Gunnar Wolf - Nice grey life

Yay! Finally it’s that time of year — DebCamp is underway, and soon it will be time for DebConf! 🎉🥳 As it is by now tradition, it’s my task to coordinate the DebConf26 keysigning party. And, as usual, I have set up the list of DebConf26 keysigning maps for everybody involved. So, if you are taking part of DebConf, make sure to: Find yourself in the keysigning map. Are you a part of the listing? If you are not there, log in to the DebConf26 management system and edit the Personal Information section of your profile. Make sure you submit...

systemd. Yes, in full lowercase. If there was ever a technology to cause controversy in the Linux world, this is it. Since its inception in 2010, systemd’s goals were set quite high: to replace the vital part in every Linux system that takes care of the system boot process. It quickly reached maturity, allowing it to be adopted as the main init system in most major distributions just five years later. Despite describing events that happened over a decade ago, systemd adoption still raises the temperature in any Linux-related discussion. David Both’s comprehensive book tackles the what, why, and how...

Today we went to see a theater play in UNAM’s Cultural Center, very near our home. No, not inside any of the theaters — in the square just between Sala Nezahualcóyotl, Foro Sor Juana and Sala Carlos Chávez.. So, yes, not only we had fun, but we had fun for free! UNAM’s El Carro de Comedias is an itinerant theater company that often presents in this same spot (but you can see the stage is foldable, and they do have presentations elsewhere, of this same play even). I went with my family, and we enjoyed a very fun adaptation of...

I am a teacher. Since January 2013, I have been teaching the “Operating Systems” course at the Engineering Faculty of UNAM. And yes, that means May and November are highly stressful months, where I have to review the work done by my students and… sigh… come to the difficult decisions leading to a numerical score that will, in very very short, represent the 64 hours they spent listening to me talk and how they shaped their understanding, plus the countless (in the sense that I cannot count them 😉) hours they devote to fulfilling my requests. And yes, as I...

Educators throughout the world are tasked with the difficult requirement of evaluating student work, making sure the grades meaningfully reflect the students’ understanding of the subject, and that a graded assignment maps to the relevant work used in solving it. After the “eruption” of large language models (LLMs) in late 2023, this task became obviously much harder: if a widely available computer program is able to solve an assignment in a way that resembles a human-generated response, how can educators meaningfully grade their groups? As has been the case with different innovations over time–such as with the appearance of electronic...

This opinion article tackles two much-discussed issues: the impact of large language models (LLMs) on job displacement, and workplace productivity. The authors begin by making a comparison, likening the effects of LLMs on knowledge-intensive work to that of photogrpahy on early 19th-century artists. While the invention of photography didn’t result in painting becoming obsolete, it undeniably changed the art in a fundamental way. Realism was no longer the goal of painters, as they could no longer compete with photography. Painters then “began experimenting with the subjective experiences of color and light.” For example, no longer limited to copying reality, impressionism...

Finally, some light at the end of the tunnel! As I have said in this blog and elsewhere, after putting quite a bit of work into generating the Debian Raspberry Pi images between late 2018 and 2023, I had to recognize I don’t have the time and energy to properly care for it. I even registered a GSoC project for it. I mentored Kurva Prashanth, who did good work on the vmdb2 scripts we use for the image generation — but in the end, was unable to push them to be built in Debian infrastructure. Maybe a different approach was...

David Patterson needs no introduction. As the brain behind many of the inventions that shaped the computing industry (repeatedly) over the past 40 years, when he put forward an opinion article in Communications of the ACM targeting the current political waves in the US, I knew I had to write this review. Patterson worked for a a public university (University of California Berkeley) between 1976 and 2016, and in this article he argues how government-funded academic research (GoFAR) allows for faster, more effective, and freer development than private sector-funded research would, putting his own career milestones as an example of...

Note: While I often post the reviews I write for Computing Reviews, this is a shorter review requested to me by Manning. They kindly invited me several months ago to be a reviewer for Python Workout, 2nd edition; after giving them my opinions, I am happy to widely recommend this book to interested readers. Python is relatively an easy programming language to learn, allowing you to start coding pretty quickly. However, there’s a significant gap between being able to “throw code” in Python and truly mastering the language. To write efficient, maintainable code that’s easy for others to understand, practice...

As a little disclaimer, I usually review books or articles written in English, and although I will offer this review to Computing Reviews as usual, it is likely it will not be published. The title of this book in Spanish is Inteligencia artificial: jugar o romper la baraja. I was pointed at this book, published last October by Margarita Padilla García, a well known Free Software activist from Spain who has long worked on analyzing (and shaping) aspects of socio-technological change. As other books published by Traficantes de sueños, this book is published as Open Access, under a CC BY-NC...