As AI takes over, certain old content becomes surprisingly more relevant.

Just like many other open source maintainers, lately I’ve had my fair share of garbage pull requests to deal with. However, I found that simply adding the following AGENTS.md in a repository seems to do a decent job of filtering out the worse:

The U.S. stock market recently reached all time highs. While there’s no telling how long this trend could continue, it seems to me that valuations are once again detached from reality. Hiring is down. Participation in the U.S. stock market is at all time high. Real estate is stalling. With some markets being worse than others. Leverage approaching high levels: I think re-valuations are coming, probably within a year, maybe within 2. I’d be surprised if it takes longer, but […]

During one of my last travels my QuiteOn case must have took a hit while in the suitcase because one day it just stopped charging. Inspection revealed poor circuitry manufacturing which left 3 pins loose. The pins worked fine until a shock caused the connections to come loose. It’s unclear to me why the pins weren’t soldered in place, but I dusted off my soldering iron and made the connection. The trick to get this precision type of soldering is […]

There’s no doubt AI can be a tremendous tool for productivity, research and coding. It’s also making software development more accessible to more people. This is generally good. We should strive to do so, because it’s empowering to do things yourself. There’s however a nuisance that’s slowly surfacing as a side effect of this progress: AI-generated (or mostly AI-generated) pull requests. I think there’s an attitude toward wanting to hide the fact that a tool was used to generate a […]

Major search engines are now including “AI Summaries” in their search results. While this is sometimes useful, such summaries are extremely annoying. I want to search for websites, not machine-generated summaries. If I wanted machine-generated summaries, I would use a different tool. Almost paradoxically, this shift in design is going to hurt search engines in the long term. When I don’t click on a search result, because I read the answer from an AI summary, I don’t access the websites. […]

Ask where one should invest a modest amount of money and nowadays the answer will most likely be to put it into passively managed index funds. It’s a very compelling and simple financial strategy: 1. Buy one or a combination of low cost index funds, preferably a mix that gives you exposure to a mix of bonds, domestic and international stocks. 2. Continue buying every now and then. 3. Wait and let the market do its compounding returns magic. And […]

Today a cyber-security firm named Crowdstrike took down large swaths of the world’s IT infrastructure by pushing a faulty update on millions of Windows machines. On a Friday. Whoops! As anyone working in IT knows, mistakes happen. But while we can bash the lack of testing and oversight over such a big mistake, I think it’s important to reflect on the role that IT departments played in the meltdown. Why would anyone ever give a company (outside the one that […]

Do a quick search on the AGPL and you’ll find a lot of criticism. Some of it often include: “It’s bad because it’s too restrictive” “It’s probably bad, because companies like Google don’t allow it internally” While it seems that the critics outweigh the fans, the reality is that critics are often individuals looking to use open source code, rather than to contribute to it. And they outnumber maintainers by a large margin. The AGPL requires people to share modifications […]

Two years ago I applied for a U.S. trademark for LibreTranslate. To my surprise and probably to my own fault for not having declared the English translation of the word “libre” from French (more on that later), the application was initially rejected on the ground that the mark was deemed by the attourney examiner to be “merely descriptive”. A merely descriptive mark is a mark that only describes a product, without adding any significant insight, interpretation, or deeper meaning. For […]