Free, Libre, and Open Source Software, Education, and Sharing-Related Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 23, 2026

• Sacha Chua ☛ OBS: A dump button for dropping the last ~10 seconds before it hits the stream

  I think I've sorted out a setup involving two instances of OBS, with the source instance sending the stream with a delay to the restreaming instance that will then send it on to YouTube. This allows me to cut the feed from the source instance to the restreaming instance in case something happens.

  The first OBS is the one that has my screen capture, webcam, audio, etc. Here's what I needed to do to change it.

• Sacha Chua ☛ 2026-04-20 Emacs news

  I enjoyed reading Hot-wiring the Lisp machine (an adventure into modifying Org publishing). I'm also looking forward to debugging my Emacs Lisp better with timestamped debug messages and ert-play-keys. I hope you also find lots of things you like in the links below!

• LWN ☛ Forking Vim to avoid LLM-generated code [LWN.net]

  Many people dislike the proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) in recent years, and so make an understandable attempt to avoid them. That may not be possible in general, but there are two new forks of Vim that seek to provide an editing environment with no LLM-generated code. EVi focuses on being a modern Vim without LLM-assisted contributions, while Vim Classic focuses on providing a long-term maintenance version of Vim 8. While both are still in their early phases, the projects look to be on track to provide stable alternatives — as long as enough people are interested.

  The Vim project has had a policy on the use of LLMs since December 2025: code generated with assistance from LLMs is acceptable, so long as the use is disclosed and the code matches the style of existing Vim code. NeoVim, the long-term fork of Vim focused on refactoring the code to be more maintainable and extensible, has a similar policy. These policies may have been added too late, however. In November 2025, Brian Carbone claimed (in a comment that is now hidden for being off-topic) that a contributor to both projects had probably been using an LLM in their recent contributions, many of which predate the policy.

  Vim maintainer Christian Brabandt didn't think that assessment was fair, but by that point the horse may have already left the stable. The contributor never confirmed whether the contributions Carbone listed were LLM-assisted or not, but the ensuing discussion ended up deciding that the project would be fine with using LLMs. Newer contributions from Brabandt and others have openly included LLM-assistance, ranging from the trivial (fixing a regex) to the security critical (handling composing Unicode characters securely). At least seven such commits have gone into Vim itself, while 22 such have been included in NeoVim at the time of writing.

• Events

  • Document Foundation ☛ LibreOffice Asia Conf 2025 – Panel: Lessons from Open Source Business, Part II

    Jiajun Xu writes, following on from part 1: The annual community event LibreOffice Asia Conference was held on December 13–14, 2025 in Tokyo, Japan.

  • FSF ☛ FSF Events: Free Software Directory meeting on IRC: Friday, April 24, starting at 12:00 EDT (16:00 UTC)

    Join the FSF and friends on Friday, April 24 from 12:00 to 15:00 EDT (16:00 to 19:00 UTC) to help improve the Free Software Directory.

• Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)

  • Akseli Lahtinen ☛ Testing out Sveltia

    So I wanted to set up a simple headless CMS for my blog. Setting up Sveltia was rather quick and easy, though configuring it took a while.

• Education

  • APNIC ☛ Welcoming the 2026 APNIC general and Policy Fellows

    Following a highly competitive selection process, the 2026 Fellowship cohorts bring together professionals, students, researchers, and policy practitioners representing 15 economies across the Asia Pacific region. More than 60% of the Fellows are under 30, in line with the program’s focus on uplifting youth and early-to-mid career professionals.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Data

    • Rlang ☛ New Value: increasing cost of UKRI research grants

      Using data from GtR, we can look at awards for research grants from UKRI agencies. We’ll look at BBSRC and MRC as the main funders in the biological/biomedical sphere. Plots first, code later.