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: Well, hello, gentlemen. Coming up on the show today, Linus put his foot down
Chris: on AI in Linux kernel development.
Chris: We'll cover his blunt message he had for developers, and then we're going to
Chris: talk about reworking the Node stack.
Chris: Brent and Wes are coming at me with a whole new hot stack.
Chris: And then I'll do a quick remote Linux desktop showdown. I went through some
Chris: of the more recent remote Linux desktop options, came away with what I think is a clear winner.
Chris: And we're going to round it out with the great poos, I guess,
Chris: the boost, the picks, and more. So before we get there, just sort of save me
Chris: mumble room. Time-appropriate greetings, everybody. Hello, Virtual Log.
Mumble: Hello, there.
Chris: Hello, Brent.
Wes: Hello. A strong crew today. That's important.
Chris: I'm going to pull on them. I'm going to get through it. I'm going to get through it.
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Chris: And we're going to try to dial this in. We do like your feedback on this.
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Wes: Yeah, very new for us as well.
Chris: I resisted this for a very long time, so I'm now paying the tax of not really
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Chris: But we just wanted to mention it. We probably should have mentioned it a couple
Chris: of weeks ago as we began experimenting more with this.
Chris: And it's a learning process. So thank you, everybody. We really haven't had
Chris: any complaints or anything like that, but we just wanted to talk about it.
Chris: Now, before it became like an elephant in the room.
Chris: And something that's exciting to see, because I'm hoping we're going to make
Chris: it, is the Texas Linux Fest call for papers have reopened.
Wes: Yeah, that's right. Just a short little window here. It'll close on July 22nd.
Chris: Oh, yeah.
Wes: But if you missed the first one, you got a shot now. They have also released
Wes: the first round of approved talks, too. So you can kind of see what is already
Wes: there if you need to calibrate off that.
Wes: And specifically, they're looking for things in observability,
Wes: automation, infrastructure, databases, or software development.
Chris: That's pretty great. I'm hoping we can make it. We don't really have all our
Chris: plans in yet, but we always try to make that one.
Wes: Yeah, I believe it's at the beginning of November this year.
Chris: Okay. Okay. All right.
Wes: So get that on your calendars, and we'll try to join you.
Chris: This week, Linus made news with a bomb he dropped on the Linux kernel mailing list.
Chris: And I think to really kind of wrap our head around this, we should go back a
Chris: couple of weeks, because what we're seeing right now are the headlines and the
Chris: takeaways from this one post in the mailing list that has a lot of other stuff in it, too.
Chris: But Linus has recently been on a bit of a world tour, actually,
Chris: sitting down with Dirk and talking about his thoughts on AI.
Chris: And what we have is a couple of series of clips that are over the last about 60 days.
Chris: And you can actually hear Linus's thoughts evolve in that 60 days.
Chris: And this is about 60 days, the timeline before this big bomb that was dropped
Chris: on the mailing list that everybody's talking about this week.
Chris: So we want to go back to that because it started – it really started with Linus
Chris: being a lot more kind of contemplative on the pain points of AI and all this.
Chris: So he sits down with Dirk Handel often at these open source summits,
Chris: and there was just a couple that happened recently.
Chris: And some of these clips our members have already heard in the bootleg because
Chris: we played this a few weeks for them, but now it's relevant to this week's episode.
Chris: Plus, there's been new stuff since then. So we're going to catch you up on all of it.
Chris: So let's start with this. Linus starts with what he thinks right now is the
Chris: most painful aspect of AI development.
Clips: Again, I have a hard time seeing everybody because I have the lights in my face.
Clips: Very bright. But how many people here use actually AI for coding?
Clips: Yeah, so I have a love-hate relationship with AI.
Clips: I actually really like it from a technical angle.
Clips: I love the tools. I find it very useful and interesting.
Clips: But it is definitely causing pain points. And the big pain points.
Clips: In Linux traditionally, and I suspect in most projects,
Clips: have not been so much the code itself, but has been when you're forced to change
Clips: how you work and people get into a rut.
Clips: People know this is how I work and this is how I like working.
Clips: And then something comes along and for me it was like a long time ago,
Clips: around 2000, I had to change how I worked because I did not scale anymore for
Clips: the project as Linux was growing.
Clips: And I still remember it being one of the more painful episodes in kernel development,
Clips: and it was literally 25 years ago.
Clips: And I think we're seeing some of the same effects now with AI,
Clips: where it kind of forces people to get out of their comfort zone.
Clips: so we've had a lot of social issues with the ai generated bug reports but also code and and there's,
Clips: uh it's not a linus doesn't scale like it was 25 years ago now it's people don't
Clips: necessarily scale and it takes a while to learn how to use the tools in a.
Clips: Maybe responsible isn't the right word, but in a way that actually works with
Clips: the community and works with the other developers.
Clips: And we are definitely seeing some of the pain.
Clips: One of the pain points recently has been the security mailing list where when
Clips: people find bugs with AI, a lot of the time, I mean, a lot of bugs can be security issues.
Clips: And I've said for years, decades, that a security bug is a bug,
Clips: but the other side of that is a bug is often a security bug,
Clips: and you may not even realize it.
Clips: And people think that when they find a bug with AI, the first reaction seems
Clips: to sometimes be, let's send it to the security list because this may have security implications.
Clips: And the security list for the kernel was overrun by duplicate reports,
Clips: by tens, hundreds of people running AI, often the same AI tool,
Clips: and getting slightly different results,
Clips: often with the same underlying cause.
Clips: but we were flooded by people sending bugs.
Clips: And then you have this list with fairly few people on it because it's all supposed to be super secret.
Clips: And we spent all our time just forwarding these reports to.
Clips: Other developers who knew that area better. And we made the policy change that
Clips: basically if you find a security or any bug with AI, you should basically consider it to be public. And...
Clips: Just because if you found it with AI, a hundred other people also found it with AI.
Clips: And obviously that when it comes to things that really are security issues,
Clips: you may not want to make the exploit public, right?
Clips: Don't go and say to the world, hey, this is how, and this, by the way,
Clips: I want to make it very clear. This is not just about the Linux kernel.
Clips: When you find an exploit for any piece of software,
Clips: don't be that guy or that gal who then crows about it publicly and say,
Clips: look, hey, I could bring down this big company or whatever.
Clips: Just let people know what the problem was and don't necessarily tell them exactly
Clips: how to make somebody's life really miserable on a Friday afternoon. Right.
Clips: So we are seeing some pain points with AI. And it's not that the technology
Clips: is bad. And I personally really enjoy it.
Clips: But there's like the social issues that it causes have yet to be all worked out, I would say.
Chris: The conversation kind of goes on, and they talk a bit more about some of the
Chris: tooling. In a more recent conversation that happened after that,
Chris: Linus touches on the—he expands a little bit more on some of the pain points
Chris: they've had with LLM development.
Clips: I want to point out for the record, we made it 26 minutes into this conversation
Clips: without talking about AI and LLMs.
Clips: But I think this will be the only talk in this conference that gets to that.
Clips: But of course, we should talk about this because we did the same session or,
Clips: totally different, but same setup session a month ago in Minneapolis.
Clips: And one of the things that a lot of people picked up on was that on stage you
Clips: said that you see LNM as just a tool, which I completely agree with.
Clips: And you made this interesting statement that you say it offers an incremental efficiency of a 10x.
Clips: And a lot of people said, oh, Linus thinks that LLMs make everything 10x better. And so I was curious.
Clips: That 10x was not scientific. Right. That was pulled out of my ass number, obviously.
Clips: Just to clarify. That was two questions down. But OK, so this was a intuitive
Clips: number that you came up with to rephrase what you just said.
Clips: But so how much of this true added value that LLMs provide?
Clips: We just talked about this. The core code gets more eyeballs,
Clips: but the LLMs can apply the same scrutiny, the same algorithm,
Clips: the same logic testing ability to all of the code.
Clips: How much do you think that the LLMs really create productivity advancement for,
Clips: not you personally, but for the Linux kernel community?
Clips: So right now we're at kind of
Clips: the point where hopefully it creates more productivity than it takes away.
Clips: We certainly saw more junk being generated by LLMs than we saw useful code up until,
Clips: the like early this year basically and even now uh,
Clips: it's taking a lot of resources from developers because,
Clips: you get these bug reports i mean i don't know how many of you have seen this
Clips: pattern in your own work uh i bet it happens or i know for a fact that it happens
Clips: outside the kernel too where you get bug reports that,
Clips: look entirely valid and it actually can take quite a lot of effort to figure out that, no,
Clips: that was just hallucination.
Clips: And it can actually be a huge drain on resources when it takes humans a lot
Clips: of effort to figure out that, hey, this machine-generated report was not true.
Chris: And so Linus goes on to say that he does think there is some long-term good,
Chris: and he kind of articulated this in the previous chat as well.
Clips: Don't get me wrong. This may sound negative to a lot of people,
Clips: but I actually think it's all very good.
Clips: When AI finds a bug in any source code,
Clips: that is a short-term pain.
Clips: But long-term is you found a bug. We fixed it.
Clips: The end result is better for it. So I'm actually, this is part of why I actually
Clips: really enjoy AI. And again, I want to stress that the conflict is not that AI is bad.
Clips: The conflict is then that there are some social choke points and social pain
Clips: points that come with this new tool that we have 35 years of code,
Clips: that it sometimes finds issues that we did not find.
Clips: and it's going to take us some time to just work through the new issues that are found.
Clips: And so I'm actually very positive about this whole thing. I think finding bugs
Clips: is great because the real problem is all the bugs you didn't find.
Chris: I also picked up that you seem to note that there has been some improvements
Chris: in some of the bigger, more important areas.
Clips: At the same time, what has definitely happened in the last couple of months
Clips: is that we are getting a lot of really good bug reports.
Clips: Most of the good ones require more than just the LLM, though.
Clips: They require a person that then goes through the report that was generated by
Clips: the AI and makes sure it was valid.
Clips: and then also acts as the go-between between developers who fix the problem.
Clips: And we've had to push back quite a bit on people in the sense that if you find
Clips: a bug with an LLM, it's not enough to just ask the LLM to make a bug report and then throw it over,
Clips: the fence to us. We want to see...
Clips: a suggested patch. We want to see the human who ran the LLM act as a kind of
Clips: back and forth, that we have somebody who we can talk to and discuss the issues with.
Clips: Because sometimes the patch is a simple one-liner that is obvious,
Clips: but quite often it ends up being, hey,
Clips: we didn't think about that issue and we will need to reorganize some code and
Clips: fixing this properly is going to take a bit of effort.
Clips: Then you really want to have the person who sent the original report involved in.
Clips: The developer is coming back and saying, hey, this is a suggested fix.
Clips: What does your LLM think about this?
Chris: OK, I think that gives us kind of a more expanded view on Linus's thoughts around
Chris: AI. So everything kind of shifted on July 14th in a Linux media mailing list discussion.
Chris: And it wasn't like a like a discussion around a conventional release or anything like that.
Chris: But it was, I guess, a thread that concerned connecting a patchwork of open
Chris: source reviews, like a different set that had been like agentically reviewed, like a whole patch set.
Wes: Yeah. So they're connecting some existing tools, right?
Wes: So there's a bunch of tools in the kernel so that when you submit a patch,
Wes: there's automated review of it, tests get run, things get built,
Wes: and then you get feedback
Wes: sent to you and also to the mailing list, maybe to the maintainer that says
Wes: like, hey, the program found these things, you know, kind of like linting or
Wes: running a basic set of unit tests.
Wes: There's various versions of analyzing the software automatically to see if,
Wes: like, it is, you know, before a human even has to get to it to try to lower
Wes: the maintenance burden.
Chris: Okay.
Wes: Especially when you consider, like, Linux tree maintainers, their job is ingesting
Wes: a giant stream of potential patches and trying to make sure that they're doing
Wes: so in a well-done, rigorous way. And so, Sashiko.
Wes: Sashiko, okay. Yeah. So, it's not a proposal. It's operational already.
Wes: It's just this is more about more plumbing on the actual, you know,
Wes: connecting it more to the, like, making it more permanent fixture of the ongoing
Wes: development process. Right now it's been a tool sort of more on the side.
Chris: And so this is a discussion around that.
Wes: Yes.
Chris: And Linus decides to chime in.
Wes: Well, it starts...
Wes: It starts because people are talking about, let's add this to the thing. And then someone...
Chris: Objects.
Wes: Yes.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: So a developer comes in to, and we can get the dudes here, but yeah,
Wes: a developer comes in to basically say like, shouldn't this be an opt-in thing?
Wes: Isn't that the normal default of what we do?
Wes: And then that gets into a whole discussion around, is that a viable model?
Wes: and then ethical concerns get brought in and it becomes a question of,
Wes: you know, if I don't want to be made, I don't want to be forced to use an AI tool.
Wes: And then the whole debate expands around there.
Chris: Yeah. And then that's when Linus chimes in.
Wes: Yes.
Chris: Linus writes, I realize some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where
Chris: I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top level maintainer.
Chris: Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects.
Chris: And if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open source thing and
Chris: fork it or just walk away.
Chris: AI is a tool and like other tools we use, and it's clearly a useful one.
Chris: It may not have been that clearly even just a year ago, but that no longer is in question today.
Chris: There are other questions around AI, like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end.
Chris: But, quote, is it still useful? That's no longer one of those questions.
Chris: Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used it.
Chris: Yes, it can also be somewhat of a painful tool, both for maintainer workloads
Chris: and from it just keeps finding embarrassing bugs standpoint.
Chris: But the solution is not to put your head in the sand and sing la la la la la
Chris: I can't hear you at the top of your voice like some people seem to do.
Chris: The solution is to make sure those LLM tools help maintainers,
Chris: that's his italics, help maintainers instead of just causing them pain.
Chris: There is no question on that side.
Chris: We're not forcing anyone to use it, but I will very loudly ignore people who
Chris: try to argue against other people using it.
Chris: And no, AI isn't perfect, but Christ, anybody who points to the problems with
Chris: AI had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same
Chris: time, because it's not like the natural intelligence is always all that great either.
Chris: The kernel project has been and will continue to be about the technology sure
Chris: the social angle of working on open source is important and often very much
Chris: a motivating part of the project,
Chris: but in the end it is a side benefit not the point of the project again his emphasis
Chris: not the point of the project,
Chris: this is not his emphasis, some kind of social warrior project.
Chris: Never has been, never will be.
Chris: In the kernel community, we do open source because it results in better technology,
Chris: not because of religious reasons.
Chris: And so we make decisions primarily based on technical merit, not fear of new tools.
Chris: That is a pretty strong, clear stance. What's your reaction to that,
Chris: Brent? Is that stronger than you expected after hearing the comments from Linus?
Brent: Well, I think it's more clearly laid out here.
Brent: Like I found in his clips on stage, he was a bit more exploring with the crowd,
Brent: like saying, oh, yeah, yeah, we're using it.
Brent: These are the experiences the project's having. But here he clearly states both
Brent: his personal kind of view, but also just a very clear stance from the project.
Brent: And I think a stance that you haven't seen very often in other projects,
Brent: especially not written in Linus-like words as he does.
Brent: But the thing that really hit me here is one of these last sentences in the
Brent: kernel community, we do open source because it results in better technology,
Brent: not because of religious reasons.
Brent: And we've seen a couple of projects in the last few years fall victim,
Brent: maybe that's a strong word, but fall victim to some infighting in the community
Brent: just because of differences in philosophy of how the project should be run.
Brent: So in a way, having Linus say, yes, this is exactly how it is,
Brent: and this is how the project believes this should be implemented is a very clear
Brent: voice about how everyone should be following.
Brent: And there's not much room for pushing back, I think.
Chris: Yeah, we've seen Linus take – I don't know what the right – but we've seen Linus
Chris: take a technical over religion argument when it came to GPL2 versus GPL3.
Wes: It's been a consistent position for him for a long time.
Chris: Wes what is your reaction here to really framing this as look the usefulness
Chris: is proved if you don't think these things are useful now then you're just clearly not using them um.
Wes: It came up again in the thread some folks pushed back on or you know we're saying
Wes: like you know we shouldn't compare these things you know these existing tools
Wes: we have are deterministic you can debug it these llms are a black box and they
Wes: can hallucinate and then linus agreed
Wes: that they were different but he kind of flips it and he says
Wes: you are correct the ai generate reports are usually much superior and more flexible
Wes: they actually find real non-trivial problems,
Wes: yeah so there's sort of even more um i will say it's worth noting that like
Wes: this is a big thread with lots of maintainers it's not just these folks right so there's um,
Wes: like there's uh roman gushkin who's a google kernel engineer who built shishiko
Wes: and was sort of you know working on it lauren pinchart who sort of started the
Wes: objection part of this a linux media contributor um and then linus but ted you,
Wes: know a whole bunch of regular kernel contributors are in there and that's where
Wes: it's becoming you know like they've been talking about around does,
Wes: it does this particular tool work even about a 20 false positive rate 80 to
Wes: 90 percent true positives on real patches and only two maintainers seemingly
Wes: in the whole thread reported real output problems everyone else seems to,
Wes: is using it and likes it ted steven rostet John Cara, Bottomley,
Wes: Bonzini, they all say it catches real bugs and that the noise is manageable. So we're seeing...
Wes: It's important to remember that the kernel is like Linus and then a whole bunch
Wes: of lieutenant tree maintainers.
Chris: Right?
Wes: And so what's happening is different maintainers are already enabling this and
Wes: thinking that they may have different rules around do you have to use the tool
Wes: or not. But they are already seemingly to commit that this is worth it for them
Wes: as a tool that they want to see used in the code they're maintaining.
Chris: Yeah, that decision has been made. And so the debate becomes should we be using
Chris: AI-assisted development in free software?
Chris: And Linus had an analogy. He had a vegetarian analogy. He says,
Chris: being vegan because you think meat is murder is fine, but vegans don't expect
Chris: the rest of the kernel community to stop eating meat.
Wes: I think it comes down to, like, I can understand the position of,
Wes: I don't want to be forced to use this tool that I disagree with, right?
Chris: Yeah, and it's not mandatory.
Wes: And so that's where what use, I think, matters a lot in the structure of what
Wes: is happening here, right?
Wes: So it's like, I think folks can have sympathy for your boss makes you use a tool.
Wes: and you're supposed to hit a velocity target and you've got to ship,
Wes: ship, you know, there's all kinds of stupid stuff that is just bullshit.
Wes: But in this case, that's not what's happening, right?
Wes: Like what's happening is an automated tool that is open source.
Wes: I don't know what inference provider they're using or whatever,
Wes: but it's a Rust tool, it's open source. All of the prompts are there that,
Wes: you know, the normal open source process sort of applies there.
Wes: And then it's finding to, at least by the people that are going to ultimately
Wes: decide if your code is accepted, real bugs that humans don't find our quality
Wes: and then it's sending it to you. So it's not you have to use it to make your code.
Chris: Right.
Wes: It's not you have to have a certain tool on your system that you authored the commit with. It's,
Wes: you may be forced by the maintainer to respond to the output of this tool.
Chris: Yes.
Wes: And then where that gets tricky is you can imagine the case where,
Wes: like, I don't want to have to sort through this slop that has stuff that's false
Wes: positives, and I can understand that.
Wes: But the flip side is where it gets harder, because what happens if the tool
Wes: finds a real bug that you now refuse to engage with?
Chris: Which is going to become more and more likely as they improve, as they get better.
Wes: Which I think connects to Linus's point. Firstly, I think folks,
Wes: like, there is very much a sort of a moral and a social and an altruistic sense
Wes: to open source. I don't want to negate that at all. That's some of the stuff that drew me to it.
Wes: But there is also this technical side, but it's also sort of almost a game theory
Wes: side, right? It's like a strategic bet on how to build software that you yourself
Wes: need, right? Like Google and Microsoft are not altruistic entities.
Wes: they're doing it because there's a strategic thing and that's sort of a bet,
Wes: and that ties into sort of it's also a methodology to develop software as much
Wes: as it is a philosophy around software and that is the side i think linux is trying,
Wes: or linus is trying to uh articulate and then he's also saying that,
Wes: we have methods to adjudicate things like you know the kernel community does
Wes: have a code of conduct now so we can sort of talk about intrapersonal conflict
Wes: things like that and of course there's the there's a whole the whole
Wes: system of maintainership is set up to adjudicate code quality on that sense
Wes: but there is no system in place to evaluate individual ethical claims,
Wes: once once that's in there like how do you that's an individual thing there is
Wes: no system in place to do that there's kernels not set up to do that so we can't right,
Wes: it that that's where a lot of this is coming from i think it's it's really a mechanism thing.
Brent: Touching on that it Makes me remember, do you remember a bunch of Russian nationality,
Brent: developers were booted off the project for...
Brent: kind of shady reasons well.
Chris: It was just as the sanctions or whatever went in during the ukraine war and yeah we were.
Brent: Kind of arguing well maybe it's not the project's place to say who can and can't
Brent: contribute uh because it should fall on more technical merits than it should on social ones.
Chris: This is just another example of there's these sort of social lines yeah.
Wes: And that one i think you could argue was partially imposed.
Chris: On them right in a sense so there's some research out there that shows that
Chris: going by numbers that are reported by developers i think it's interesting that
Chris: there is sort of this false positive rate it's like an lm thinks it found a bug.
Wes: There's also in this specific tool a case where because it sees patches sometimes
Wes: it might find real bugs but in code that wasn't what you just added or touched so there's some noise.
Chris: In that sense too yeah but it looks like like a lot of like the so the rate
Chris: of is about a 20 false positive but what is interesting is it's like what they're
Chris: developing like what the developers call a gray zone nitpicky small theoretical
Chris: stuff that nobody really kind of tends to care about.
Chris: And when you look at the stuff that's like the real important stuff,
Chris: the hit rate is more like 80-90% of true positives for the actual critical things that get submitted.
Chris: So an interesting thing is, if you look at what's coming in,
Chris: according to self-reported numbers by these developers...
Chris: The stuff that is important tends to be accurate. And the stupid stuff that's
Chris: just like low-hanging stuff tends to be where the slop is at.
Brent: The challenge is really separating the two, isn't it?
Wes: And tuning it and seeing it. It'll be interesting because this will,
Wes: in effect, provide some real data out there if you want to mine it to see how this changes over time.
Wes: I did think there was some signal here in just seeing that, like,
Wes: you know, Chris Mason, the ButterFS developer, has been contributing to some
Wes: of the prompts that are getting used here.
Wes: And then Jonathan Corbett at LWN took a look and called them some of the prompts
Wes: that get fed into this 11-stage super—it's quite the process—called them some
Wes: of the best documentation on kernel patch review ever written.
Wes: He expressed a little, you know, sadness,
Wes: around that we couldn't write it until we were writing it for a machine.
Wes: Yeah. But seemed to think that there was a lot of really good stuff in there.
Chris: Huh. That is funny how that works, huh? Here's the question I have for anyone
Chris: in the audience who is on the side of we shouldn't be using AI in free software.
Chris: I'd like to hear from you because I think, A, that's a point that should get voiced more, but B...
Chris: I'd like to know where you stand on if an LLM-assisted tool finds a legitimate
Chris: security issue, submits it to a project that is anti-AI, anti-LLM,
Chris: what should that project do?
Chris: Should they just ignore the security patch? Should they go try to recreate it
Chris: from scratch? That's a ton of work. That's probably more work than going through their submission.
Chris: So I'd like to know if you're out there and you're not really pro-AI use and
Chris: free software, how would you
Chris: solve that little particular problem that's obviously going to come up?
Chris: What do you do there? What happens if a real bug is found, somebody sends in
Chris: a patch that's AI-assisted or LLM-generated, and that project,
Chris: do they refuse to engage with it? What should they do?
Chris: I don't know what the options there are for them. Because that seems like that's
Chris: going to be a thing is the projects that close the door to this, two things happen.
Chris: Number one, they're going to get folks that are submitting bug reports that
Chris: may be actually useful in some cases that they're going to ignore.
Chris: but number two and i've talked about this before on the show and i'll just so
Chris: i'll make a brief is they're not going to participate in the dialogue,
Chris: and the state of free and open source ai is at a critical junction right there
Chris: is and it could really use our community out there advocating for what we believe
Chris: in and what we want to see and
Chris: instead a lot of our community is like linus says putting their heads in the sand as a result they're.
Chris: A lot of money from Anthropic and OpenAI and others has knives out for open
Chris: source AI. And we're going to see a concentrated effort as the open source AI
Chris: models catch up to the frontier models, quote unquote.
Chris: They have such a financial position to protect that they're going to turn to
Chris: lobbying efforts and things like that.
Chris: And it's going to be like the 90s again with free software, but now in the intelligence field.
Chris: And only this time, we don't have a Stallman out there.
Chris: We don't have a free software foundation out there for AI. In fact,
Chris: for the most case, they're all just ignoring and rejecting it.
Chris: And so ironically, they're going to end up with worst-case scenario AI because
Chris: they're not participating in the dialogue.
Chris: And I've said it before, so I don't need to go on about it.
Chris: But I hope some people have been realized or come to realize this since Linus made that post.
Chris: Because I think what Linus is trying to at least say for the Linux kernel is
Chris: the decision is made. these are useful.
Chris: Now it's on you if you want to use it or not. But from a project standpoint,
Chris: we're not debating the usefulness anymore. It's a tool.
Chris: And our sovereign individual developers on their own prerogative are implementing
Chris: and using these tools because they want to.
Chris: And that is now the official state, the official position of the Linux kernel.
Chris: You have to wonder if that does move some people and maybe get some people more
Chris: actively involved in the free software side of ai.
Wes: I do think i even saw in that mailing list read some folks saying you know like
Wes: i had folks who had their own ethical concerns but also sort of were forced
Wes: to reach a conclusion of like well at this point you know not using it is worse
Wes: than using it even with those concerns it's.
Chris: Like that that game theory scenario yeah i know it sucks it's the welcome to
Chris: the world of technology is this is not the first time we've been here.
Brent: Well, that's strange. The title of this little section says notes with Wes and Brent.
Wes: Hey, I know that guy.
Brent: And that's because it's been a, what would we say, multi-week journey of reassessing
Brent: what notes mean to us in our life and times.
Brent: And we touched on this a little bit in the members feed last week.
Brent: And I think it went into a great bit more detail than we even expected.
Brent: We were just like, I think Chris was like, hey, I heard you talking about notes
Brent: recently. And then there went 10 minutes worth of really interesting discussion.
Brent: So, but it's been another week. And Wes, you've been diving into notes.
Brent: I've been diving even more into my notes. So where should we start?
Brent: Should we give like maybe a detailed summary of what we were talking about last week?
Chris: I wanted to start, if you guys don't mind, because I think the real story is
Chris: why this all started was because you had a NextCloud disaster.
Chris: And I also recently experienced a NextCloud disaster. I was viewing a very important text file.
Chris: I clicked it just to view it in the text editor. I didn't edit, didn't save.
Chris: And it wiped the file out just by viewing it. And then it immediately closed and saved that.
Chris: And it was a very important file. I had it in backup, but just viewing it,
Chris: wiped it out. It turned out to be like a little bug where basically...
Wes: Some kind of race condition.
Chris: A race condition, yeah. And wiped out one of my most important notes.
Chris: And I realized right then and there, I'm not using NexCloud for notes anymore.
Chris: but I want to know what happened to you. And I think cause that is what caused
Chris: you to spiral into redoing your entire notes.
Brent: Oh my gosh. Why do I do this? Uh, so I've been using next cloud.
Brent: I looked at the calendar for about like something like 10 years now and notes,
Brent: for that amount of time. And it's been the number one application.
Brent: I would say definitely on next cloud that has been important for me over the years.
Brent: But even more broadly, it's probably the ecosystem I use the most every single day.
Brent: So if you took away a bunch of tools of mine, notes would be the one thing that
Brent: is a capture of my knowledge, the place where I think about things,
Brent: the place where I keep tricks and tips and stuff.
Brent: So some people don't use notes as much as that, but I'm a note fiend. So, you know.
Brent: Kind of like tabs. And what I have noticed happening recently is a slight erosion
Brent: of my trust in the sinking process of my notes over the last...
Brent: Many months, I would say. But it's just like keeps suggesting.
Brent: So it wasn't as drastic as your experience, Chris. But for me,
Brent: it's these little tiny paper cuts and these little micro warnings I kind of see them as.
Brent: Because I would have like one note over here that would be like,
Brent: oh, I thought I wrote a little detail there. And it's kind of missing on my laptop.
Brent: And then I go to use my phone and, you know, I'm out in the world.
Brent: And I want to refer to something that I left on there 30 minutes ago.
Brent: And all of a sudden, it's not syncing. And it hasn't synced for many hours.
Brent: And so the things I was relying on having with me at all times are just kind
Brent: of not there. And so you got to find some other way to get it.
Brent: So I had enough of those experiences that my otherwise deep trust in this note
Brent: system, as PJ will definitely,
Brent: back me up on, as I've been trying to convince him to use this thing forever
Brent: because I trusted so much in it, has now been eroded to the point where I was like, well,
Brent: I think I have to solve this a different way because I looked for,
Brent: you know, was it a config set and was it some weird files I had in my infrastructure
Brent: that are causing problems?
Brent: Is it a bug I can report or something like that? And for months I've been looking
Brent: and trying to try different methods and play around and I came to no clear explanation.
Brent: So that's been a little frustrating.
Wes: You were giving this a shot. you were trying not to move.
Brent: Well 10 years if you've been using for 10 years and all of a sudden you know
Brent: a key binding goes away and you just can't live without it so.
Chris: This is after a long journey how you reluctantly ended up with obsidian.
Brent: Don't give all the sauce away right and and i don't even know if that's the
Brent: final landing point because i'm a little hesitant so.
Chris: You started flirting with obsidian you're a little nervous because it's not
Chris: free software but it is markdown based so you.
Brent: And you're going to look at it. So, you know.
Chris: Yeah. All right.
Brent: I was basically looking for a couple...
Brent: things maybe absolute needs one is markdown backed because i i can't do databases
Brent: i don't know how those work,
Brent: but also i'm using it on various devices right and i want to use kate on my
Brent: desktop and i want to use something that's just like fairly fast on the phone
Brent: so it has to have a phone right right phone fast,
Brent: way to use it that that's super important for me maybe like 50 of the importance,
Brent: but also like a really good search,
Brent: that's surprisingly difficult to find in some of these apps so i scour the landscape
Brent: trying to find you know something that's open source something that's quite
Brent: mature it's still developed actively something that uh you know hits all these other points and um,
Brent: once you put all those filters on and there's not much out there and turns out obsidian kind of falls,
Brent: in that category quite nicely and i had hesitated to even look at it or even
Brent: consider it meanwhile everybody else is raving about it so,
Brent: I reluctantly installed it.
Chris: Everybody's doing it.
Brent: Yeah, I know. Everybody's doing it. Well, I, contrarian, you know,
Brent: I don't want to be everybody, but it turns out. Well, they're kind of right.
Brent: Like, it's got some great features.
Chris: I mean, there's a reason why people like it. However, it did provoke feedback
Chris: from listener Kai, right?
Wes: Indeed. Dear Lupteam, and specifically, dear Brent.
Wes: I'm a semi-long-term listener and core contributor.
Brent: Thank you.
Wes: I just finished episode 675, where you were considering LogSeek and Obsidian.
Wes: But it sounds like you've missed that Logseek has moved away from Markdown files
Wes: and are switching to a graph database approach.
Wes: The Logseek Markdown version, OG as they call it, will only receive security updates in the future.
Chris: Oh, wow.
Wes: I am currently also reconsidering my note-taking application.
Wes: Obsidian just doesn't feel right for me.
Wes: And I'm currently taking a closer look at Silver Bullet.
Wes: The beauty. It runs on your server in a centralized place, and you access it
Wes: from your devices by connecting to the server.
Wes: The files are cached and synced locally, so you can use it even when there is
Wes: no internet connection.
Wes: Though they are starting to work on local applications as well.
Wes: I haven't tested it in depth yet, though I believe that you and I share the
Wes: same taste. So maybe this is something you could check out as well.
Chris: You know, Wes, I believe you and I came across Silver Bullet not too long ago.
Wes: Yes, and are kind of looking around for various note-taking applications for show notes things.
Chris: Yeah, for show notes. We were looking at this as a potential way to do our show notes.
Wes: Yeah, so it's MIT-licensed, server-hosted, browser-based. Your data stays on
Wes: your machine. It's plain Markdown files, live preview.
Brent: I'm liking this.
Wes: By-directional links, a built-in query language, SLIQ, and a Lua scripting environment
Wes: that lets you program your notes, which is very cool. Run queries,
Wes: build widgets, automate workflows, all from inside your pages.
Wes: And the pages or the plugins run in sandboxed web workers, so you can have extensions,
Wes: that can be secure without sacrificing power.
Chris: Okay.
Brent: All right.
Chris: So, to me, it seems a little complicated, but...
Chris: Maybe not when you actually look at what it's doing. Silver Bullet.
Chris: By the way, silverbullet.md if you'd like to check it out, listener.
Brent: Ah, that's clever.
Chris: Yeah.
Brent: I kind of felt it landed somewhere in the middle. Like, it's extremely powerful
Brent: if you know what you're doing. You don't have to use those features.
Brent: It has some nice easy wins, like bi-directional wiki links and those kind of
Brent: things that I haven't been using that were kind of like on my mandatory list.
Brent: even though that's not what I was using.
Chris: Built-in to-do items is nice too.
Brent: Yeah, it has all these well-thought-out quick access features.
Brent: There's a nice video where one of the main developers goes through kind of a
Brent: tour, and you can tell they're passionate about it, and there's some cool stuff.
Brent: I thought of Wes right away with some of the power of using,
Brent: scripting languages, Lua specifically, to just make your notes programmatic,
Brent: and that seems like a wonderful thing for us nerds around here in this room.
Wes: Yeah, it almost makes it closer to something like a Jupyter notebook or something, which is interesting.
Brent: Reminded me a lot of text-based accounting.
Wes: Mm-hmm. I like that comparison.
Chris: Okay, so here's what I want to know, Brent, is what is it not...
Chris: It doesn't sound like it worked for you.
Wes: You're clearly not using it.
Brent: Right?
Chris: Yeah, there's like a big butt hanging here and I want to know what it is.
Brent: Well the big one here is but it's only a web app like it runs in a browser I
Brent: don't know if people like and you want a mobile.
Chris: App you want a mobile app too.
Brent: Yeah it's a big mobile app guy and you know is this the kind of thing people
Brent: pin is this the kind of app you would pin you can pin.
Chris: A tab on that.
Brent: You'll have to teach me.
Chris: Now, what I'm wondering is, are you willing to hear the LogSec sales pitch?
Chris: Because I think, Wes, you've stuck with it, right?
Wes: Oh, yeah.
Chris: That's saying something, because it's been a couple of years.
Brent: Yeah.
Chris: A few years, yeah.
Wes: I don't use it for, like, absolutely everything, but, yeah, I got some real data in there.
Chris: So, Brent, I mean, could we be interested in putting you in a nice LogSec today?
Wes: I also thought it would be a good, just because there is a big change going,
Wes: I thought it was just a time to check in as well.
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: You know, it's not up front. It's not going to be for everyone.
Wes: One, it's a very different model.
Chris: Can you tell me about the change in your words and what you think about this
Chris: database change they're doing?
Wes: Yeah. So one way to think about it is it's more of almost like less of an upgrade
Wes: and more of a different product.
Chris: Yeah. It seems like it.
Wes: It's a block-level graph database
Wes: with typed properties. You get data log queries and an AI agent API.
Wes: It also happens to be a note-taking app.
Chris: Okay. I see. So they're pivoting for the agentic future.
Wes: Well, I mean, in some sense, but this was sort of always an evolution because
Wes: like in the Obsidian model, just as an example, but just sort of like you inherit
Wes: a hierarchy from the operating system, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Wes: You're sort of like you have a folder tree, you have Markdown in there,
Wes: you probably have it all organized.
Chris: Yeah. It's all folders and whatnot.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Which I kind of, I do like to some degree.
Wes: Yeah, that's not bad. I'm not saying anything's wrong with that.
Wes: But this is a different way to think about how you might want to organize things.
Wes: And so the old version of LogSeq sort of was a mix where it had markdown files
Wes: on disk, but it was never a great fit for really what the best representation
Wes: and use of what LogSeq was good for was, I thought.
Wes: So now with the LogSeq DB version, the SQLite database, I would also argue I
Wes: get why people don't like databases for storing stuff.
Wes: if you are using agents I think that's perhaps less of a concern because they're
Wes: pretty good at getting data in and out of things and they have no problem manipulating
Wes: SQLite for you so or turning a SQLite dump back into structured text files or things like that but,
Wes: you're no longer a prisoner of the file system. Pages are UUID-addressed entities
Wes: with titles. No folders, no paths.
Wes: Basically, the hierarchy is at the block level, including create parent-child,
Wes: but then any other hierarchy you want, you're not limited to a tree.
Wes: You build whatever graph you want with the graph primitives that are built right in.
Wes: And then, of course, it does come with an MCP. It comes with a CLI.
Wes: Of course, it has really nice search.
Wes: Plus, it has the query language. It includes data log, lets you do stuff.
Wes: So like if you want to write a query that isn't supported by however the search
Wes: works as it stands now, you have full access to like the underlying data model.
Wes: It does provide a read-only markdown mirror.
Chris: Oh, that's interesting.
Wes: So like you don't have to worry about that side of it. You can't edit those
Wes: files and have it sync back.
Brent: Oh, well, geez.
Wes: But you can totally read. Yes.
Chris: Yeah, you can view. Yeah. Yeah.
Chris: It has a mobile app.
Wes: Yep, mobile app that's new. It's all very new. So a lot of the biggest critiques
Wes: right now is like, it's moving fast, it's a big change, and I think maybe the
Wes: folks behind it haven't super articulated what I think is kind of the exciting
Wes: vision for where it could be going.
Chris: It seems notable that in May, they raised $4.1 million.
Brent: Wow.
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: So I think they're going to be around for a minute working on this,
Chris: and that knowledge graph seems to be the thing that got them the funding.
Wes: It is AGPL. So you can pay them $5 a month if you want them to handle the sync,
Wes: but you can host it yourself.
Chris: That's pretty reasonable.
Wes: And the new stuff, which I haven't tried this yet, but the new sync is real-time sync.
Chris: Oh. Huh. That is really nice. It does come up when I'm moving between machines sometimes.
Wes: And it is super new. So some folks with super giant libraries have had some
Wes: issues importing them, but they does support importing from the previous version.
Chris: Okay.
Wes: Yeah. So I think it's sort of like, as we were talking about in the,
Wes: in the pre pre the members show, we,
Wes: some of the biggest, maybe one of the competitors to a personal knowledge system,
Wes: is like the fact that if you have something like Hermes, it's building a thing
Wes: that's like has Markdown files that it's indexing to search and injecting.
Wes: and a lot of these agent memory systems or QMDs or whatever are sort of half
Wes: of part of building structure on top of markdown.
Wes: And so I think where this is interesting is LogSync presents another point on
Wes: that continuum, especially like I was trying it out last night and the MCP is
Wes: really nice. It's very well done. It's not perfect yet, but it has pretty much everything you need.
Wes: And so you can read the files if you want. You can read it and do searches through the MCP.
Wes: It's just that the main thing that changes is the right path goes through the database.
Chris: Yeah.
Chris: Which is, I mean, for a long-term tool, probably not a bad idea.
Brent: More efficient.
Chris: Also, I noticed they have a CLI as well.
Wes: A CLI, yep.
Chris: A Mac client and a Windows. Do they have a Windows? Yeah, they have a Windows client, I think. Okay.
Brent: I got a couple of questions here, Wes, since you, over the years,
Brent: seem to have really connected with this ethos, if I say that.
Brent: What do you find is the perfect kind of information to store in this?
Brent: Because I realized when we were having these discussions about like,
Brent: well, what is notes even, that I was trying to store very different types of
Brent: information in the same place to have it accessible in the same ways.
Brent: And maybe that's not a very good idea. So perhaps there's a way to store the
Brent: right kind of information in something like LogSeq and store the other kind
Brent: of information somewhere else. It's more suitable.
Chris: Oh, boy. That sounds complicated.
Brent: I know. That's why I was leaning away from it. But Wes seems to think this is
Brent: really good for something. So what is that?
Chris: Why not everything?
Wes: Well i think i tend to keep like some stuff like per project stuff tends to
Wes: live in like a repo that i have for a project so i mean not that there's not
Wes: notes or thoughts or ideas about that that might be in there but it tends to
Wes: be that kind of stuff it's sort of
Wes: it's ideas maybe things i want
Wes: to investigate you know things i've learned about stuff notes for a future
Wes: me going through or redoing something and i find that i what is really nice is that you can just,
Wes: enter information and then start building adding links to it and you don't it's
Wes: very easy to go navigate that so i don't worry as much about having a strict hierarchy because it
Wes: was always felt like i had part of what limited me was classifying it up front
Wes: like that and this means i don't really have to i can just
Wes: put information in and sort of the structure emerges.
Chris: Yeah i do sometimes spend a lot of time figuring out okay where does this live
Chris: what yeah like classifying.
Brent: But I wondered if there's some kind of upfront discipline every time you're
Brent: making a note to try to tag it or tag a block.
Brent: Can you explain a little bit of the...
Brent: I don't know, daily workflow.
Chris: Hygiene to make sure the notes actually link and stuff.
Brent: What's the thing I need to learn to make this work well?
Wes: Well, I think you just kind of play with it.
Wes: Like, you could have an orphaned thing, but, you know, there's autocomplete
Wes: on the tags. So as long as you have, as long as your variance in the tags that
Wes: you do isn't so crazy, and then you can kind of go check, and especially now
Wes: if you had an agent in there, you could go do some sort of a quick audit.
Chris: Can I ask you about that, Brent? Sure. Is that is your intention to have an
Chris: agent have access or edit these?
Brent: Well, when we first started this discussion, it wasn't, I think,
Brent: partly because I wanted to have some protected space,
Brent: where this was like blessed information that I had, you know,
Brent: cross reference a documentation or had used in anger and was like,
Brent: the golden command or whatever it is that solved that problem.
Brent: And I feared that letting an agent kind of have access to that would mix the
Brent: information in a way that I felt was impure somehow.
Brent: But you guys challenged me. And so I've been using agents like crazy to make,
Brent: a Carpathia LLM wiki thing. And I've been freaking, oh, why did you guys get
Brent: me into this? So for weeks now.
Brent: been playing with this and it's totally amazing so i'm starting to change that.
Chris: Person with that consideration to me it seems like logsec looked at what obsidian
Chris: is doing for agents and said oh we can we can do better than that,
Chris: i mean this is with the mc i'm thinking with an mcp and a cli you really could
Chris: truly brain dump and then have the agent start connecting the dots right they're
Chris: actually really good at that kind of context stuff so you could have it,
Chris: post facto and you know obviously propose it before it makes the changes.
Chris: But post-factor, you could say, go through and link things. And I've done this.
Chris: That's why I can speak to this.
Chris: I wasn't very good at linking my stuff together.
Chris: Some people, they go into Obsidian, and they have these awesome,
Chris: I don't know, point graphs or whatever, this incredible cluster of notes.
Chris: Mine are just like dots all disconnected, just like stars in space.
Chris: And so I was very bad at that. But the agents are able to go through and very
Chris: effectively notice the commonalities.
Brent: They're like your librarian almost.
Wes: I had a thought on your question too about the tagging versus – and as it relates
Wes: to directories. I think – so one version is you can just do the same thing where
Wes: you were going to say where in the tree does it go.
Wes: It could be which is the first tag I had.
Wes: But then the thing you don't have to do is fight about the relative importance.
Wes: You don't have to be like, oh, well, should it be in this one or this one?
Wes: Because you just add both.
Chris: Okay alright yeah and then the other thing too is like,
Chris: It's sort of nice, if you have an agent in front of it, you could capture notes
Chris: in Telegram, you could capture them in Kate, wherever you want, and then,
Chris: the agent could go through and save them, you know, using this database,
Chris: this block system. The agent could be the one that files it for you and then retrieves it for you.
Wes: The one limitation right now is there isn't a headless MCP, so it requires the
Wes: window to be running, but there's no, I was taking a look at the code,
Wes: and there doesn't seem to be any technical limitation there.
Wes: It just isn't plumbed up that way yet, so.
Brent: So check on Wes's GitHub to see next week if we got something?
Chris: Something to consider. I mean, you've got me thinking about it.
Wes: Like, it might not be for anyone, but I think it's a fun way to at least make
Wes: you rethink some of how you think about and relate to the knowledge you're trying to store.
Chris: Yeah, and if you're looking for a knowledge system, that's, yeah,
Chris: that is... All right, so LogSec, L-O-G-S-E-Q.
Wes: But it definitely now, it maybe also makes it a little clearer because it's
Wes: definitely now not, decisively not competing for, I have an existing markdown
Wes: infrastructure that I want a thing that can upgrade it to a graph.
Wes: That is totally separate now.
Wes: And we've got some feedback from our dear Olympia Mike. Howdy, JB team.
Wes: I've been quiet since LinuxFest Northwest, but definitely not idle.
Wes: Lots of stuff has been happening thanks largely to people in this community.
Wes: First, Nixbook 2605 is officially out.
Brent: With Flakes?
Wes: With a new installer.
Chris: Hey, new installer's cool.
Wes: Yeah, Flakes? Good question, bro. And that inherited upstream changes that allows
Wes: new users to choose their file system on install Oh, hey.
Chris: Oh.
Wes: And it has a progress bar that doesn't appear to get stuck at 46%. That's a big upgrade.
Chris: That's nice. Yeah, I like that.
Wes: In Nick's book itself, the channel, okay, that answers it, has been bumped to
Wes: 2605, a new version of Cinnamon, a collection of default-free wallpapers,
Wes: and fixes to Etsy scale so multi-user systems have more consistency.
Brent: That's a nice touch.
Chris: Good, good.
Wes: This has all been aggressively tested and working well. If you have a Nick's
Wes: book, you'll automatically get this within a week, or if you want it Now,
Wes: you can just run Upgrade and Reboot from your start menu.
Chris: Love that.
Wes: So cool. The new installer can be downloaded from nixbookos.org.
Wes: Also, the Computer Upcycle Project has officially won its first grant as well.
Wes: The city of Olympia has chosen the Computer Upcycle Project as one of 60 nonprofits
Wes: to fund this year and awarded us $15,000.
Chris: Congratulations.
Wes: Very well deserved. This will be used to purchase chargers, SSDs,
Wes: and branded laptop bags, along with continuing to fund the development of Nixbook.
Wes: We're also committed to hosting monthly workshops in Olympia aimed at the tech
Wes: curious and youth to show them hands-on, and how to take that old laptop and turn it into a Nixbook.
Wes: All this makes me super excited and happy about the future of Linux and getting
Wes: more people involved and aware of what's possible.
Wes: And of course, I'll urge them all to be listeners of this here podcast.
Wes: Thanks again to everyone who has donated, supported, or simply cheered on Nixbook,
Wes: and the non-profit. This community really does make anything possible.
Brent: That is so sweet.
Chris: And it feels with the price of hardware right now more important than ever that
Chris: there's something like this out there.
Chris: And I wonder if it could be a model for other areas because,
Chris: you know, Mike's doing a lot.
Chris: But it'd be great to see if like another organization like this could pop up,
Chris: say like on the East Coast and then pop up in the UK and pop up in Canada.
Chris: You know, just sort of sprout.
Chris: I think that'd be really neat to see. But in the meantime, Olympia Mike is doing
Chris: incredible work and I do appreciate the update.
Wes: We sure do.
Chris: It's nice to hear. Thank you, sir. And keep up the good work and keep us posted
Chris: on it. With that, gentlemen, let's do a couple of boosts.
Chris: And Greg the Lawyer is back. He's our baller booster with 100,000 sats.
Brent: Wow.
Chris: Well, Greg, the lawyer did. He said, love the discussion on making a Clanker
Chris: OS. I've been using Claude to maintain my flake for a while,
Chris: and it's nearly flawless.
Chris: I now get a dedicated Hermes profile set up for the task. My Hermes runs on a Debian VM.
Chris: I would love a Clanker stream on how you have yours running on Nix.
Brent: Uh-huh.
Wes: I really— Oh, a Nix combo stream.
Chris: I feel like I missed the boat. I set up just the most amazing EV camping routing.
Chris: Like, you know, all the years I've been road tripping, I've been collecting
Chris: like what my idea of a perfect app would be, you know, wildfire,
Chris: cellular signal, closures, everything I've ever wanted to know in one thing.
Chris: And I finally built it. I should have streamed it. Should have streamed it.
Wes: I could stream a tour.
Chris: I feel when we maybe get back and we get our feet underneath us,
Chris: Greg, I feel like it's going to be time for another clanker stream.
Chris: We've probably gone too far, but we just we got stuff coming up.
Chris: We're doing a little trip to Canada, up to Brentlandia. So when we get back from that.
Wes: I think we got to pin some tabs.
Chris: We're going to start cooking. We're going to pin some tabs, and we're going
Chris: to start cooking on a clanker stream. That's the mission. Thank you,
Chris: sir. Appreciate that. Baller boost.
Wes: BTC is my 401k boost sin with 3,998 sats.
Wes: Oh, no. Seems my lightning node can't reach Brent or the JB node.
Wes: But here's some more for you.
Brent: No, thanks.
Wes: And a catch-up boost to provide value while my LB hub was down and stream and sats were depleted.
Chris: Well, thank you. So, BTC, I saw that boost come in live. and I was like,
Chris: oh, what's going on? Went over.
Chris: Yeah, Tor was totally down, and that node's on Tor. Totally offline.
Wes: Yeah, that'll make it a little hard.
Chris: Won't it? Yeah. I was like, oh! It was like, I wasn't monitoring Tor.
Chris: I was monitoring the lightning daemon. I was monitoring the Bitcoin daemon.
Chris: I was monitoring the boost.
Chris: Not monitoring Tor. So I got that fixed. Thank you very much. BTC is my 401k.
Brent: Odyssey West is here with 2,550 sats.
Brent: Hey, could you guys look into Odysseus, that PewDiePie thing he made?
Brent: I know he's probably a little more jank compared to something like Hermes,
Brent: but, you know, he's still worth
Brent: looking into since the popular YouTube is building it and deploying it.
Chris: It might be something worth looking into. It could be fun. Yeah.
Chris: We've been talking about building an agentic test harness bench.
Chris: Something like that. That could be a good one. Thank you, Odyssey.
Chris: Nice to hear from you. Autobrains here with 5,000 sats.
Chris: I did it. I took the plunge and I signed up for an intro computer programming course.
Chris: Oh, until now, I've just been a dabbler in writing scripts. The course is about Python. Nice.
Brent: Nice choice.
Chris: It's asynchronous online at my university.
Wes: Cool.
Chris: It's well done. It's a good blend of bite-sized chunks of written and video
Chris: content with homework and quizzes. Nice.
Chris: Have you guys taken lots of computer programming courses? What worked especially
Chris: well for you and what inspired you? Oh, man.
Chris: The only official computer course I've taken, I think, other than like training
Chris: courses on like, here's a crash course on PHP. I did one of those.
Chris: I did a crash course on Python.
Chris: But the only actual official training I took was basic. I'm an old man.
Wes: And yet I've never seen you write basic. How is that?
Chris: Well, I wrote some cool basic programs. Let me tell you what. QBasic was my friend.
Wes: If it helps, Visual Basic was my first programming language.
Chris: I hated Visual. Okay, so, what about you?
Wes: Yeah, well, before I ended up getting a physics degree, I was a CS major,
Wes: so I took the first two or three years of most of those classes. I would say...
Chris: Everything Simpson's been self-taught?
Wes: Yeah.
Chris: Wow.
Wes: I think, no, I did, I think I did one MOOC-style...
Wes: uh functional programming course
Wes: and a machine learning course but yeah that was a long time ago yeah.
Chris: Back when we called it machine learning yeah.
Wes: Yeah that's how long ago it was what usually helps me is sort of trying to chase
Wes: the thing that i'm most curious about like that doesn't work you know some things
Wes: you just have to grind through that's always gonna be the case but you know
Wes: finding things that motivate you that you're curious that make it,
Wes: feel more like play than like work and if you can try to keep do whatever you can
Wes: sometimes it's worth a little like you don't want to over fixate on your setup
Wes: and not the actual work but it is worth a little bit of investment just to try
Wes: to keep the feedback loop as quick as possible because that helps keep it feeling like play.
Chris: Yeah i agree that's good that's good advice.
Brent: I was doing exactly that last night where i will confess that i stayed up,
Brent: all night never went to bed at all because i was so deep in the flow of like
Brent: playing and chasing curiosities and like learning all sorts of stuff and breaking
Brent: things and fixing things.
Chris: You still showed up late for the stream. How does that work? You're up.
Brent: Well, I don't know. I was moving slower, and I'm on a different time zone.
Wes: There wasn't even any squirrel-based excuses.
Chris: I know.
Brent: Usually there's no squirrel-based reason.
Chris: We were all up late last night. I was up late last night. I replumbed.
Chris: I have Blue Bubble set up, and I was replumbing it, and then I was working on
Chris: some of the EV road trips. I was up way too late.
Brent: Too.
Wes: We all know we have a show.
Brent: Your version of late and my version of later.
Chris: Yeah, that's true. My version of late's like midnight.
Brent: Mine's like 4 a.m.
Chris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Marvin42 came in with $42 in Fiat Funk coupons.
Brent: Nice.
Chris: Here's a few bucks to help pay for refactoring Hypervibe.
Chris: I just found out that the Dendritic Nix idea a few days ago and have been trying to get Hermes to use it.
Chris: I'm still struggling with the concept, and it wants to build everything monolithic
Chris: or make each setting a file. I'm for better skill shopping.
Wes: Ooh, fun update. Thank you, Marvin.
Chris: That's so good.
Wes: The Dendritic Nix stuff is interesting. I think that might be something I have to poke at more.
Chris: Thank you. That's a great boost, too.
Wes: Anonymous boosts in with 25 Fiat Fun coupons.
Wes: A long-time listener, first-time booster. Thank you from Austria.
Chris: Awesome. Thank you for the first-time boost. Appreciate that.
Brent: Jem Lepore is here with 10 Fiat.
Brent: Thanks for all the hard work you guys put into this show week after week.
Brent: Next time you're headed out east, come have a good barbecue with us in KCUS at Kansas City.
Chris: We would love that.
Wes: That sounds ideal.
Chris: No complaints here.
Wes: Someone just needs to get a certain van working.
Brent: Oh, I can do that. I just need a reason, you know. Just give me a reason.
Chris: A little bit of a kid.
Wes: Barbecue.
Brent: I'm in.
Chris: I don't think I've ever really properly had it. My biggest exposure has always
Chris: been to Texas barbecue. I'm open-minded.
Wes: We need to do a barbecue tour.
Chris: High five connoisseurs here with $5 in Fiat Fun Coupons.
Chris: How are you all thinking about the secession planning now that there are agents?
Brent: A whole good question.
Chris: I imagine my family could get an agent to handle much of the home lab maintenance after I'm gone.
Wes: Fascinating.
Brent: Wow. Do you remember that episode we made? And then there was like a couple
Brent: projects trying to tackle this, but we came to the conclusion that it's just a very hard problem.
Chris: A secession agent.
Brent: This is cool. Start building, I say.
Chris: I mean, there's something there.
Wes: Just imagining the chat GPT thing behind a window they break in case of.
Chris: Break in case or like a or telegram chat thread that's like set up but don't use I mean it gives.
Brent: A whole new meaning to soul.md.
Chris: Doesn't it oh okay we gotta move on it's getting dark Wes you wanna take our.
Wes: First one member free booth yes I bear comes in with two member free booths oh by the way had to re,
Wes: sign up for Jupiter Party not sure what email I used oh yeah that's that happens
Wes: that happens for sure thanks for having the web booths with USD I'm not into
Wes: Bitcoiner stats but I love the shows Thank you very much.
Wes: Here's a little utility that I have been vibe coding for Linux-based routers and firewalls.
Wes: I'm using it on my ViOS boxes, but it works on any Linux instance using IP chains.
Wes: Cool. FW Top.
Chris: This looks really good. It's got a great TUI.
Wes: Python, MIT licensed. Oh, very colorful and pretty TUI. You are right.
Chris: A real-time router firewall traffic visualizer for the terminal inspired by
Chris: BTOP. You nailed it. It looks so good.
Brent: This is impressive. huh and a release three days ago very nice.
Chris: That's really sweet that is so
Chris: so what we need is uh you need to vibe up a flake.nix we'll give it a shot.
Wes: Thanks for the.
Chris: Support yeah thank you very much and thanks for signing up again appreciate that.
Brent: Well, Mr. Pickles is here with a free members boost.
Brent: You should provide API keys to members. We have three 3090s and use about 2 billion tokens a month.
Chris: Oh, 3090s as in NVIDIAs.
Brent: Oh, yeah, right. I don't even, you know, I've just blocked this out of my mind.
Chris: I also had to pick Hisler, a full text indexer for every website you visit. Whoa.
Chris: Great for finding a thing you read about a month ago, but can't recall. Holy smokes.
Brent: This is like recall.
Wes: But just let's read it. It indexes their full content, so you can find information
Wes: again from the web interface terminal or an AI assistant connected through MCP.
Brent: Huh.
Wes: I guess it's by Adam Tauber, Ascii Moo, who also made CRX or Chex.
Wes: Maybe not the NG one, but the one before that.
Chris: No kidding.
Wes: Kali and a bunch of other smaller projects. Yeah.
Chris: No kidding. That's such a neat find. Thank you, Pickles. Appreciate that.
Chris: I'll take the king. King Arthur is back with a member boast.
Chris: Uh, is not a king voted into parliament as one doesn't vote for one's king.
Chris: Rather, the lady of the lake bestows Excalibur to the one worthy to rule over Britain. Of course.
Chris: I do not require a sound clip or a member boost. Only a specific boost for those
Chris: who can bestow one, two, five, five, three sats to you in the future. Oh.
Chris: What is that? Twelve?
Brent: Does it require a map or just some kind of culture?
Chris: I think it's related to the overall boost.
Wes: It must be. Yeah, we have some homework.
Chris: Thank you, Cain. Appreciate you.
Wes: LP Boost Sin, I'm just starting to dig in for Nix OS, but I got confused from the start.
Chris: It's okay.
Wes: What's the difference between declarative Nix OS versus the community one?
Wes: Which one is the best for a VPS versus desktop laptop? Oh, you must mean determinate Nix.
Brent: Ah.
Wes: Autocomplete, maybe.
Chris: Okay, so determinate Nix is, yeah, it's like, yeah, okay. That's like,
Chris: I guess you would call it a distro of Nix?
Chris: a spin of Nix a fork of Nix.
Wes: Yeah somewhere in there.
Chris: Yeah with some tools and installers that are designed for you know enterprise
Chris: use and what not in there perfectly fine I think though probably for most people
Chris: unless they know they need determinant Nix they probably just want to use Nix yeah.
Wes: It offers some extra stuff but you you probably won't need or necessarily even
Wes: care about a lot of that until you are a more experienced Nix user or you're
Wes: trying to use it for some like production sort of purpose.
Chris: What about Wes what about if you what about out if he wanted to install it on
Chris: an existing distribution.
Wes: Yes so for that the determined nix installer is great.
Chris: I think so too.
Wes: And then i also it also means like this decision doesn't matter for the most
Wes: part as much as you think it is so if you're going to install it there just
Wes: reach for whatever as long as you get nix,
Wes: it'll work uh if you're going with nix os then you're probably just going to
Wes: get like the standard nix os install media and then you're just going to get
Wes: the plain upstream nix os anyway uh and either way,
Wes: They'll all build your next packages. So for that, you'll be just fine.
Brent: The amount of overlap is overwhelming. Like there's a very tiny slice of notable
Brent: differences, but most of it as a beginner, you just learn.
Chris: All right. Help me break this down. Dance Tango writes, Chris,
Chris: you considered a dedicated camera, a camera without AI that fixes the image.
Chris: Is that really something for you? Do you remember what they're speaking about?
Brent: Yeah. I think we had a caller mention how.
Chris: Oh, we're talking about dedicated pocket cameras.
Brent: Or dedicated like a music player or.
Chris: Something like that.
Brent: So the question is a camera without ai that fixes oh the camera without ai that
Brent: fixes the image is that something for you.
Chris: I would think if you're going for like a pocket camera you probably want you
Chris: don't want something manipulating the image right you do that after the fact if you want to do it.
Wes: Right yeah that's what i would.
Brent: Think how much of a purist are you that's a.
Chris: Scale that's that is a good point though like with the camera phones you're
Chris: not really getting a true picture
Chris: you're getting like an interpretation that's pretty close you always.
Brent: Did you always.
Chris: Did that's true.
Wes: Well uh paul comes in with our last member boost half listened to the bit about analog.
Chris: Cameras two.
Wes: Years ago i've started taking pictures of concerts with a nintendo 3ds awesome
Wes: it's far more engaging for me than taking them with my phone if you're interested
Wes: you can see them on 3d stage vibes dot.
Chris: 80 stop it.
Wes: Let me know if you want to know more.
Chris: That's that is definitely a vibe.
Brent: So you were only half listening, and yet you sent us some cool photos?
Chris: Thank you. That's pretty great.
Chris: That's pretty great. I'm looking at them right now. 3DS stage vibes.
Brent: They're surprisingly good. Wow. Yeah.
Chris: Yeah, for a 3DS, right? They're not better than you. Yeah.
Brent: There's a philosophy in the photography world that says the best camera you
Brent: have is the one you have with you.
Brent: So if you've got a 3DS, you start shooting with that thing.
Wes: And why don't you have a 3DS?
Chris: I've actually got a dead one I need to replace the battery of.
Chris: I really would like to get it working again.
Brent: Jeff?
Chris: Thank you, everybody, who boosted the show. We had 12 of you stream sats as
Chris: you listened. You sat streamers. You collectively stacked 25,726 satoshis.
Wes: Not too shabby.
Chris: Not too shabby at all. When you bring it together with the fiat boosts and all
Chris: the traditional boosts and convert it all to sats, our grand total for this
Chris: week's episode is 265,638 satoshis.
Chris: We tell you the numbers so that way we're transparent. You know what the show makes.
Chris: you can decide what you think the value of the show is we put it out there and
Chris: we ask if you get value from it and want to keep it going, prevent the fate
Chris: like the Linux magazines have seen you can do it at boost.jupiterbroadcasting.com
Chris: or with a podcasting 2.0 app.
Chris: If your boost is above 2,000 sats we'll read it on the air you can also just
Chris: stream sats you can boost below 2,000 we still put in our show notes and we
Chris: read it ourselves and have a nice little chuckle usually because they're usually
Chris: quite nice Well, we really appreciate it, of course.
Chris: You can get a membership at linuxunplugged.com slash membership or support the
Chris: whole network at jupyter.party.
Chris: Keep the thing going and get the bootleg or the ad-free version of the show
Chris: and have that support on autopilot, and then you get access to the free member
Chris: boost at boost.jupyterbroadcasting.com.
Chris: Thank you, everybody.
Chris: All right, so we're doing something a little different for the pick segment,
Chris: and I'm going to make it quick because I'll tell you right up front,
Chris: Moonlight and Sunshine are the way to go.
Chris: Sunshine runs on the remote computer, captures the desktop, and encodes using
Chris: your GPU or CPU if you don't have a GPU. And it's more like a video stream.
Chris: It's really designed for remote gaming, which means a modern composited desktop
Chris: actually performs almost natively.
Chris: You can even do things like use OBS, and if you had to, you could even edit
Chris: video. Even over a relatively weak connection.
Wes: And that's kind of where you were playing with some of this,
Wes: right? The idea of like, well, we've evaluated a ton of different ways to handle
Wes: remote studio production over the years.
Chris: Rust Desk has been a real solid go-to, but on Wayland, it requires someone at
Chris: the console to authorize the connection.
Wes: Which is kind of a no-go.
Chris: Cannot do that. MeshTastic is a community favorite, but I don't need fleet inventory,
Chris: file transfer, process management, a dashboard. I don't need any of that.
Chris: And I also don't need it to solve the proxying the remote because I'm going
Chris: to use mesh networking. So I've solved the network aspect already.
Wes: And there's a lot of tools that bundle a bunch of that stuff together.
Chris: Yes, yes, yes. So what I really like about Sunshine is that the hardware video
Chris: encoding, if you have it, even with just a basic Intel laptop GPU, is really impressive.
Chris: It's fine on the CPU, too. I have one system here we have to do on the CPU.
Chris: But everything works. hdr sound all comes through so you can hear the desktop
Chris: audio as you're in the remote session it works with plasma and gnomes animations
Chris: hyperlands animations you can watch videos it has multi-monitor support,
Chris: so all of it's really really nice um and of course it has wayland support as
Chris: well as x11 support which matters a lot.
Brent: What's the downside what's the.
Chris: Well, the downside is that you have to set up Sunshine on one end.
Chris: You have to set up Moonlight, which is a desktop application.
Chris: And then you pair them once.
Chris: And once they're paired once, you can connect. But the downside is you do have
Chris: to do that one-time pairing.
Wes: So there's a little bit of setup, especially before maybe you are in a remote situation.
Chris: But the handy thing is the pairing UI is a web interface. So you can probably,
Chris: if you're on the mesh network, just bring up the remote web UI,
Chris: put in your pin, and pair that way from the remote system.
Chris: So that's not so bad. So really the downsides are pretty minimal unless you
Chris: need the other things that a MeshTastic team viewer type things offer with file
Chris: transfer and process management and maybe even user management and inventory. I don't need any of that.
Chris: So I was really impressed because I wanted to revisit and I'll actually tell
Chris: you the strongest contender doesn't come up very often.
Chris: The strongest contender is not MeshTastic, is not RustEssle. Those are great.
Wes: MeshTastic?
Chris: Yeah, that's what it's called, right? Oh, I'm sorry. MeshCentral. Thank you. Thank you.
Brent: I mean, video over MeshTastic is impressive.
Chris: Honestly, if you could do remote
Chris: desktop, even process management over MeshTastic, I would be thrilled.
Chris: No, I meant Mesh Central. I just got the meshes meshed up.
Chris: But I actually think the one that we really should give more credit to and the
Chris: one that people should consider besides the sunshine and moonlight combo,
Chris: the folks over at No Machine are still cooking.
Brent: Wow.
Wes: They've been going for so long.
Chris: They've been going.
Wes: Which is why I think folks forget.
Chris: Yes. They've been going since the very early days. And they really have pioneered
Chris: hardware H.264 encoded remote desktop streams.
Chris: And it still kicks butt. I think no machine is better if you need a separate remote session.
Chris: So if you want to be able to log in and have a desktop session running and have
Chris: a whole other user session that's in a remote session, no machine's great at
Chris: that. Sunshine, you'd have to set that up completely. Sunshine is really for
Chris: taking control of the console.
Chris: No machine lets you do both.
Chris: And it supports USB and device redirection. So you can have printers and certain
Chris: mouses and keyboards. So it does a lot more nice stuff.
Chris: But if you just need something quick, you've already got the networking taken
Chris: care of, like a mesh network or something like that. You don't need a central
Chris: proxy or inventory or fleet.
Chris: I really think for the 10 minutes it takes to get Moonlight and Sunshine going
Chris: again, it's, like, super.
Wes: And these are pretty easy. Like, I mean, they're now, it's been out for a while,
Wes: right? So they're, like, pretty available in repos or Flatpak.
Chris: Sunshine is actively still being developed.
Chris: Moonlight hasn't had an update for a while, but it's a pretty stable.
Chris: I mean, it's just an H.264 streaming client that supports input.
Chris: So it's not very complicated.
Chris: There are a few forks out there, but Moonlight, it's packaged in Flatpak.
Chris: It's packaged in just about every distro now because it has been pretty stable for a while.
Chris: same with sunshine but sunshine is still moving they're still progressing with
Chris: it still getting better and better and it's was really nice been a couple years to check in,
Chris: i did all the remote testing we'll see though we're going to go to canada and
Chris: next sunday's episode will be a remote episode and if we're live that meant that uh,
Chris: sunshine and moonlight worked and if we're not live.
Wes: Keep on refreshing that.
Chris: Rss yeah exactly yeah exactly uh it should be good though we're We've got some
Chris: good projects planned when we get up to Brent's house that's going to make,
Chris: I think, for a great episode.
Brent: I've got a whole list.
Chris: Yeah, I know you do. We're looking forward to it. So, of course,
Chris: we also want to know your feedback on Linus's position in the kernel now, how you feel about that.
Chris: And particularly, I'd like to reach out to those of you who are against AI use
Chris: with free software and what you'd like to see happen if a project receives a
Chris: legitimate concerning bug that's generated or, you know, the patch,
Chris: the fix is generated by an LLM. What would you like to see that project do?
Chris: A couple of range of questions there and also your thoughts and feedback on
Chris: LogSec, Obsidian, and free software notes in general. I think all of those would
Chris: really fill out the feedback and the boosts, and we'd really appreciate it.
Chris: So why not join us? See if we make it live. See if it actually happens.
Chris: Make it a Tuesday on a Sunday. Join us at 10 a.m. Pacific, 1 p.m.
Chris: Eastern. Of course, we've got chapters.
Wes: Oh, yeah, and transcripts.
Chris: Those are all available in the feed.
Wes: Magic text files just waiting for you to download them.
Chris: I don't know if we'll have video next week, but we usually have an MP4 hidden
Chris: in that feed as well, if you can believe it. If you could even believe it.
Wes: If you find yourself a fancy client, they can make it even easier.
Chris: Yeah, they'll just show it to you. Yeah. How about that? Podcasting 2.0.
Chris: If you want more show, remember that lug gets together in the mumble room before
Chris: we get going. They're cooking all along.
Chris: members you get the full bootleg version with twice the content clocking at
Chris: almost two hours right now and then links to everything we talked about today
Chris: how to contact us mumble our matrix chat all of it at linuxunplugged.com and
Chris: this was linuxunplugged 676,
Chris: thank you so much for joining us on this week's episode of your unplugged program,
Chris: we'll see you right back here next tuesday which of course is next sunday.