Chris: Hello, friends, and welcome back to your weekly Linux talk show. My name is Chris.
Wes: My name is Wes.
Brent: And my name is Brent.
Chris: Hello, gentlemen. Coming up on this episode, it's time for a GitHub diet.
Chris: We'll get into the tools helping us cut back. But first, our favorite features
Chris: in Linux 7.0, and then we'll round the show out with some great boosts,
Chris: some picks, and a lot more.
Chris: So before we get into all of that, let's say time-appropriate greetings to our
Chris: virtual lug. Hello, mumble room.
Mumble: Hello. Hey, Chris. Hello, Brent.
Chris: Hey, guys. Hello, all of you up there and quiet listening, too.
Wes: What a crew we got.
Chris: Thanks for being here. Of course, you can join our Mumble Room every Sunday.
Chris: Details are on our website, and we'd love it if you join us.
Chris: It's pretty great. And look at all these years, Mumble's still here.
Chris: Show going strong for like 12-plus years, almost 13 years. Mumble Room's still
Chris: here with us the whole way.
Chris: Speaking of being with us, go check out Define.net slash Unplugged.
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Chris: Thank you to everybody who supports
Chris: the show by going to Define.net slash unplugged. We do appreciate it.
Chris: LinuxFest Northwest 2026, just a few days away.
Chris: 13 days away. April 24th to the 26th at the Bellingham Technical College.
Chris: Oh, boy. And the calendar is live. The unplugged program is currently scheduled
Chris: to be in HC108, which I think is that big classroom we did that one year.
Brent: Hmm.
Chris: I don't know, boys. We got to give that some thought.
Wes: Yeah, you seem really unsure over there.
Chris: Yeah, the vibe just hasn't been right in the classrooms. We're not professors giving a lecture.
Brent: I thought all the construction the last couple of years in those sections we
Brent: couldn't use was to build us like a brand new studio with an audience section in it.
Chris: Right, of course. That's what they'd spend their money on.
Wes: The first year we did a classroom was better than the second.
Chris: Yeah, I agree.
Wes: So there is some variable, but you're right. But one way or another,
Wes: we had to make a show, right?
Chris: We'll make a show. One way or another. We'd love it if you want to join us.
Chris: You can get the details at linuxfestnorthwest.org.
Chris: I don't know. I think it may be Joops isn't going to make it this year.
Chris: I got baby chicks at home now.
Wes: So maybe have you considered bringing the entire farm?
Chris: I think we bring the van. The van goes to Joops. Yeah.
Brent: The van will go to Joops instead. And the van will a hundred percent be there. Whether I am or not.
Wes: Joops junior.
Chris: All right. I have a question for the audience before we get into today's topics. Two things really.
Chris: Number one, your question. Uh, I may become obvious why, but I'd like to know
Chris: if your password manager disappeared tomorrow, which one would you switch to?
Chris: Boost in and tell us if your password manager disappeared tomorrow which would
Chris: you switch to? Alright? That's number one. Number two.
Chris: The Elephant in the Room episode 666 is coming up and we have a new challenge.
Chris: To celebrate episode 666 of the Unplugged program we are announcing the BSD challenge!
Chris: And it's early days, so you have a chance to get in and help us form what we're
Chris: going to do because obviously this is episode 662, so we have a few weeks.
Chris: It's not a Linux versus BSD thing. It's can Linux users function on BSD.
Chris: One fresh B install, four levels
Chris: to climb, and hopefully your Linux muscle memory only gets you so far.
Chris: This is what I have so far, and this is all subject to change,
Chris: and I'd love the audience's input.
Chris: I think we should have four levels to achieve. Level one is can you just get
Chris: a usable system. Level two is can you get a daily driver?
Chris: Level three is a power user. So can you do things like update packages,
Chris: update the OS, set up SSH, restart and stop services?
Chris: And then level four, and I think this is maybe where we have some debate.
Chris: I was going to say get jails or containers working, but I think Wes and Brent
Chris: think level four should be something more challenging.
Chris: And then we have a scoring system. But that's the rough outline that we'll get into more.
Chris: But let's settle this level four stuff. stuff so i i i guess i proposed level
Chris: four is you get a jail going but you guys think that's probably more level three stuff.
Wes: Yeah i mean it's just you know that'd be like saying it's not maybe it's not
Wes: quite exactly the same but like if should level four for a bsd user on linux
Wes: be running a docker container yeah that's.
Brent: A good way to put it.
Wes: Now what level four should be maybe it's like linux compatibility or getting
Wes: full like docker on bs i don't know it should it feels like there should be
Wes: a proper impressive stretch to it.
Chris: Hmm you have any suggestions for a level four stretch brent.
Brent: Uh, I have two. One would be, how long can you daily drive this thing?
Brent: You know, you got it running, you got some of your applications on there.
Chris: Can you make it a full week?
Brent: Yeah. Are you using this as a desktop for a full week? Or is this like,
Brent: you know, can you even use it as a server for a full week if that's your way to go?
Brent: I have another twist though that might be interesting if you're,
Brent: if you're up for it. You want more suggestions? Yeah. Yeah.
Brent: What I want to know, like, what is the craziest place some of our audience members
Brent: can run this BSD that they want to run for a week?
Brent: Do you have some crazy device or like, are you running a, I don't know,
Brent: phone network on your farm and there's some BSD components to it?
Brent: Or so not something you're currently running, but like during the challenge,
Brent: what is the craziest thing you're willing to do for this BSD challenge? Bonus points.
Chris: Okay. Okay.
Wes: See this is why we need the audience's help because uh clearly we're too nix
Wes: os brained over here to really even be able to formulate a bsd challenge at this point.
Brent: Isn't there a.
Chris: Bsd yeah level four i mean i like the idea i like that as an idea for level
Chris: four but we need to have a few other things level four because i don't know
Chris: if i have any cool crazy hardware to put it on right now.
Brent: Way better work at it.
Chris: But i want to get all the points so level four is official beastie whisper and i want to get something.
Wes: Fancy with like zfs like boot set boot environment set up so you.
Chris: Get like you.
Wes: Know rollbacks and stuff that might be too easy too though.
Chris: Intro okay well please do boost in or go to the contact page and send us your
Chris: suggestions for the bsd challenge we what we our idea would be is to kick it
Chris: off in 665 officially or 664 depending what you guys tell us,
Chris: and then have the conclusion in 666, right?
Chris: I think that could be fun. So that's the idea. Let us know what you think for the BSD challenge.
Chris: Well, as you're listening to this here podcast, Linux 7.0 should be landing.
Chris: It is expected to release later today as we're recording.
Chris: And even though Linus always says the major version numbers don't really mean
Chris: much other than he doesn't like to get much beyond .19, there's always a bunch
Chris: that ends up in these .0 releases every time.
Wes: Funny how that works, huh?
Chris: Yeah. So we thought we'd go through some of our favorite things in here. Surprise, surprise.
Chris: Some of them are going to be file system related. but not all of them.
Chris: Wes, I know you've been talking about for a little bit, the scheduler changes,
Chris: some nice performance improvements there.
Wes: Yeah. Which ones are you thinking of?
Chris: Well, I don't know. You're the one that's been talking about them,
Chris: but I think the one that I recall you mentioned is the time slice extension,
Chris: although I don't really understand much about it, but I guess that sounds interesting.
Chris: Notably less micro stutter and better desktop responsiveness with that one they
Chris: have on there. And I remember you going on about scheduler changes recently. I just don't know.
Wes: Oh yeah. I mean, there's been a lot in general, how much of that made it into 7.0.
Wes: I mean, there is a lot of stuff. Some of that is coming also in 7.1,
Wes: because there's always excitement around that.
Wes: But yeah, one in particular is the Time Slice extension. And it,
Wes: It's notable because, A, scheduling is hard.
Wes: You know what I mean? Like, it's probably one of the hardest things that the
Wes: kernel actually has to do in order to do it right, especially because just about
Wes: everyone uses the Linux kernel.
Wes: So, how do you get the right scheduling between a monster AI inference server
Wes: or a Postgres database server and, you know, MyPixel?
Wes: But this one has also been in the Time Slice extension, has been in development
Wes: for, like, 10 years at this point, And it finally got merged,
Wes: which is exciting just for the story of like open source kernel development.
Chris: Something taking that long and finally make it in is always a big deal.
Wes: Yeah, exactly. But it should help. Like there are times where you're in what
Wes: are called critical sections as a process where you really don't want to be interrupted.
Wes: You know, maybe you're doing something with the disk or, you know,
Wes: some sort of critical part of your application.
Wes: And this is trying to help so that like user space processes can sort of request
Wes: a time slice where they won't get preempted without some of the full performance
Wes: overheads of like actually fully blocking preemption,
Wes: where the kernel might still need to do something ultimately to maintain,
Wes: you know, acceptable latency elsewhere, but to try to provide more information
Wes: and more mechanisms to allow user space processes to better actually share the
Wes: available resources and meet their own deadlines.
Chris: And so that's where the name time slicing comes from, is you can kind of,
Chris: as I guess as a resource heavy application, you could say, hey,
Chris: I'm going to need some time coming up soon, make it available for me.
Wes: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Wes: I mean, it gets more detailed than that, right? Because there's stuff called
Wes: restartable sequences and all
Wes: of the heuristics that kind of go into like fully optimizing this stuff.
Wes: There's also been more work, which got some drama over,
Wes: which we talked about, I think in a previous members episode,
Wes: maybe around Postgres having benchmarks that were like 50% slower on some instances
Wes: that also had to do with some changes happening to preemption in the kernel.
Wes: And that's where right the whole thing that we have a actual preemptible thing
Wes: where tasks do get interrupted and we aren't just running one application anymore
Wes: it's still having consequences 30 years later.
Chris: Well here's the thing i've learned watching these kernel releases
Chris: and it's very much so true with the 7.0 release
Chris: you could kind of plan your next laptop or
Chris: workstation upgrade around these so
Chris: what's in 7.0 are a bunch
Chris: of new drivers and what what
Chris: gets called i guess the kernel developers call foundational drivers for the
Chris: next gen cpu and gpus that are landing in the next amd in the intel and qualcomm
Chris: platforms and a few others and so the nice thing is is that because these these
Chris: types of kernels take a little bit to get out except for ubuntu is going to ship it pretty soon.
Chris: It means brand new laptops and desktops are probably going to work out of the
Chris: box with Linux 7.0 with everything functional day one.
Chris: And you're going to be able to get these new platforms like an AMD Zen 6,
Chris: which I am particularly looking forward to.
Chris: And it's just going to work with 7.0. And what I mean by you could watch this
Chris: and kind of plan your hardware releases is you can see, okay,
Chris: this is landing now in 7.0.
Chris: And so if I want to get an AMD Zen 6 system and I use XYZ distro then i just
Chris: wait till xyz distro gets 7-0 and that's my window of time to upgrade to that
Chris: new hardware you know and that that will just ensure it's a smooth process and it's,
Chris: It's so much new hardware coming to Linux with new capabilities across x86,
Chris: ARM64, RISC-V, and even Power.
Chris: Like, this is a massive CPU architecture release, Linux 7.0.
Wes: Yeah, there's SpaceMitK3, which is the first of the RVA23 profile specifications
Wes: of actual RISC-V hardware being supported in the kernel,
Wes: which I think also includes maybe some acceleration for some sorts of AI-type tasks.
Wes: So maybe, I mean, it's still early days, but maybe, yeah, I think it's 8AI Accelerator Core.
Wes: So what you can really do with it, how you get your hands on it,
Wes: I don't know, but it's at least starting to look slightly less like only sort
Wes: of developer machine enablement.
Chris: Okay. Is there anything else we need to cover? I mean, I know there's a lot
Chris: in this, and Feronix and Linux Newbies has done a great job,
Chris: or kernel Newbies, has done a great job of rounding a lot of this up,
Chris: but file system area is pretty big this release, and I think we should probably get to that.
Wes: What, you're going to skip over the AI agent key support? Come on, the copilot key.
Chris: What?
Brent: Yeah.
Chris: No, this did not make my list of features. Tell me about this.
Wes: There's the co-pilot key, but beyond that, Linux 7.0 adds three additional standardized
Wes: HID key codes for contextual AI interactions.
Wes: Action on selection, contextual insertion, and contextual query.
Chris: What?
Brent: Chris, why is your face doing that?
Chris: I don't even understand what this means. I literally don't. Brent,
Chris: do you have a guess of what this means? I'm sure Wes knows, but...
Brent: Sounds like maybe some buzzwords got into the mailing list here.
Chris: I mean, is it like something for deploying? Is it to enable agents to deploy
Chris: and identify systems on cloud infrastructure?
Chris: Like, that's the only place I could go with this.
Wes: I think it's for interactions, right? So that now you have, you could have something
Wes: where it's like, select something and click a button, and you could have a universal,
Wes: like, HID-level way to ask an assistant for help.
Wes: Or we could remap it, whatever, because it's Linux, right? But like on Windows,
Wes: you might have a copilot key, and then google got this more sort of fine-brained
Wes: stuff so you can have like i want to ask the ai a question or i want the ai
Wes: to insert or edit text here.
Chris: Or yeah.
Wes: That kind of.
Brent: The word key is used for so many things these days.
Chris: But like so you can have keyboard you could have like a keyboard key but this
Chris: could probably also work if you were building one of those tubes that's constantly
Chris: trying to sell you stuff probably work for that too you know i have a little
Chris: button on there i can see that okay yeah that's true all right all right this
Chris: is it's interesting the stuff that makes it at the kernel level okay now can
Chris: we talk about file systems okay,
Chris: So, Brent.
Brent: Yes?
Chris: I bet you would think if we were going to talk about file systems,
Chris: you would assume we were going to talk about BcacheFS or ButterFS.
Chris: But it turns out some of our traditional favorites got some nice updates as well.
Brent: So the old is the modern now?
Chris: Well, I mean, if you're using the older file system, quote unquote older,
Chris: you still get good stuff, right?
Chris: I think everybody knows XFS is one of our favorites.
Brent: It's one of your darlings.
Chris: But now one of Wes's predictions has come true.
Brent: Yeah, it looks like ext4 is getting faster concurrent I.O.
Brent: Rights, and there's a new standardized generic I.O. error reporting layer across file systems.
Brent: And, well, that means that container creation is 40% faster thanks to OpenTree
Brent: namespace improvements. Wes, how do you feel about this?
Wes: I am pro. So you wouldn't be surprised by that, though.
Wes: But yeah, we talked a little bit about it in the past. There's been a bunch
Wes: of improvements tied to NOLFS being in this kernel and the OpenTree namespace
Wes: stuff that means sort of the mount namespace handling,
Wes: which is very important if you want to isolate a container or be able to pick
Wes: and choose what mounts a container sees.
Wes: All of that stuff can be a lot more sane without having to copy every single
Wes: mount on the system and then just to remove 80% of those to get the actual mount
Wes: tree that you really want.
Wes: And so when you tie that into improved stuff like, you know,
Wes: concurrent direct IO writes to multiple files, and there's often lots of tiny
Wes: files involved with containers, you can see how some of these performance wins
Wes: really start stacking together.
Chris: That is good to see.
Brent: I'm curious, what did you base your prediction on then?
Chris: Oh, no. This was the prediction, Brent. And this is the one that made my list,
Chris: is XFS has gained autonomous self-healing.
Brent: No way.
Chris: Real-time air monitoring plus automatic background repairs. This,
Chris: I think, was one of your predictions, if I'm not mistaken, Mr. Payne.
Wes: I mean, you know, there's a lot of excitement around a lot of the file systems that we talk about.
Wes: But you shouldn't sleep on XFS, right? They've been adding like sneaky copy
Wes: on write style features. They've been adding more like dynamic stuff at runtime,
Wes: more monitoring, and now more live information about file system health events.
Wes: And then that means you actually have the possibility to act on those and try
Wes: to self-repair immediately instead of, you know, a month later when you notice and you run that FSCK.
Chris: Yeah, the patch set is interesting. It's done by creating an anonymous file
Chris: that can be read for events by user space programs.
Chris: Events are captured by hooking various parts of XFS and IOMAP so that metadata
Chris: health failures, file IO errors, and major changes in file system states like
Chris: unmount, shutdown, etc.
Chris: Can be observed by user space programs. When an event occurs,
Chris: the hook functions queue an event object to each event for later processing.
Chris: A program must have the ability to read it, yada, yada, yada, going on.
Chris: In user space, we created a new, this is the part that is interesting,
Chris: in user space, we created a new daemon program.
Chris: It will read objects and initiate repairs automatically. This daemon is managed
Chris: entirely by system D and will not block unmounting of the file system unless
Chris: repairs are ongoing, which is interesting.
Chris: So you can unmount it unless it's in the middle of a repair.
Chris: It'll stop you from unmounting it.
Chris: The daemons are auto started by a service that uses fan O notify.
Wes: Yeah, F-A notify.
Chris: Thank you. F-A notify.
Wes: Yeah and that's what's so cool about this is it's not just
Wes: the file system level kernel level functionality that like hey we have this
Wes: new framework it'll be great once someone takes advantage of it no this is like
Wes: actually also shipping a user space thing that can take immediate advantage
Wes: of it i mean you know you got to get it shipped and packaged and available and
Wes: configured in distros downstream and all of that but that'll happen.
Chris: You will have to have system d as well Another noteworthy XFS change is a performance
Chris: improvement for parent pointers.
Chris: They're used for storing backlinks in a file extended attribute for a parent
Chris: and directory in its file name. And I guess in some cases...
Chris: Wait in times had increased by 56% in some scenarios, and now those times are
Chris: down to 8% for writes and 19% for deletion.
Wes: So, not bad. Yeah, it's kind of that boring level of optimization where you
Wes: probably don't even know what the, why do we have these parent pointers and all of that?
Wes: But, you know, file systems end up being a giant set of arrows pointing at different things, right?
Wes: Unless you want to copy everything all of the time, you need ways,
Wes: like if you're dealing with extended attributes, you need ways to know details
Wes: about the parent directory, where you're at in the file system,
Wes: the permissions that are there.
Wes: And if you have to go try to search some data structure every time you want
Wes: to do that, you're going to have a bad time.
Wes: And so parent pointers help you go have back references, have links,
Wes: have pointers, as the name implies, to be able to traverse around on the file
Wes: system and get from here to there.
Wes: And you know there's extra cost to those both size and then sometimes how they're
Wes: implemented has performance and so the faster you can resolve all those sort
Wes: of metadata relations in the file system the faster the whole thing will be.
Chris: So there's a few other items on our on our shared list i have one other big
Chris: one on my personal list we have some memory management changes anything in particular
Chris: you want to touch on before we get to the big news regarding the horns if you know what i mean.
Wes: Yeah uh there's some cool iou ring stuff going on i.
Chris: Was hoping you would cover that okay good.
Wes: Yeah iou ring security task level
Wes: restrictions and there's a functionality called sec comp in the kernel that
Wes: we use a lot for various sandbox and gets used in containers sec comp bbf is
Wes: a thing it's a type of policy you can apply to filter the available system calls
Wes: that can happen so you can say
Wes: like hey this program doesn't need to use a bunch of these system calls.
Wes: It only needs to read files and talk to the network in this way or whatever.
Wes: So you can set up set comp to then secure a program.
Wes: SecComp filters work on these system calls, but they don't see IOU ring.
Wes: At least they didn't before kernel 7. And this is because IOU ring is this whole
Wes: sort of asynchronous ring that's meant to help have this section of memory that
Wes: both user space and the kernel can talk to and then share there without having
Wes: to have constantly switching between user space and kernel space,
Wes: which can be an expensive operation like when you do a system call.
Wes: But the problem is now you've created this whole other way to effectively make
Wes: at least a subset of system calls, which is using IOU ring to do it.
Wes: And sec comp previously had no visibility. So you could do all this nice security
Wes: work to filter the available system calls for an application with sec comp,
Wes: only to then have IOU ring be a big gaping hole in that because it was effectively out of base.
Wes: So essentially now, you know, the limitations basically were containers and
Wes: systemd that do apply these filters essentially couldn't.
Wes: So they've added classic BPF filters or CBPF, which that's a whole other thing here.
Wes: But yes, we have CBPF and eBPF in the kernel for these IOU ring operations and
Wes: their task level restrictions.
Wes: They persist across fork. BPF filters can also examine sort of the arguments
Wes: that are going into the filtering operation, which means they're strictly more
Wes: capable than SecComp in that regard.
Wes: And you might wonder why CPPF, why classic BPF Berkeley packet filter and not
Wes: extended Berkeley packet filter with eBPF.
Wes: That's actually because in containers, often eBPF for security reasons gets disabled.
Wes: So they needed some kind of way to do this with a bytecode, flexible bytecode
Wes: format that could work both in containers and with IOUring's model.
Wes: And thus, this patch set was born.
Chris: Wow, that feels like a pretty serious amount of constraints.
Chris: That's very impressive.
Wes: And as usual, it was Jens Expo, who does just incredible work in file system
Wes: performance and security work and IOUring in particular.
Wes: So yeah, a very impressive change. And while it might be stuff you and I aren't
Wes: using day-to-day all of the time, the folks doing really performance and latency
Wes: sensitive work on linux and security work definitely will care.
Chris: Yeah and of course the biggest news of the 7.0 release is the tux logo is now
Chris: customizable via a new k config option forgot that that's bearing the lead sorry about that everybody.
Wes: Oh yeah that's actually going to be most of our episode next week we'll be.
Chris: Playing with that and getting the jupiter rocket on there another big deal for
Chris: 7.0 is the rust experiment is over.
Chris: It is official. Rust is now considered part of the Linux kernel and has moved
Chris: to a new stage of recognition.
Chris: The experiment is done, i.e. Rust is here to stay.
Chris: Miguel Ojeda said, the experiment is done. Rust is here to stay.
Chris: I hope this signals commitment from the kernel to companies and other entities
Chris: to invest more into it, e.g.
Chris: Into giving time to their kernel developers to train themselves in Rust.
Chris: Thanks to the many kernel maintainers that gave this project the support and
Chris: patience throughout these years, and to the many other developers,
Chris: whether in the kernel or in other projects, that have made this possible.
Chris: I had a long list of 173 names in the credits for the original poll that merged
Chris: the support into the kernel.
Chris: And now such a list would be way longer, so I'm not even going to try to compose
Chris: one. But again, thanks a lot, everybody.
Chris: Wow how long have we been following that this.
Brent: Has been a journey.
Wes: Somehow i don't think this is really going to be the end of the drama but it
Wes: is at least a very notable moment in that conversation right it's it's it's a turning point.
Brent: Will uh will they pull it out in a couple months or what.
Chris: Yeah no.
Wes: We're moving to zig yeah.
Chris: Yeah right it's moments like this that you just reflect all this and go gosh
Chris: this has been a real journey you know this has been something we've watched
Chris: for years, and it's finally landed.
Wes: How long did we spend, like, will they, won't they? Is Rust the right fit?
Wes: How do you get agreement? What?
Brent: I think every time we do a segment like this, you just have to stop and marvel
Brent: at everything the kernel is doing, all of the complexity that goes into the
Brent: kernel, how much it changes even on a daily basis.
Brent: And yet we get to just run it on whatever device we want to.
Brent: And it works quite beautifully for the most part. Like it's astonishing.
Brent: I think it's important to be reminded of that and to thank everyone for all
Brent: the crazy amount of work that they put into it that we get to take advantage of. So thank you.
Chris: Maybe a few less systems will be supported, though.
Chris: Linux 7.1, the next version, is the end of the beginning.
Chris: The beginning of the end, I guess, for i486 support.
Chris: And this has, I guess, been in the works for a while. But Linux 7.1 is expected
Chris: to start the removal of Intel i486 CPU support from the upstream Linux kernel.
Chris: Linus Torvalds has reportedly said that there is, quote, zero reason to keep
Chris: i486 support since almost nobody is still using it.
Wes: Ooh.
Chris: Uh-huh. And no modern Linux distribution ships with support.
Chris: They say users who rely on 486 hardware are pointed towards using the existing
Chris: LTS kernels that remain, for now.
Chris: This is the first step, and it's a patch that removes the config option in the
Chris: kernel for the 486 build. So the kernel will no longer build a 486 image.
Chris: And then the steps further down the road will be full code removal,
Chris: which will likely come in following kernel series, assuming there's no major objections.
Wes: You know, it's really kind of a salt in the wound because in 7.0,
Wes: they dropped the last remaining parallel port Ethernet driver.
Wes: So what's happening here? Yeah. And we got to make room for Wi-Fi 8 and 800
Wes: gigabit networking, I guess.
Chris: I will admit, the first thing that popped into my head when I saw this story
Chris: was, should I fire up a 486 machine just one last time?
Brent: Yeah, I was thinking like, oh, stay tuned. You'll see a 486 challenge in Linux
Brent: Unplugged in any time now.
Chris: I mean...
Wes: Level 4 BSD. Is he getting it to work on 486?
Chris: Watch it, E-Bag.
Chris: Thank you to our members. Thank you very much for making this possible.
Chris: We don't have a sponsor for this segment, but we're still here.
Chris: Linuxunplugged.com slash membership.
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Brent: Well with some recent workflow changes on my end i've been using git more now
Brent: than i ever have It seems almost every folder on my system now has a little
Brent: Git repository hidden in it.
Brent: Chris, you recently leaned into Git as well this year. This is like your year of Git.
Brent: And, well, Wes, you've been using it forever, and you showed us the way. Thank you.
Brent: But we got us thinking, like, can we do Git in a different way?
Brent: Because GitHub has certainly been ubiquitous.
Brent: But can we do better?
Chris: Yeah. I feel it creeping into more and more of my workflow, too.
Chris: You know at first it was like oh this is great for sharing projects with
Chris: the audience and that it is good for but then
Chris: it's like well I'm already all set up and I'm authorized and I've
Chris: got the command line tools and every app has a built-in so next thing you know
Chris: I've got like 15 repositories and I'm checking stuff in every day and now I'm
Chris: starting to look at making gists and I'm starting to put those up on get having
Chris: just go home using an action and all these things I'm using more and more of
Chris: github and yeah I thought.
Chris: I got to tap the brakes here a little bit. And we've been talking about this
Chris: offline for about a year, if we should build our own GitLab or something like that.
Chris: And so for me, this week, it came to a head when I was creating yet another
Chris: gist. And I don't have like big requirements here.
Chris: I want like kind of like a prompt library. I want a command library,
Chris: you know, useful Nix OS commands or useful commands for a router,
Chris: whatever it might be that I'm working on.
Chris: I want to just have like a library of these kinds of things I can go to and share with people.
Chris: And GIST is a lazy way to do it on GitHub, but there's got to be other things in other ways.
Chris: So I looked into OpenGIST, which is a self-hosted pastebin powered by Git.
Chris: And as you would expect, you can just run it as a Docker container or whatever
Chris: on your machine. And OpenGIST is pretty great.
Chris: It's a AGPL 3.0 licensed.
Chris: It is mostly written in Go and a little bit of TypeScript.
Chris: And the interface is really nice and simple. and it's pretty, pretty good.
Chris: Didn't quite solve my needs, especially because I think I don't need just gist.
Chris: I think I might need actions and might as well.
Wes: That was going to be my first question for you was, like, I think you have been using a lot of them.
Wes: And maybe it's useful to frame sort of the capabilities because there's,
Wes: you know, we're talking about a lot of different technologies, right?
Wes: There's Git itself, the Merkle tree directed acyclic graph that like stores
Wes: all of the wonderful details. That's totally open source. Then there's like
Wes: GitHub as a proprietary service and UI and interface.
Wes: And then there's like the sub features, right? So like GISTs on GitHub are sort
Wes: of like a pastebin snippet, but with GIST support or with Git support under the hood.
Wes: And that's where I think OpenGIST is very interesting because it is like,
Wes: there's a lot of pastebin things, right?
Wes: We already run several, I think, between various people as part of the network,
Wes: but not a lot of them also have Git under the hood, which is a pretty big upgrade.
Wes: It is only really directly targeting that one use case of like,
Wes: I want a get back to paste bin.
Chris: It's a little narrow for what I, I, I, this is where I started.
Chris: I might want something more broad than this. I'm not sure.
Chris: I'm not, I guess what I'm trying to decide is do I want to go all in or do I
Chris: want to have several tools I string together? You know what I mean?
Wes: Yeah, I do. Cause you kind of already, right? There's, that's where it's like.
Wes: Not everyone is on GitHub, but it has a social networking effect to it.
Wes: And there's that aspect.
Wes: And then there's just the question of like, what are you doing?
Wes: There's different activities that you do in Git. There's stuff that's totally
Wes: private, that's part of your own mesh network and backend infrastructure.
Wes: There's stuff that's a mix where it is your stuff, but you want to have it available
Wes: and shared with the audience or us.
Chris: Oh yeah, you too. Yeah, exactly.
Wes: And so maybe to that extent, it does make sense to have multiple tools.
Wes: But then you also don't want to make even more crazy, complicated setups when
Wes: the whole point was just to be able to like easily share or easily have,
Wes: you know, backups and change control and change management.
Chris: So this is kind of my I guess you could say I'm at a bit of a fork in the road
Chris: in a way. It's like I could I feel like I could. Yeah. You like that?
Brent: Yeah.
Chris: I feel like I could pause here and kind of.
Chris: Take some guidance. And I know you've been playing with a self-hosted setup,
Chris: but I'm not quite clear on what you've been working on and how far you've taken it.
Chris: So I'm curious to know what you've been building, Wes.
Chris: Brent, I'm curious to know if you've looked into this at all.
Chris: And obviously I want to know what the audience is hosting. So,
Chris: Brent, I'll start with you.
Chris: Have you looked into any kind of self-hosted Git, Lab, 4GEO?
Chris: Type solutions at all.
Brent: When we started with the website project to rebuild jupiterbroadcasting.com
Brent: using the community and using you know best practices which meant i had to learn git,
Brent: as you'll remember i was like for a couple weeks there just like deep diving
Brent: into how git works on the back end how best to use it because i felt like i
Brent: hadn't necessarily had the experience before yeah.
Wes: That was one of my favorite weeks ever.
Brent: Now it's just a daily tool things seem to happen.
Brent: And back then, I remember thinking, well, given my deep lean to privacy and
Brent: hesitation around trusting Microsoft, certainly I looked into what can I self-host myself.
Brent: And these days, I am not putting any of my personal stuff on GitHub,
Brent: mostly because I don't trust myself to not throw keys in there and stuff at this point.
Brent: So I have looked into alternatives forge
Brent: joe and at the time get t and those options
Brent: it felt at that point a little too
Brent: powerful for what i was looking for which is just a little bit of hosting of
Brent: some code but these days i think
Brent: i need to revisit that i determined back then that i probably didn't
Brent: need it but given workflow changes recently
Brent: and using it daily and how that might
Brent: solve some problems for me i haven't been looking actively at changing it but
Brent: i've been thinking actively about the implications of using github on the daily
Brent: yeah and so i'm looking forward to hearing what wes can implement for us really
Brent: is what it comes down to i'm.
Chris: On the i'm on the same path it's like well i'm only using it for this well i'm
Chris: only using it for this well now i'm only i'm only using it for these three or four things.
Brent: On github.
Chris: In particular and some of my systems like my servers i just use Git locally,
Chris: it's fine because I have a different backup strategy for that,
Chris: but more and more of my projects have been drifting to GitHub.
Chris: Alright, so what have you been cooking on in the background there, Mr. Payne?
Wes: Yeah, well, it started, I mean, I've done multiple, I've had a lot of stuff
Wes: in Git, and I've used, you know, GitLab and various things.
Wes: And there's a bunch of simple, you know, backend options for this simple web
Wes: UIs just on top of Git or that kind of thing.
Wes: But for me, it got more serious, because I had been mirroring stuff to GitHub,
Wes: and they, you know, and I had my own backups of a bunch of my repos.
Wes: Sure yeah you know they added more easier private
Wes: repo support without having to pay a few years ago so
Wes: that was one thing but when we
Wes: started playing more with open claw like that project is just such
Wes: a mess especially just as fast as it moves and things change i was like there's
Wes: no way not only do i need to have this running on nix os but i it just all needs
Wes: to be in git or i'm going to drive myself insane but i didn't want all of that
Wes: to be public because it was going to be like an agent doing stuff and I was
Wes: going to want to be like reviewing its changes and that kind of stuff.
Wes: I wanted something that had the features of a forge, you know,
Wes: not just code, but like actually something where I could do PRs and go review
Wes: code and maybe in a way that had a structured API. And so I started looking into Forge.
Chris: I like all of those things. Yeah, you're right. Something where you could have
Chris: pull requests because why not?
Chris: I mean, if you're going to lean into a workflow to manage your infrastructure, might as well.
Chris: And something that has an API means that you can integrate it with agent workflow.
Chris: Uh so how are you running it and how far have you gotten with it.
Wes: Yeah so i've been running for a little while the bare for
Wes: joe stuff's been working great it has really nice nix os support
Wes: so like the abbreviated history is there's
Wes: like a really simple tool called gogs uh gogs that
Wes: is super small tiny like just a clean little ui and
Wes: then at some point like 10 years ago that got
Wes: forked into getia um or get t however you're
Wes: supposed to say that and then there's been drama there with like
Wes: the company and the people behind it and so
Wes: that eventually led to a soft fork of for joe um which is also the thing that
Wes: is powering and developed by the codeberg folks and then at some point that
Wes: soft fork became a hard folk hard fork so there's a lot of sort of vague compatibility
Wes: um but all kind of going in their own direction i see um but what's neat about it is it is,
Wes: it really is kind of just like as close to an open source github in a box as i think you could want.
Wes: If you go with something like GitHub or GitLab, it's very enterprise-y.
Wes: And Forgeo felt kind of just right for HomeLab, self-hosted,
Wes: maybe a bit of actual infrastructure, it could scale up.
Wes: I mean, it sounds like the Fedora team is moving from, or some of Fedora at
Wes: least, is moving from Azure, their own Forge, to Forgeo.
Wes: So it can scale up to pretty reasonable-sized organizations,
Wes: but it's also still just a Go binary that can use SQLite, or it can scale up
Wes: to like being deployed like I'm doing it with Postgres and a NixOS module because
Wes: it has great NixOS support built in too.
Chris: I mean, the interface, as you're speaking, I'm kind of going through it,
Chris: it looks like you're looking at a GitHub project when you go to somebody with
Chris: a proper readme and all of that.
Wes: Yeah, and if you're used to using GitHub, you'll have no problems adapting.
Wes: It doesn't have everything. Like, in particular, it does not have guests or snippets.
Wes: I think there's a PR that's in progress, but I don't think it's merged yet.
Wes: So, you don't get everything.
Chris: Well, OpenGist is simple enough that I can still see running that as a side
Chris: service. The big one for me would be actions.
Wes: Yes, and so it does have actions, and I've been working on setting that up actually
Wes: somewhat just this week. So I finally got it going.
Wes: What's cool is you have, they're like, they're not necessarily GitHub compatible,
Wes: but they are very GitHub familiar. So they are similar into the actions format,
Wes: similar YAML files, and they have a similar runner concept.
Chris: So I guess...
Chris: So Action is, it's like a reusable piece of code that runs on the Forgeo server,
Chris: or Forgeo, or however you say it, or on GitHub, right?
Chris: So could you, do I have that right? Like, can we explain what an Action is real
Chris: quick before we get too far?
Wes: And so this is connects to sort of the CI, CD, continuous integration, continuous delivery.
Wes: And GitLab probably like gets some credit for being one of the first forges
Wes: that really built this in with their own GitLab CI stuff.
Wes: And the idea is there's just a lot of automation. If you want the code to be
Wes: the source of truth, then it makes sense to drive stuff as events off the code.
Wes: And so if you want to push, then, you know, maybe you're pushing to a new PR
Wes: and you want it to go run the tests for you automatically and let you know if they pass.
Wes: Or maybe you have a lot of contributors of different levels or different knowledge,
Wes: and you want to have, you know, run some linting and formatting checks to make
Wes: sure that random PRs meet the standards of the project.
Wes: And that can scale all the way to, you've merged your PR, and now you build
Wes: your official package, and you push it to, or your container,
Wes: and you push it to the registry, or you release it as like a release or a tag.
Wes: Or that can all go all the way to trigger the deployment code, right?
Wes: And so this is how a lot of the community website, Brent, you
Wes: were talking about our great community powered website and it uses
Wes: actions right so it'll go when we have our
Wes: scraper run it pulls it goes and scrapes and if it finds
Wes: new episodes it makes a pr with that and the pr can kick off actions to go build
Wes: the site and make sure it builds properly and on on some of them it can even
Wes: go spin up a whole preview website that you can go look at so you can really
Wes: scale it from just run like a basic linter on your code all the way up to like
Wes: go do stateful deploys, depending on what you want to do.
Wes: But that's the little hook is basically you have some kind of way to trigger
Wes: it, be that a push or a code change or some action in the repo,
Wes: or a manual trigger or web hook.
Wes: And it is an automation that is instantiated with the state from your repo,
Wes: so that it already has the code and it can do stuff with it.
Chris: And I have like a basic one that I've been using a couple of things that I haven't,
Chris: I really haven't explored it much, but I've been finding it very useful in that
Chris: I have a couple of projects that I'm downstream of and I pull them and I build
Chris: packages for them using a GitHub action.
Chris: So then when I update my local system, it just pulls from my repository instead
Chris: of the upstream one, which has like all this other, all these other dependencies
Chris: and crap that it auto installs that I don't need.
Chris: But it just helps with, you know, just small things like that.
Chris: So I have a package ready for me to go when I do an update and it runs like
Chris: twice a day. That's kind of what I'm looking for.
Wes: Exactly. And you can go, right, like, I have one that abuses it like a cron
Wes: job to go scrape bookmarks I do and ping a Slack channel.
Wes: But yeah, you can also have it where, like, this is super useful for Nix packages
Wes: where you can have it automatically go check and see if there's been a new released
Wes: version upstream and go make a PR that automatically does the update and updates all the pins for you.
Wes: So yeah, I was looking for something like that, especially because I've been
Wes: playing more with setting up.
Wes: Well, there's a lot of ways to do it, but some kind of Nix build host or a Nix cache.
Wes: If you combine those things, then you could have a Nix cache that your systems
Wes: are on, and maybe you have a powerful system, and you can register on that system
Wes: a runner for your CI system.
Wes: So it can run on whatever's running the Forgeo instance, but it can also run
Wes: on whatever other system that has access over the network to be able to dispatch it.
Chris: Cool. Is that just like a container or something, or an agent you run on another machine?
Wes: Exactly, yes. You can have it run native if you want. So that's kind of neat
Wes: because for some Nix stuff, like Nix can be the sandbox.
Wes: They don't necessarily need a whole build container. But for other stuff,
Wes: you might want it to have an Ubuntu base or a Nix OS base or use your own custom
Wes: container. So it can do both.
Wes: And so you can do that on the host that's running the forge or you can do that
Wes: on some other networked host.
Wes: And so you can set up a workflow, which is what I've been working on.
Wes: It doesn't totally work yet.
Wes: This hopefully will be finished somewhat soon, but I got distracted by other
Wes: projects, as you guys well know. but the idea would be,
Wes: There are some stuff like some of my VPSs that it's like, I just don't really
Wes: need to be building them on there. It works. It's fine. It's just not particularly fast.
Wes: And I make all the changes in code anyway. So why not go have something that
Wes: spins up, tests it, I can add more tests over time. If all that works, then go push it.
Wes: And then either the CI can trigger it automatically, or if I want to do it myself,
Wes: or tell a bot or whatever, then on the next rebuild, not only has it already
Wes: been validated, but then it can just go pull the build files.
Chris: So, this topic, I think, is coming up more and more.
Chris: And I think one of the reasons it's growing is because there is a discomfort
Chris: with this dichotomy of forces that are at play with GitHub.
Chris: And there is this network effect that github benefits
Chris: from that is extremely strong and you see it in community you
Chris: see it in tool adoption etc etc etc right and
Chris: then on the other side of that there's this equally strong force if not becoming
Chris: stronger of in shitification and it's always it goes this way with all of these
Chris: commercial platforms they you know they always kind of start at the really good
Chris: end of the spectrum and then over time due to corporate strategy taxes,
Chris: they tend to bend towards inshittification.
Chris: And I think there's a lot of people concerned that GitHub is going that direction.
Chris: And you mentioned there was drama in the past with 4G0,
Chris: Do you feel like that stuff is settled? So like if I'm moving,
Chris: like if I'm packing my bags, is this somewhere I can move into long term, do you think, Wes?
Wes: Yeah, I think so. I would say you should think about like which pieces you're
Wes: trying to replace and for what.
Wes: So like right now, I'm just using it as like a private backend forge for my
Wes: own stuff on my own private infrastructure and mesh.
Wes: But there are some things like you could obviously expose it publicly with a
Wes: proxy or a port or whatever you want to do.
Wes: And they're working on some kinds of federation uh
Wes: they even have some nlnet sponsorship on this i think to like be
Wes: able to federate for joe instances so that's you
Wes: know that's something that's coming and you can do custom actions
Wes: but they have some there's like a forge uh for joe
Wes: sync or something where you can at least do one-way sync
Wes: so like you can do your primary development in your private forge
Wes: but then push to github as sort
Wes: of a secondary thing whether you want to share that more publicly or as a sort
Wes: of cheap backup because that was one of the things is like there are some things
Wes: i might keep on github because it's primarily dominated about sharing or the
Wes: social thing but there's a lot of stuff where it's like i want it on there for
Wes: easy access or for reference but like i could do all the primary stuff locally
Wes: and then just sync it later.
Brent: That sounds like quite a nice workflow actually yeah.
Wes: I don't have it all ironed out to be clear but uh it seems like a lot of other
Wes: people which is where i'm pulling a lot of this from is just there's been a
Wes: lot of folks experimenting with these types of workflows.
Wes: And it seems like there's between Codeberg itself and Private Forgeo and the
Wes: possible Federation, there's just a lot cooking there right now.
Chris: Brent, on that topic of it seems like we're entering this, where we're bending
Chris: more and more towards incentivification, there was an article that the Software
Chris: Conservancy published, and they start with something that I thought maybe we
Chris: probably could have opened with,
Chris: you know, if I were to plan this a little better.
Chris: But moving off of GitHub for some people, it's not an easy task.
Chris: Like there's some people in the chat room, like PJ, he's like,
Chris: oh, not really, wouldn't be hard for me to move. I'm not using it at all.
Chris: That is easy. But other people.
Brent: Are deeply entrenched.
Chris: That is a deeper problem. And the Conservancy is trying to make a pitch here.
Brent: Yeah, I would call this almost a call to action this day here.
Brent: Since June 2022, we've been encouraging and helping FOSS developers to give up on GitHub.
Brent: We realize, though, this is not an easy task. GitHub is ubiquitous,
Brent: though through their effective marketing, GitHub has convinced free and open
Brent: source software developers that GitHub is the best and even the only place for FOSS development.
Brent: However, as a proprietary trade secret tool, GitHub itself is the very opposite of FOSS.
Brent: By contrast, Git was designed specifically to replace a proprietary tool,
Brent: BitKeeper, and to make FOSS development distributed using FOSS tools and without a centralized site.
Brent: GitHub has distorted Git, creating add-ons and features that turn a distributed,
Brent: egalitarian, and FOSS system into a centralized proprietary site.
Brent: And all those add-on features are controlled by a single for-profit company, Microsoft.
Brent: By staying on GitHub, established FOSS communities bring newcomers to this proprietary
Brent: platform, expanding GitHub's reach and limiting the imaginations of the next
Brent: generation of FOSS developers.
Brent: They give other reasons here in this article for why a lot of the anti-GitHub
Brent: community wants to stay away from Microsoft.
Brent: And there's one in particular that I think our audience would really feel hits home.
Brent: And I wonder if this hit for you both as well.
Brent: They say Microsoft has escalated the incorporation of its for-profit Copilot
Brent: product. The Copilot banner now incorporates many different proprietary so-called
Brent: artificial intelligence products.
Brent: However, the first Copilot product was designed to automatically generate code
Brent: interactively for developers, and that feature is still pushed on GitHub users.
Brent: Copilot AI model was trained, according to GitHub's own statements,
Brent: exclusively with projects that were hosted on GitHub, including many licensed
Brent: under copy left licenses.
Brent: Microsoft even admits that there was one document that they encountered and
Brent: ignored a whopping 700,000 different times during training, and that was the
Brent: GNU General Public License.
Brent: Most of these projects are not in the public domain. They are licensed under FOSS licenses.
Brent: These licenses have requirements, including proper author attribution,
Brent: and in cases of copyleft licenses, they sometimes require the works based on
Brent: it, or then incorporate that software to be licensed under the exact same copyleft
Brent: license as the prior work.
Brent: Microsoft and GitHub have been ignoring these license requirements for quite a few years now.
Brent: Their only defense of these actions was a still-unretracted statement by their
Brent: former CEO in which he falsely claims that unsettled law on this topic is actually quite settled.
Brent: In addition to the legal issues, the ethical implications of GitHub's choice
Brent: to use copyleft code in the service of creating proprietary software is a grave
Brent: one. So the debate here is.
Brent: Is it okay to use over 700,000 open source projects to fund their,
Brent: well, business model at this point?
Brent: And this is something when Microsoft first bought GitHub, many of us imagined
Brent: the dark ways that that could go negatively against open source ethos.
Brent: And at the time, we didn't really have answers. But I think you could argue
Brent: this is one of the reasons that we were hesitant back then.
Chris: I think maybe an interesting way to frame this, a model to use,
Chris: would be if they were properly doing attribution, would that solve the majority of the problem?
Chris: Is the issue not that they're using code that's open source and copyleft,
Chris: but the issue is that when they generate that code, if it's close to the exact
Chris: original code, they're not attributing it?
Chris: I don't want to get nuanced into like, well, if it's changed by 25%,
Chris: but I just wonder if that is the problem. If it's just simply,
Chris: is the core issue attribution?
Brent: I think the argument would be the issue is the licensing of the product that they're using.
Brent: All of this code into.
Chris: Well, but that doesn't make sense, right? Because if you post a free software
Chris: code on Stack Exchange, it doesn't matter if the Stack Exchange backend is running on Windows or not.
Wes: I think Brent means what gets output from, not runs Copilot.
Chris: Okay. All right. What do you think, Wes?
Wes: I mean, there's certainly like license fights to be had for sure,
Wes: but there is that whole uncomfortable question of like, well,
Wes: how much learning and what counts as learning do we allow, right?
Wes: Because just about every single person who's ever contributed to copyleft went
Wes: on to contribute to other differently licensed projects.
Wes: That's just how it works, right? And so we can argue if the scale of this matters,
Wes: we can argue if LLMs count as learning when we're doing the statistical modeling with them or not.
Wes: But I think for us, right, there's one thing on the giant scale,
Wes: but as individual users, the VEM training on my open source or public code was
Wes: not Not the thing that I cared about necessarily.
Wes: I think for me, it'd be more about control and knowing when that was happening.
Wes: And where GitHub in particular is in an awkward spot is like there's the stuff in public.
Wes: And I think at this point, you just sort of have to accept that if you put something
Wes: on the available internet, it will be ingested for purposes unknown and uncontrollable to you.
Wes: But then for people like me who are not paying GitHub, but still have some stuff
Wes: that's private on there, that's where it gets murkier for me.
Wes: Because like if I'm a company that has like an actual contract with them,
Wes: that's a whole other thing.
Wes: That has its own sort of risk and uncertainty that's quantifiable by lawyers I employ and all that.
Wes: But for me, without that and with no lawyers to deploy, it's sort of like,
Wes: well, I want to have better boundaries of what do I consider I'm just sending
Wes: off into the ether in the commons?
Wes: What do I think is actually private and under my control?
Wes: So that's the framework I'm currently using.
Chris: So would like a user toggle satisfy you? You know, if you could go and say like
Chris: a checkbox, because maybe they have this, I don't know, they just don't train on my data.
Chris: Does that solve that problem? I mean, these don't seem like particularly unsolvable problems.
Wes: Well, no, so for that, I think that's the trust thing, right?
Brent: That would go to the contract.
Wes: Because I don't have any audits. I don't have any enforcement mechanisms there.
Chris: Oh, so for me.
Wes: That's where I, if I don't want them to train on it, I don't want it on their platform.
Chris: Yeah, that I agree with. Yeah, that's...
Wes: I mean, I'm totally down for them adding that. I think that might help, right?
Wes: They're giving people more control or at least the illusion or some level of
Wes: control to have more say in that, I think would be helpful and would be an act
Wes: of good faith what it actually does in terms of real consequences and how it
Wes: changes things. I don't know.
Chris: I agree. And I think the best solution is to just move off the platform.
Chris: If this is a concern of yours and for private stuff, I think that does make
Chris: sense for stuff that I was going to share publicly with the audience.
Chris: Anyways, I don't really care if they train on it. It's just not really been my complaint.
Wes: I also find that the,
Wes: The co-pilot on the GitHub site has not actually been that annoying to me.
Wes: I don't actually edit that much code on there or anything, but it's not like
Wes: it's constantly injected in when I go look at GitHub or use it.
Chris: I'm sorry. People are editing code directly on the GitHub.com website.
Wes: Oh, yeah.
Chris: They deserve to be annoying.
Wes: They have a whole editor.
Chris: I guess I've seen that, but I didn't think anybody actually used it.
Chris: That just seems crazy to me.
Wes: So what I was going to say is I find the copilot being built into VS Code but
Wes: still requiring a login to be way more
Wes: annoying than anything that they're injecting over on the GitHub side.
Chris: True, true. Yeah, there's a lot of strategy taxes around GitHub that I find very annoying.
Chris: I will just as a quick aside, maybe I should leave it, but I'll just say.
Chris: I just think if you were to go back in time 13 years ago and play this segment
Chris: back for us back then, where we're sitting here and we're preening about intellectual
Chris: property and protecting our licenses and our copyrights.
Chris: I just think it's so funny coming from a community that used to be about breaking
Chris: the Tivos and used to be about sharing, you know, sharing things.
Chris: I don't want to say pirating music and TV and movies, but a lot of people in
Chris: this community engage in those activities and have since the days of Napster
Chris: and have no qualms about it.
Chris: But then this topic comes up and all of a sudden now this is where they've decided
Chris: this is the hill they're going to die on after a decade plus of stealing music, TV shows and movies.
Chris: I just find it ironic, especially from a community that in the past has been
Chris: sort of anti-copyright, anti-licenses that prevent them from hacking things,
Chris: you know, proprietary blobs and things like that. And now all of a sudden,
Chris: We're like the people that are like pro-proprietary information.
Chris: I just think it's pretty ironic.
Chris: But people have the right to, you know, do it, choose whatever they want.
Chris: And I think that's why some solutions around self-hosting your own GitHub alternative
Chris: are viable. And I think it sounds like for me, for Geo, if I can figure out how to say it.
Wes: Could be about- For Geo. I guess it's Esperanto for Forge. So there you go.
Chris: Okay.
Wes: And yeah, I do think there are some arguments to be made around the scale and
Wes: the like, I think a lot of the uncomfortableness is from the asymmetry of scale
Wes: and resources and this feeling of like,
Wes: I am doing this stuff and I wanted to benefit humanity and the commons or other
Wes: people or whatever, but I didn't necessarily want to have that be underwriting
Wes: your entire business model without you giving back. And so there's totally legitimate
Wes: things there, but you're right.
Wes: We should also probably strive to make sure that we can find consistent frameworks
Wes: to evaluate this stuff because it's changing fast and we want to figure out
Wes: how to think about it well.
Chris: I agree. I don't think we should lose sight though, that even though they,
Chris: if they have indexed and they've rolled over and all of this,
Chris: that information has been made available to all of us extremely reasonably.
Chris: And we have access to it through a lot of free tools now that are making all
Chris: of us faster builders and we're building more things.
Chris: So if your effort was towards making humanity better and making more information
Chris: freely available to the people, that has been achieved.
Chris: And now more people are accessing and utilizing it, maybe not directly through
Chris: you and the way you want them to consume it.
Chris: But it is happening at a much larger scale than it was even six months ago.
Chris: And the amount of free software that is being produced and published on platforms
Chris: like GitHub is growing exponentially like a hockey stick right now.
Chris: And so in a way, it has made that information more accessible to people.
Chris: And so if at the core of what you're trying to do when you create something
Chris: as free software is improve the information and access to humanity that is being
Chris: achieved, you may not like the means in which it's being achieved.
Chris: But you can't deny it's happening. Just not justifying it. I'm just trying to
Chris: say there's two sides to all of this.
Chris: And people should have their options to opt out and not participate.
Chris: And I'd like to hear what the audience suggests.
Chris: If there's something better than we've come up with, please let us know.
Chris: Because I think this is going to become a bigger and bigger deal as people make
Chris: their decisions here. Because this ain't slowing down, right?
Chris: That bend is continuing.
Chris: And the corporate strategy won't slow down.
Brent: We have an extra special baller booster here, our dear, lovable,
Brent: squishy PJ, Producer Jeff.
Brent: Producer Jeff sent in 22,222 Satoshis.
Brent: Says, I am a forgetful booster. Pin your tabs, Brent.
Chris: Yeah, Brantley, how come you won't ever pin your tabs over there?
Chris: You know what? We just want you to gosh darn pin your tabs. Oh, yeah. All right?
Brent: Oh, I meant to tell you earlier, I pinned my first tab in years this week.
Chris: What? What? What?
Brent: I did.
Wes: What was it? Are you willing to share?
Brent: The song really got me inspired to change my ways.
Brent: And I pinned an OpenCode web UI tab because I figured that would be useful.
Brent: I have many, many questions. Maybe we'll get into that at some point in the future.
Chris: Huh. Okay. All right.
Wes: He's going to make us radically rethink our relationship with pinned tabs.
Wes: I don't know if I'm ready for it.
Chris: I don't. Oh, geez. I got to have lunch first, I think. Speaking of lunch,
Chris: Derivation Dengus came in with 21,633 sats.
Chris: I'm loving these AI episodes, especially the practical AI tips.
Chris: I've been pretty extensive on my NixOS home lab, so I've been trying to build
Chris: systems that agents can safely take on some of the maintenance for.
Chris: And, you know, things like that. There's still a lot of work to do and a lot
Chris: to work out, but these episodes always give me good ideas. Keep them coming.
Chris: We did get a good amount of feedback. We did. On the emails,
Chris: it was almost 50-50 split with one extra email coming in to the don't talk about
Chris: it so much side on the AI stuff.
Chris: So it was good feedback, and we're still reviewing it all.
Chris: Please do keep telling us your opinions on it. If you're catching this after
Chris: the fact, we still want to know.
Wes: Yeah, and I like how Dingus here points out, too, I think, something that is
Wes: relevant to our last topic, which is whatever you think about how they were
Wes: made, they're here now, and you can use these tools to improve your own open
Wes: source work, your own home lab, and or easier escape from proprietary services.
Wes: Nothing like an LLM script to help you do your Google takeout, that kind of thing.
Chris: There you go.
Brent: That has been my entire week. I will just divulge.
Wes: Ooh, I didn't even know that. Well, our dear Magnolia Mayhem comes in with 2,345 SATs.
Chris: Two males in a row. Nice.
Wes: And a Knicks Book Machine giveaway follow-up. I love this.
Wes: I finally got my wife to sit down and use it.
Wes: There wasn't that much information that I could glean from the experience,
Wes: but that's mostly because there wasn't anything that she ran into.
Wes: Wow. I gave her the prompt of, imagine you're someone who needs a job,
Wes: and this just got set down in front of you as a laptop.
Chris: Gave her the prompt.
Wes: She immediately just went to Indeed.com. I can't even say she was impressed,
Wes: because to her, it was just a computer, which I think is maybe the best response I could have gotten.
Wes: From her perspective, Linux is my i3 desktop. She didn't even know she was on Linux.
Wes: Best report I could give, up next, grandma.
Chris: Oh!
Brent: Oh, yeah.
Chris: Let us know how that goes. Interesting. You know, that is probably the best
Chris: report possible, I suppose.
Chris: Thank you, Mr. Mayhem. Appreciate that.
Brent: Well, we have a couple boosts here from Elray. El Rey 741,
Brent: While I can appreciate other listeners' sentiments, and initially for a little
Brent: while I agreed, that there was too much AI conversation in Linux Unplugged,
Brent: but then I reflected on it a while back, and I have really appreciated the pragmatic
Brent: and fun approach JBS has taken to the AI topic.
Brent: For a while, you've used it in the background and not brought it up much,
Brent: because I'm assuming it wasn't as applicable to the wider audience,
Brent: for example, the song generation that we do.
Brent: But as you found things had greater impact to your day life,
Brent: you've brought more intentional topics to us, the audience.
Chris: Oh, thank you. I think that's fair.
Brent: I also wanted to throw out there that I've loved the members bootleg feed update
Brent: having the video enclosure.
Brent: Life has been crazy busy, so being able to see the amazing studio,
Brent: your facial reactions, and friendly faces has been awesome when I get some downtime.
Wes: It's so nice to hear from LRA, too. Hope you're doing well.
Chris: Yeah, me too.
Brent: Agree?
Chris: And thank you for the feedback.
Brent: FYI, since you've chatted with Fountain a lot in the past, when rotating to
Brent: landscape mode, oh, this is a bug report, I think.
Brent: When rotating to landscape mode using the video version in full screen,
Brent: the Fountain logo cuts off part of Chris's head.
Brent: So when you go to the third person shot, since Chris is on top,
Brent: not a big deal, but you know, Chris's face.
Chris: Yeah, I do like to be on top and that is something I'll talk to them about.
Chris: You got to have that wide screen.
Chris: I mean, it's just a 16 by nine video. Thank you. It's good to hear from you, sir.
Chris: User 266 is here with 4,709 sats. Woo-hoo!
Chris: Long-time listener, first-time booster.
Brent: Nice.
Chris: That's great. Maybe my last, since I'm switching away from Fountain,
Chris: though. Too many bugs for me. Some people hit them, man, you know?
Chris: It's really gotten very, very good, but in terms of some of the other apps,
Chris: they still have like a decade on them.
Chris: But he says, all the talk about AI has been okay with me, but not whole episodes.
Chris: There's so much more going on in the FOSS world. Well, that is, there is a lot.
Chris: True. It doesn't get as much coverage as it should, So that's one of the things
Chris: we try to take on as we can.
Wes: And feel free to boost or email in too if there's something we have missed in
Wes: the FOSS world that's exciting.
Chris: It says greetings from Italy.
Wes: Because we don't see it all.
Chris: Greetings from Italy to you too, or at least back from us.
Wes: Italy meetup, let's go.
Chris: Let's go. All right, I like that.
Wes: All right, well Ensign Nix comes in with 2,048 sats.
Wes: I'm not a fan of AI, but I acknowledge that it's a useful tool.
Wes: The thing I dislike the most is that it's been placed on too high of a pedestal
Wes: by the big tech companies and advertised as the answer to all of humanity's problems.
Wes: And as a result, now I can't buy memory or a hard drive without breaking the bank.
Wes: I actually want the AI bubble to burst so we can shape its future instead of
Wes: greedy corporations who only care about profit.
Chris: I will say.
Wes: That's a fun, refreshing take. I like it.
Brent: I agree.
Chris: It's a nuance in that you can't blame the tech for the way the corporations
Chris: around it decide to make purchases even before they have the money to pay for it all.
Chris: But it is the silly part of the curve, for sure.
Brent: I think what Chris is trying to say is, it's not the tech, it's the people.
Chris: Yeah, it often is, though. It often is.
Wes: And boost in and we'll send you the studio address and you can send your RAM here.
Chris: We need it. Oh, man.
Brent: Adversaries 17 boosted in 4,220 satoshis,
Brent: Well, I think you guys are balancing AI and non-AI topics very well indeed.
Brent: I can definitely tell there's a lot of work put in each week to keep topics
Brent: fresh and highlight the lesser hyped things. Please keep it up.
Chris: Oh, thank you, sir.
Wes: Thank you.
Chris: I like the adversaries. NK of comes in with five, you think I got that right, 5,000 sets.
Chris: Another one, I like the AI coverage, but I know it's not everyone's cup of tea.
Chris: Could chapters help those wanting to skip the subject? I think the current ratio
Chris: between AI and not is good. So keep up the good work. Thank you.
Brent: Do we have chapters in our feed that people can use?
Chris: We do have chapters.
Wes: It does bring up, you know, that could perhaps, and I'm failing at this all
Wes: the time, but kind of like with Nick's, perhaps then if we do think consciously
Wes: about keeping, you know,
Wes: not an absolute ban or anything, but just keep, don't inject AI into every chapter when we don't need to.
Chris: It did take a drinking challenge to get us to behave a little bit.
Brent: Yeah.
Chris: Hopefully it doesn't get that bad.
Wes: So hopefully we can avoid that.
Wes: Well, Kiwi Bitcoin Guide comes in with 4,567 cents.
Wes: I enjoy the AI subject matter and the way you cover it. I'm fairly new to the
Wes: Linux and FOSS world, and now I have to weave AI into it all,
Wes: so I appreciate the way you bring it into the Linux ecosystem.
Wes: Give examples of practical use cases and also potential hooks to be aware of.
Wes: AI seems to be here to stay, and everyone needs to understand how to use it,
Wes: so keep the content coming. That's my vote.
Chris: Thank you.
Brent: Thank you.
Chris: Yeah, that has, so, I mean, I do really appreciate all the positive feedback,
Chris: because it does sort of balance out some of the negative feedback.
Chris: I think the takeaway is when we talk about it, talk about it in a practical
Chris: useful context that uh you know and i think that's what something we've been
Chris: good at with with an open source focus.
Brent: The way i've been approaching that tool is like what can i do with it you know
Brent: the the technology is really just
Brent: the means to doing something bigger and greater and i think that helps me.
Chris: I think to buy a.
Brent: More positive relationship with it.
Chris: Like you were mentioning one of the models you were you were leaning into this
Chris: past week uh is an open source one and um and.
Brent: They're quite capable these days.
Chris: Yeah that's been really fun to explore too.
Brent: Well turd ferguson boosted in 10 000 satoshis,
Brent: As someone a bit more seasoned than you boys, I've been appreciating the light but practical AI talk.
Brent: I don't know about you, but I have been noticing a slowly but growing trend
Brent: of people reluctantly accepting and then really beginning to embrace this technology.
Chris: This reminds me of a meme I saw on social media.
Chris: Somebody screenshotted their blog headlines, you know, just like the RSS feed
Chris: of their headlines. and a year ago it was why I will never use AI or Vibe code.
Chris: And then like six months later it was some of the things I'm finding it kind of useful for.
Chris: And then three months after that his blog post was I don't write a line of code
Chris: anymore. This is incredible.
Chris: And it is funny how you see people start on a journey. It's like when you find
Chris: something that's useful for it, it begins to crack that kind of assumption that
Chris: you've made about it I think I think there is something to that.
Wes: It's also just wild because everything changes so fast between the capabilities.
Chris: How you can use.
Wes: Them and how easy or hard they are to use and all of that too which does not
Wes: always jive well with our human level speed.
Chris: And like many people have pointed out there's a lot of noise out there too you
Chris: know a lot of noise it's very confusing all of that too,
Chris: Thank you, Turd. Appreciate that. Forward Humor comes in with 4,444 stats.
Chris: Hey, guys. I just wanted to say thank you for all the variety in the show,
Chris: including the AI and tech news.
Chris: I always appreciate a show that entertains me and keeps me up to date.
Chris: Not enough time in the day to stay current on my own.
Chris: The show continues to dive deep on interesting and helpful topics.
Chris: Keep up the good work. Wow, Forward Humor, thank you.
Chris: We did not pay these people. We did not pay them to say that.
Wes: They're paying us for some reason.
Chris: They're paying us, and we didn't know. Thank you, guys. Appreciate that.
Wes: Tomato comes in with a row of ducks.
Brent: I think it's tomato.
Wes: Hey, you say potato, I'll say.
Wes: I'm simultaneously sick to death of hearing about AI and enjoying Love's AI coverage.
Brent: Wow.
Wes: You are all on a very, very short list of exceptions because you strike a good
Wes: balance, both in terms of the amount of coverage, but also being neither cheerleaders
Wes: nor thought-free haters.
Wes: I'm pretty much aligned with Brent, and like he clearly is, I'm enjoying hearing
Wes: Chris and Wes's AI adventures.
Brent: I just watch from a small distance and keep my detective shield up.
Chris: He lets us burn the tokens on the agents.
Brent: Then I can be more efficient.
Wes: You're watching from your hardware hacking lab, buddy.
Brent: Yeah, it's more of a bug lab at this point.
Brent: SpookySatCom came in with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 satoshis.
Brent: For someone who isn't completely sold on the overall value of all the AI development,
Brent: I do find value in your approach to covering the use cases for it.
Brent: So keep up that great work.
Chris: Wow. Thank you. All right. That's great, Spooky. Appreciate that.
Chris: That's a good amount of signal there.
Chris: And, of course, you're always welcome to counterbalance or add your own.
Chris: It's going to be a topic of consideration for a while as we find that balance.
Chris: Thank you, everybody, who streams stats as well. 15 of you collectively stacked.
Chris: 24,874 sats. When you combine that with our boosters, that brings this episode
Chris: to a humble but very appreciative and thankful,
Chris: 124,185 sats. Now, this is a value-for-value show, which means we put it out
Chris: there for free, and if you got value from it, you can send it back with a membership or a boost.
Chris: Fountain FM does make it easy. They make a lot of easy ways,
Chris: including self-hosted or fiat channels or whatever it might be to boost.
Chris: But then there is a galaxy of options when you go to AlbiHub,
Chris: from self-hosted to apps on your phone and whatnot to participate including
Chris: just boosting from the podcast index.
Chris: Go check it out. And thank you everybody who supports with a boost or a membership.
Chris: Keeps the show going. Coming on Lucky 13.
Chris: How about that boys? That's crazy. So crazy. Wow.
Chris: All right, to make up for last week following the rules and only having one
Chris: pick, we are really breaking the rules.
Wes: It's a blowout.
Chris: It's a pick blowout this week, and both Wes and I came across SSH Route,
Chris: a network-aware SSH router that routes connections to different IPs or ports,
Chris: keys, jump hosts, etc., based on your active VPN or network.
Chris: So if you're moving between networks or VPNs, this is for you.
Chris: It detects your active network or VPN, automatically selects the right host,
Chris: the right port, the right identity file, the right jump host,
Chris: et cetera, for each connection without you having to touch your .ssh slash config like an animal.
Chris: You make a few definitions in there, and you're good to go.
Chris: Every connection SSH route detects which network you're on, if it's your office
Chris: LAN, a wire guard peer, a mesh network, and then it resolves the correct SSH
Chris: parameters before handing off to the real SSH binary. Pretty cool.
Brent: That is slick.
Wes: I think this one confused some folks who saw it after it was getting promoted
Wes: on Reddit and a few other places, just because it might be a tool that you hope
Wes: you don't need, you know?
Wes: Like in a sense of, if you have a sane universe and really well-architected
Wes: networks and like super modern tools and really coherent thought about infrastructure,
Wes: then maybe you don't need something like this.
Wes: But for the rest of us who do have all of that mess, maybe it's helpful.
Wes: And you get, like, the main part is you can keep all of this stuff declarative,
Wes: keep it in a yaml file something tells me that would make it pretty easy to
Wes: wrap into a nix os config if you needed to that kind of thing.
Chris: Interesting yeah you know wherever i go i can just ssh into my machines no problem
Chris: i don't need it but uh i figured somebody out there might now uh tell me about
Chris: render cv i have a feeling this could be useful for people out there that hate creating resumes oh.
Brent: That's me actually i hate creating.
Chris: Yeah well.
Brent: Computers and resumes really.
Chris: Well yeah Who doesn't hate creating resumes?
Brent: I have been actively looking for work. So if anybody has something that seems
Brent: interesting for a Brent, I'm all ears.
Brent: But that said, this week, I was like, I should probably update that old resume of mine.
Brent: And I did not want to do it the same way I've done it in the past.
Brent: I wanted to do it programmatically because, come on, I wanted to put that thing
Brent: in Git and keep track of it.
Brent: Different branches for a different job. I'm like, come on.
Brent: I'm a better me than I was in the past. And I found there are many,
Brent: many, many, many options for this, which is a good thing.
Brent: But the one I ultimately settled on way too late at night was RenderCV.
Brent: This is basically a resume builder. It says for academics and engineers.
Brent: I don't know if I fit into either of those. But you can basically version control
Brent: your CV, which is quite obvious and super useful.
Brent: It is a JSON. I think it might be JSON.
Brent: So it's relatively easy to edit.
Brent: But the thing I loved the most about it is that it's really quite handy to use
Brent: with your favorite AI companion because it's just a heck of a lot of text similar to an XOS.
Brent: You just treat your resume like your infrastructure.
Chris: Right. The source file, it's a YAML file. And so if you've got something that
Chris: can work with a YAML file, that's all you need.
Brent: Is it YAML? See, I didn't even need to care. It's just text.
Wes: You're technically still right because YAML is a superset of JSON, it turns out.
Chris: Wes. Damn it.
Brent: Thanks Wes. At least someone loves me. That is the worst.
Chris: Well, actually of the episode.
Brent: What I really loved about this approach is,
Brent: of course I mentioned I could track different resumes and different branches
Brent: and keep track of them over time,
Brent: which is what quite obviously useful, but also I can just have a variety of
Brent: different versions that I'm working on concurrently and interface with it the
Brent: way I interfaced with it was basically using my favorite AI tool.
Brent: And that meant that I could,
Brent: I have it check my silly ways of trying to promote myself,
Brent: which I am very bad at and just be like, hey, give me some kind of objective
Brent: way of talking about myself because I feel this entire process is very uncomfortable for me.
Brent: And so it turned it into more of like an infrastructure project than it did
Brent: me just talking about myself, which was a good way to break into like.
Chris: Okay, let's get this done. Like I, like you, cannot conceive of a way to like
Chris: talk about myself in the structure of a Word document in paragraphs.
Brent: Right.
Chris: But for some reason, a structured YAML document that's just like,
Chris: that does make sense because it's just attributes.
Chris: That to me, I could work with, ironically. And it looks like what it produces
Chris: is a pretty good, clean looking resume.
Brent: Oh, yeah. I was really impressed. I was super impressed. So I would highly recommend it.
Brent: You don't necessarily have to use this particular tool. There's a bunch of them
Brent: out there that do different things.
Brent: But if you haven't leaned into this way of taking care of your resume i highly highly recommend cv.
Chris: And it seems like a great way like you say where you could iterate on it over
Chris: time and you could keep those iterations and get if you'd like.
Wes: If you don't you're doing it wrong.
Brent: It really also comes down to me having just been lazy and i said go find everything
Brent: you can about me on the internet and like compile a cv for me because there's
Brent: information out there right And it did really well.
Brent: I was super impressed. I said, like, make sure you grab some, you know, GitHub.
Brent: Stats because this particular application i was looking at was pretty like git
Brent: heavy and i was like go go pull some insights from github go like you know so
Brent: very impressed i'm sure you can ask your favorite ai buddy to do the same thing for you.
Wes: I have nerdy thoughts on this yeah just because i took a
Wes: look because actually i've been working on my own sort of version of
Wes: this before even seeing the render cv existed so i
Wes: really approve of your find here because i i took a look
Wes: into the code and the spirit is great because
Wes: it's purely this like data oriented pipeline as you
Wes: noticed right you put in yaml and then you get out pdf or it can do markdown
Wes: and it can do html and under the hood it uses types and i think it can do latex
Wes: as well but types is a modern rust based really nice type setting and layout
Wes: engine so that's why the pdfs look so nice as they do.
Wes: Plus, it uses Pydantic, which is a great Python. There's a lot of Python under
Wes: the hood. And Pydantic is a great validation and schema library for Python.
Wes: And as a result, they export a JSON schema, which then can be applied to the YAML config.
Wes: And that tells editors or AI helpers what the schema and the keys are.
Wes: So if you open it in VS Code, you can get sort of an autocomplete or a helper
Wes: to show you what's allowed in this field and what are the valid keys and stuff.
Wes: And then on the backside, and this is something I'm looking at copying or implementing
Wes: my own version of or running at render CV stuff on the side or whatever,
Wes: they have a whole set of tools used to parse the resulting PDF and essentially
Wes: a test to make sure that it can parse out all the details it expects and sort
Wes: of get it back to a YAML-y state,
Wes: which helps if you're going to submit to these automatic systems that look at
Wes: your PDF and do that in their own sort of HR backend system.
Wes: You want to make sure that your
Wes: PDF isn't going to be opaque to those and render CV has that all baked in.
Wes: So super professional grade. You don't have to like pick the nerdy fun data
Wes: and get route and then feel like you're losing out to the people who have the
Wes: word resumes because that's what everyone else set up to support. So I really like that.
Brent: And I enjoyed how I could treat it almost like building my next config where
Brent: everything gets, you know, during build time, it tells me if I made any mistakes,
Brent: which I made plenty of, and I got all that fixed up.
Brent: So instead of, you know, exporting a PDF, checking it and be like,
Brent: oh, that didn't work or didn't get formatted the way I wanted,
Brent: all of that got checked, let's call it at build time when it was doing the exports
Brent: instead of wasting all my time.
Wes: You know what you could do? Stretch goal. See if your helper can help.
Wes: You could turn it into a totally Nixified build.
Wes: So you did Nix build and you got out a PDF on the other side.
Wes: And you could have the resume stuff that's in YAML be in Nix if you wanted.
Chris: Incredible.
Brent: Stay tuned next week.
Chris: All right. So the last one, it has been a very, very long time since we have done a hardware pick.
Chris: But you often hear us referring to these ESP devices. We're loving these things.
Chris: We talk about them more and more on the show.
Chris: And it's a great way to take a lot of your Linux hackery knowledge and apply
Chris: it to physical hardware.
Chris: But it can be intimidating to start physical hardware projects,
Chris: especially when you don't know anything about where to start.
Chris: This past week, the Open Home Foundation had their State of the Open Home presentation.
Chris: And along with that, they announced the ESP Home Starter Kit.
Chris: It's an official ESPM Home Starter Kit, and they call it the easiest way to
Chris: start building your own smart devices.
Chris: No soldering, no breadboards, no coding experience needed.
Chris: Plug-in modules. They have a visual YAML editor, and you're up and running.
Chris: It integrates with Home Assistant or standalone right away. $39.99.
Chris: The majority of the profit supports the Open Home Foundation and funds future
Chris: ESP Home and Home Assistant and other Open Home Foundation projects.
Wes: This looks fun.
Brent: Yeah, it does.
Chris: It's a really neat bit of kit. It's, it, it also just has a really cool visual appeal to it.
Chris: And it includes in the box, you get enough to actually build something useful with it.
Chris: You get a motion sensor, you get a temperature and humidity sensor.
Chris: You get a 10 X RGB LED board to play around with, with a buzzer module.
Wes: Huh? What's that?
Chris: And a physical button.
Chris: So, I mean, obviously you could use this to control lights, monitor bedroom
Chris: temperature and humidity. You could trigger automations with the physical button module.
Chris: You get audible notifications with the RGB.
Chris: And it's really easy to get started. And everything just plugs in together. Just all connects.
Chris: And it comes in cool little cases and whatnot, too. And it's $40.
Chris: It is expected to ship mid-May. I've put my hat in because the pre-sales just
Chris: went immediately since it was on the live stream.
Wes: So did you get a sense, like, is this going to be a one-off or hopefully something
Wes: that turns into like an ecosystem that keeps getting developed in future models and versions?
Chris: I would bet if it's successful that the latter. So the way that I've noticed,
Chris: they kind of dip their toes in with these kinds of things and they sell it through
Chris: a third party and they kind of see how it goes.
Chris: And if there's a strong response, I would not be surprised if the foundation
Chris: started doing more starter kits like this.
Chris: Home assistant has gotten to the point that if you if you
Chris: utilize all of their features it's just as easy to get
Chris: something working with home assistant as it would be with home kit or any
Chris: other i mean even to the point of on your phone it'll slide
Chris: up and say a new device is detected would you like to add it to home assistant
Chris: you just hit a button and it just adds it i mean it's gotten really good so
Chris: easy and this this is going to work like that and i just i think it's going
Chris: to be really exciting because it's also a really you know two three hour saturday
Chris: project could be a really fun thing and a great learning experience too.
Chris: So it is called the ESP Home Starter Kit and it's currently being sold by Apollo
Chris: Automation and I'll put a link to it in the show notes, of course,
Chris: which you can find those show notes at linuxunplugged.com slash 666.
Chris: No, we definitely want your input on how to shape and do this BSD challenge
Chris: because our hope would be that you participate along with us.
Chris: And we want to kick it off in episode 665 and conclude in episode 666.
Chris: So we've got a couple of weeks to set the ground rules.
Chris: So please go to the contact page or boost in your thoughts on a BSD challenge
Chris: and what you would like to accomplish, what you'd like to see us accomplish.
Chris: Any thoughts on the scoring a level four challenge anything like that please
Chris: help us out we'd love to see that and don't forget linux fest northwest also
Chris: just around the corner 13 days scary.
Wes: Yeah how's the audio stack on freebsd because uh you know yeah.
Chris: We're gonna end up running oh my god.
Brent: That's whatever you're done.
Chris: No no we gotta do the math on that we better do the math on that I hope we dodged that one.
Chris: We're doing it live.
Brent: People. We're doing it live.
Chris: Speaking of live, we'd love it if you joined us live. We do it on a Sunday,
Chris: a Tuesday on a Sunday at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m. Eastern.
Chris: Yeah, that's over at jblive.tv, or if you're on the go, just tune in jblive.fm
Chris: in your browser or whatever you want.
Wes: VLC on Android? Great for that.
Chris: Great for that. Wes Pano, there are extra levels of detail around the show.
Chris: It's not just an audio podcast.
Chris: You could say there's different types of metadata, even.
Wes: Yeah, that's right. We have lovingly crafted Editor Drew Blast titles in JSON
Wes: format, hosted on the cloud for easy access, dynamic updates.
Wes: Jump right to the content you want, skip the AI section, go right to the stupid
Wes: AI section, whatever you like. We don't care. We don't judge.
Brent: We don't care.
Wes: Just download the MP3 file and we're all good.
Chris: No, I'm kidding.
Wes: But we also then take the wonderful stems that Editor Drew produces and we run
Wes: that through some wizardry to produce diarized transcripts that, you know,
Wes: aren't maybe 100% perfect but are pretty darn good and at least help you furthermore
Wes: find out exactly what we said or jump to the content you want.
Chris: I hope the best transcripts in the business because we feed the thing individualized
Chris: stems of each of our tracks so there's no crosstalk.
Chris: It's as clean and crisp as it can get because we care about that kind of thing.
Chris: Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of Your Unplugged Program.
Chris: You're welcome to join our virtual lug in Mumble next week.
Chris: And, of course, as we do the BSD Challenge, links to everything we talked about
Chris: today, our contact page, our Mumble info, our matrix info, our membership, all of it.
Chris: LinuxUnplugged.com and a bunch
Chris: of great shows over at jupiterbroadcasting.com. Okay, that's it for us.
Chris: Thank you so much for joining us. And we'll see you right back here next Linux
Chris: Tuesday. And you know when that actually is. That's on a Sunday.