today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 24, 2024

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • PostgreSQL ☛ Pigsty v2.7 Released, free RDS PG with 255 extensions available

    The Pigsty community is thrilled to announce Pigsty v2.7.0, which has 255 unique extensions available, to the free PostgreSQL distribution and RDS alternative. We also have introduced some new docker-compose templates for Odoo, Jupyter, PolarDB, and GA Supabase.

    Pigsty is a Battery-included, local-first PostgreSQL Distribution as a Free RDS alternative.

  • The Register UK ☛ John Deere now considers VMs to be legacy tech

    Software development will be cloud-native at John Deere for the foreseeable future, he said. And that’s a big deal because the company has for almost a decade employed more software engineers than design engineers, with code therefore perhaps more important to customers than the machines in which it runs.

• Openwashing

  • LWN ☛ Portable LLMs with llamafile

    Large language models (LLMs) have been the subject of much discussion and scrutiny recently. Of particular interest to open-source enthusiasts are the problems with running LLMs on one's own hardware — especially when doing so requires NVIDIA's proprietary CUDA toolkit, which remains unavailable in many environments. Mozilla has developed llamafile as a potential solution to these problems. Llamafile can compile LLM weights into portable, native executables for easy integration, archival, or distribution. These executables can take advantage of supported GPUs when present, but do not require them.

  • LWN ☛ Managing expectations with a contributions and credit policy

    Maintainers of open-source projects sometimes have disagreements with contributors over how contributions are reviewed, modified, merged, and credited. A written policy describing how contributions are handled can help maintainers set reasonable expectations for potential contributors. In turn, that can make the maintainer's job easier because it can help reduce a source of friction in the project. A guide to help create this kind of policy for a project has recently been developed.

    People sometimes have rather different expectations about how open-source projects function with regard to contributions. For example, a recent discussion about how to credit a Linux kernel patch that had two authors attracted more than 600 comments, covering a wide range of opinions from "the original author should have sole credit" to "the original author should get no credit at all". Another kind of disagreement is over which types of contributions are welcome: some projects don't want external contributions, or any new features, but contributors keep sending them anyway.

• Audiocasts/Shows

  • Bryan Lunduke ☛ What is a good GNU/Linux Distro in 2024?

    An excerpt from the May 23rd “Lunduke’s Nerdy Q & A”.