Are there actually open source developers that wander from project to project with one-off contributions that are of significant value? This seems to optimize for that specific scenario, and it’s not something I’ve seen in practice.

The contributions I’ve seen from such people in the open source projects I’ve worked on ranged from zero to negative value, and involved unusually large amounts of drama.

I can imagine things are different for some projects. Like maybe debian is trying to upstream a fix?

Even then, can’t they start the PR with a verifiable intro like “I maintain this package for debian.”?

For the other 99% of welcome contributions, intros typically are of the form: “I was hired to work on this by one of the industrial teams that maintain it”

Ovet-strict spam filters usually lead to de facto shunning of the person that doesn’t realize their incoming messages are being dropped.

I think that’ll also happen to most open source projects that adopt a policy of silent auto-rejection of contributions without review.

To play devil’s advocate: We’ve vendored a few open source projects by just asking an LLM to fix obvious bugs that have been open for 12+ months (some projects are abandoned, others active).

If upstream can’t be bothered to fix such stuff (we’re talking major functionality gaps that a $10-100/month LLM can one-shot), isn’t my extremely well tested fix (typically a few dozen or maybe hundred lines) something they should accept?

The alternative is getting hard forked by an LLM, and having the fork evolve faster / better than upstream.

Telling people like me to f—— off is just going to accelerate irrelevance in situations like this.

Open source projects are under no obligation to accept any patches, AI or human generated. Being the fastest evolving fork may not be their goal.

I'm pretty doubtful a handful of one-shot AI patches is a viable fork. Bug fixes are only one part of the workload.

I agree with you, but I don't envy the maintainers. The problem is that it's really hard to tell if someone is skilled like you or just shoveling what an LLM wrote up to the maintainers to have them "figure it out." Honestly, getting a library hard forked and maintained by people that can keep up with the incoming PRs would be a relief to a lot of folks...

Oh, to be clear, there’s no way we’d want incoming code for these forks.

Incoming bug reports or design docs an LLM could implement? Sure.

Maybe something like the Linux approach (tree of well-tested, thematic branches from lieutenants) would work better. We’d be happy to be lieutenants that shepherded our forks back to upstream.

> Telling people like me to f—— off is just going to accelerate irrelevance in situations like this.

You have your fork and the fixes, the PR is just kindness on your part. If they don’t want it then just move on with your fork.

I once submitted a PR to some Salesforce helper SDK and the maintainer went on and on about approaches and refactoring etc. I just told him to take it or leave it, I don’t really care. I have my fork and fix already. They eventually merged it but I mean I didn’t care either way, I was just doing something nice for them.

If you don’t follow spam links, then it lets the spammer probe your spam filter, and try stuff until you follow links.

A better approach is to follow all links always (even to non-existent recipients) if you must play this game.

That reminds me: I should make sure all my mail clients are still set to plain text rendering.

That sounds like a feature, not a bug, given where Google’s revenue comes from.

Google's revenue comes from Google's ads, not other people's ads, and they already know when you open your emails. They should block remote loading, to ensure their ad platform works better than other people's.

There’d be a bigger problem for the security training folks if there was a 100% pass rate.

I wonder how they react to expected inflation, and how to build that in.

Official numbers say inflation has been 3% since Trump got in office in 2025. We’re seeing > 30% across the board on our bills, and GDP “growth” statistics imply inflation well above 3% (e.g., last quarter growth in the US was entirely due to increased health care spending).

Here’s a list of “transports” which (I think) are storage backends that manage the passkeys (preventing the user from controlling their own credentials).

https://github.com/linux-credentials/libwebauthn?tab=readme-...

Anyone have any idea how hard it is to add “text file” or (god forbid) “TPM with user supplied keys” to the list?

(The latter would let you backup your keys securely, and then recover them by using the keys, which you backed up elsewhere.)

You’re thinking about this wrong. Leadership says the gap between human and LLM performance on complex tasks is too big.

The easiest way to close it is to prevent the humans from sleeping.

Admittedly, while stunningly accurate portrayal of an executive mind, it is almost ridiculously hilarious on its face.

What's the gap between sleep-deprived humans and LLMs?

Extreme programming (XP) was all about going as fast as you could go. One of their rules was "never work more than 40 hours for more than one week in a row". Why? Because when you get tired, you slow down. The net effect is negative after the first week.

In favor of whom? LLMs?

Our cars have a total of 8x the capacity of our home batteries. We're ~ one dongle away from doing what you describe.

The other thing we need to see to really replace grids are panels that are optimized for overcast days. Currently, production drops to 0-10% when it's cloudy, even though the fraction of wattage hitting the panels is way higher than that.

At some point, I think we'll end up with panels that produce linearly to the amount of light (this is probably hard), or that are high efficiency in winter / high altitudes, but low efficiency at peak (this is probably easy).

Currently, panels are marketed on wattage under full sunlight at high temperatures. This is important for air conditioning use cases, but the grid is overproducing on those days already and we'd curtail if we took them off grid.

Same for me, I made a choice back then, and only realized it was a mistake in hindsight, to set up a small storage system, thinking it would just serve as a backup for blackouts. Since those have mostly been very short so far (a few seconds or minutes), I went with 8kWh, while the car has 74...

Today I'm expanding it, aiming for 38kWh, which is still much less than the car. Even though the price of LFP batteries has dropped significantly, it hasn't fallen enough, nor has the cost of grid power risen enough, to justify aiming for 100kWh to have substantial autonomy for most of the year, including heating.

Using the car as part of the system would be fantastic, and the technology is all there to make it happen, except for the will of manufacturers and the political drive to go in that direction. It's not happening because they don't want people to be self-sufficient; they want large power plants, not semi-autonomous homes and warehouses. But the fact is, economically and technically, the former makes no sense, while the latter does.