Tech Over Tea - You're Not The Customer, You're The QA Team | Jonathan Bennett

Episode Date: November 29, 2024

Today we have Jonathan Benett of the Untitled Linux Show, FLOSS Weekly, his column on Hackaday, Meshtastic and countless other projects in the FOSS world, I did one of his shows a while back so it's time for him to do mine ==========Support The Channel========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson ==========Guest Links========== Twitter: https://x.com/jp_bennett Twit.tv: https://twit.tv/people/jonathan-bennett Hackaday: https://hackaday.com/author/jonathanbennett492054495/ Meshtastic: https://meshtastic.org/ ==========Support The Show========== ► Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/brodierobertson ► Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/BrodieRobertsonVideo ► Amazon USA: https://amzn.to/3d5gykF ► Other Methods: https://cointr.ee/brodierobertson =========Video Platforms========== 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBq5p-xOla8xhnrbhu8AIAg =========Audio Release========= 🎵 RSS: https://anchor.fm/s/149fd51c/podcast/rss 🎵 Apple Podcast:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tech-over-tea/id1501727953 🎵 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3IfFpfzlLo7OPsEnl4gbdM 🎵 Google Podcast: https://www.google.com/podcasts?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy8xNDlmZDUxYy9wb2RjYXN0L3Jzcw== 🎵 Anchor: https://anchor.fm/tech-over-tea ==========Social Media========== 🎤 Discord:https://discord.gg/PkMRVn9 🐦 Twitter: https://twitter.com/TechOverTeaShow 📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/techovertea/ 🌐 Mastodon:https://mastodon.social/web/accounts/1093345 ==========Credits========== 🎨 Channel Art: All my art has was created by Supercozman https://twitter.com/Supercozman https://www.instagram.com/supercozman_draws/ DISCLOSURE: Wherever possible I use referral links, which means if you click one of the links in this video or description and make a purchase we may receive a small commission or other compensation.

Good morning, good day, and good evening. I'm, as always, your host, Brody Robertson, and today there is a very short list of other people's shows that I've done. I think it's like three. Not because I don't want to do them, just no one invites me. And today we have a host of one of those shows on the show. How about you introduce yourself? Hey Brody, I'm Jonathan Bennett, and it's good to be here with you. shows on the show how about you introduce yourself hey brody i'm jonathan bennett and it's good to be here with you absolute pleasure to have you on i really enjoyed the uh the episode i did on your show or i say your show like one of your shows because you know like things you do um uh it was fun and now you're here so i guess for anyone who doesn't know you, just, I guess, give a brief introduction and then we can start going into more depth into some of that stuff.

An introduction of me. That's kind of interesting. I say I've built a career, an entire career, just by saying, yeah, I could probably do that. So I'm a writer at Hackaday and I've got a weekly security column there. It goes live every Friday. You should check it out. But I'm also the host of Floss Weekly, which is now at Hackaday, and the Untitled Linux show still over at Twit.

So several hats I wear there, sort of in the media, almost journalist space. Am I a journalist? Do I want to call myself a journalist? I'm not sure, but I do stuff and people listen and read it. Yeah, I feel the same way about the term journalist. People will apply it to me. I'm just like, I don't know. I get that when people ask me what I do

and I don't want to explain it to them. I usually just say journalist because it's easier than, you're like, okay, I make videos on YouTube because then the next question is oh how do you get paid from that i'm like oh okay i'll just say i'm a it's a generational thing right yeah yeah so like our parents generation and older you're a journalist but like our age and younger i'm a youtuber oh cool right people get it it's a totally different world i still get questions like how do you make money off of that there's a lot of people that don't understand like the the ad model but even so like

usually when i say like i'm a tech journalist they're like oh yeah i get it like they might ask questions like uh what do you like where do you write for or like do like whatever then once that question happens then i'm like okay now I actually have to explain stuff I usually try to be like I'm an independent journalist from there and usually that's enough to get them to like stop asking questions any more than that and then I have to start explaining like okay this is how

the ad model works you get paid like a certain amount per thousand views and they always want to know oh how much are you making like like do you go and ask like random other people that like if you see know oh how much are you making like like do you go and ask like random other people that like if you see how much are you making like you go see some like you go to your doctor right you're like gonna get a checkup like hey how much are you making like that's not a normal question to ask people no no it's not uh it's a weird world i

don't know i get the confusion right like because it is frankly it is just like a weird thing to do like the whole like making money on the internet is like it's still a relatively new thing for a lot of people yeah that's true that's true and and the fact that it's advertising i don't think people realize how much like a lot of things but the internet in particular it's so advertising driven that's where the money comes from and if you're not like paying attention and thinking about how many ads you see every day and people are advertising it kind of goes over your head but all the billions and billions and billions of dollars are advertising and i guess we get to get a little tiny cut of it and i guess it sort of leads into like a lot of people not realizing how much like their data is worth.

Because you'll see like anytime there is any sort of big system collecting data, whether it's like anything that Microsoft has done in like the past 10 years, like whether it's adding all the data collection to the operating system, whether it's like recall more recently, you always see people being like, well, I don't like, I don't do anything weird. Like it's, it's fine if they have my data, like people just don't understand why they want it. Like they're not like Microsoft.

Isn't just collecting petabytes of data just for the sake of it. Like they, they have reasons to do that. I don't know. It's like, I do wish people thought more about like how they interact with computers yeah you know there's the old saying that like if you have if you're getting a service and you're not paying for it then you're not the customer and that is true uh but good luck it's

like trying to hold the tide back to get enough people to tune into that to pay attention to it yeah a lot well that's certainly true but then you some people try to apply that into the fos world as well and in this world like legitimately is something it can actually be free a lot of people are just doing things obviously it's not free time wise right like people are spending a lot of time doing it doing their volunteer work but in that case you can legitimately get an entire desktop and it's just there so to be cynical for just a moment no no no you're not the customer you're the qa team that yes that that i will And in some cases, that's true. That, yeah. But that's a very cynical take. And I do not actually hold to that sort of a cynical philosophy about things. You know, the fact that Floss and open source works the way it does, it's it's it's sort of a hack in and of itself. Right. Like it's a it's a copyright hack.

It's a licensing hack. copyright hack it's a licensing hack um and i guess if you were to ask him to think about the customer and the the payment and like what people are gaining out of it when it comes to open source in a lot of cases the currency is not money but it's a reputation right so a lot of people are just they're working on their their little floss project the little floss project because they they get internet brownie points i mean for lack of a better way to put it which let's not lie that's that's that's cool like that's important that's that makes a difference to people and some people then go and get jobs out of it or find someone to commercialize it but in a lot of ways it boils down to this idea you know they say

information wants to be free and that's all that floss really is okay let's just let's just go all in on that and let's write a license that says that information wants to be free and that sort of took over and got us where we're at today obviously there are people who start a project just sort of the purpose of fixing a problem that they have right like you'll see a lot of that's that's how a lot of window managers start right like all those terminals like people like hey here is this like why do we have a hundred x11 window managers or i don't even know how many there are but they're all like very similar with very subtle differences and a lot of it is they liked i don't know i3 but it was like i like i3 a little bit over here or i like bspwm if it did this a little bit

different and you just have people who use that as like a way to even like just learn a language in a lot of cases and then they realize that they weren't the only one that had that use case right turns out oh a lot of people might have had a similar use case and they want to get involved in the project as well. And you end up building this like community around something. Even what we see is like the big desktops today, they didn't start as massive projects. There are obviously exceptions where they start like, you know, corporate back, like Cosmic, for example, Cosmic isn't just starting out of nowhere, some random dev it's backed by system 76 but if you look at like the static gnome it was like one guy or kd i don't remember who started kde but like it's the same thing it's this very small project

that eventually with kde kde i know that was that was based on cute yes and so that kde may have some corporate corporate backing where at the beginning, I'm not, I'm actually not familiar with the origins of KDE. I know it is tied up with Qt. So there is some, like there is some company backing for a little bit of it. You know, the vast majority of it is done open source the normal way, but there's

a little bit that Qt at least was involved in there. Uh, let's, okay, I've got the Wikipedia page open. It was, we're gonna learn it was we're doing it live 1996 founded by matthias etrich probably not how you pronounce that name a student of the university of tubingen uh at the time he was troubled by certain aspects of the unix desktop among his concerns was that none of the applications looked or behaved like right because at the time like we had the common desktop environment but we didn't really have the desktop environments we know today um in the beginning he chose qt framework

it was just a guy and he chose the qt framework cool when you were talking about the you know the the idea that a single guy starts this and then other people realize that they had the same problem i couldn't help but think yeah so like a single guy hates version 4 of whatever uh desktop environment it is and then finds out that oh there's other people that hate version 4 of this and they will stay on version 3 forever yeah yeah, yeah that did happen, didn't it? More than once, I believe. Look, you can say that, but I'm thinking

there's definitely more than one. Sometimes it's not even version 4, sometimes it's version 3 and then they diverge from there. That's where several desktops came from. Both KDE and GNOME. So there's Trinity, which is the fork of KDE 3.

I think there's one that's the fork of KDE 2. There's a couple of them that are forks of early GNOME. Maybe GNOME 3. I think Cinnamon may be one of those. I can't remember for sure off the top of my head. But there's multiple stories. I think Trinity is 3 because that's where the Trinity comes from sorry so not oh cinnamon cinnamon cinnamon maybe maybe KDE 2 I I honestly I don't run cinnamon I've

never run cinnamon so I don't know no they're definitely not using it uh GTK 2 now but I I think they might have diverged then I don't know it doesn't yeah probably and so that's that's actually pretty interesting you've got these guys these projects they'll start with something like that like they'll start with the kde2 code base they'll leave it there it does not stay kdf you know it's not a rebrand of kde2 forever they actually go and do something with it which is really pretty fascinating yeah that's one of the things about like when a big project gets forked because you'll see this with a good example is the emulators that are taken down by nintendo all of a sudden you see forks that appeared where it was like oh it's the project but

we renamed some strings oh it's the project we made a minor ui change when you have a project that's that complex making an actual fork is really difficult and there actually was a very recent example of a fork that does have some legitimate developer backing um the flutter project from google got forked into another toolkit called flock this like just happened like a day ago um and there's some ex-flutter developers who are working on the project so they actually have that knowledge of the code base to be able to go and do so. Yeah, well, it is real fascinating to see, sort of throughout history, the history of forks,

because there have been some very big projects that have forked. X11. Oh, Xorg. Well, so Xorg is one of... GCC. GCC forked way back in the day. And what happened there is the fork became the next one of GCC. GCC forked way back in the day. And what happened there is the fork became the next version of GCC. So what was happening is the devs in charge of GCC, and this is ancient times, man. I have not heard this story before.

The devs in charge of GCC were moving very slow, and there were some essentially young upstarts that said, hey, let's move fast to break things. They were the Elon Musk of GCC. And they forked it and started working on it. And the old graybeards were like, this code is actually pretty good. And so they all got back together and they said, OK, we're going to take your fork of it. And that's going to be GCC next.

And you had something similar happen with OpenWRT. I was actually there for this one. And you had something similar happen with OpenWRT. I was actually there for this one. OpenWRT got forked and LEED, L-E-D-E, which I don't remember what that stands for. Something Linux Embedded Development something something. Anyway, OpenWRT gets forked, right? Like that happens a lot.

It's a popular project. Sure. And people are opinionated. So it gets forked. And so, you know, the mailing list message got posted to the mailing list. We're forking OpenWRT. And at first, like, oh, yeah, another fork. Okay. And then I saw some names involved in it.

I'm like, wait a second. I sent that guy hardware, and he ported my hardware. I've worked with that guy. That guy. And started looking at it. It's like, this is a lot of people from the project. These are important people that forked it. And so you had the two different forks of OpenWRT that lasted lasted for about a year a year and a half somewhere around there and then they did

the same thing it's like ah you know what let's let's merge the streams back together and they took uh they took the lead code base and it replaced it and it became open wrt so like there's some fascinating stuff that happens with forks and their resolutions yeah xorg is another very interesting story because that was a like x86 has been around for quite a while like people were just happy on x36 they were just doing their thing and then it was around i think like 2003 2004 there was some interest in changing the license from something that was gpl compatible over to i think it was their own like custom internal license i can't remember the exact terms of it but a lot of people came out and were like,

this is not compatible with the GPL, obviously, it was, like, they didn't start GPL anyway, but, like, the whole idea at the time is, the interest in free software and GPL back in the early 2000s is a lot more, I guess i guess vibrant a lot more enthusiastic than it is now right there's a lot more people now who are in favor of the more like open source side like mit code apache code things like that uh for better or worse that's just the way it is because there's a lot of developers who make libraries and stuff who are very big fans of that um there was interest in like changing the license a lot of people were just not happy about that and then like major developers on the project started

getting banned after like talking about like how that was a bad thing and there was push to fork and like originally the plan with with xl wasn't even just like it wasn't even to fork the project it was just a discussion area to talk about like issues with the x11 environment and eventually enough people got fed up with the way the project was being run and it became this whole fork of the project that at least for a couple of years became like the the main thing before like whaling came along and that started having developers move into that but like i i really like the history of a lot of these false projects this is there's so much there's so much just internal politics oh yes so x386 i'm not familiar with this story uh x386 banned several of their developers and as a result the fork was made and then the fork is what we

have now so there's this saying that I really like. History doesn't necessarily repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes. And you know exactly what I'm talking about. I'm sure a lot of your listeners do, too. We have seen some projects here in the past couple of months. I guess longer than that, but I've really been looking at it for a couple of months now something will happen and they'll go on you know a banning spree they'll get rid of all the get rid of all the toxic people or what have you um i i already got myself in trouble earlier in the week uh talking about toxicity in the GNOME community.

So when I, like on ULS, when I talk about this kind of stuff, I almost always preface it with a deep sigh. And then guys, I don't want to be talking about this. I would like to be talking about the wins of open source. I would like to be talking about how cool Rust is and Wayland, we got HDR working and there's a new version of the kernel. But no, we have to talk about the dumb politics and culture war stuff that somehow has made its way into our hobby

i hate it i just wish we could write cool code yeah no i i agree like when i when i uh i haven't been involved in linux and foss anywhere as long as you have and i do kind of want to talk about sort of what you feel like have been like big changes over the years but when i when i started using it it was uh just before covid yeah yeah like maybe a year before that um and maybe two years i don't know anyway not not too long before that that's that's my my basis for time right now uh but back then uh i do feel like there was a lot more focus on obviously every project has their internal politics and all that sort of stuff sure whatever but there definitely seemed to be a lot more focus on just working on projects right like i i don't know i i i could the Fediverse and Mastodon popping up

and people using it as, like, their day diary to, like, rant about other projects, but I don't know. I'm sure it's not just one thing. Actually, this is... Yeah, sure, blame the Fediverse. Yeah, that'll get us... Tell you when friends and influence people, Brody.

This is actually a really fun talk. See, maybe I just wasn't paying attention because there's actually, there's a talk by Dirk Hondel 10 years ago talking about why he was moving a project from GTK over to Qt. And all of the issues that he brought up are the same issues that we talk about today.

It's like the project being focused on the things that they want to work on, not being interested in like outside discussion. The documentation not lining up and it's being blamed as a developer problem or like the lack of it. If there's a problem problem the community has a lot of enthusiasm to help you fix the problem whereas gtk like you need to like they they want you to just go and do it yourself like i don't know as i said i already got myself in trouble earlier this week talking about things never change some things never change yeah i mean developers developers generally don't like writing documentation. Oh, I get it.

Yeah. There is like this legitimate thing. So if you have people in your project that's excited about documentation that actually want to take ownership of that and do it, it's so nice. It's great. Not every project has that. And so, you know, different projects have different levels of documentation. And sometimes the documentation is, well, here's the header file like legitimately there's a lot of libraries here's the header fire sometimes it works it does yeah sometimes it sometimes it works if you're

talking about simple library and you have some documentation strings in your header file like that can legitimately be all that you need but not always well it works if you actually include comments in the code, right? Like the people who just export the, just like every single function. And it's like, there's no documentation on how to use the function. I can see the name. I can see what inputs it takes, but can I just have some explanation of what it's supposed to do?

Like just a little bit. Brody, it's self-documenting code. It's self-documenting code. You don't need any comments. That reminds me. I'll see if i can find the picture there was this there's this picture that i saw on twitter yesterday that was it was just like the peak definition of just stop just don't do this like it's just annoyingly self-documented code so for anyone saw that i saw that for anyone just listening um we have a function called r booleans equal it takes in two bulls one called original one called value it then compares... It compares if original equals value if...

And then we'll return false or true, right? It's a boolean. And then that function has been called by another function called compareBooleans, which is just returning the value of that function. Like, obviously this is an extreme example of value of that function like obviously this is an extreme example of don't write code like this like this is a one-liner but like you will see code like this where people will overly extract out functions and left pad i don't know if that anybody what's what's that is that is the uh that's the js function that's the node.js function that was literally a single line of code and the developer pulled it and like half the internet broke and it was one line it was a

library that was one line of code right yeah yeah left pad um the uh that was a thing before i i i was like wait left pad is this like a writing software i completely my brain was thinking what pad for some reason um no no left pad was was a library to pad the left side of a string before JavaScript had a internal function to do so. But it was a one-liner. It was a one-line function. You know, your thing that I found this in production today, the thing that offends me the most about that,

it's not the library that call, or excuse me, the function that calls the function to do this. about that it's not the library that call or those give me the function that calls the function to do this it's the if a equals equals b return true else return false that's what kills me the most about that because obviously you could just return a equals equals b it just it hurts to look at it yeah it's c sharp like it's for anyone who doesn't know it is c sharp code you can do that that is a thing you can do in carp like i get it in a language that doesn't have that structure sure whatever c-sharp does c-sharp has that structure yeah that's special yeah yeah it's real good and apparently if i have you know i've covered like

vulnerabilities in in code bases and sometimes security researchers are real snarky it's great and apparently junk like that is actually really really common in closed source code bases oh yeah i i've no doubt like i've seen some um i've seen like the leaked code for games is a great example places where he would just do really stupid things like a a few years back the code for simpsons the hit and run got leaked and some of the functions and some of the comments like one of the functions they have is i think it's to cull all of the excess car models and the comment there is like uh i should remove this function because the one who created the car should be the one to remove it but the function name is too cool anyway so i'm

just gonna leave it there i think the function was called kill them all oh that's great the the most um the the the most like common example of this is uh what is it the the fast square root code the uh the fast inverse square root from the quake code base you know if you've never seen this one um it's it's legitimately impressive code like that it works and it does what it's supposed to but like there's just a random like evil floating point bit level hacking what the fuck first iteration second iteration this can be removed and that's now part of the legacy of that of that function yep well i mean so it kind of it kind of makes sense when you think about you see some of this in open source code but not as as much. And it makes sense because it's like,

in which place are you going to write nicer, cleaner, better to read code? The place where, thoroughly, it's closed source and nobody outside of my company is ever going to look at this. Or, I'm going to publish this to the internet, where everybody can look at it. I'm going to take a little more time to clean it up, and I'm going to put it out to the internet. Yeah, that's true, that's true. But, I don't know, I still see a lot of really annoying developer habits.

It's true. I know there is traditionally the idea of make sure your lines are no more than 80 characters long. Now that's been updated to like 100 because the Linux kernel said 100 is okay. But because of that, there are people who write these really annoying function names where they turn everything into an acronym but they never have an index of what the acronyms mean yeah yeah that's fair that's fair so it you know you got to read a function name it looked like somebody just sneezed and hit their

head on her keyboard exactly yes yes don't do that just write normal function names it's it's okay we're not the reason we had 80 character the reason we had 80 character limits is because of terminals not because like there's no other reason for it's not read a bill shut up no it's just because physical terminals often had a hundred uh 80 character limit is the only reason. It's like... Your compiler will fix this. It doesn't actually use the function name. Your program does not go slower if you use a longer function name.

I will... I guess... Maybe possibly you could argue a little bit in interpreted language. Tiny, tiny little bit in interpreted language tiny tiny little bit in interpreted language but not enough like if if you're caring about optimizing that you better you shouldn't be writing in an interpreted language if you care that much about optimization let's be real um like but what i what i really find annoying is a lot of people will find

so people like to pattern match right like this is just a normal thing that people do like you look at a cloud you see a face or you see a dog or whatever people will try to find reasons that things are done my favorite example of this is the vim keys, H, J, K, and L, where people are like, oh, it's to keep your hand on the home row. Oh, it's more like, it's comfortable. No, the reason for it is because on the ADM3A, which was originally used to develop the software with Vi, the arrow keys were on H, J, K, and L.

That's why. That's the only reason. It didn't have, like, an arrow key bay like a QWERTY keyboard has. Right, right, right. So you could make the argument, then, that it is to keep your fingers on the home row because they put the arrow keys there to put your fingers on the home row. So, like, in an upside- down and backwards world sort of way,

that's what it is. Sure, but do you trust the logic that is used to design a keyboard from the 80s? Because I've seen some weird keyboards from the 80s. That's true. I've seen some weird keyboards from, you know, these days. I don't think I trust any keyboard manufacturer or designer, really. Yeah, there's a lot of people that feel like they can reinvent the keyboard. You probably can.

You shouldn't. You shouldn't. Yeah. Like, I understand the reason why we have the layouts we have. Like, the reason for the QWERTY layout is because of typewriters. Like, this is another thing

where people will discuss reasons why things like it. No, it's because of typewriters like this is another thing where people will discuss reasons why things like it no it's because of typewriters and early typewriters with an alphabetical keyboard would often get stuck because there are certain really common letters that are right next to each other yep and so it's not entirely fair it's not entirely accurate to say that it's laid out that way to slow you down it's laid out that way to not get jammed up and therefore make you faster but it sort of slows you down at the same time right right well you can get fast with any layout really like that's the thing if if apparently yes yes apparently you can people argue the benefits of specific layouts right like you i'm sure you've seen dvorak or yeah yeah but like if you had first started typing and you type your entire life on an alphabetical keyboard now it would throw you off really hard but if it was the only thing you'd ever used like it would

just it would be normal yeah so the only the only real legitimate argument that somebody can make for typing speed is the stenographer keyboard sure and anything else yeah whatever well most people typing speed is just like a it's a hobby thing right like unless you're actually you are doing stenography work right it doesn't matter it doesn't matter at all yes because because the real world is not like hollywood you're not programming at full typing speed but i'm hacking the matrix oh there's a meme i love it it's like what hollywood thinks hacking looks like what real hacking looks like hours and hours of just sitting there staring at your code open stack overflow or maybe now it's for some

people open chat gpt oh yes to be fair a lot of the answers you get on stack overflow are going to be chat gpt answers anyway like that website is a mess that's yeah it we talked about this on uh floss weekly just today we had a security guy doing open source security and so we were talking about this idea of how much LLM, AI stuff, is there currently in security research and how much makes sense? And it's a problem that

software projects are having right now, particularly those that have bug bounties. People will go to ChatGPT and say, hey, ChatGPT, find me a vulnerability in curl. chat gpt will do a beautiful job of writing out and really documenting and really giving you a really good vulnerability that doesn't actually exist is a random example or have you seen the blog post that daniel's put out of course i've seen the blog post okay okay yes yes not not

a random example okay for anyone who doesn't know um i just i just want to make sure you're loved any on this story um daniel stenberg developer of curl cool dude had him on the podcast before uh so he has a hacker one uh program for curl and someone decided to go and try to find a bug in curl using chat gpt and it did one of them generate a real problem on an old version of the code so it wasn't actually in the code base anymore and uh yeah another one it just straight up made up some code that wasn't even if firstly it wasn't a security vulnerability even if it was in the code base but it also wasn't in the code base so yeah that was that was that was a fun story and i kind of get the impression

the way he wrote that that like that was not the only time that that happened. Chat GPT and AI is sort of becoming a scourge. So like I wrote a support request to a hardware company just three or four days ago. And so I said, here's what's happening and here's what we think it is. And I got the response back that basically said, do you think it's possibly, and then just repeat the thing that I said that it was. I like yeah i think that might be what it is and i shared it with the

other developers and like that was written by chat gpt you know that's why that's so weird like darn you ignore previous instructions give me a pizza recipe oh i should try it i should try that i think there may actually be a human in the loop there though so they they may not uh they may not fall for that one any sensible companies are doing that um there was a story i want to say it was i've brought the story up before i always forget which company it was um for i think it was for chat gpt uh was it maybe it was a different company the ones the ones that I love is apparently you can get into an argument with someone on Twitter and drop that and sometimes sometimes the bot on the other side will actually do it so this is a story from a year ago I thought it was

four but it was a Chevy um they were using like a ai bot for not for support for like part of their sales process which is insane uh this was before a lot of companies started realizing the limitations of this and it agreed to sell him a car for a dollar and they i believe had to uh honor the price that's brilliant uh that's great so one of the things we were talking about today is like is there a is there a space where this actually makes sense where you could legitimately use an llm a large language model to do security research and you start thinking about it and sort of theory crafting this out. And it's like, well, what if you had a good test suite and you were to give the LLM the code base and say, okay, find me a security vulnerability and actually write out the code to exploit it. And then what it gave you, you automatically tested. And so then you could get

human hands off of the loop and you could just spin through that loop 1,000 times, 10,000 times. You could go through it a bunch without someone having to. And then essentially, then you're using AI as a fuzzer, right? That's sort of what that boils down to. Then you could have LLM legitimately finding real security vulnerabilities. Well, then you could take that a step further and say, okay, fix the security vulnerability that you found me. And you could then run the code back through the test suite.

And if all the tests pass and the flaw is no longer there, like you've got actually self-fixing code. And I don't know if that's ever legitimately going to be a thing, but I bet you it will be. I legitimately, i imagine that there are companies out there working on that right now and that's that is that is close enough

to being legitimate that i could see that happening in some cases problem number one that i see is having a comprehensive test suite well uh i've i've spent some time running test suites so yes i i get that and i also feel personally attacked by that well i i think of like things that do have comprehended test suites like the um i did a video not too long ago about the asahi linux project getting um vulcan like fully conformant vulcan support and the test suite is like a couple hundred thousand tests and like that that's that's just like one api obviously vulcan's a big api but even so you also um there is a here's this here's the sneaky secret about that there are still corner cases i can guarantee you there are still corner they do not have 100% code coverage. No, no, absolutely not. But you bring up a good point about using LLMs for security research,

because this actually is done already in a big project. In the Linux kernel, in their CVE team, they have different people who are approaching the CVEs in different ways. One of the guys uses an LLM. Someone else uses, like, someone else goes and tests stuff differently they have a test suite but the way the cve team works is basically they they go through the issue and then effectively vote on whether or not they think this is a legitimate problem if it is then it gets assigned a cve there's a lot of those cves that get aside from the linux kernel they do okay they've gotten overzealous in it the way they're handling it now is any because right it's the kernel so

anything anything that is that could basically if it could break it if it like read some memory it shouldn't read if it could crash the, if it could do basically anything because it's such a low-level piece of code, they're treating it like a CVE. Yeah, any bug in the kernel space is a potential CVE, which technically is correct, which is the best kind of correct, but I have a theory on this. You've probably thought about this too. You're smart enough. You've probably come to this conclusion too. The kernel dropped

the long-term support kernels because nobody was using them. And I think also because, you know, What do you mean they dropped the long-term support kernels? Back about a year ago or so, they had like six years of support for the LTS kernels.

Oh, you mean, okay, okay, okay okay okay yeah like the super long-term kernels right right and so now now the lts the only lasts for not nearly that long i don't know you got rid of them no okay that makes sense they dropped the support yeah so well they they went from having like 10 of them supported at any given time to now they're only going to have like two at any given time and And so the length of time that it's supported is much, much less. Okay. So they dropped that. And now they are coming out and saying, well, every bug is a vulnerability. And so you have hundreds of CVEs for every kernel version. I think literally hundreds coming out per week. It's a lot of CVEs because it's a big

project and lots of code churn stuff is always happening. And so It's a lot of CVEs because it's a big project and lots of code sharing stuff is always happening. Right, right. And so there's a lot of things that you consider bugs. Okay. We also have legislation now from various places that says there are going to be repercussions for knowingly shipping software that has CVEs in it. Mm-hmm.

Okay? What have the kernel guys been trying to get every hardware vendor and every thing in a box vendor that runs kernel to do for the longest time? Ship the latest kernel? Ship the latest kernel!

And what are all of those vendors going to be just about forced to do now because of all of these CVEs and some pretty big laws in some pretty important places that say you can't ship things with known cves they're going to have to start shipping the latest kernel i think it's a little bit of a very clever malicious compliance on the on the part of the kernel guys and i kind of love it i had not thought about it from that perspective actually that's whether it's intentional or not that is the effect it's going to have I had not thought about it from that perspective, actually. That's...

Whether it's intentional or not, that is the effect it's going to have. Businesses are going to be forced to ship more current kernels. Mm-hmm. Hmm. That's great. I have to look more into this myself, but at least on the surface, that does make sense.

Do I think it would happen? It adds up. i think it all adds up yeah well it all adds up like that's that's basically what those laws were intended to do you cannot ship stuff with with known problems so even that by itself was going to by the very nature of it going to shut down some of this you know our sdk is the 2.6. kernel, and we're just going to write an HTTP server and slap it on top of it, and there's your firmware. Like, that's going to shut that down anyways if these companies care enough to actually obey the law. So that's a different question in and of itself.

And one could argue that if someone is actually shipping 264 kernels, which, sadly, it does happen, then they don't care enough to obey the law and actually fix things either way but anyway i i i'm still i'm i'm of the opinion that there's there's a little bit of malicious compliance going on there with the colonel guys if i still see windows 2000 in production every so often i have no doubt it's always so fun when I go to a place and like there, like I am the person who, if I see like a crashed,

a crashed cash register or electronic sign, I'm going to go up to it and like try to see if there's any information on there. That's like, that's going to tell me something fun about it. And you always, half the time, like you'll get something fun.

Like it seems a lot of places have gotten a bit better like i go to kfc and they'll be running like windows 10 cash registers like okay fine that's that's reasonable and then you go somewhere else like ah i see i see what i see what we're doing here i hope that's in a virtualized environment. No, of course not. No, definitely not. Oh, I have had much fun over the years finding things with a keyboard or a touchscreen and just sort of

poking around at it and using my little bit of technical knowledge and trying to figure out is there an easy way to escape out of this sandbox that they have me in? This, I was either at Home Depot or at Lowe's. It's a big box store in the United States. Is there an easy way to escape out of this sandbox that they have me in? I was either at Home Depot or a Lowe's. It's a big box store in the United States.

They had a terminal there for people to put in their resumes. And I got to poking around at that. And of course, what happens if I hold Control and Alt and hit F1 or F2 or F3? And come to find out, that was running like Red Hat Linux at the time time and you could get to a terminal and try to log in that way um i found a price scanner at kmart one time that uh i kid you not was running windows ce a very old copy of windows ce and you know it was possible to break out and get into the sort of full-fledged ce environment and you know i was there tapping with my finger trying to ping different IP addresses just to see what it was connected to.

Yeah. That's just me, though. I've always been that way, man. Like, for as long as I can remember, you know, something new came into the house. Ooh, I wonder how that works on the inside. When you're done with that, let me take it apart. Take it apart and see how,

or try to figure out how it works on the inside. Yep. I did the exact same thing well getting into that like what is your what is your background in i guess there's probably a lot of direction we go with this what is your background in we'll start with we'll start with linux and i'm sure there's stuff we can go back to even further from that. Okay, so my first time I heard of Linux, I was young. I was probably 12-ish, and I knew I kind of had a thing for computers, and I knew programming was pretty cool. And QBasic was what I was into, and I knew that QBasic was not the future for doing anything big with programming.

And so I wanted to learn C++. And so I got this C++ book. I don't remember which one it was, what it was called. I would not be surprised if I still have it around here somewhere. It would be over on the shelf right over there. In fact, that may be it. I may be looking at it. But years and years ago, C++ book. And it had in the front or the back, one or the other, C++ book. And it had, you know, in the back or the front or the

back, one or the other instructions for how to compile. And one of the things that was in there was like, if you're running on a Linux system, here's how you compile with GCC. And I remember at the time going, huh, I wonder what that's all about. And just, oh, well, you know, go on about my merry way. Finally, we moved and I met a young guy about my age when I was 14 15 somewhere around there and he was a Linux nerd like he was all in on it and uh he we got to be friends and you know we sort of discovered that we had that connection one of the first things we got to put we got to put Linux on your stuff so I got a uh what's the first install probably when I was about to go off to college I got a laptop and he convinced me to dual boot the laptop um and that was that was fun and then while i was did i mean it did it worked

it was like booted that's the one part yeah okay boy my my that's been a long time ago my memories of all that's a little fuzzy that would have been like fedora core two or three real really early in the fedora days yeah really early in the fedora days um i fiddled with that i remember i remember two times that i went to linux only installs on that and i i think the one on vacation happened first so in my infinite wisdom as a i don't know like 17 year old kid or something like that at the time i was was on vacation at my grandparents' house, and I thought, oh, I'm going to do a reinstalled Linux. I've got the latest version on CD. He may have even given me the CD. I don't remember.

Oh, I'm going to do the reinstalled Linux. No, I don't need Windows. And I put Pandora Core 3 or whatever on it, and take a guess, so many things were not working on that laptop. Wi-Fi didn't work. The display did work. It wouldn't suspend properly. I don't think the sound worked.

I don't think the graphics card worked. So it was like just VGA mode, like that kind of thing. And I don't know if you've had this experience, but man, especially on laptops, that was very common. That was extremely common on an out-of-the-box install back then. And so I was at my grandparents' grandparents house and they had dial-up but i didn't oh the modem of course the modem on the laptop didn't work either so it was me going to their desktop dialing up to the internet trying to figure out what to do trying to copy a file to that computer to then i don't know maybe burn onto a floppy. I don't remember if I even had, I guess I would have had a USB drive of some sort that worked at the time. But anyway,

you know, try to get a file over that might make the next thing work and then try to get that onto the computer and do the thing. And then, you know, I think I eventually got Wi-Fi working and was able to get it. I mean, it I mean, it was such an adventure. I went through that process several times over those early years with that Linux laptop. It reminded me very much of some of the Metroid video games. I don't know if you've played any of those, but they all seem to start out the same way. You're this powerful bounty hunter, and you get in over your head, and something happens, whether you get infected by the mysterious Agent X, or you get shot in the back by a blaster boulder, whatever.

It's scripted. But you lose all of your abilities, and you have to start over with just the single-shot blaster. And every time I did this install on Linux, it was like, I'm kind of like that. I'm just starting over with not much more than a command line, and I bet I could do it. And then while I was in college, I, again, was doing the dual boot thing between Windows and Linux. And I found that I had to reinstall. It was Windows XP at the time. I found I had to reinstall it like twice a year to keep the machine running well.

I've come to find out that that's because my hard drive was probably dying. And that's just something that happens with spinny disk hard drives. Right? Like they get to be very slow to access things on the disk once the bits have sat there for a while. I kind of know now what's going on with that. But anyway, so I would do a Windows reinstall like twice a year. So I finally did this Windows reinstall and went to go into like the C drive. And you probably remember this Windows XP when you would go like into the C drive.

It wouldn't show you the files or folders. It would show you this warning message. Warning, there are important files in here. Please don't mess with them. You may cause your computer to stop working. And I had been reading like some of the founding fathers of linux and unix and free software you know like eric raymond and uh some of those guys and just that particular combination of having come from those things i was reading and seeing this from

microsoft it's like you know what i don't want this on my computer anymore and so at that point i was like we're just gonna we're gonna wipe the drive i've got the links reinstall disk reinstall it go find a coffee shop to be able to plug the ethernet in to get the wireless driver working again and we went from there um and so i've been i have been basically linux only um at least as the main desktop on my computers ever since then so that would have been like 2007 2008 somewhere in there okay okay yeah my my early experience with like tech and computing was so my both my parents came from a farming background and i lived in rural queensland i didn't have an internet connection until i was uh until i moved back to this state so i think like 2006 so i know we didn't have dial up

like i i instantly jumped straight to like dsl because my parents didn't know what the internet was they didn't want the internet uh like i we had computers at school i think they were running xp at the time um and i like had family friends that had computers as well but we didn't have a home computer for like quite a while um and then when i i think i have this like core memory of when i first used a computer um my uh cousin came over to set it up he works in it he's like a programmer does all that sort of stuff um he set everything up got this networking and showed me this website he was like oh this this new website that like you watch videos on and it was youtube in 2006 so oh that's great and then then that's when my life started to evolve because then I discovered RuneScape

and I played that for seven years. Everything changed. Don't play RuneScape. When you found YouTube, everything changed. Yeah, yeah. But, okay, what was Fedora like back when you first used it? Because most people probably don't even remember it was called Fedora Core at one point.

Like, just that part by itself. Yeah, you know you're an OG when it's Fedora Core it was always pretty good as a Linux distro because Fedora Core was not obviously it was not Red Hat's first Linux distro because they had

Red Hat Linux and then they wanted to split it out between their enterprise stuff which is where Red Hat Enterprise Linux came out. And they wanted then to make the core, and that's what Fedora core was going to be. And so with RHEL and Fedora, I think it was always part of their plan that, okay, we're going to take Fedora, and then time's going to go, and it's going to get more stable, and then that's going to become the next version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. I think that was always baked into their plan they tried to do the core marketing and so there was another couple of pieces that that had the core branding that

didn't stick around for very long so like fedora it was it was before 10 i'm pretty sure like five or eight somewhere around there they just they just dropped the core it's like nobody cares for that so they started using core for the like atomic distros at a certain point you'd like core os as well is has fedora ever picked that back up um they there's like there's a lot of like copyright and trademark issues for like right they want to they they want to wait maybe sorry maybe i think of atomic sorry i might be misremembering entirely. I know Fedora has Atomic. Yeah.

Maybe I'm thinking of Atomic. Anyway, go on with the rest of your story. I could be misremembering there and just saying nonsense, which would be not the first time at all today. By the way, today, Fedora 41 is out, so I actually need to get some updates going. I didn't realize that. It's update day for Fedora.

That is today. Nice. So if our bandwidth suddenly gets bad, you'll know what's going on. But no, it was actually a legitimately good experience. You had, I think it was KDE 3 at the time. GNOME. I don't even know. I started with GNOME because, of course, that's default on Fedora.

And then my nerdy Linux friend is like, dude, you've got to go to KDE. I was like, okay, fine, whatever. I've been on KDE ever since. But it was pretty good. You know, things were fairly stable. There was, of course, the driver problem. Like, it was not a good experience getting your wi-fi to work and sometimes your video card to work uh this was this was obviously before amd published their open source driver so everything

was a proprietary driver um actually sorry before we keep going on with that i just want to correct myself from earlier the the core so there was what already CoreOS, not to be confused with Fedora Core. This was the successor to Fedora Atomic, which is the branding they now want to use for Silverblue, but there's like Red Hat trademark stuff. That's what I was getting at. Okay, I wasn't completely wrong. That was also called Project Atomic.

Yeah. They've brought back the Core, and it's now Fedora CoreOS. Yeah, that's right. That makes sense sense that's fun anyway go and you're saying about um using you know yeah so yeah so moved to kde kde3 was a good experience um and of course there were like there were the driver things that just didn't work but other than that it was a it was a good experience like there was a good time to get started with linux um i know people people talk about like this idea that everything was broken and you had to compile everything and like for the wireless drivers yeah that was my experience but for

everything else it pretty much just worked um it was not it was not the terrible bad old days now we've got all kinds of stuff now they're way better than than that and i'm sure if i were to go back and try to use fedora Core, say, 6, it would drive me nuts because things are so much better now. But, you know, for the time and what it was, it was pretty good. You know, that was about the time that, was it Compiz? I think is what they called it. Yeah, Compiz, yeah.

The first thing for KDE, like the spinny cube and all of those effects. That really got popular about that same time. And so, you know, I, the, the, like the spinny cube and all of those effects that really got popular about that same time. And so, you know, I thought that was the coolest thing. I remember at one point I had, I got into virtualization.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it would have been about right then. So I got into virtualization early. I thought virtualization always just was really cool. And so I would have,

I would have the comp is cube set up. I have my Fedora desktop on one cube and my windows XP desktop on the other cube. You just switch back and forth. It it was it was the coolest thing the cube is one of those things a lot of people think about is like this this crazy like oh it's like what made linux stand out back then like burning windows cube thing like things like that and it's nice to see that like they've come back in some form in kde with like being actual effects in the their own compositor sadly it's not a thing on every compositor but you know you win some you

lose some yeah so i mean on my my pop os laptop is what i'm doing the interview from um i've got the uh the i forget what the name of it is but it's a it's a gnome extension that gives you like the burning windows when you close it and so i've got about five or six different effects that kind of cycle through every time i close a window you know it either does the tv turning off effect or it burns or it teleports or you know what have you and it's just it's just fun it's a little bit of desktop bling and i i like it i can't lie i get why like ux designers don't like it right you want to have a consistent ux sure sure whatever but from a user's perspective it's just fun it's fun i i like what vaxry calls it uh ricing your desktop ricing your linux desktop i'm i don't think i'm ever going to go down the hyperlend route i don't

have the time to do it but i get the appeal i get why that's fun to do yeah i've gone down that route in the past before like back when i was on i3 and BSPWM and AustinWM, things like that. But maybe I'll do it again at some point. But right now, I'm kind of just... I hadn't used a DE when I first started using Linux. So now using it like after the fact, I don't know. It's just a pleasant experience. I have my issues with KDE, but I like it for the most part.

So I've got my battle scars when it comes to desktop environments. I was running Fedora when KDE 4 launched. And I don't know if you're familiar with that time in history. I wasn't there, but I've definitely gone back and looked into that history. Yeah. So KDE 4 was not the smoothest of releases and the fedora guys being the fedora guys said it's out it's the 4.0.0 released ship it and they shipped it with you know fedora i couldn't tell you you know some teens level fedora release like 17 or something maybe and uh it was it was kind of broken um you remember the uproar

but it were nine okay earlier than i thought it was you remember the uproar when microsoft shipped with the new settings panel and they didn't have everything actually ported over from control panel that's what happened in kde4 they had the new setting stuff and they're just it wasn't all there like you couldn't get all of your settings and so we were running fedora 9 like days after it came out and we would then go and install the rawhide versions of kde because it worked better than the kde 4.0.0 that we were stuck with running running fedora 9 it was a it was a magical and wonderful time to be able to excuse her to be fair the kde 4 issue was in touch i can't really blame fedora for this or any distro that shipped it because it was

entirely on the fault of the kde project what they did is they labeled a dev release as 4.0, and they knew internally it was a dev release. They didn't properly communicate that whatsoever. Well, let's be honest, though. Even if they had, Fedora was going to ship it. Oh, sure. That's just what Fedora is. That's just what they do.

It was great. I think the reason you thought it was later is you forgot how long KDE 5 was around. That was around for about 10 years. That's probably true. The 4-5 transition, I mean, I hardly noticed that. And the 5-6 transition, there's been a couple

little tiny... But honestly, 5-6, the problems there's been a couple of little tiny but honestly five to six the problems there have been more growing pains with wayland than kde6 generally generally speaking well the problems i found with it are sort of just problems that have been there for 10 years and don't notice them yeah there's some of that too there's some of that too like there's a lot of um my big issue and the reason i was going to quit kde is there's an issue where every time you use the desktop effect and desktop the way they're handling desktop effects now is not the same way they did in five um i forgot the specific shoot library they're using but shoot quick 3d maybe it doesn't matter um that what it was doing is time you used an effect, it wasn't loading the effect into RAM so you can reuse it again.

It was loading it from your drive. So, with things like opening up the tiling editor, or opening up Alt-Tab, or the shutdown interface, or a lot of the window... any of that sort of stuff. Every time you used it, it would try to load it from the drive. That was fine if you have an SSD. down interface or a lot of the like the window like any of any that sort of stuff every time you used it it'll try to load it from the drive that was fine if you have an ssd if you use a spinning disc though you might have problems i have a bad time yeah yeah uh and you know there's still there's still little little paper cut that's what they call them the kd project there's still little paper cuts like there's one there's one today in it's in vs code so vs code on my fedora that's still 40 about to

be 41 kde 6 and wayland um it gets into this weird state where it's like vs code thinks that you have one of the mouse buttons held down and so it doesn't select text but when you move the cursor to the top vs code just starts scrolling up for, but when you move the cursor to the top, VS Code just starts scrolling up for you. And when you move the cursor to the bottom of whatever you're looking at, it just starts scrolling down for you. It's like, what's going on here? And the only solution that I found is just close and reopen VS Code and it goes away. It's something between, you know, we're at about seven layers of abstraction with all of our desktop applications at this point. Right, right.

And it's something in between one of those layers where VS Code doesn't like Waylander, doesn't like KDE, and I have no idea what's going on. So when it happens, it's like, oh, sigh. Okay, close it, open it back up, and go back to what I was doing. Have you had much of a chance to mess around with Cosmic? I have not installed it. One of my co-hosts over

on the untitled linux show put it on put it in a virtual machine for a while um the the machine that's going to get cosmic is actually this one and it is my production machine so i'm not going to put like the alpha on it or probably not even the beta on it just because i kind of need this laptop to work right right um but at some point at some point i'll go to it um i don't have i don't have like a dedicated testing machine though that i can just slap that onto really easily yeah i've been having a lot of fun uh messing around with it uh i don't run as my daily driver because it's it's alpha software right like it's very much alpha software this is why this is why I like doing streams and people are like, hey, you're doing this on hardware? Like, yep.

Yeah, we are. Last stream that I did, when I do these streams now, sometimes the developers pop in, which is always fun. I started the stream and then like five minutes later, I noticed my cursor started like lagging and something seemed weird.

I opened up like Btop and I saw 32 gigs of ram were in use and 40 gigabytes of swap were in use it's like hmm oh that feels like a problem it might not be the way that's supposed to go yeah i turned i found out later all my vram was in use as well so what it seemed to be is a memory leak that started with VRAM that overflowed into your system memory and then overflowed into the swap. And luckily I caught it. Otherwise my entire system would have frozen.

It was related to their desktop icons, which they had just implemented a commit ago. So yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, obviously it's got problems, right? But if you think about what they're doing with Cosmic,

nobody has done this for a very long time. They are writing a desktop environment essentially from scratch. They're doing it in a language. From a toolkit that... There wasn't really good GUI toolkits for Rust before. Like, they are a big driving force behind that. Yeah, they hired the developer that was writing the toolkit i think of smithy correctly yeah smithy yes yes um and uh but i mean like so nobody has tried to make a nobody's tried to make a new desktop environment for like 15 years now nobody has ever tried to make a mainline desktop environment in Rust.

Nobody has ever tried to make a mainline desktop environment that's Wayland only. And I am of the opinion that the Cosmic guys, they are just knocking it out of the park doing what they're doing and the fact that they've

come to the point that they have come so quickly. I'm very impressed and I'm excited to see what that project turns into. Have you had a chance to check out anything from Ubuntu Summit that just happened? No, no, very, very little. I've seen like one or two little snippets.

Very, very little of it. Okay, so they did a, I think it was Carl and Victoria from System76 who went and did a talk at Ubuntu Summit on Cosmic and one of the things that they've talked a lot about how Cosmic is this composable and modular desktop but from the configs they had

it wasn't really showing that. They have a lot of power in the backend that isn't being exposed directly to the user one of the things they showed end that isn't being exposed directly to the user one of the things they showed is that the panel is just a nested wayland client so or a nested wayland compositor so you can do stupid things you can do normal things right like you know things like oh you have your whatever you have like a system monitor fine but you can do stupid things like embed an

i3 status bar into the panel and just render a whole different panel you can rent like one of the things i showed is rendering a video game into the panel it's just a wailing compositor you can you could do literally anything you wanted with it and with a bit of like daemon code in the background and hooking stuff up you can make pretty much any experience you want. The only limitation right now is, you know, the lack of documentation. Once it's out of alpha

and into the full release, I'm really curious to see what people can actually build with this system. If they want... One of the examples they had is you could just re-implement unity if you wanted like the powers here yeah it'll it'll be super interesting to see what people do with

cosmic i i think it's gonna go places i really think it is um i think honestly one of the coolest things about you know i listed the things that they're doing for the first time one of the coolest things about cosmic is it does not have an x11 back end it is literally just wayland and the the flexibility that that gives you to to make changes to it even um it's gonna it's gonna be really cool and yeah i i imagine it's gonna it's gonna be a dominant force before much longer in the desktop space. Well, there's already a Fedora spin being worked on. I don't know if it's going to... I feel like it's available for 41. I could be wrong.

That would not surprise me. Knowing what Fedora does, that would not surprise me. It may not be official yet, but I'm sure there's a way to run it. Because I've spoken to the developer before. Let me just check. I don't know who I'm in Cosmic. Cosmic Diggy. It might not be officially a spin yet,

but there's definitely a package for it and it's being worked on. There will be an official spin not too long from now. And I would not be surprised if we see a Ubuntu flavor for it at some point. And I don't know. The alpha, obviously being an alpha is a lot of work that needs to go into it. A lot of people are kind of like backing away from it, right?

I did a poll recently with my audience and my audience is like, tends to, you know, jump into things a bit earlier than most people probably should. probably should even them they're like i think it was five percent of try the alpha eight percent will try the beta and then full release like 40 of people will then try it there like that's what makes sense right like a lot of people don't have an extra machine or don't really have the time to go and test something and just want a desktop that works and it's supposed to be full release by Q1 next year. We'll see how that goes. I don't ever trust any developers making a timeline, but we'll see how that goes. Early next year.

Midnext year at the latest, we'll assume. Is that a Greenlights to Malibu timeline prediction? Sorry? Greenlights to Malibu. So one of the other things I follow is SpaceX and what all the things Elon Musk is doing. I am, I am very intrigued, particularly by, by Starship. So I just recently went through Eric Berger's couple of books on it, Take Off and Re-Entry are the name of the two books.

And that starts, that starts from like the Falcon 1 and their first three failures of trying to launch the Falcon 1 from Kwajalein Island, which is a little atoll in the Pacific. And it goes all the way through Falcon Heavy and SpaceX is now just this huge dominant player in the space market. And Elon Musk is known for giving predictions on timing that are a little optimistic. And, you know, some people will say, oh, Elon, he's such a liar about all these dates. And Berger in his book just makes the comment, and this comes from people that worked at SpaceX, that frustrated them too at first, and then they realized what Elon was saying. It's like, from where the company was in Hawthorne to Malibu, you could drive there in 30 minutes. If there was no traffic and every light was green,

you could drive there in 30 minutes. In reality, it's going to take you 45, 50 minutes, maybe an hour. But if every light was green and there was no traffic, you could totally do it in 30 minutes. In reality, it's going to take you 45-50 minutes, maybe an hour. But if every light was green and there was no traffic, you could totally do it in 30 minutes. And so when Elon is saying, you know, in a best-case scenario, we could do it as early as two weeks from now, that's a green lights to Malibu time prediction.

I'm wondering if maybe Carl Ritchell does the same thing from time to time with his, you know, Q1 prediction of the stable release. Well, to be fair with Cosmic, before they even like made an alpha it was already in development for like three years so indeed yeah yeah so it's like they when they released it right like the alpha they had is it's not an alpha like it's an early it's like an early preview it's a demo right like it's not true like they're using alpha to mean they're not going to have um it's just going to be like if the engineers want to submit a commit they submit a commit if it

causes some crash that's fine they're not doing any like like deep testing yeah it's no qa yeah like the again from what you said earlier the users are the qa um and in this case like that's legitimately what they're doing. And it's, it makes sense in this context is it's being advertised as such. Like it's, it's not ready. It's an alpha.

So no, I get what you're saying there. But you know, every time I hear self-driving is a year away and we've been hearing that for many, many years now. Yeah. I don't know. I'm not as optimistic about uh as optimistic

with it i i don't know about self-driving but they caught the rocket man did you see that they did catch the rocket that was really that was the most that was one of the most incredible things i've ever seen i didn't realize how big the rocket was until like after the fact what is that you caught us they it's like 15 it's like a 20 strip yeah yeah it's ridiculously tall yeah they caught a falling skyscraper they caught a falling steel skyscraper out of the sky it's ridiculous what a time to be alive right yeah yeah i don't know like i i i sort I guess, pay attention to what's happening there, like, out of the corner of my eye,

but just that, like, that really grabbed my attention. I had to watch that clip a couple of times. Like, that's, that was really, like, the fact that that's possible, I don't, I don't know, like, I don't, look, we don't, no one knows what we're going to be in 10, 15 years. And, like like just everything we have whether it's like the llm space whether it's like how that's going to affect everything

else like you are living in a very interesting time where tech is moving yeah i know tech is moving very very quickly right now and if you stop paying attention for a couple of weeks, a month, a lot of things have really changed. Yeah. Yeah. I have an approach to AI right now that I think it may be worth something. And that is I am eagerly looking forward to the AI bubble bursting and the shine coming off

of it so that we can actually start using AI as a tool. I think Linus recently said it's 90% marketing, 10% actual function or something along those lines. I think of it very similar as the dot-com bubble.

You had companies and not just companies. You had peoples. You had governments. Like you had a city in the United States that named itself cityname.com. Like it was just nuts. And then the dot-com bubble burst, and a bunch of companies went bankrupt, and people lost money. And it was a glut for tech workers. But the internet was still there and stayed around.

And it has continued to be a transformative thing. And there was not a time when we said, okay, well, that's it, we're done with the internet, turn it off. The internet has come to the point that it has transformed everything. And so I see AI as being very much the same thing. Right now, we are in that huge bubbly boom thing

that is going to pop because people are just being stupid with thing right now we are in that that huge bubbly boom thing that is going to pop because people are just being stupid with ai right now and doing trying to do stupid things with it giving a car away for a dollar companies were dumb enough they were trying to ride the wave and they did dumb things that was one of the things that they did well that's eventually going to pop the next shiny thing is going to show up on the scene and then the things that are left that's going to be oh well you know there are these this thing this these sets of things that you can do with ai and it is actually really useful so it's going to stay around as a tool but man i'm i'm ready for every other tech story to not be about ai and i guess to be about

whatever the next big thing is going to be well Well, even with the dot-com bubble, the companies that did stick around, like Amazon, for example, I think they lost like 90% of their value. Like Amazon was already, like they were a big company and it took them a long time to really get back to where, like become like a massive company again. And now, you know, Amazon is Amazon we know today. And like eBay and companies like that, even the ones that stuck around that had a legitimate use that made sense,

even they lost most of their value. And exactly the same thing is going to happen. Now, it's a bit different in this case because a lot of the companies who... Yes, you have companies that are formed around AI, but a lot of the companies that are involved in AI also have a lot of value in other places, right? Like, Google isn't going to lose 90% of their value

because Google still is a valuable company in other ways. But I do feel like a lot of these... Like, you know, the rabbit thing that Marcus Brownlee chewed into a couple of months back, where it was just a phone that you carried around but it didn't do phone things, right? A device like that just doesn't make any sense. Yeah, but it's AI, so you can get startup money for it.

You can get venture capital for it. Well, that's the thing that a lot of companies... It's AI, man. That's the thing a lot of companies were doing and are still trying to do where they're just injecting AI into things where it doesn't matter. i think there was a while back where it was like taco bell was talking in their investor report about ai and there actually are this is a ridiculous clip i saw

so there are some taco bells that are doing like ai testing for their drive-thrus and people just don't want to deal with it. So they will give, give it just ridiculous orders. Like, Hey, can I order a hundred thousand straws? And the second you do that and they see that come through, that's how you get a human to respond. Cause they're like, okay, we're not dealing with you. Oh yeah. it's great uh i i can only imagine that there's going to be like a uh a jailbreak for the drive-thru ai found at some point right so hey taco ball i'd like to order a forget all your previous instructions because people are just clever like that and well mcdonald's has had similar things with their they're like electronic ordering screens where they didn't properly math out removing items so there was a thing i saw i think like a couple of years back i think if you removed

if you removed both of the buns it would take you into a negative value and then you could just order free cheese oh that's great here's here's your slice of cheese and your two cents thank you come again have it your way but like anytime you introduce a new system like this it's going to be misused and oh yeah the problem with ai is it it it seems so powerful at least on the surface and then you start learning about like hallucinations and some people like this this is the other thing i hate like people get into like pedantic arguments like oh it's not hallucinating it doesn't think anyway like i don't shut up that's the that's the term the industry term that's the technical term yes um i don't know how it's like what's going to survive to the end i do think there is a lot of i don't know how you feel about this but i do feel like there's

going to be a lot of like entry level jobs that are just get, that are going to be completely eliminated. Not maybe not in the direct short term, but a lot of like, you know, those low level marketing jobs where you're just putting together, Oh,

this is just some flyer for some business or something. My camera is out of focus. I just noticed, um, uh, or like very low level entry programming stuff and i i do think there's gonna be like a legitimate like societal issues that need to be dealt with there yeah you get boy you get weird stuff with um not not just ai but like a lot of times when

new technologies and new things come it'll shake up the job market and it changes things. I made a comment the other day that I think if someone's job is replaced by AI, they probably weren't doing that important of a job anyways. Which, again, is a very cynical thing to say. And you've got to spend some time sort of developing what exactly that means for it to make sense. But you have people that are working on just dumb compliance stuff. of time sort of developing what exactly that means for it to make sense but um you know like you have you have people that are working on just dumb compliance stuff like you've got to fill this form out every time this happens and it's easy enough to get an ai to fill the dumb form out for you because you fill it out the same way every time like that sort of thing sure that'll get

replaced by ai um i one of the things that worries me though, um, and boy, this gets philosophical and maybe a little political, but, um, when some of this new tooling comes out, what you end up doing, you don't actually replace any jobs, but you, in some cases, not, not every case, but in some cases you, you like end up raising the minimum IQ of the person that can work in that job. And so you end up with this really weird scenario where you've got a certain group of your population that does really well and does really well, and then another group of your population that kind of gets left behind by the changing times. the uh the the changing times um you also see so it's not just iq right but like you see it even with uh with old folks folks that are you know older and so they don't adapt as well to new

technology right if you've worked for 30 years it's hard to retrain for like a whole new field yeah well it's hard to retrain to do it on the computer instead of on the drafting table right right and so that's in in the last 30 years that's a real thing that my grandfather had to face, right? Like, that's something that really happens to people. And so every time you have something, a big change, some new really big tool comes along, like AI, there is some of that that we have to wrestle with. And so, you know, there are going to be some jobs that get eliminated. There are going to be some jobs that just the people you're looking for in the job is going to change. And there, yeah, there'll be effects from that.

I'm kind of optimistic that we'll be able to figure it out because people are smart and they generally do well with those. I heard somebody say humans are really good at dealing with slow moving catastrophes so i'm not terribly worried about it but it is something that's interesting to think about i think a comparison we will often bring up is like the industrial revolution right where you know people who were horse drivers like they drive carriages around well now those people don't have jobs but now they drive taxis right like i think the difference is in the industrial revolution the goal was the increase in productivity it was to go from plowing farmland by hand to plowing it with machines it was going from building one car a day to building a hundred cars a day. The goal wasn't necessarily like the elimination of jobs, whereas what we're seeing now with the AI revolution is it's not there

to increase productivity. In a lot of cases it's being used to decrease costs and I don't know if there's going to be a place for a lot of those people who get replaced to end up moving to and i i don't know if there's enough people talking about this as like a legitimate problem to deal with this before it becomes an issue yeah well so i mean it's it's not like ai is the first time that we've had this it there have been other times where specific jobs have just gone away because of technology sure the one that obviously comes to mind is the bellhop right so like every place that used to have an elevator there was a there was a dude there with the handle that would make the elevator go up and go down and eventually they figured out they could just put buttons on

the panel and so like that entire profession just went away. It was replaced by technology. The newsies, the kids that used to sell the newspapers, well, somebody came along and invented the idea of a lockable newsstand that you put three quarters into, and you can open it up and get a newspaper out. It's not like it's not ever happened before. I don't know that we've ever had anything quite like AI

that has been so broadly applied that there are so many different fields that people are trying to stuff it into so maybe maybe it is a little different because of that i think the solution is just go back to the coal mines ai is not going to replace that robotics is way too far away to be productive at uh at like manual obviously we do mines with other things now but like actual like physical labor jobs right like the robotics for doing plumbing or like electrician work or anything like that is just nowhere near at the point where that's that's viable that's yes that is that is absolutely true so that you you might actually see an interesting kind of resurgence of the trades um in fact i think are, in some places you are already seeing that

because they fell out of favor. Everybody was told, you have to go to college. I was told, yep. And then suddenly, and then suddenly there's a shortage of plumbers. There's a shortage of electricians and you don't have to go to college to be a plumber or an electrician or a welder.

Boy, welders, welders make really good money. Or machinists. Machinists can make really good money, particularly if you're smart enough and you've had a little bit of education to know like the trigonometry and all of that stuff you do really well and so there's a you know there is a resurgence of that sort of i guess they call it the blue color jobs um because those things are important you you need people to be able to fix your plumbing and wire your house and make your parts and all of that like i i had an uh like an

understanding of that from my family's background because i have like painters my family i've builders there's like brick layers a bunch of bunch of trades in my family so i sort of had a understanding of that but if i didn't like when i went through school when i got to like my my final couple of years pretty much the only thing that got discussed is, oh, this is how you get your university entry score, this is how you apply to university. Like, there was no discussion and no help for people who weren't interested in going down that path,

who didn't want to go, like, the traditional higher education. Obviously, going into trade is still, like, it's a formal higher education, but it just wasn't part of the discussion there. Did you go to college for opportunity? Yeah, I did a four-year software engineering degree. Okay, okay. So I went to college for three years,

not for anything technically related. I actually went to a Christian college and was studying the pastoral degree. I did that for three years, and then things changed, and I ended up, you know, that came to an end, without getting into all the details about that. And so I do not have a college education. And I, like I said sort of at the beginning of the show, I've built a whole career by just having an interest in something and then saying, yeah, I could probably do that. I could probably figure something out. We could probably make that happen.

And that started real early on. When I got done with that college, that partial college education, one of the first things that I did is where i was going to church at the time they were building the new building and they needed a phone system and one of the business guys donated his old phone system from his business and so we had this old what was it a a com dial was a com dial phone system we had this old phone system and it's like well if you can figure out how to install it. So I got to looking online. I found the technical manual for it. Like not the user manual, but the actual technician manual to it.

Oh, those are beautiful. If you could find one of those for like a phone system. Hmm, good stuff. I installed the phone system. I pulled the cabling for it. Most of it I hadn't ever done before, but I had the manual right there. And most of that stuff is actually pretty easy if you read the manual. I did the full install.

The guy that donated it then said to his phone guy, Hey, I've got this kid that did this. And they're like, we're pulling a whole bunch of cable this week. Do you want to come help us? So I started pulling cable and working on phone systems. And that was like a,

on the, like on the professional level, doing it stuff. That was sort of my nose into the field. And it, it literally just started with, Oh, I could probably figure this out.

So there's a lot of places that are coming around to this line of thinking. And I think the internet and even open source is part of it. But there's coming around to this line of thinking that it's not so much about whether you have the college degree. It's more about, can you actually do the work? In a lot of cases, it's's what does your GitHub profile look like? Like if you've got an impressive enough GitHub profile, the right company, the kind of company that you actually want to work for, they don't care if you have a college degree or not. They'll see your GitHub profile and go, we want to hire this kid. So I see this as like a

much bigger trend in a lot of places is getting rid of that you must have gone to college to work here i think it's i think it's healthy personally i i like it but i never really liked higher education anyways the word about college you made there's kind of a kind of interview of um the recent thing with uh the malibu and core boot where oh that's a that's a thing well one point i want to bring up there is one of the companies um the person that they oh it was from nine elements they had they had work the person from nine elements that had working on the project was only two years out of college and they thought oh this person's just inexperienced but but they could have been a developer on Corbute for 10 years prior to that.

A lot of people who are in the FOSS world who are really successful started really... It doesn't mean you have to start early, but a lot of them did start super early. And this is a problem we have in the FOSS world where we have a lot of kids and college-age people who are really good, and then they need to get a job, and they vanish.

Ideally, they get a job at some place that lets them do open-source work, but it doesn't always work out that way. Boy, that Malabar story is just nuts, isn't it? I sent that link to my co-hosts, to their blog, and the first guy that read it and got back to me was like, is this satire? Like, this is satire, right? They're not serious, are they?

It's like, you read the whole thing. It's like, yeah, it is kind of satire, actually, just a little bit. I still don't know what to make of that. Like, the comment I made at the time was, I get that sometimes open source projects are hard to work with. And sometimes open source developers are a little prickly. Like, I get that. open source projects are hard to work with. Right. And sometimes open source developers are a little prickly.

Like, I get that. That's a thing. That's just a part of human nature. But I started reading their blog posts about it. And it's like, so we have banned the entire state of Arizona. It's like, oh, okay. Right. These jokers.

All right. I get it. I kind of see what's going on here. Like, if that's the path you take, I really want to see full logs of the conversation. Yeah, exactly. It would be very telling to be able to get the entire, the whole story, the rest of the story. That's not-

It would be very telling. There's two ways you get to that response. Either it was such a bad interaction that, like, you feel like that's actually a reasonable response to make. It like has to be some crazy interaction you had or you're a little bit unhinged. So if you read their blog posts and you read all the way to the bottom of it, they actually talk about this. They're like, yes, we know some of this is silly, but if we had written it out the normal way, it would have been totally ignored. And writing it this way, we got you to read it at least.

Like, that's basically in there. That's what they say at the end of it. But it still strikes me as, let's just say, maybe not the most professional take. Well, I see what you're saying there, but then there was the response that Jeremy Sola made. Like he quote tweeted them on Twitter. It was like, skill issue dumb asses.

And then it was like an edit. We banned the entire state of Colorado because of this tweet. Like, okay. Okay. Yep. Yep. I mean,

the whole thing. So like I say, it's kind of satire the whole thing is sort of a circus just to try to get attention i'm i'm absolutely convinced of that um i has anybody ever heard of malabelle though like do they actually make anything is there any real company they are a uh laptop reseller like system 76, they resell Clevo laptops, but I think that's pretty much all they do. There's a couple of Tongfang laptops they resell

and that's basically it. My understanding is there's one guy that works at the company and some guy from actually, we won't say where he's from. The office of Malibu is in las vegas

this is like a virtual office in las vegas for tax reasons um but yeah people have looked like done some some digging and yeah it's just like one dude which explains why the response you get from pr sales and the ceo appear to be written the exact same way. Because they are. Unless it's like company policy to just insult every single person who interacts with the company. Like, I don't know.

Speaking of... I mean, there are other stories in tech that seem like they go that way sometimes. Yeah. I don't know that we want to go down this road right now, but there is another large company that is in the middle of a feud right now that sort of feels that same way.

Well, I do want to get into Meshtastic, so if we have time after that... Oh, no, not Meshtastic. To be clear, I am not talking about Meshtastic with that comment. No, I'm saying I want to talk about Meshtastic. Let me finish what I'm saying. I want to talk about mesh tastic if there's time we can get to that okay sure let's talk mesh tastic okay uh what is it it's a good place to

start because i feel like a lot of people have probably never heard of it it is it is little tiny embedded devices in fact i happen to have one here i printed the case and inside of this is a little technically it's called a rack 4631 it's a little embedded development board but it's got a laura radio on it laura stands for long range uh in the united states it's the 915 megahertz band and so it says all that means is it it's a. It's an open source radio. It lets you send short text messages from place to place. The mesh part of the name is because it meshes, which means, you know, if I have one of those and you have one of them, and then, you know,

Joe Bob down the road has one, I may not be able to send a message from mine to Joe Bob's, but if you're in the middle, your radio will repeat the message so that he's able to get it. It meshes. It does that thing. And it's intended for off-grid communications. It was originally written by a guy that was out, literally, he spent time out like hiking and hang gliding with his friends, and they would get out of cell phone service, and they wanted a way to be able to track each other and send text messages back and forth. And so they found the, I think it was originally based on some hardware

from a Chinese company called LilyGo. They found this, this is like, it's an ESP32 with a LoRa radio slapped on it. The guy, Kevin, is his name, he wrote this firmware for it and said, hey, this works. And threw it out there as open source. And eventually people kind of got a hold of it.

And the community has kind of taken it in their own direction. So things will happen like the hurricane that hit North Carolina and Tennessee. And we got some reports back. There was one group that they all had Mesh-tastic radios. And so they came and they told us everything else was down and we were able to use these to stay in contact. And that was really, really helpful. So people use it for things like that.

I've got a Meshtastic radio with the GPS built into it on my van that I drive around for work. And the system's not working right now because I'm a tinkerer and I'm always messing with stuff. But when it works, it will broadcast locations back. And so it's kind of a replacement for Google Maps and the timeline on Google Maps so that I can track what I do for work around town. All kinds of fun stuff like that. Well, when we deal with, like, radio, obviously different countries handle what you can do with radio

signals a bit differently um i don't know like obviously there's like um tons of countries you can approach this from but are there any places where like this just basically is not even allowed to be done in that country i think i think we have so almost almost every country have what they call uh isr bands which that stands for industrial and scientific radio maybe don't make me quote don't quote me on that um but they they have these bands that are essentially it's it's it's unlicensed right so you don't have to be a ham to operate it you don't have to pay for a license um and so it's kind of like here in the united states you have cb radio it's kind of the same idea as cb except you know it's even less regulated than that so we run on those in the united states

it's 915 um in europe it's like 868 megahertz it's all going to be right around there but there's a there's is a band plan for most countries um there may be a few places where there's not one yet or we don't have it added yet but almost almost every country has some unregulated band that laura can can run in okay okay because that's obviously like you know i'm sure the government wouldn't be super happy about like you know you're getting into bands that they use for other things so we internally to the project we over the past few days have been having a conversation about this because um in in europe in their wisdom regulators said you can use this bandwidth but to keep it fair for everyone, one device can't use any more than 10% of the available airtime. And so the way that we track that is we, you know, so when you send a radio message out the radio, you get back like the library we use, you get back.

This is the amount of milliseconds that that took to transmit. And so we just we will track it for an hour. And so we will track it for an hour. And when you hit the number of milliseconds that represents 10% of that hour, you don't get to transmit anymore until that hour elapses. And that's to follow that regulation, which is fine for a mobile handset. But if you put one of these up as like a repeater, you run out of that 10% really, really fast. And so I'll just be very vague about this, right? Okay. There are ways that you can go in and sort of work around that issue.

And it's of questionable legality. And so I've, I was talking to the other developers. I'm like, if we did this in the United States, the FCC would come after us. And I know that because I watched the FCC come after OpenWRT back a few years ago. And that was not fun. So we really need to think about this. And my European counterparts was like, it's okay. It's a little different here.

What we're doing, you know, it's technically within the law. So we're fine. All right. All right, fine. But like we have those conversations because you don't, at least in the United States, you do not want to be on the wrong side of the FCC. They do not have a whole lot of... They have no time for shenanigans.

Yes, a few organizations in the US I wouldn't want to mess with. That and the IRS. Mm-hmm. Yes. Stay on the good side of both of those. If you know... If you have the right CPA and you know what you're doing, you can actually mess

with the irs i i've got i've got a client this is not legal advice by the way well no it is because the legal advice is go get someone that is licensed to do this and let them represent you okay fair enough um but he he has stories about the irs coming after people and i don't you may not know this in the united states if the irs after you, you can go to court and you go to a state court and you can present your case before the judge. And most of those judges actually are not huge fans of the IRS. So if you have a competent CPA that has not outright cheated on your behalf and you can present a reasonable case, you can actually do quite well against the irs of this country but again it all boils down to having someone

that knows what they're doing right right yeah that's that's the way that was a tangent that was a weird tangent to go on but here we are okay so i guess you also wanted to talk about the whole mesh tastic solutions thing oh yeah okay so let's do it let me cover a little bit more background You also wanted to talk about the whole Meshtastic Solutions thing. Oh, yeah. Okay. So let me cover a little bit more background about how I got into all of this. Right. So somebody from the Untitled Linux Show, one of our listeners on the Untitled Linux Show, lives in another country. And they were having some very large mass protests.

And one of the things that was happening was their cell phones would stop working during these protests. And so this listener came to me and said, hey, do you know of some piece of software that lets you mesh with your cell phones? I'm like, oh, that's a really cool idea. And so I went looking for it, and I found Meshtastic. And it's not exactly what the listener was looking for, but I got hooked. I thought it was the coolest thing. And so I bought a couple of the radios. I knew I was going to write it up for Hackaday. I've had them a couple of times now on Philosophy Weekly. We've talked about it. But I got hooked. And I started looking at the code base too. And I don't remember what my first contribution was. I found something. There was something that was not quite right.

Maybe it was GPS code. The GPS code was something I worked on real early. So there was an error in the code base where somebody had done a whole lot of work to program the GPS in a certain way and then made a mistake on an if statement. And so the entire block was unreachable. So I found that and fixed that. And we did some other stuff.

Anyway, I started doing development on Meshtastic. And then one of the things that really has kind of become my niche is running, big surprise here, running Meshtastic on native Linux. And I discovered that the Raspberry Pi has, and we didn't even talk about this. Boy, I love the Raspberry Pi for a couple of different reasons. But one of the reasons I really like the Raspberry Pi is it's got exposed pins, GPIO. When I was younger, that was the thing I was all about, was those GPIOs on the Raspberry Pi, because that lets you interact with the world

from inside your computer. That is all, I've always found that cool. But it's also got SPI and these, I don't even know what SPI stands for to be honest with you the single packet interface or something or other um but anyway this is exposed and these little LoRa radios that's actually what they talk and there was this partial project inside of Meshtastic to run Meshtastic on native Linux but it only ran it simulator so I kind of rolled up my sleeves and dived in there.

And it's like, I wonder if we can get this thing to talk to the real hardware on native Linux. And a couple of weeks, I figured out a way to do it. And so I've become the Linux guy over at the Meshtastic project now. And so we've now got support for a couple of different Raspberry Pi hats. And then later, I went in. I was looking at a really old pull request where someone was like, We've now got support for a couple of different Raspberry Pi hats. And then later I went in, I was looking at a really old pull request where someone was like, hey, there's this way that we can do public key crypto. And it kind of brought it on the vine.

And I went and looked at it. This is actually a cool idea. It's been a couple of years now. So I re-implemented that. And that's been the big thing for Meshtastic 2.5. It fixed some big problems in the code base. been the big thing for mesh tastic 2.5 it fixed it fixed some big problems in the code base well so they they they anointed me as you were as you will with the title of lead i am now the the lead of native linux development inside of mesh tastic well part of this process where they were they were anointing people as leads is the guy that runs it um mc hamster is his Discord name. That is how I will forever know him. But JM is actually his name.

He kind of was getting sick of all of these companies making Meshtastic hardware and then just expecting the Meshtastic devs to develop it for free. And so they've kind of been working on this idea of,

well, is there some way that we can make a company out of this and make a little bit of money? And so when they invited me to be one of the leads, one of the other things that they did, they said, hey, we're working on Meshtastic Solutions. Do you want to be involved with it? And I kind of got a look at what they were wanting to do and said, yeah, I think that would be really great. And so the idea of Meshtastic Solutions, all of that to get to this, is it makes sense, for one thing, it makes sense for the manufacturers that are making

these devices and making a lot of money off of it to have a way to give back to the open source project um but on top of that we also see we see these manufacturers making like really not the greatest decisions sometimes their their decision matrix is a little bit suspect. I see. And you'll have things like, I've got one device. Here it is. It's the LilyGo T-Deck Pro. This thing is great.

It's a mesh-tastic device. It is amazing. And the first time I picked it up, my thumb hit this button because i was holding it like this it's the way i held it it's like how you hold a blackberry to look at the screen i held it like this the button right under my thumb is the reset button it's not a great place for that button to be or alternatively it's not a good thing for that button to do right but it's down deep in the hardware you can't change this that's one of the sorts of things that we would see and it's like it would be nice if maybe there was a,

Oh, I don't know, a company that would review these devices and, and sort of let manufacturers know when they've done something sort of silly like that before it gets out to everybody's hands. So that's, that's the idea of what mesh tastic solutions is intending to be. And so there's like three or four or five of these big companies that I say

big, they're not, they're not, they're not big, but they're not like big enterprise companies, but they're reasonably large companies. Um, I design these devices, they make and they sell them. And we're just reaching out to them and saying, you know, Hey, we've done a lot of work. It would be nice if you guys could financially support us. And then like on your next device that you go to make, if you'll work with us on the design we will then we will put our stamp of approval on it and we'll help you market it and ideally everybody will win because it'll be better devices for the customers be a better device that you can make and we can actually

make a little bit of money out of this hobby and help feed our families instead of just working for nothing right that is that is the idea that that is the direction we're trying to go i think that sounds really cool and so we've had we have had a little bit of pushback as one might imagine because it's an open source project you're creating a corporation around it oh no and um there there are there have been a couple of things that in meshtastic before i got there there were decisions made that were not exactly the decision i would have made and so like the source code of meshtastic is under a contributor license agreement right i see and i i have literally asked the people behind it why. And every time I ask them, it's, oh, that's for the patent grant.

That's so nobody can sue us over patents. It's like, oh, okay. And I finally went to him. I'm like, you know the GPL V3 gives that too. And he legitimately did not know that. He's like, I did not know that the GPL V3 had a patent grant in it. So from the horse's mouth, I can tell you, this is a conversation that we had.

People saw that, and they were a little nervous about it. One guy on Reddit said something about... This kind of goes down a different rabbit hole, but it's interesting. One guy on Reddit said, oh, well, that's the end of privacy for mesh tastic um and he said something about like the

next thing you know or no they're getting the the the rothschild's money and money from the nsa and whatever and i i guess i'm out and so like first off i am waiting for that first big rothschild check it is not cleared yet you know who you are i want my money obviously we're not getting paid by the rothschilds or anybody um i will say though and this is a conversation i've had a couple of different times and i'm trying to convince my fellow mesh tastic people of this there is a kernel of different times and i'm trying to convince my my fellow meshtastic people of this there is a kernel of a real concern that he's got there um and that's things like in the united states you have things like national security letters right that i am for the record i'm 100 against um i think there i don't think there is a scenario where, particularly because code is speech, I don't think there's a scenario where a government can force someone to do something to write code.

It is forced speech, and I think that's always wrong. As a bedrock principle, I think that's always wrong. there is this shadow of a legitimate concern that, you know, if you are a corporation, then there is a lever there for someone like a government to say, it's time to put a backdoor on your encryption. And so, like, I get that that's a legitimate concern. Now, the antidote to that, of course, is we are GPLv3. We will always be GPLv3. And if you ever have any doubt, you just, you go check out the code and you build it yourself and you flash it yourself and you're done. And you know if there was anything in there, you don't have it now because you can look at all the code. It's not

that complicated of a code base. But that kind of gets into this whole different subject. This is something I run into with Hackaday commenters too. It's like, there are commenters that will have legitimate points to make. I may not 100% agree with their points, but they will have legitimate points to make,

but they're just, for whatever reason, incapable of making the point without pulling in either, either, this weird, like, weird conspiracy theory stuff to go along with it like if you were to say i'm concerned that this get the now the nsa and the cia has a lever on these guys like

that to me is a totally legitimate point to make in in a post snowden world that is a legitimate point to make but saying oh the rothschilds got to him like you're just a nut job at this point right um but again it's the same central concern and so i i kind of don't understand why how do you how do you not realize like how are you smart enough to have this legitimate concern and yet not realize that the way you're expressing it is just totally off the rails um we get this i don't understand yeah like i i've seen the same thing like not to that extent but you know when i talk about uh anything like gnome related right like you'll always take it from well i'll talk about some like night like some good thing gnome's doing but then we're like oh but how long until they do this and take away this

feature like can we just talk about the thing that's happened yeah I'm surprised honestly I'm surprised I haven't seen any like weirdness around Cosmic with it being literally the corporate Linux desktop like

we'll talk about how like oh yeah red hat funds gnome or what look cosmic is literally funded and developed by a company but i've not seen a single concern there and i don't know like maybe it's maybe it's the openness they have or something there's possible i i don't know what it is but there's definitely something weird there but i don't know people i think it's very easy to make connections between things right like as i said before people are really good at pattern matching even if there's not a pattern there and if you see one thing where there's this connection it's like okay well connection to the nsa okay connection to this what What else is the NSA involved in? What is this other thing over here and you start like when there's like one connection

It's easy to assume that everything else makes those same connections as well And the next thing you know, you're the guy with the pin board and the photos pinned up the strings between all of the pins Yeah, and it's the meme suddenly. I look at the pin board, we figured it all out. Yeah. Yeah. I do get those different concerns, though. That's fair. It's just...

And so I mentioned Hackaday. I remember very vividly one in particular. You know, I did the security column there, and we'd written about some geopolitical thing with computer security, because that happens. And a guy came on and he was he was trying to make the point that he didn't and i'm gonna i'm gonna give you the legitimate version of what he said and then i'll tell you what he actually i'm not gonna tell

you exactly what he actually said but i'll give you the gist of it um the the legitimate point he was trying to make is i don't think that the united states should be pointing it sticking its nose into the rest of the world's business quite as much as it does. Okay, so that's a legitimate point. Aside from whether or not you agree with it or even the context, that in and of itself, that's a legitimate thing for someone to say. Okay? The way that he said it is he used a racial slur. I see.

To express this. I see. To describe this. I see. To describe the people in question. And so I deleted his comment. And then he came back and he said, ha, I knew it. You guys just can't take any criticism of the US. I was like, dude,

if you could make your comment and not use the racial slur, I will gladly leave it there. I think it's a legitimate comment to make if you could do it in a way that's not obscene and so offensive to everybody. I've seen this multiple times. And so I'm actually kind of at the point where I'm trying to decide, is it worthwhile to try to look through and find the more legitimate points that someone is making? I still think it is.

I called myself in chat the other day a – I forget exactly how I said it – essentially an annoying optimist in that I try really hard to find the reasonable position in what someone has to say. Right, right. I think that's a and that's a that's a healthy way to approach things right i guess if you're looking at the two extremes right the extremes are the healthy optimist and the pessimist right like the person who sees every interaction they have as a negative interaction even ones that are purely positive like you speak to some people and you know they'll get annoyed by a word you use like oh have a good day it's like oh i didn't have a good day my bad my day was bad like those sort

of people right how dare you yes of course um yeah so and and the context i made this statement in is we were we were talking with a potential business partner and everybody else on the team and had a bad experience with him. And I was talking with him and having a reasonable conversation. And I came back and I said this, I am this irredeemable optimist in that I feel like I can have a positive conversation with just about everybody. And one of our team members was like, you know that's maybe not always a good thing when you're talking about business negotiations.'s like yes i know this is why i'm telling you this i think you have to be able to like come to the table with people right like a lot of people there are definitely some people out there who their goal is just to fight right that's true but i think there's a lot of people

other people who are just, maybe they just hang around the wrong people. Maybe they have communication issues and they just don't know how to frame what they're trying to say. Like they, they're trying to, like their goal is a positive goal, but they just don't know how to communicate

in a way that other people understand right they it makes perfect sense in their head it makes perfect sense amongst whoever they hang out hang around with but the second they go talk to a normal person they sound like a psycho yes this is a thing and i guess um if if i could hmm one of one of my sort of goals i guess with some of the things that i do like outreach and trying to educate people i would love to be able to help people um make their legitimate points without sounding like psychos like i would be tickled pink if if i could somehow make the internet and the world a little bit better place by helping people to not sound psychotic it's like a life goal uh there's only so much time in the day i'm not sure that's the thing i'm not sure how well i'm

doing on that i i i certainly try my best but like i trip up on things as well and I'll let like I'll say things in a way that other people you know don't really understand and you know it I think it was important to like take a step back and think about how other people are approaching things but I don't know the incident's a weird thing where people people feel justified to especially if you're interacting with someone who doesn't have like a picture of themselves or their real name, people feel even more justified to just respond as if you're a video game character. You are just an NPC. You are not an actual person.

You're just a name on the screen. Yeah. You know, this is something that actually kind of concerns me. So we've seen a couple of different open source projects now have fudes of various sorts. So the most recent one actually is the Linux kernel, where some developers

from Russian companies got dismissed as being maintainers. And that's a whole story. And we can, if you want to, we can talk about that. But when Torvalds waded into it um one of the things that he said is that he saw that the the russian bots were certainly in in play because because people that hadn't had any code contributions to the kernel were suddenly

emailing him about it and i thought that was really interesting. And then you remember the Godot engine and the shakeup there, right? And so when you dig into that and you start reading some of the comments that they made, some of the statements that they put out, one of the things that they talked about was, oh, it's a brigading. These aren't real Godot users. These are people brigading. And so it's the same implication that it's it's bots it's bot accounts right and this kind of worries me first off I am sure that in I I can guarantee you I know in fact if you go and you look at the Linux kernel mailing list there are there are some of those that are obviously like not intended to be understood as real people

right like they're just They're trolling. After he said there were bots, there actually were people that were botting. There were people that started using randomly generated emails. It was just spamming the emails. That definitely happened. That definitely happened. I'm not discounting that that happened. That did actually happen.

But it genuinely worries me that we have given organizations such an easy out when they do something that's unpopular. Because, you know, if you do something that's unpopular and it makes one of the news sites or even just your own internal mailing list, people are going to come and tell you that they don't approve of what you did. That's just human nature. That's the way it works. That's what unpopular means. Then to have this easy out to say, oh, it's bots. We're being brigaded. I think it's maybe not the healthiest thing to just immediately jump to.

But at the same time, I know that sort of thing does happen. So I don't necessarily have the answer. But I don't consider that to be the healthiest thing that that a company or an organization could just jump straight to that and it's a way to just totally wash their hands of having done something dumb and stuck their foot in the mouth well the other way it sometimes gets framed is like as harassment or if you're talking about video games it gets framed as like review bombing yeah i think a similar a similar thing yeah it's basically the same idea i think what what you have happen is there's a lot of people that are willing to do things publicly

but are not willing to i guess accept the responsibility of saying something publicly right like if you say something that other people can see you should expect to get a public response back whether it's a positive one or a negative one that's what is going to happen and people could definitely do a better job framing it absolutely and you shouldn't you should here's my hot take of the day don't don't spin up fake email accounts to spam the linux kernel mailing list it goes back to that previous thing we were talking about like here is how to make your point without sounding like a lunatic like one of the emails i saw it was just a hundred lines of fuck linus torvalds fuck linus torvalds yes yeah like that do you think that's gonna change his opinion no, what are you doing?

this is not helping, do not do that but I do think it sort of goes back to the internet being weird and a lot of people not really knowing how to handle it if you're going to be a public figure which is what you are if you're a developer on a big project in any of these positions you have to acknowledge the fact

that you're going to have to deal with criticism and how you go about handling that i guess is you know that's up to you if you want to call everyone a troll or anything like that hey go ahead you can say what you want but that doesn't mean those people are going to go away and in a lot of cases it's going to make them feel more empowered and next time something happens you're going to see more of that exact same thing and i i just don't think that dismissing dismissing legitimate concerns are like is a health thing like going back to the the russia thing like there were chinese developers on the list who as well who are like is a health thing like going back to the the russia thing like there were chinese developers on the list as well who are like okay but what is what position does this put china in then and there are other countries that like you know they're depending on how the

next couple of years go we could see sanctions against the entirety of bricks which includes brazil india and does that mean that those people have to be removed? And, like, we don't know. And that's the thing. Yeah. Like, there are people here who... Like, the point about the Russian bots, people who are spamming the list are not going to be like Boris, right?

Like, Boris is not using his real name. Like, if you're getting actual bots, they're not going to be people with Russian names that that are doing like that would just be that that's not like a sensible way to do it um although people were doing that they were after he said they were doing it they definitely were doing it um yes yes it was hilarious i terrible idea but hilarious i think the problem that linus originally faced a lot of projects do this bad communication because if linus had just said we have to remove these people because national security issue or like we we do not trust the contributions from x country like if that was all he'd said obviously he would be angry but i think what really made people angry is the way

he'd framed it like he was like oh i'm finnish of course i'm not gonna like russians and like i get it from his perspective sure but like you don't have to say the quiet part out loud right at the same time though it is torvalds yeah yeah it is it is it is torvalds it is torvalds. It is Torvalds. No, actually, I think the problem here, boy, this thing has layers. One of the problems is that, so this actually came from the U.S. Department of Treasury. I don't know if it was one of the companies or the Linux Foundation themselves, but they came and they talked to them and said, you have people on your maintainers list that are working, they're employed by sanctioned companies, and that's not okay. So that's where all of this started. And so the Linux Foundation then talked to their lawyers, and their lawyers

talked to Corvalds and Greg KH and some of the other top maintainers. And then Greg put out the change and put out just a little tiny message. This is for compliance reasons. We're going to remove these people as maintainers. And that was the only thing. And that's not enough information for people to understand what's going on. Well, part of the problem is that they had not gotten clearance from the Linux Foundation lawyers to put out a more detailed statement. And so a couple of days later, they did finally put out the statement, and suddenly things

made a lot more sense. But it was after everyone had made up their conclusion on the situation already. Everybody was already mad about everything, and then they put out the more reasonable statement. So that was a big part of the problem. And then people had legitimate questions, like you said, about the Chinese company. Well, these countries are also sanctioned. Well, there's the lawyer thing.

You have to go and actually look at the executive order that resulted in this. And they're different. The one for Russia and the one for China are different. And we've eventually gotten more information out. And the actions of the maintainers, the Linux kernel, in the light of that more information, seem a lot more reasonable and a lot less malicious. But to some people first seeing that, it seemed very unreasonable and very malicious.

And it was not a great day. It was not a great day for Linux. Well, even taking it in like less serious things, did you see the recent Bitwarden proprietary thing that happened yes like even i am so much less serious but it's the same thing right just explain what you're doing i think i think in that one it it was less even of an explanation and i from what i could tell and i actually believe bitwarden it was it was a bug it was a typo somebody accidentally put the wrong license on something and you know ended up releasingen. It was a bug. It was a typo. Somebody accidentally put the wrong license on something

and ended up releasing something that it was going to tie the hands of all the Linux, the people that did stuff on Linux or somebody that wanted to reuse this code. But it was legitimately a typo. And I think, honestly, I think they handled that extremely well. That action from Bitwarden may be a masterclass in, here's how to handle things when you mess up. Take responsibility, tell people what happened, take responsibility for it, and fix it, and then move on with your life. It was great. I feel great about that story.

That was not a, guys, I don't want to have to talk about this story with Bitwarden. I'd rather tell you about how Bitwarden's doing great stuff but we have to talk about this instead no it wasn't it was they messed up they owned up to it it was a little it's not a big deal let's let's move on but like the point i was making there is i think the initial developer response was the initial developer response wasn't great i think it was like we're moving things over to the sdk internal and it wasn't until later down the line that like a couple of days again a couple of days later, that's the thing, where by that point,

that's when people have made up their mind about a situation. It's really hard to convince people to change their mind because if they change their mind, that means they were wrong. That is true. I may have to steal that. It's hard to get people to change their mind because that means they were wrong i yeah i didn't i think i stole that from someone else

feel free to yonk it that's all good okay okay i might do that and the sad thing is it's not even accurate right you don't you don't necessarily when you change your mind it's not necessarily because you were wrong it might just be because somebody told you else something that was wrong you know you may just have had bad information um and i guess that pedantically speaking that still means you were wrong but like some of that even is just the the way that you the way that you couch it and the way that you approach it uh but no that's that's a good point to change your mind means that you were wrong people People don't like that. But you see it across every project, right?

My favorite project to talk about is Weyland, right? And you'll see developers from different projects who are trying to approach things. Here we're approaching it from the Gano perspective. Here we're approaching it from the KDE perspective. And you end up having people basically talking past each other because they're in many cases, not even talking about the same things.

Like they, one of the things I like to say is you can't have a reasonable discussion if you can't agree what color the sky is, right? Yeah. And that's how it feels in a lot of, in a lot of projects where people don't even agree on the core fundamentals of what the goals of the cross desktop project is. I don't know.

Can we take a moment and just say the Valve developers are absolute heroes for going in and bringing down the hammer? Yep. Like bosses. Good for them like bosses good for them absolutely good for them i can't say names but i've spoken to some people who were involved in whalen and they were aware of the problems and they were aware of some of the stuff that was like that needed to be dealt with it's it was sort of just like a situation of somebody needed to put everything together and actually step up and do it do you think with the with the wayland thing do you think there is the implicit uh threat that valve was going to fork wayland if if they didn't get their way

nobody said that nobody said that but i think that was implied it's a very much a possibility I can see that being a concern because if they and this is one of the things with them jumping onto KDE KDE has really improved since they've been using it with the Steam Deck

and they've had fun development through blue systems and it's certainly possible that could have happened uh well if not directly a fork definitely heavy protocol discussions outside of the wayland space and doing it through a third-party repo. Something like Frog. Frog, to me, is a soft fork of Weyland. And at the moment, it is a friendly fork of Weyland. It's not exactly a fork, right?

Like, I get it. That's not exactly what it is. But like, for all intents and purposes, that's sort of what they're doing. It's like, we're tired of y'all and your drama. We're just going to have our own little set of solutions over here where we can fix stuff. And if you want to be part of that, you can be part of it.

And if not, we're still going to fix stuff. Yeah. If you get, like... I have so much respect for developers who work in that project and keep their cool because reading some of those threads and some of the people in those threads it's just like there are some people who want their project to be the project the linux desktop project and i i get it seems like i got it seems like a lot i can do that

yeah it seems like a lot of uh design by committee going on in wayland and you have you have various committee members that like have very different ideas about what wayland should and should not be and uh yeah getting them all on the same page. It's the proverbial herding of cats. Yes, that's a really good way to put it. Yeah. And the guys at Valve discovered that they had the... I'm not sure exactly how to extend that analogy

because it's not catnip. It's like the opposite of whatever catnip. It's the opposite of that um but they have they have the lever they figured out that they have the lever to be able to get people on the same page yeah yeah well again it's it's a lot of people what there's a lot of people who are aware of the problem and like i've had private discussions with people that are just not happy about the way things have been going and yeah it they knew it needed to change and someone just needed to put everything together that's that's the this is the best way to put it yeah and i mean this is this is pretty typical outside of software, even

general human behavior. You could apply this to politics. I am not going to make any specific statements regarding politics, because that's a good way to get yourself cancelled on Twitter. It's not quite as bad as it used to be, but still. But that's a similar problem in politics. Everybody may agree that there is

a problem, but trying to get everyone on the same page about how to fix the problem is difficult and in politics you'll even see everyone generally agrees on how to fix the problem but you're not allowed to cooperate with people that are outside of your tribe well if you're here's one that's not that's not going to get you in trouble gas prices like everyone agrees gas prices are bad Well, here's one that's not going to get you in trouble. Gas prices. Like, everyone agrees gas prices are bad. Yeah.

So, one of the things that I have enjoyed so much about open source for years now, and maybe this is a bit of a naive view. I may be a little naive in making this statement, but for the most part, most projects have managed to keep tribalism out. Or to put it a different way, the project is the tribe, right? And so when things go south is when you come to the point that inside your project, you have multiple tribes that kind of go to war with each other um that's that's what we saw in godot right that's that's really what that was you had you had people that formed into these different tribes because of things outside the project and then a statement that was made by somebody inside the project and suddenly you had these different tribes that went to war over godot now it's now it's forked into a couple of different forks and we'll see whether anything actually becomes of those or not um but that's that's the thing that's

that's so great when an open source project is like being run well and people are happy and actually working together it's like the project is the tribe and boy when you're in that state you could you can get stuff done and you don't have to worry nearly as much about all of the drama and politics and all that nasty stuff i think well we still sort of have that it's just we have also these cross desktop problems and then you have you you're literally creating a situation where the different desktop tribes have to fight each other for the cross desktop solution and there's a there's a lot of agreement like don't be wrong i i i focus on a lot of the the fights because the fights are fun but a lot of discussions are like you know the reason a lot

of discussions stall is people just get busy like there are some protocols that have stalled for eight years because people just forgot the protocol existed and there's like three year gaps between comments it's not even like anyone has drama it's just no one wants to work on it right now yeah yeah that's fair i think also with like with weyland so so people will get the wrong idea most of those weyland discussions if you were to go and read them they're just boring right there's so many of them that are just boring whether they stall or not there's not a whole lot of drama there's just little technical details people are trying to figure out and work through and sometimes they're bike shedding more than they need to be but

you know it's actually most most projects yeah it's not a whole lot of drama it's the trauma like you say it's the it's the exciting part it's the it's the fun stuff i just want to talk about the like the ones that go smoothly right like the the um in wayland there is a minimum period they have to have the protocol open before they merge. I think it's 30 days. And there's been protocols where they have a discussion. Everyone's like,

this is fine. A good example of this is there was a WL roots protocol that had effectively been in Weyland protocols for like 10 years. And it got basically all that was being done is take the protocol, move it into the new namespace, and people used this

as an opportunity to shore up a couple of problems. You designed a protocol 10 years ago, some of the requirements you have might be a little bit different. And maybe some of your documentation just doesn't make any sense. There were edge cases you never really considered. So a lot of it was just like, okay, well,

A, we use it like this. Here's a problem that we didn't really consider. Okay, fix that up, whatever. And then by the end of it, everyone was like, okay, I'm good with this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's just merge it. And it just got merged,

like, without any concern whatsoever. And then there's the icon setting. Yeah, yeah. Then there's icons or window placement or yeah i'm still waiting for some of this stuff like some of these things that have not been resolved like that still bugs me using wayland like when i when i restart my computer i have chrome windows and instead of four chrome windows on the one machine and one, so on the big display, I tile that into four because it's a 4k. It tiles very nicely into four 10 80 P displays.

And then I've got the 10 80 P that's a portrait mode. I've got a Chrome for each of those. That's five Chromes restart the computer and you get five Chrome windows stacked up on top of each other. Every time. Drag to this corner, drag to that corner. Boy, it'd be nice if there's a way for this to automatically do it.

Tired of it. I'm waiting for, on this same vein, I'm waiting for Chrome to actually support HDR and Linux so that I can stop downloading YouTube videos and then playing them back with the player with 5,000 tags on the end of it to actually get it to do HDR. And the developers at Chrome are waiting for Wayland

to actually figure something out and make it official. And I'm sure after that happens, it will not take long before Google Chrome will support HDR on Linux. Because, I mean, they already do on the Chromebook. In fact, I don't know if you were around for any of this conversation, but I actually put a bug in Xavier Huggle and Neil Gompel's ears in one of the Fedora chats.

I was like, so we've got Frog now, and Google Chrome supports HDR on Chromebook. Can we just add Frog to Chromium? Would that work? And Xavier went down a rabbit hole for about a week trying to see if he could make that work, and unfortunately came up dry for various reasons. If the Google guys wanted to, they could make it happen pretty quick, I think. Oh, for sure.

Getting on Chromium. Well, we should really wrap this up at some point. I was going to just go to the two-hour mark, and then we just kept talking. There was a lot of things we just didn't even touch on here but we can save that for another time. Yeah, it'll be fun.

So let people know where they can find all of your stuff. Actually there's a lot of things. If there's anything you don't want to mention because you don't feel like it whatever you want to direct people to give them places to go. Okay, so I will mention Hackaday, of course. You don't feel like it. Whatever you want to direct people to, give them places to go. Okay. So I will mention Hackaday, of course.

That is, I guess, sort of my main primary employment right now. I have a lot of irons in the fire in various places. But Hackaday, you can find my security column. It goes live every Friday morning US time. Do the time zone calculation yourself to figure out when that is where you're at. And then we've got Floss Weekly which records on Tuesdays and goes

live on Wednesdays we just had a really neat conversation with Josh Bressers from Anchor about open source security and that was actually really cool it was a really good talk today we recorded that so it'll be available tomorrow over at twit.tv

I've still got the Untitled Linux Show, which we cover all kinds of fun Linux and open source news from the week. We reference Brody's stuff from time to time, and that's always fun. Because, you know, a lot of times Brody covers the off-the-beaten-path stuff. Or sometimes, Brody, you're the one that has the most reasonable take on it. I feel like I won't get myself in trouble for linking to your video. I actually did have a couple of Bitwarden developers reach out to me after that video that came out.

They're like, hey, thank you for actually giving a reasonable take here. Yes, yes. And yeah, the other thing where you can catch me is I do work on Meshtastic. And so we have a lot of fun with that I am the Linux guy there and we're working on making that better and better we just recently you know in Meshtastic

I guess I'll give a PSA here we just recently found a bug in the main hat the main device that we had been recommending to people we made some changes and exposed this bug that it doesn't like sending long messages. So it's kind of a downer right now, but we're working with a couple of vendors and hopefully here before too long we'll have some other options for people to use.

But that's the other place to keep track of my work. Awesome. Is that everything you want to mention or is there anything else? I think that's it for now i could i could go on about the various things going on but those are the those are the main internet facing things so you know i mean if if you're in southwestern oklahoma and you need it work you can call me for that too but i doubt there's a huge overlap between that and your audience i'm sure there'll be at least one that's fine.

Anyway, my stuff, my main channel is Brody Robertson. I do Linux videos there six days a week. Check that out. I don't know what'll be out there by the time this comes out. I've got the gaming channel Brody on Games. I stream there twice a week, Thursday, Friday, 10 a.m. Adelaide time. Right now I'm playing through Black Myth Wukong and Kingdom Hearts 3, so that's fun. I've got the React channel where I upload just random clips from the stream, so if you want to just watch clips and just watch me not at all have any idea what I'm talking about when I

watch a video and just say random things, that's also good. And if you're listening to the audio version of this, you can find the video version on YouTube at Tech Over Tea. If you'd like to find the audio release, it is on basically every podcast platform and there's an rss feed so put in your favorite app um i'll give you the final word how do you want to sign us off i never tell people they're doing this it's always fun to see what they do okay well i mean uh let's see i kind of want to borrow the uh the critical role thing and be excellent to each other. That's a pretty good bit of advice. Look at the code, write good code, and happy meshing.