote system. Okay. So it's not so bad. So really the downsides are pretty minimal unless you need the other things that a mesh-tastic,

team viewer type things offer with file transfer and process management and maybe even user management and inventory. I don't need any of that. So I was really impressed because I wanted to revisit and I'll actually tell you, the strongest contender doesn't come up very often. The strongest contender is not mesh-tastic,

is not RustSel, those are great. Mesh-tastic? Yeah, that's what it's called, right? Oh, I'm sorry, Mesh Central. Thank you. Thank you. I mean, video for Mesh-tastic is impressive. Honestly, if you could do

remote desktop, even process, man. I would be thrilled. No, I meant mesh central. I just got the meshes meshed up. But I actually think the one that we really should give more credit to and the one that people should consider besides the sunshine and moonlight combo, the folks over at No Machine are still cooking. Wow.

They've been going for so long. Which is why I think folks forget. Yes. They've been going since the very early days. And they really have pioneered hardware H264 encoded remote desktop streams. and it still kicks but I think no machine is better if you need a separate remote session.

So if you want to be able to log in and have a desktop session running and have a whole other user session that's in a remote session, no machine's great at that. Sunshine you'd have to set that up completely. Sunshine is really for taking control of the console. No machine lets you do both.

And it supports USB and device redirection so you could have printers and certain mouse's keyboard, so it does a lot more nice stuff. But if you just need something quick, you've already got the networking taken care of, like a mesh network or something like that. You don't need a central proxy or inventory or fleet. I really think for the 10 minutes it takes to get Moonlight and Sunshine going again,

it's like... And these are pretty easy, like, in there now. It's been out for a while, right? So they're like pretty available in repos or... Sunshine is actively still being developed. Moonlight hasn't had an update for a while, but it's a pretty simple. stable. I mean, it's just an H264 streaming client that supports input, so it's not very

complicated. There are a few forks out there, but Moonlight, it's packaged in flatpack. It's packaged in just about every distro app, because it has been pretty stable for a while. Same with Sunshine. But Sunshine is still moving. They're still progressing with it. Still getting better and better. And it was really nice. It's been a couple of years to check in. I did all the remote

testing. We'll see, though. We're going to go to Canada. And next Sunday's episode will be a remote episode. And if we're live, that meant that sunshine and moonlight worked. And if we're not live, keep on refreshing that RSS fee. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, exactly. It should be good, though. We've got some good projects planned when we get up to Brent's house that's going to make, I think, for a great episode. I got a whole list. Yeah, I know you do. We're looking forward to it.

So, of course, we also want to know your feedback on Linus's position in the kernel now, how you feel about that. And particularly, I'd like to reach out to those of you who are against AI use with free software, and what you'd like to see happen if a project receives a legitimate concerning bug that's generated, or, you know, the patch, the fix is generated by an LM. What would you like to see that project do? A couple of a range of questions there and also your thoughts and feedback on LogSec, Obsidian, and free software notes in general.

I think all of those would really fill out the feedback and the boost, and we'd really appreciate it. So why not join us? See if we make it live. See if it actually happens. See you next week. Same bad time. Same bad station. Make it a Tuesday on a Sunday.

Join us at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern. Of course, we've got chapters. Oh, yeah, and transcripts. As are all available in the feed. Magic text files. Just waiting for you to download them. I don't know if we'll have video next week, but we usually have an MP4 hidden that feed as well.

If you can believe it, if you could even believe it. If you find yourself a fancy client, they can make it even easier. Yeah, they'll just show it to you. Yeah. How about that? Podcasting 2.da. If you want more show, remember that lup, lug gets together in the mumble room before we get going. They're cooking all along.

Members, you get the full bootleg version with twice the content clocking at almost two hours right now. And then links to everything we talked about today, how to contact us, mumble, our matrix chat, all of it at Linuxunplug.com, and this was Linux Unplug 676. Thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of your Unplug program. We'll see you right back here next Tuesday, which, of course, is next Sunday.