ermshaus.org

2026-09-24

↪ Nate Graham: KDE and AI, and you, and me — The KDE project tries to develop guidelines for pushing back against LLM slop contributions. Third parties create some drama. LLM critics misunderstand the situation and pile on KDE. It’s a bit of a mess.
↪ Peter Johnson: Ceer unveils EXOBOT EVs, Saudi Arabia's first electric vehicles

2026-09-17

In an ongoing effort to at least maintain the various PHP packages I wrote over the years, I recently released v1.0 of mermshaus/crc, a library for performing cyclic redundancy checks. It can run with all PHP versions that are officially supported (8.2 to 8.5) and should be stable for the algorithms it contains. An interesting side note might be that, for the first time in any of my projects, I added infrastructure to locally run the tests for all supported PHP versions (make test-all). The test script will use Docker to automatically add test environments for any PHP version that’s not available on the host. I plan to expand this into a setup that can share the PHP version images over multiple projects. #

2026-09-16

I’m so ridiculously lazy right now that I open new windows in kitty instead of tabs because I can’t be bothered to figure out how to start tmux in there. — Stop telling me I probably just have to type “tmux”, you’re not my mother.

I really like kitty+chafa as an image viewer.
```
function gallery() {
  local cols="${1:-4}"
  clear; ls -1 | chafa --files - --grid="${cols}" --optimize=9 --label=off --clear
}
```
#
↪ David Chisnall: “For people who still believe the GPL influences corporations in a meaningful way”
This site is now finally able to define and render content in CommonMark. Until today, for historical reasons[1], all Markdown was interpreted and rendered using kramdown. I added a CommonMark→HTML renderer today because I more and more started to use small Markdown snippets here and there with simple formatting needs. My existing kramdown rendering stack calls the kramdown executable in an external process. That’s fine for larger tasks such as rendering longer articles which might use more involved formatting features, but it got annoyingly slow for more basic tasks. CommonMark is a much simpler standard with implementations in different programming languages, so I can render everything in memory without the indirection and overhead of external calls. The site is generated statically, so all of this happens under the hood. But it makes the whole build process so much simpler when rendering most of the Markdown is basically free of cost. You don’t need to worry too much about caching, you can just re-render.

[1] The initial infrastructure of this site predates CommonMark by quite a bit. #
↪ Thomas Dutrion: The hidden architectural cost of PHP’s syntactic sugar — (AI cover image. Boo!) The central thesis how shorter syntax might lead to bad design decisions is a bit far-fetched. I understand the point, and I wouldn’t completely refute it, but developers should be trusted not to make bad decisions just because the corresponding code doesn’t require many keystrokes. Anyway, I’m linking the article because of the section on how specifically arrow functions automatically bind $this when declared in object context without using static. It’s not different from other Closure behaviour, so I don’t think it’ll lead to many issues, but I tend to agree that this can be a bit of a trap.
↪ Sebastian Klovig Skelton: CW@60: All computers are bastards — This is a great summary of what many perceive to be wrong with tech. If you want an access to understanding the “AI debate”, this is a good starting point.

2026-09-14

↪ Türkiye Today: 105-square-meter Roman mosaic, Eros head uncovered at Pompeiopolis in Türkiye — I don’t know how common such finds are, but the fact that we can experience artifacts that are this old (~1,700 years) and still so well-preserved is always fascinating.

2026-09-13

Interestingly, a Google product that’s difficult for me to replace seems to be Google Maps used in Android Auto. I don’t drive a lot, so I seldom need navigation. But when I do, my current setup just works without any tinkering or additional payments. That’s why I’m quite reluctant to try to start using an alternative like OsmAnd. I don’t feel it’s worth the hassle. You can only really test it while driving. #
Alright, video gaming, I got ~45 mins. Gimme that dopamine kick! Here we go! … Yeah, sure, download the kernel update first. Restart… Oh, the akmods thingie needs to finish running to rebuild the nvidia drivers. Just a sec… Now, Flatpak Steam needs to pick up the driver changes. Better do another reboot, and we’re all set! Oh, okay, random 5.4 GB shader pre-caching update. Why not. And let’s hit that “Play” button! Shader rebuild 0%… 1%… #

2026-09-11

A thought experiment: Is it wrong to simply take a software project coded with #AI, change all the creator info, and re-release it as your own work?

If yes, would it still be wrong if your coding agent did it?

If yes, would it still be wrong if you told your coding agent to extract all needed info as a set of specs and instructions and then have it re-write the software according to that specification? #

2026-09-01

↪ Vicent Martí: Git at any scale

2026-08-31

2026-08-25

↪ Hendrik Mans: AI Makes Better Software

2026-08-24

↪ A Word on Omarchy
↪ Armin Ronacher: Codeberg Divides — Apart from the general comments on LLMs, I very much agree with Armin. It’s obvious that you can’t run a site like GitHub or Codeberg without any sort of content policy, but if you’re simply looking for a European alternative to GitHub, I don’t think it’s wise to pick infrastructure providers that are rather opinionated. It’s too much uncertainty for my taste.

2026-08-23

2026-08-21

2026-08-13

2026-08-11

2026-08-07

2026-08-06

2026-06-03