news
Free, Libre, and Open Source Software and Sharing
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It's FOSS ☛ Beyond Free: The Value Proposition of Open Source for Creatives
FOSS is free as in cost, but not free as in effort. The loss of convenience is real, especially at the start. But for creatives who are willing to invest, the long-term rewards—flexibility, control, and a workflow built to last—are more than worth the price.
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Web Browsers/Web Servers
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Shayon Mukherjee ☛ An MVCC-like columnar table on S3 with constant-time deletes
Parquet is excellent for analytical workloads. Columnar layout, aggressive compression, predicate pushdown, but deletes require rewriting entire files. Systems like Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake solve this by adding metadata layers that track delete files separately from data files. But what if, for fun, we built something (arguably) simpler? S3 now has conditional writes (If-Match, If-None-Match) that enable atomic operations without external coordination. Let’s explore how we might build a columnar table format on S3 that gets most of Parquet’s benefits while supporting constant-time deletes.
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Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)
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Wouter Groeneveld ☛ I'm Sorry RSS Subscribers, Ooh I Am For Real
That’s as far as I can take that Outkast song. I upgraded to Hugo v0.150.1 and thought I fixed all the breaking changes but I was wrong and noticed the biggest one too late. Some dangling atom file once used to generate Gemini news feeds suddenly went back online causing all items to be duplicated. Aren’t new releases with shady notes documenting the changes great.
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GNU Projects
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GNU ☛ GNU Guix: Fundraising campaign to sustain GNU Guix
Today we're launching a fundraising campaign to sustain and strengthen GNU Guix. Guix is completely independent from any company or institution, we rely on the support of our community to fund the project. If you can, please help sustain Guix by making a donation.
Why we need your support
Like many Free Software projects we need financial support because running a project is expensive. We incur costs for development infrastructure, facilitating developer collaboration and supporting the community around the project.
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Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
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Open Data
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Science Alert ☛ 50-Year-Old Data Reveals Venus's Clouds Are Mostly Water
It had been stored on microfilm in NASA's Space Science Data Coordinated Archive office – so the first step in reanalyzing the data was to fish it from the archives and digitize it.
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Standards/Consortia
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DJ Bernstein ☛ 2025.10.04: NSA and IETF
The problem in a nutshell. Surveillance agency NSA and its partner GCHQ are trying to have standards-development organizations endorse weakening ECC+PQ down to just PQ.
Part of this is that NSA and GCHQ have been endlessly repeating arguments that this weakening is a good thing (in much the same way that NSA advertised Dual EC as providing "increased assurance"). I have a previous blog post showing that those arguments collapse upon examination. But that's not today's topic. In today's blog post I'm instead looking at how easy it is for NSA to simply spend money to corrupt the standardization process.
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