I watched a movie this evening which featured the main actress singing “Both sides now” and is was moving until it became too musical-like for my taste. But now I’m in a Joni rabbit hole again, listening to all great versions of Joni performing that song. One of the earliest live video’s I found was from 1969 and on the other end of the timescale there’s the Grammy one from 2024 with Brandi…

Source

Tailwind Labs laid off 75% of its engineering team last week.

Adam Wathan, CEO of Tailwind Labs, spent the holidays running revenue forecasts. In a GitHub comment, he explained what happened:

The reality is that 75% of the people on our engineering team lost their jobs here yesterday because of the brutal impact AI has had on our business. Traffic to our docs is down about 40% from early 2023 despite Tailwind being more popular than ever.

The story circulating is that AI is killing Open Source businesses. I don't think that is quite right.

AI didn't kill Tailwind's business. It stress tested it. Their business model failed the test, but that is not an indictment of all Open Source business models.

Tailwind's business model worked for years. It relied on developers visiting their documentation, discovering Tailwind Plus while browsing, and buying it. Tailwind Plus is a $299 collection of pre-built UI components. Traffic led to discovery, and discovery drove sales. It was a reasonable business model, but always fragile.

In the last year, more and more developers started asking AI for code instead of reading documentation, and their sales and marketing funnel broke.

There is a fairness issue here that I don't want to skip past. AI companies trained their models on Tailwind's documentation and everything the community wrote about it. And now those models generate Tailwind code and answer Tailwind questions without sending anyone to Tailwind's website. The value got extracted, but compensation isn't flowing back. That bothers me, and it deserves a broader policy conversation.

What I keep coming back to is this: AI commoditizes anything you can fully specify. Documentation, pre-built card components, a CSS library, Open Source plugins. Tailwind's commercial offering was built on "specifications". AI made those things trivial to generate. AI can ship a specification but it can't run a business.

So where does value live now? In what requires showing up, not just specifying. Not what you can specify once, but what requires showing up again and again.

Value is shifting to operations: deployment, testing, rollbacks, observability. You can't prompt 99.95% uptime on Black Friday. Neither can you prompt your way to keeping a site secure, updated, and running.

That is why Vercel created Next.js and gives it away for free. The Open Source framework is the conduit; the hosting is the product. Same with Acquia, my own company. A big part of Acquia's business model is selling products around Drupal: hosting, search, CI/CD pipelines, digital asset management, and more. We don't sell describable things; we sell operations.

Open Source was never the commercial product. It's the conduit to something else.

When asked what to pivot to, Wathan was candid: "Still to this day, I don't know what we should be pivoting to". I've written about how digital agencies might evolve, but CSS frameworks and component libraries are a harder case. Some Open Source projects make for great features, but not great businesses.

Tailwind CSS powers millions of sites. The framework will survive. Whether the company does is a different question. I'm rooting for them. The world needs more successful Open Source businesses.

We’ve gone from generating funny images to AI being a core part of being a developer quite fast, haven’t we?

I built a dashboard that tracks Drupal Core's code quality over time, across major releases from Drupal 7 through Drupal 11. It measures lines of code, cyclomatic complexity, maintainability index, anti-patterns, and API surface area. Think of it as a health report for Drupal's codebase.

The dashboard updates automatically and is available at https://dbuytaert.github.io/drupal-core-metrics/.

The charts tell a clear story of steady, hard-won progress. A story to be proud of and worth sharing. Code quality is dramatically better than it was in Drupal 7: lower complexity, easier to maintain, fewer anti-patterns, and dramatically better test coverage. Drupal now has nearly twice as much test code as production code!

Drupal Core's API surface has modernized too. As Drupal shifted from procedural to object-oriented patterns, global procedural functions gave way to classes implementing interface methods, services, plugins, and events.

By tracking these metrics publicly, I hope to inform decisions about both code quality and developer experience. When we refactor complex code, we can measure the impact. We can set goals and track progress.

All charts use static code analysis. Static analysis can't measure the experience of learning Drupal, but it can hint at it. As a next step, I'd love to measure developer experience more directly. Dynamic analysis could help, for example by tracking call stack depth or how many files and APIs you need to touch to make a simple change.

The dashboard is open source, and contributions are welcome at https://github.com/dbuytaert/drupal-core-metrics.

Special thanks to catch for multiple rounds of feedback. As the most active Core Committer over the past 12 months, his input was invaluable.

L’urgence de la souveraineté numérique pour échapper à la merdification

Le triste exemple de YouTube

Je n’ai plus de compte Google depuis plusieurs années. Je me suis rendu compte que j’évite autant que possible de cliquer sur un lien YouTube, car, à chaque vidéo, je dois passer par le chargement d’une page qui surcharge mon ordinateur pourtant récent, je dois tenter de lancer la vidéo, attendre plusieurs secondes qu’un énorme popup l’interrompe. Puis je dois faire en sorte de trouver le son original et non pas une version automatiquement générée en français. Une fois tout ça terminé, il faut encore se taper des publicités de parfois plusieurs minutes.

Tout ça pour voir une vidéo qui pourrait potentiellement contenir une information qui m’intéresse. Et encore, ce n’est pas du tout certain.

• De la merdification des choses (ploum.net)

Alors, oui il y a des moyens de contourner ces merdifications, mais c’est un travail permanent et qui ne fonctionne pas toujours. Donc, en gros, je ne clique sur les liens YouTube que quand je suis vraiment obligé. Genre avant je regardais les clips vidéos des groupes de métal que recommandait Alias. Désormais, j’utilise Bandcamp (j’y achète même des albums) quand il le mentionne ou je cherche ailleurs.

• Rock et metal progressifs, science-fiction, jeu de rôle et divagations de vieux gauchiste; maison fondée en 2002 (erdorin.org)

Vous croyez que votre vidéo doit être sur YouTube, car « tout le monde y est », mais, au moins dans mon cas, vous avez perdu de l’audience en étant uniquement sur YouTube.

Une merdification totalement assumée

Le pire, c’est de se rendre compte que la merdification est vraiment assumée de l’intérieur. Comme le souligne Josh Griffiths, YouTube encourage les créateurs à tourner des vidéos dont le scénario est généré par leur IA. YouTube rajoute des pubs sans le consentement du créateur.

• YouTube is Awful. I'm Not Posting There Anymore. (joshgriffiths.site)

Toujours dans son blog post, il décrit comment YouTube utilise votre historique vidéo pour déterminer votre âge et bloquer toutes les vidéos qui ne seraient pas appropriées. C’est tellement effrayant de stupidité que ça pourrait être dans une de mes nouvelles.

• Stagiaire au spatioport Omega 3000 (pvh-editions.com)

Une chose est certaine : en me connectant sur YouTube sans compte et sans historique, YouTube me propose spontanément des dizaines de vidéos sur les nazis, sur la Seconde Guerre mondiale, sur les fusils utilisés par les nazis, etc. Je n’ai jamais regardé ce genre de choses. Au vu du titre, certaines vidéos me semblaient à la limite de la théorie du complot ou du négationnisme. Pourquoi me les recommander ? L’hypothèse la plus effrayante serait que ce soit les recommandations par défaut !

Parce que ce n’est pas comme si YouTube ne savait pas comment effacer les vidéos qui ne lui plaisent pas !

• YouTube Erased 700 Videos of Israeli Human Rights Violations (theintercept.com)

Si vous réalisez des vidéos et que vous souhaitez les partager à des humains, par pitié, postez-les également ailleurs que sur YouTube! Personne ne vous demande d’abandonner votre « communauté », vos likes, vos 10 centimes de revenus publicitaires qui tombent tous les mois. Mais postez également votre vidéo ailleurs. Par exemple sur Peertube !

• What is PeerTube? (joinpeertube.org)

De la dépendance politique aux technologies merdifiées

Comme le dit très bien Bert Hubert, le problème de la dépendance aux monopoles américains n’est pas tant technique que culturel. Et les gouvernements européens devraient être les premiers à montrer l’exemple.

• Keynote opening Digital Commons EDIC: Moving beyond the Digital Uncommons (berthub.eu)

Je pense qu’il illustre parfaitement la profondeur du problème, car, dans sa conférence qui décrit la dépendance technologique de l’UE envers les USA et la Chine, il pointe vers des vidéos explicatives… sur YouTube. Et Bert Hubert ne semble même pas en réaliser l’ironie alors qu’il recommande Peertube un peu plus loin. Il héberge d’ailleurs ses projets personnels sur Github. Github appartient à Microsoft et son monopole sur les projets Open Source a des impacts dramatiques.

• How Github monopoly is destroying the open source ecosystem (ploum.net)

J’ai déjà noté à quel point l’Europe développe des solutions technologiques importantes, mais que personne ne semble s’en apercevoir parce que, contrairement aux USA, nous développons des technologies qui offrent de la liberté aux utilisateurs : le Web, Linux, Mastodon, le protocole Gemini.

• Pourquoi n’y a-t-il pas de Google européen ? (ploum.net)

À cette liste, j’aimerais rajouter VLC, LibreOffice et, bien entendu, PeerTube.

Les solutions européennes qui ont du succès font partie des communs. Elles sont tellement évidentes que beaucoup n’arrivent plus à les voir. Ou à les prendre au sérieux, car « pas assez chères ».

Le problème de l’Europe n’est pas le manque de solutions. C’est simplement que les politiciens veulent « un Google européen ». Les politiciens sont incapables de voir qu’on ne lutte pas contre les monopoles américains en créant, avec 20 ans de retard, un sous-monopole européen.

C’est un problème purement culturel. Il suffirait que quelques députés européens aient le courage de dire : je supprime mes comptes X, Facebook, Whatsapp, Google et Microsoft pour un mois. Un simple mois durant lequel ils accepteraient que, oui, les choses sont différentes, il faut s’adapter un peu.

Ce n’est pas comme si le problème n’était pas urgent : tous nos services informatiques officiels, tous nos échanges, toutes nos données sont aux mains d’entreprises qui collaborent ouvertement avec l’armée américaine. Vous croyez vraiment que les militaires américains n’ont pas exploité toutes les données Google/Microsoft/Whatsapp des politiciens vénézuéliens avant de lancer leur raid ? Et encore, le Venezuela est un des rares pays qui tentait officiellement de se passer des solutions américaines.

L’honnêteté de considérer une solution

Quitter les services merdifiés est difficile, mais pas impossible. Cela peut se préparer, se faire petit à petit. Si, pour certains, c’est actuellement strictement impossible pour des raisons professionnelles, pour beaucoup d’entre nous, c’est surtout que nous refusons d’abandonner nos habitudes. Se plaindre, c’est bien. Agir, c’est difficile et nécessite d’avoir le temps et l’énergie à consacrer à une période de transition.

• Dire au revoir aux GAFAM : journal d’une ancienne instagrammeuse (www.24joursdeweb.fr)

Bert Hubert prend l’exemple du mail. En substance, il dit que le mail n’est plus un bien commun, que les administrations ne peuvent pas utiliser un mail européen, car Microsoft et Google vont arbitrairement rejeter une partie de ces emails. Pourtant, la solution est évidente : il suffit de considérer que la faute est chez Google et Microsoft. Il suffit de dire « Nous ne pouvons pas utiliser Microsoft et Google au sein des institutions officielles européennes, car nous risquons de ne pas recevoir certains emails ».

Le problème n’est pas l’email, le problème est que nous nous positionnons en victimes. Nous ne voulons pas de solution ! Nous voulons que ça change sans rien changer !

Beaucoup de problèmes de l’humanité ne proviennent pas du fait qu’il n’y a pas de solutions, mais qu’en réalité, les gens aiment se plaindre et ne veulent surtout pas résoudre le problème. Parce que le problème fait désormais partie de leur identité ou parce qu’ils ne peuvent pas imaginer la vie sans ce problème ou parce qu’en réalité, ils bénéficient de l’existence de ce problème (on appelle ces derniers des « consultants » ).

Il y a une technique assez simple pour reconnaître ce type de situation : c’est, lorsque tu proposes une solution, de te voir immédiatement rétorquer les raisons pour lesquelles cette solution ne peut pas fonctionner. C’est clair, à ce moment, que la personne en face ne cherche pas une solution. Elle n’a pas besoin d’un ingénieur, mais d’un psychologue (rôle que prennent cyniquement les vendeurs).

• Du désir profond de se faire arnaquer (ploum.net)

Une personne qui cherche réellement à résoudre son problème va être intéressée par toute piste de solutions. Si la solution n’est pas adaptée, elle va réfléchir à comment l’améliorer. Elle va accepter certains compromis. Si elle rejette une solution, c’est après une longue investigation de cette dernière, car elle a réellement l’espoir de résoudre son problème.

La solution du courage politique

Pour les gouvernements aujourd’hui, il est techniquement assez simple de dire « Nous voulons que nos emails soient hébergés en Europe par une infrastructure européenne, nous voulons diffuser nos vidéos via nos propres serveurs et faire nos annonces officielles sur un site que nous contrôlons. » C’est même trivial, car des milliers d’individus comme moi le font pour un coût dérisoire. Et il y a même des tentatives claires, comme en Suisse.

• New Open Source law in Switzerland (joinup.ec.europa.eu)

Les seules raisons pour lesquelles il n’y a même pas de réflexion poussée à ce sujet sont, comme toujours, la malveillance (oui, Google et Microsoft font beaucoup de cadeaux aux politiciens et sont capables de déplacer des montagnes dès qu’une alternative à leur monopole est considérée) et l’incompétence.

Malveillance et incompétence n’étant pas incompatibles, mais plutôt complémentaires. Et un peu trop fréquentes en politique à mon goût.

• Image postée par Tibolalu sur Mastodon

A developer named Martin DeVido gave Claude complete control over a living tomato plant that he named Sol. This might be the coolest agentic experiment I've seen. You can follow along live at autoncorp.com/biodome.

Every 30 minutes or so, Claude wakes up to check temperature, humidity, CO₂, and soil moisture, then decides when to turn on the grow light, heat mat, fan, or water pump. No human backup.

It also watches the plant through a camera. Just earlier, it looked at Sol and observed "healthy bushy foliage, no wilting, turgid leaves, 6-8 compound leaves visible. Sol looks great!".

This plant seems to be living its best life. And Claude clearly seems pleased with itself.

Claude monitoring Sol's environment and deciding to water 200ml after analyzing soil moisture across two probes.

Most AI interactions are fast and fleeting. You prompt, it answers, and you close the session. Regular AI tools branching into the real world to control a slow, messy process feels like a glimpse of what is next. A tomato plant is innocent enough. But it's not hard to imagine what comes next.

Either way, I'd love to experiment with similar, innocent ideas. If you have any, let me know.

How Github monopoly is destroying the open source ecosystem

I teach a course called "Open Source Strategies" at École Polytechnique de Louvain, part of the University of Louvain.

As part of my course, students are required to find an open source project of their choice and make a small contribution to it. They send me a report through our university Gitlab. To grade their work, I read the report and explore their public interactions with the project: tickets, comments, pull requests, emails.

This year, during my review of the projects of the semester, Github decided to block my IP for one hour. During that hour, I simply could not access Github.

It should be noted that, even if I want to get rid of it, I still have a Github account and I was logged in.

• We need to talk about your Github addiction (ploum.net)

The block happened again the day after.

This gave me pause.

I wondered how many of my students’ projects were related to projects hosted on Github. I simply went into the repository and counted 238 students reports in the last seven years:

ls -l projects_*/*.md | wc -l
238

Some reports might be missing. Also, I don’t have the reports before 2019 in that repository. But this is a good approximation.

Now, let’s count how many reports don’t contain "github.com".

grep -L github.com projects_*/*.md | wc -l
7

Wow, that’s not a lot. I then wondered what those projects were. It turns out that, out of those 7, 6 students simply forgot to add the repository URL in their report. They used the project webpage or no URL at all. In those 6 cases, the repository happened to be hosted on Github.

In my course, I explain at great length the problem of centralisation. I present alternatives: Gitlab, Codeberg, Forgejo, Sourcehut but also Fossil, Mercurial, even Radicle.

• Radicle: peer-to-peer collaboration with Git (lwn.net)
• From Git to Fossil (lucio.albenga.es)

I literally explain to my students to look outside of Github. Despite this, out of 238 students tasked with contributing to the open source project of their choice, only one managed to avoid Github.

The immediate peril of centralisation

As it was demonstrated to me for one hour, the immediate peril of centralisation is that you can suddenly lose access to everything. For one hour, I was unable to review any of my students’ projects. Not a great deal, but it serves as a warning. While writing this post, I was hit a second time by this block.

A few years ago, one of my friends was locked out of his Google account while travelling for work at the other end of the world. Suddenly, his email stopped working, most of the apps on his phone stopped working, and he lost access to all his data "in the clouds". Fortunately, he still had a working email address (not on Google) and important documents for his trip were on his laptop hard drive. Through personal connections at Google, he managed to recover his account a few weeks later. He never had any explanations.

• Et si vos comptes disparaissaient demain ? (ploum.net)

More recently, Paris Buttfield-Addison experienced the same thing with his Apple account. His whole online life disappeared, and all his hardware was suddenly bricked. Being heavily invested in Apple doesn’t protect you.

• 20 Years of Digital Life, Gone in an Instant, thanks to Apple (hey.paris)

I’m sure the situation will be resolved because, once again, we are talking about a well-connected person.

But this happens. All the time. Institutions are blindly trusting monopolies that could lock you out randomly or for political reasons as experienced by the French magistrate Nicolas Guillou.

• The Judge at the End of Europe (www.project-syndicate.org)

Worst: as long as we are not locked out, we offer all our secrets to a country that could arbitrarily decide to attack yours and kidnap your president. I wonder how much Venezuelan sensitive information was in fact stored on Google/Microsoft services and accessed by the US military to prepare their recent strike.

Big institutions like my Alma Mater or entire countries have no excuse to still use American monopolies. This is either total incompetence or corruption, probably a bit of both.

The subtle peril of centralisation

As demonstrated by my Github anecdote, individuals have little choice. Even if I don’t want a Github account, I’m mostly forced to have one if I want to contribute or report bugs to projects I care about. I’m forced to interact with Github to grade my students’ projects.

237 out of 238 is not "a lot." It’s everyone. There’s something more than "most projects use Github."

According to most of my students, the hardest part of contributing to an open source project is finding one. I tell them to look for the software they use every day, to investigate. But the vast majority ends up finding "something that looks easy."

That’s where I realised all this time my students had been searching for open source projects to contribute to on Github only. It’s not that everything is on Github, it is that none of my students can imagine looking outside of Github!

The outlier? The one student who contributed to a project not on Github? We discussed his needs and I pointed him to the project he ended up choosing.

Github’s centralisation invisibilised a huge part of the open source world. Because of that, lots of projects tend to stay on Github or, like Python, to migrate to Github.

The solution

Each year, students come up with very creative ways not to do what I expect while still passing. Last year, half of the class was suddenly committing reports with broken encoding in the file path. I had never seen that before and I asked how they managed to do it. It turns out that half the class was using VS Code on Windows to do something as simple as "git commit" and they couldn’t use the git command line.

This year, I forced them to use the command line on an open source OS, which solved the previous year’s issue. But a fair number of the reports are clearly ChatGPT-generated, which was less obvious last year. This is sad because it probably took them more effort to write the prompt and, well, those reports are mostly empty of substance. I would have preferred the prompt alone. I’m also sad they thought I would not notice.

But my main mistake was a decade-long one. For all those years, I asked my students to find a project to contribute to. So they blindly did. They didn’t try to think about it. They went to Github and started browsing projects.

For all those years, I involuntarily managed to teach my students that Open Source was a corner of the web, a Microsoft-managed repository of small software one can play with. Nothing serious.

This is all my fault.

I know the solution. Starting this year, students will be forced to contribute to a project they use, care about or, at the very least, truly want to use in the long term. Not one they found randomly on Github.

If they think they don’t use open source software, they should take a better look at their own stack.

And if they truly don’t use any open source software at all and don’t want to use any, why do they want to follow a course about the subject in the first place?

I stop watching and downvote the moment your video has middle-of-screen subtitles. Idem ditto for huge forced subtitles.

I remember when PHP 4 was a thing. jQuery was new and shiny. Sites were built with tables, not divs. Dreamweaver felt like a life hack. Designs were sliced in Photoshop. Databases lived in phpMyAdmin.

My blog turns 20 today!

I have been at this for two decades now, yet I still don't identify as a blogger. It feels awkward to say the words: I am a blogger.

Probably because I started writing to think out loud. I never set out to be a blogger. And honestly, I still feel like I'm figuring the whole thing out.

My history with blogging actually goes back 25 years. Before this site, I started Drop.org, where I shared ideas and experimented with emerging web technologies. Drop.org eventually led me to create Drupal. Drupal 1.0 even included a feature called "public diaries". We didn't call it "blogging" back then, but that is what it was.

The irony was that Drupal was powering personal blogs around the world, while my own site was still a few static HTML files.

At DrupalCon Amsterdam in 2005, Steven Wittens called me out on it. Steven was the number two in Drupal at the time. He proposed a bet: if I did not launch a Drupal-powered site before January 1, 2006, I would owe him a Duvel. If I did, he would owe me one.

I wrote my first post on December 31, 2005 with less than a day to spare. I don't remember if I ever collected that Duvel, but I haven't stopped writing.

In the early years, I would post short thoughts on a whim. Social media did not exist yet, so there was almost nothing between a thought and my Publish button. Today, those quick thoughts often end up on social media instead, although I have mostly stepped away from it. More people read what I write now, so a new post can take me hours instead of minutes.

I removed analytics from my site long ago. I do not want to write for page views, nor do I want to invade your privacy. My site aspires to the privacy of a physical book.

I write to discover and connect with people. But one thing has never changed: I am a terrible judge of what will connect. The posts I polish the longest often get little attention, while the ones I nearly talk myself out of publishing are the ones people share. I have stopped trying to explain this, but it reminds me that I do not get to decide what matters to others. Maybe the polishing takes something away. Maybe the risky ones carry an honesty that others can feel.

I love that writing in public has a way of keeping you honest. Ideas that seem solid in my head can fall apart the moment I try to explain them. I have changed my mind more than once simply by trying to put my thoughts into words.

But the writing is only half of it. The best part happens after you press publish.

Blogging starts conversations with people I have never met. Blog posts become invitations that never expire. They wait patiently for the right moment to be found. Someone reads an old post, reaches out, and suddenly we are talking. Even in person, conversations start more easily because people already have a sense of who I am or what I care about.

My attention to this blog has gone up and down over the years. Work pulled me away. Travel pulled me away. But I always come back. Writing in public gives me something I do not get anywhere else.

It is strange to think this all traces back to that Duvel bet. My site still runs Drupal of course, which must make it one of the oldest Drupal-powered sites.

Some of you have been reading since the beginning. Many found your way here much later. I am grateful for all of you. Thank you for making this feel like a conversation instead of a monologue.

I plan to keep writing here as long as I can. If you have been reading for a while, I would love to hear from you. Even a simple hello means a lot.

Proposed diagnostic construct. Not recognized by any legitimate diagnostic body, though widely reinforced by social institutions.

Diagnostic Criteria

A. Persistent pattern of cognitive, emotional, and social functioning characterized by a strong preference for normative coherence, rapid closure of uncertainty, and limited tolerance for sustained depth—intellectual, experiential, or emotional—beginning in early socialization and present across multiple contexts (e.g. interpersonal relationships, workplace environments, family systems, cultural participation).

B. The pattern manifests through three (or more) of the following symptoms:

1. Normative Rigidity
   Marked discomfort when encountering deviations from customary practices, beliefs, or emotional expressions, even when such deviations are demonstratively non-harmful or adaptive. Often expressed as “But why?” followed by silence rather than curiosity.
2. Contextual Literalism
   Difficulty interpreting meaning, identity, or emotional communication outside their most common cultural framing; metaphor and subtext are tolerated primarily when socially standardized.
3. Consensus-Seeking Reflex
   Habitual alignment with majority opinion, authority, or prevailing emotional norms when forming judgments, often prior to personal reflection or affective attunement.
4. Change Aversion with Rationalization
   Resistance to novel ideas or emotional complexity, accompanied by post-hoc justifications framed as realism, pragmatism, or emotional maturity, rather than acknowledged emotional discomfort.
5. Social Script Dependence
   Reliance on rehearsed conversational and emotional scripts (weather, productivity, polite outrage), and visible distress when interactions require unscripted vulnerability, prolonged emotional presence, or exploratory dialogue.
6. Hierarchy Calibration Preoccupation
   Excessive attention to formal roles, relational labels, and status markers, such as job titles, relationship escalators, age-based authority, or institutional validation, with difficulty engaging others outside these frameworks as emotionally or epistemically equal.
7. Ambiguity Intolerance
   A pronounced need to resolve uncertainty quickly—cognitively and emotionally, even at the cost of nuance. Mixed feelings, ambivalence, or unresolved emotional states may be experienced as distressing or unproductive. Questions with multiple valid answers may be experienced as irritating rather than interesting.
8. Pathologizing the Outlier
   Tendency to interpret uncommon preferences, communication styles, atypical cognitive styles, emotional expressions, relational structures, or life choices as problems needing explanation, containment, or optimization.
9. Empathy via Projection
   Assumption that others experience emotions in similar ways and intensities, leading to misattuned reassurance, premature advice, or minimization of divergent affective experiences, resulting in advice that begins with “If it were me…” and ends with confusion when it is, in fact, not them.
10. Depth Avoidance in Sustained Inquiry
    Marked difficulty engaging in prolonged, high-resolution discussion of topics that extend beyond surface facts, sanctioned opinions, or immediately actionable conclusions. Deep exploration of systems, first principles, or existential implications is often curtailed.
11. Diffuse Interest Profile
    A pattern of broad but shallow interests, with engagement driven primarily by social relevance or utility rather than intrinsic fascination. Mastery is rare; familiarity is common.
12. Expertise Anxiety
    Discomfort in the presence of deep intellectual or emotional proficiency—either in oneself or others—leading to minimization, deflection, or reframing depth as excessive, obsessive, or impractical.
13. Instrumental Curiosity
    Curiosity activated mainly when a topic yields immediate benefit. Curiosity pursued for its own sake may be regarded as indulgent, inefficient, or emotionally suspect.
14. Affective Flattening in Non-Crisis Contexts
    A restricted range or shallowness of emotional experience outside socially sanctioned peaks (e.g. celebrations, emergencies). Subtle, slow-building, or internally complex emotional states may be under-recognized, quickly translated into simpler labels, or bypassed through distraction.
15. Emotional Resolution Urgency
    A strong drive to “process,” “move on,” or “feel better” rapidly, often resulting in premature emotional closure. Emotional depth is equated with rumination rather than information.
16. Vulnerability Time-Limiting
    Tolerance for emotional exposure is constrained by implicit time or intensity limits. Extended emotional presence—grief without deadlines, joy without justification, love without clear structure—may provoke discomfort or withdrawal.

C. Symptoms cause clinically significant impairment in adaptive curiosity, cross-cultural understanding, deep relational intimacy, sustained emotional attunement, and the capacity to remain present with complex internal states—both one’s own and others’, or collaboration with neurodivergent individuals, particularly in rapidly changing environments or in relationships requiring long-term emotional nuance.

D. The presentation is not better explained by acute stress, lack of exposure, trauma-related emotional numbing, cultural display rules alone, or temporary social conformity for situational survival (e.g. customer service roles, family holidays).

Specifiers

• With Strong Institutional Reinforcement (e.g. corporate culture, rigid schooling)
• With Moral Certainty Features
• Masked Presentation (appears emotionally open but only within safe, scripted bounds)
• Late-Onset (often following promotion to middle management)

Course and Prognosis

NTSD is typically stable across adulthood. Improvement correlates with sustained exposure to emotional complexity without forced resolution, relationships that reward presence over performance, and practices that cultivate interoceptive awareness rather than emotional efficiency. Partial remission has been observed following prolonged engagement with artists, immigrants, queer communities, altered states, long-form grief, open-source software, or toddlers asking “why” without stopping.

Differential Diagnosis

Must be distinguished from:

• Willful ignorance (which involves effort)
• Malice (which involves intent)
• Burnout (which improves with rest)
• Actual lack of information (which improves with learning)

NTSD persists despite information.

Salesforce had an embarrassing moment last week.

Vivint uses Salesforce's Agentforce to send satisfaction surveys after customer service calls. Recently they discovered surveys were randomly not being sent and no one noticed for weeks.

When Salesforce investigated this problem, they found the root cause: their AI agents were skipping steps. They didn't need AI for that task. They needed the workflow to complete every time. So they added more structure and guardrails around the agents. More workflow, not more magic.

And that is the right answer. I actually wrote about this months ago in The Orchestration Shift:

The future will likely require both: deterministic workflows for reliability and consistency, combined with AI-driven decision-making for flexibility and intelligence.

Salesforce learned it the hard way.

This is exactly why I've been paying attention to external workflow automation platforms like n8n and Activepieces. They let you control which steps are deterministic and which steps use AI. Internal automation solutions like Drupal's Event-Condition-Action module follow the same idea.

Using Activepieces or n8n, Vivint's workflow would look like this: the customer service call ends, AI analyzes the transcript and personalizes the survey message, then the automation platform sends the email. The AI does what it is good at and the automation platform ensures the send happens every time.

LLMs are probabilistic by design. Steps that require determinism should not use AI.

Two architectural approaches are emerging for solving this problem.

The first is "outside in". Workflow platforms like n8n or Activepieces put a deterministic process in control and use AI for specific steps within it. The workflow specifies when to invoke the AI, what to do with its output, and what happens if it fails. Outside in is more reliable and auditable. If the AI fails or returns something unexpected, the workflow catches it. You can see exactly what happened and why. But it is less flexible because you are limited to what the workflow designer anticipated.

The second approach is "inside out". AI agents can invoke deterministic tools as part of their operation. The AI is in control, but when it needs to do something that requires precision, it hands that task to a tool that executes reliably. This is what Anthropic's Claude Code does, for example. When Claude Code needs to verify that code compiles, it does not guess. It calls an actual compiler. Inside out is more adaptive. You describe what you want and the AI figures out how. But it is harder to audit and debug, harder to explain to regulators, and more expensive at scale since the AI is invoked at every step.

It feels intuitive that both approaches will coexist. They can be nested. Picture three layers. The outer layer is workflow automation. It is fully deterministic and guarantees the process. The middle layer is AI. It is non-deterministic and makes the judgment calls. The inner layer of the AI step are deterministic tools. They execute the precise actions for the AI.

Not everyone needs all three layers. For certain tasks, like writing software, inside out is enough. But for complex enterprise workflows with many steps, multiple integrations, complex business rules, and strict audit requirements, you need the outer layer.

That is where workflow automation platforms come in. They do not need to power every AI use case. They need to win the complex workflows where enterprises need visibility and control. That is also where a lot of commercial value will accrue. Enterprises pay for reliability and accountability.

We are still early in the age of AI agents. The temptation is to believe that intelligence alone will replace structure. But enterprises cannot gamble processes that touch customers, revenue, or compliance. They need systems where every step is accountable. That is why deterministic workflows matter. They are where reliability and intelligence meet and where the next generation of enterprise platforms will be built.

And when infrastructure becomes essential, organizations want to own it, not rent it. That is why Linux won servers and PostgreSQL won databases. If the orchestration layer becomes essential to enterprise AI, open source will be an important choice. Activepieces is open source and n8n is "source available" (the code can be inspected but has commercial restrictions). Either way, I would love to see them succeed.

Currently the last lines of code are being added/ reviewed to integrate a “wizard” tab in Autoptimize Pro, which should help new users to switch between different presets all while keeping backups of original settings so one can easily try out different optimization levels. Have a look at below screenshot to see where we’re taking this And while we’re at it; have a great 2026…

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Lopen er gangen van de (Belgisch) Limburgse mijnen onder uw huis? Dat kunt U misschien aan de hand van onderstaande “ongeveer juiste” kaart zien, die ik uit nieuwsgierigheid op basis van de kaart van de Facebook-pagina van de “Kempense Steenkoolmijnen – vriendenkring” maakte. De positionering is op basis van de loop de Maas gedaan en zou dus min of meer correct kunnen zijn.

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My solar-powered website just crossed 500 days of uptime. It took the biggest snowstorm in nearly three years to put that streak at risk.

Winter storm Devin is burying the Northeast of the United States right now. There is over five inches of snow in Boston. Thousands of flights are cancelled, thousands more delayed.

I'm writing this from Schiphol airport in Amsterdam, my own flight home delayed. I can't see whether the solar panel on our roof deck is buried in snow or still catching a little light. All I can do is watch my solar dashboard from across the ocean and wait.

The view from Schiphol airport.

The dashboard says the battery is below 15%. It's still night in Boston and well below freezing. Even when the sun comes up, the charge controller won't recharge the battery if it is too cold.

When I started this experiment, I wrote that some downtime for some websites should be acceptable. I questioned why we obsess over 99.9% uptime for personal websites that don't need it.

The irony isn't lost on me: I wrote that downtime is fine, but I've refreshed the dashboard three times while writing this.

My website might go down, or it might stay up. Either way, I love that it will come back on its own whenever the sun breaks through. Both of us waiting for the weather to clear. Me at the airport and the Raspberry Pi under a snowy roof in Boston.

Update, December 30: The bad weather won. After more than 500 days of uptime, the battery drained, and my solar-powered website went offline. Friends noticed before I did and began sending jokes and memes. My favorite was a fake newspaper calling my solar panel one of the great disasters of 2025.

But this morning, the sun came back and so did my site. It is oddly satisfying to see something fail gracefully and recover on its own. That was the point of the experiment. The audience was a nice bonus.

It’s been 1,067 days since I last posted something on this blog. And instead of writing the blog post I wanted to write, I did everything else.

Drupal-blue LEDs, controllable through a REST API and a Drupal website. Photo by Phil Norton.

It's Christmas Eve, and Phil Norton is controlling his Christmas lights with Drupal. You can visit his site, pick a color, and across the room, a strip of LEDs changes to match. That feels extra magical on Christmas Eve.

I like how straightforward his implementation is. A Drupal form stores the color value using the State API, a REST endpoint exposes that data as JSON, and MicroPython running on a Pimoroni Plasma board polls the endpoint and updates the LEDs.

I've gone down the electronics rabbit hole myself with my solar-powered website and basement temperature monitor, both using Drupal as the backend. I didn't do an electronics project in 2025, but this makes me want to do another one in 2026.

I also didn't realize you could buy light strips where each LED can be controlled individually. That alone makes me want to up my Christmas game next year.

But addressable LEDs are useful for more than holiday decorations. You could show how many people are on your site, light up a build as it moves through your CI/CD pipeline, flash on failed logins, or visualize the number of warnings in your Drupal logs. This quickly stops being a holiday decoration and starts looking like a tax-deductible business expense.

Beyond the fun factor, Phil's tutorial does real teaching. It uses Drupal features many of us barely think about anymore: the State API, REST resources, flood protection, even the built-in HTML color field. It's not just a clever demo, but also a solid tutorial.

The Drupal community gets stronger when people share work this clearly and generously. If you've been curious about IoT, this is a great entry point.

Merry Christmas to those celebrating. Go build something that blinks. May your deployments be smooth and your Drupal-powered Christmas lights shine bright.

I recently fell into one of those algorithmic rabbit holes that only the internet can provide. The spark was a YouTube Short by @TechWithHazem: a rapid-fire terminal demo showing a neat little text-processing trick built entirely out of classic Linux tools. No frameworks, no dependencies, just pipes, filters, and decades of accumulated wisdom compressed into under two minutes.

That’s the modern paradox of Unix & Linux culture: tools older than many of us are being rediscovered through vertical videos and autoplay feeds. A generation raised on Shorts and Reels is bumping into sort, uniq, and friends, often for the first time, and asking very reasonable questions like: wait, why are there two ways to do this?

So let’s talk about one of those deceptively small choices.

The question

What’s better?

sort -u

or

sort | uniq

At first glance, they seem equivalent. Both give you sorted, unique lines of text. Both appear in scripts, blog posts, and Stack Overflow answers. Both are “correct”.

But Linux has opinions, and those opinions are usually encoded in flags.

The short answer

sort -u is almost always better.

The longer answer is where the interesting bits live.

What actually happens

sort -u tells sort to do two things at once:

• sort the input
• suppress duplicate lines

That’s one program, one job, one set of buffers, and one round of temporary files. Fewer processes, less data sloshing around, and fewer opportunities for your CPU to sigh quietly.

By contrast, sort | uniq is a two-step relay race. sort does the sorting, then hands everything to uniq, which removes duplicates — but only if they’re adjacent. That adjacency requirement is why the sort is mandatory in the first place.

This pipeline works because Linux tools compose beautifully. But composition has a cost: an extra process, an extra pipe, and extra I/O.

On small inputs, you’ll never notice. On large ones, sort -u usually wins on performance and simplicity.

Clarity matters too

There’s also a human factor.

When you see sort -u, the intent is explicit: “I want sorted, unique output.”
When you see sort | uniq, you have to mentally remember a historical detail: uniq only removes adjacent duplicates.

That knowledge is common among Linux people, but it’s not obvious. sort -u encodes the idea directly into the command.

When uniq still earns its keep

All that said, uniq is not obsolete. It just has a narrower, sharper purpose.

Use sort | uniq when you want things that sort -u cannot do, such as:

• counting duplicates (uniq -c)
• showing only duplicated lines (uniq -d)
• showing only lines that occur once (uniq -u)

In those cases, uniq isn’t redundant — it’s the point.

A small philosophical note

This is one of those Linux moments that looks trivial but teaches a bigger lesson. Linux tools evolve. Sometimes functionality migrates inward, from pipelines into flags, because common patterns deserve first-class support.

sort -u is not “less Linuxy” than sort | uniq. It’s Linux noticing a habit and formalizing it.

The shell still lets you build LEGO castles out of pipes. It just also hands you pre-molded bricks when the shape is obvious.

The takeaway

If you just want unique, sorted lines:

sort -u

If you want insight about duplication:

sort | uniq …

Same ecosystem, different intentions.

And yes, it’s mildly delightful that a 1’30” YouTube Short can still provoke a discussion about tools designed in the 1970s. The terminal endures. The format changes. The ideas keep resurfacing — sorted, deduplicated, and ready for reuse.

Lee Robinson, who works at Cursor, spent $260 in AI coding agent fees to migrate Cursor's marketing site away from Sanity, their headless CMS, to Markdown files. That number should unsettle anyone who sells or implements content management systems for a living. His reasoning: "With AI and coding agents, the cost of an abstraction has never been higher". He argued that a CMS gets in the way of AI coding agents.

Knut Melvær, who works at Sanity, the very CMS Lee abandoned, wrote a rebuttal worth reading. He pointed out that Lee hadn't actually escaped the complexity of a CMS. Lee still ended up with content models, version control, and user permissions. He just moved them out of the CMS and distributed them across GitHub, Vercel, and custom scripts. That reframing is hard to unsee.

Meanwhile, the broader momentum is undeniable. Lovable, the AI-first website builder, went from zero to $200 million in annual recurring revenue in twelve months. Users prompt what they want and Lovable generates complete, functional applications.

Historically, the visible layer of a CMS, the page builders and content creation workflows, is where most people spend their time. But the invisible layer is what makes organizations trust the system: structured content models, permission systems, audit trails, web service APIs, caching layers, translation workflows, design systems, component libraries, regulatory compliance and more. A useful way to think about a CMS is that roughly 30 percent is visible layer and 70 percent is invisible layer.

For more than twenty years, the visible layer was where the work started. You started from a blank state – a page builder or a content form – then wrote the headline, picked an image, and arranged the layout. The visible layer was like the production floor.

AI changes this dynamic fundamentally. You can now prompt a landing page into existence in under a minute, or generate ten variations and pick the best one. The heavy lifting of content creation is moving to AI.

But AI gets you most of the way, not all the way. The headline is close but not quite right, or there is a claim buried in paragraph three that is technically wrong. Someone still needs to review, adjust, and approve the result.

So the visible layer still matters, but it serves a different purpose. It's where humans set direction at the start and refine the result at the end. AI handles everything in between.

You can try to prompt all the way to the finish line, but for "the last mile", many people will still prefer using a UI. So the traditional page builder becomes a refinement tool rather than a production tool. And you still need the full UI because it where you review, adjust, and approve what AI generates.

What happens to the invisible layer? Its job shifts from "content management" to "context management". It provides what AI needs to do the job right: brand rules, compliance constraints, content relationships, approval workflows. The system becomes more powerful and complex, while requiring less manual work.

So my base case for the future of CMS is simple: AI handles eighty percent of the work. Humans handle the remaining twenty by setting direction at the start, and refining, approving, and taking responsibility at the end.

This is why Drupal is not standing still. We recently launched Drupal Canvas 1.0 and one of its top priorities for 2026 is maturing AI-driven page generation. As this work progresses, Drupal Canvas could become an AI-first experience for those who want it. Watching that come together has been one of the most exciting things I've worked on in years. We're far from done, but the direction feels right.

Lee proved that a skilled developer with AI coding agents can rebuild a marketing site in a weekend for $260. That is genuinely remarkable. But it doesn't prove that every organization will abandon their CMS.

CMSes have to evolve. They have to become a reliable foundation that both humans and AI agents can build on together. The visible layer shifts from where you create to where you refine. The invisible layer does more work but doesn't disappear. Someone still has to direct the system and answer for it when things go wrong.

That is not a smaller role. It's a different one.

Op mijn fietstochtje vandaag, terwijl ik door Borgharen reed, schonk een mij voor altijd onbekende wandelaar me een gulle glimlach. Amper een secondje verbondenheid en dan de zon die kort daarna doorbrak en mij Winterzonnewende op de fiets was memorabel!

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Prepare for That Stupid World

You probably heard about the Wall Street Journal story where they had a snack-vending machine run by a chatbot created by Anthropic.

At first glance, it is funny and it looks like journalists doing their job criticising the AI industry. If you are curious, the video is there (requires JS).

• We Let AI Run Our Office Vending Machine. It Lost Hundreds of Dollars.(www.wsj.com)

But what appears to be journalism is, in fact, pure advertising. For both WSJ and Anthropic. Look at how WSJ journalists are presented as "world class", how no-subtle the Anthropic guy is when telling them they are the best and how the journalist blush at it. If you are taking the story at face value, you are failing for the trap which is simple: "AI is not really good but funny, we must improve it."

The first thing that blew my mind was how stupid the whole idea is. Think for one second. One full second. Why do you ever want to add a chatbot to a snack vending machine? The video states it clearly: the vending machine must be stocked by humans. Customers must order and take their snack by themselves. The AI has no value at all.

Automated snack vending machine is a solved problem since nearly a century. Why do you want to make your vending machine more expensive, more error-prone, more fragile and less efficient for your customers?

What this video is really doing is normalising the fact that "even if it is completely stupid, AI will be everywhere, get used to it!"

The Anthropic guy himself doesn’t seem to believe his own lies, to the point of making me uncomfortable. Toward the ends, he even tries to warn us: "Claude AI could run your business but you don’t want to come one day and see you have been locked out." At which the journalist adds, "Or has ordered 100 PlayStations."

And then he gives up:

"Well, the best you can do is probably prepare for that world."

None of the world class journalists seemed to care. They are probably too badly paid for that. I was astonished to see how proud they were, having spent literally hours chatting with a bot just to get a free coke, even queuing for the privilege of having a free coke. A coke that cost a few minutes of minimum-wage work.

So the whole thing is advertising a world where chatbots will be everywhere and where world-class workers will do long queue just to get a free soda.

And the best advice about it is that you should probably prepare for that world.

Over the years, I've built dozens of small, site-specific Drupal modules. None of them live on Drupal.org.

It makes me wonder: how many modules like that exist across the Drupal ecosystem? I'm guessing a lot.

For example, I recently open-sourced the content of this blog by exporting my posts as Markdown files and publishing them on GitHub. To do that, I built two custom Drupal modules with Claude Code: one that converts HTML to Markdown, and another that exports content as YAML with Markdown.

Both modules embed architectural choices and algorithms I explicitly described to Claude Code. Both have unit tests and have been used in production. But both only work for my site.

They're built around my specific content model and field names. For example, my export module expects fields like field_summary and field_image to exist. I'd love to contribute them to Drupal.org, but turning site-specific code into something reusable can be a lot of work.

On Drupal.org, contributed modules are expected to work for everyone. That means abstracting away my content model, adding configuration options I'll never use, handling edge cases I'll never hit, and documenting setups I haven't tested.

There is a "generalization tax": the cost of making code flexible enough for every possible site. Drupal has always had a strong culture of contribution, but this tax has kept a lot of useful code private. My blog alone has ten custom modules that will probably never make it to Drupal.org under the current model.

Generalization work is extremely valuable, and the maintainers who do it deserve a lot of credit. But it can be a high bar, and a lot of useful code never clears it.

That made me wonder: what if we had a different category of contributed code on Drupal.org?

Let's call them "adaptable modules", though the name matters less than the idea.

The concept is simple: tested, working code that solves a real problem for a real site, shared explicitly as a starting point. You don't install these modules. You certainly don't expect them to work out of the box. Instead, an AI adapts the code for you by reading it and understanding the design decisions embedded in it. Or a human can do the same.

In practice, that might mean pointing Claude Code at my Markdown export module and prompting: "I need something like this, but my site uses Paragraphs instead of a regular Body field". Or: "I store images in a media field instead of an image field". The AI reads the code, understands the approach, and generates a version tailored to your setup.

This workflow made less sense when humans had to do all the adaptation. But AI changes the economics. AI is good at reading code, understanding what it does, and reshaping it for a new context. The mechanical work of adaptation is becoming both cheap and reliable.

What matters are the design decisions embedded in the code: the architecture, the algorithms, the trade-offs. Those came from me, a human. They are worth sharing, even if AI handles the mechanical adaptation.

This aligns with where engineering is heading. As developers, we'll spend less time on syntax and boilerplate, and more time on understanding problems, making architectural choices, and weighing trade-offs. Our craft is shifting from writing code to shaping code. And orchestrating the AI agents that writes it. Adaptable modules fit that future.

Modules that work for everyone are still important. Drupal's success will always depend on them. But maybe they're not the only kind worth sharing. The traditional contribution model, generalizing everything for everyone, makes less sense for smaller utility modules when AI can generate context-specific code on demand.

Opinionated, site-specific modules have always lived in private repositories. What is new is that AI makes them worth sharing. Code that only works for my site becomes a useful starting point when AI can adapt it to yours.

I created an issue on Drupal.org to explore this further. I'd love to hear what you think.

(Thanks to phenaproxima, Tim Lehnen, Gábor Hojtsy and Wim Leers for reviewing my draft.)

If you've worked with storage systems, you know RAID: redundant arrays of independent disks. RAID doesn't try to make individual disks more reliable. It accepts that disks fail and designs around it.

I recently open-sourced my blog content by automatically exporting it as Markdown to GitHub. GitHub might outlive me, but it probably won't be around in 100 years either. No one really knows.

That raises a simple question: where should content live if you want it to last decades, maybe centuries?

I don't have the answer, but I know it matters well beyond my blog. We are the first generation to create digital content, and we are not very good at preserving what we create. Studies of link rot consistently show that large portions of the web disappear within just a few years.

Every time you publish something online, you're trusting a stack: the file format, the storage medium, the content management system, the organization running the service, the economic model keeping them running. When any layer fails, your content is gone.

So my plan is to slowly build a "digital preservation RAID" across several platforms: GitHub, the Internet Archive, IPFS, and blockchain-based storage like Filecoin or Arweave. If one disappears, the others might remain.

Each option has different trade-offs and failure modes. GitHub has corporate risk because Microsoft owns it, and one day their priorities might change. The Internet Archive depends on non-profit funding and has faced costly legal battles. IPFS requires someone to actively "pin" your content – if no one cares enough to host it, it disappears. Blockchain-based solutions let you pay once for permanent storage, but the economic models are unproven and I'm not a fan of their climate impact.

If I had to bet on a single option, it would be the Internet Archive. They've been doing some pretty heroic work the past 25 years. GitHub feels durable but archiving old blog posts will never be Microsoft's priority. IPFS, Filecoin, and Arweave are fascinating technical experiments, but I wouldn't rely on them alone.

But the point is not to pick a winner. It is to accept failure as inevitable and design around it, and to keep doing that as the world changes and better preservation tools emerge.

The cost of loss isn't just data. It is the ability to learn from what came before. That feels like a responsibility worth exploring.

How We Lost Communication to Entertainment

All our communication channels are morphed into content distribution networks. We are more and more entertained but less and less connected.

A few days ago, I did a controversial blog post about Pixelfed hurting the Fediverse. I defended the theory that, in a communication network, you hurt the trust in the whole network if you create clients that arbitrarily drop messages, something that Pixelfed is doing deliberately. It gathered a lot of reactions.

• Is Pixelfed sawing off the branch that the Fediverse is sitting on? (ploum.net)

When I originally wrote this post, nearly one year ago, I thought that either I was missing something or Dansup, Pixelfed’s creator, was missing it. We could not both be right. But as the reactions piled in on the Fediverse, I realised that such irreconcilable opinions do not arise only from ignorance or oversight. It usually means that both parties have vastly different assumptions about the world. They don’t live in the same world.

Two incompatible universes

I started to see a pattern in the two kinds of reactions to my blog post.

There were people like me, often above 40, who like sending emails and browsing old-fashioned websites. We think of ActivityPub as a "communication protocol" between humans. As such, anything that implies losing messages without feedback is the worst thing that could happen. Not losing messages is the top priority of a communication protocol.

And then there are people like Dansup, who believe that ActivityPub is a content consumption protocol. It’s there for entertainment. You create as many accounts as the kinds of media you want to consume. Dansup himself is communicating through a Mastodon account, not a Pixelfed one. Many Pixelfed users also have a Mastodon account, and they never questioned that. They actually want multiple accounts for different use cases.

On the Fediverse threads, nearly all the people defending the Pixelfed philosophy posted from Mastodon accounts. They usually boasted about having both a Mastodon and a Pixelfed account.

A multiplicity of accounts

To me, the very goal of interoperability is not to force you into creating multiple accounts. Big Monopolies have managed to convince people that they need one account on each platform. This was done, on purpose, for purely unethical reasons in order to keep users captive.

That brainwash/marketing is so deeply entrenched that most people cannot see an alternative anymore. It looks like a natural law: you need an account on a platform to communicate with someone on that platform. That also explains why most politicians want to "regulate" Facebook or X. They think it is impossible not to be on those platforms. They believe those platforms are "public spaces" while they truly are "private spaces trying to destroy all other public spaces in order to get a monopoly."

People flock to the Fediverse with this philosophy of "one platform, one account", which makes no sense if you truly want to create a federated communication protocol like email or XMPP.

But Manuel Moreale cracked it for me: the Fediverse is not a communication network. ActivityPub is not a communication protocol. The spec says it: ActivityPub is a protocol to build a "social platform" whose goal is "to deliver content."

The ActivityPub protocol is a decentralised social networking protocol based upon the ActivityStreams 2.0 data format. It provides a client to server API for creating, updating and deleting content, as well as a federated server-to-server API for delivering notifications and content. (official W3C definition of ActivityPub)

• On open protocols (manuelmoreale.com)

No more communication

But aren’t social networks also communication networks? That’s what I thought. That’s how they historically were marketed. That’s what we all believed during the "Arab Spring."

But that was a lie. Communication networks are not profitable. Social networks are entertainment platforms, media consumption protocols. Historically, they disguised themselves as communication platforms to attract users and keep them captive.

The point was never to avoid missing a message sent from a fellow human being. The point was always to fill your time with "content."

We dreamed of decentralised social networks as "email 2.0." They truly are "television 2.0."

They are entertainment platforms that delegate media creation to the users themselves the same way Uber replaced taxis by having people drive others in their own car.

But what was created as "ride-sharing" was in fact a way to 1) destroy competition and 2) make a shittier service while people producing the work were paid less and lost labour rights. It was never about the social!

The lost messages

My own interpretation is that social media users don’t mind losing messages because they were raised on algorithmic platforms that did that all the time. They don’t see the point in trusting a platform because they never experienced a trusted means of communication.

• Facebook m’a rendu injoignable (ploum.net)

Now that I write it, it may also explain why instant messaging became the dominant communication medium: because if you don’t receive an immediate answer, you don’t even trust the recipient to have received your messages. In fact, even if the message was received, you don’t even trust the recipient's attention span to remember the message.

Multiple studies have confirmed that we don’t remember the vast majority of what we see while doomscrolling. While the "view" was registered to increase statistics, we don’t have the slightest memory of most of that content, even after only a few seconds. It thus makes sense not to consider social media as a means of communication at all.

There’s no need for a reliable communication protocol if we assume that human brains are not reliable enough to handle asynchronous messages.

• A Society That Lost Focus (ploum.net)

It’s not Dansup who is missing something. It is me who is unadapted to the current society. I understand now that Pixelfed was only following some design decisions and protocol abuses fathered by Mastodon. Pixelfed was my own "gotcha" moment because I never understood Instagram in the first place, and, in my eyes, Pixelfed was no better. But if you take that route, Mastodon is no better than Twitter.

Many reactions pointed, justly, that other Fediverse tools such as PeerTube, WriteFreely, or Mobilizon were just not displaying messages at all.

I didn’t consider it a big problem because they never pretended to do it in the first place. Nobody uses those tools to follow others. There’s no expectation. Those platforms are "publish only." But this is still a big flaw in the Fediverse! Someone could, using autocompletion, send a message pinging your PeerTube address and you will never see it. Try autocomplete "@ploum" from your Mastodon account and guess which suggestion is the only one that will send me a valid notification!

On a more positive note, I should give credit to Dansup for announcing that Pixelfed will soon allow people to optionally "not drop" text messages.

How we lost email

I cling to asynchronous reliable communications, but those are disappearing. I use email a lot because I see it as a true means of communication: reliable, asynchronous, decentralised, standardised, manageable offline with my own tools. But many people, even barely younger than me, tell me that email is "too formal" or "for old people" or "even worse than social network feeds."

And they are probably right. I like it because I’ve learned to use it. I apply a strong inbox 0 methodology. If I don’t reply or act on your email, it is because I decided not to. I’m actively keeping my inbox clean by sharing only disposable email addresses that I disable once they start to be spammed.

• Why you are probably not at inbox 0 (but should be) (ploum.net)

But for most people, their email inbox is simply one more feed full of bad advertising. They have 4 or 5 digit unread count. They scroll through their inbox like they do through their social media feeds.

Boringness of communications

The main problem with reliable communication protocols? It is a mostly solved problem. Build simple websites, read RSS feeds, write emails. Use IRC and XMPP if you truly want real-time communication. Those are working and working great.

And because of that, they are boring.

Communications protocols are boring. They don’t give you that well-studied random hit of dopamine. They don’t make you addicted.

• On Social Media (gem.sdf.org)
• Experiential Pica (www.lesswrong.com)

They don’t make you addicted which means they are not hugely profitable and thus are not advertised. They are not new. They are not as shiny as a new app or a new random chatbot.

The problem with communication protocols was never the protocol part. It’s the communication part. A few sad humans never wanted to communicate in the first place and managed to become billionaires by convincing the rest of mankind that being entertained is better than communicating with other humans.

As long as I’m not alone

We believe that a communication network must reach a critical mass to be really useful. People stay on Facebook to "stay in touch with the majority." I don’t believe that lie anymore. I’m falling back to good old mailing lists. I’m reading the Web and Gemini while offline through Offpunk. I also handle my emails asynchronously while offline.

• Offpunk, an offline-first command-line browser (offpunk.net)
• There Is No Content on Gemini (ploum.net)

I may be part of an endangered species.

It doesn’t matter. I made peace with the fact that I will never get in touch with everyone. As long as there are people posting on their gemlogs or blogs with RSS feeds, as long as there are people willing to read my emails without automatically summarising them, there will be a place for those who want to simply communicate. A protected reserve.

You are welcome to join!

• Illustration of a message board piled with messages by David Revoy (CC By 4.0)
• Illustration of animal meeting at an intersection with messages by David Revoy (CC By 4.0)

Today marks exactly 25 years since I registered amedee.be. On 12 December 2000, at 17:15 CET, my own domain officially entered the world. It feels like a different era: an internet of static pages, squealing dial-up modems, and websites you assembled yourself with HTML, stubbornness, and whatever tools you could scrape together.

I had websites before that—my first one must have been around 1996, hosted on university servers or one of those free hosting platforms that have long since disappeared. There is no trace of those early experiments, and that’s probably for the best. Frames, animated GIFs, questionable colour schemes… it was all part of the charm.

But amedee.be was the moment I claimed a place on the internet that was truly mine. And not just a website: from the very beginning, I also used the domain for email, which added a level of permanence and identity that those free services never could.

Over the past 25 years, I have used more content management systems than I can easily list. I started with plain static HTML. Then came a parade of platforms that now feel almost archaeological: self-written Perl scripts, TikiWiki, XOOPS, Drupal… and eventually WordPress, where the site still lives today. I’m probably forgetting a few—experience tends to blur after a quarter century online.

Not all of that content survived. I’ve lost plenty along the way: server crashes, rushed or ill-planned CMS migrations, and the occasional period of heroic under-backing-up. I hope I’ve learned something from each of those episodes. Fortunately, parts of the site’s history can still be explored through the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive—a kind of external memory for the things I didn’t manage to preserve myself.

The hosting story is just as varied. The site spent many years at Hetzner, had a period on AWS, and has been running on DigitalOcean for about a year now. I’m sure there were other stops in between—ones I may have forgotten for good reasons.

What has remained constant is this: amedee.be is my space to write, tinker, and occasionally publish something that turns out useful for someone else. A digital layer of 25 years is nothing to take lightly. It feels a bit like personal archaeology—still growing with each passing year.

Here’s to the next 25 years. I’m curious which tools, platforms, ideas, and inevitable mishaps I’ll encounter along the way. One thing is certain: as long as the internet exists, I’ll be here somewhere.

L’autocomplétion de nos intentions

Lorsque j’ai commencé à utiliser mon premier smartphone, en 2012, j’utilisais évidemment le clavier fourni par défaut qui proposait de l’autocomplétion.

Il ne m’a fallu que quelques jours pour être profondément choqué. L’autocomplétion proposait des mots qui convenaient parfaitement, mais qui n’étaient pas ceux que j’avais en tête. En acceptant une autocomplétion par désir d’économiser quelques pressions de doigts, je me retrouvais avec une phrase différente de ce que j’avais initialement envisagé. Je modifiais le cours de ma pensée pour m’adapter à l’algorithme !

C’était choquant !

Moi qui étais passé au Bépo quelques années plus tôt et qui avais découvert les puissances de la dactylographie pour affiner mes idées, je ne pouvais imaginer laisser une machine me dicter ma pensée, même pour un texte aussi mondain qu’un SMS. Je me suis donc mis en quête d’un clavier optimisé pour usage sur un écran tactile minuscule, mais sans autocomplétion. J’ai trouvé MessagEase, que j’ai utilisé pendant des années avant de passer à ThumbKey, version libre du précédent.

• Le bépo sur le bout des doigts (ploum.net)
• Writing on a smartphone: review of 8pen and MessagEase (ploum.net)
• dessalines/thumb-key: A privacy-conscious Android keyboard made for your thumbs (github.com)

Le choc fut encore plus violent lorsqu’apparurent les suggestions de réponses aux emails dans l’interface Gmail. Ma première expérience avec ce système fut de me voir proposer plusieurs manières de répondre par l’affirmative à un email professionnel auquel je voulais répondre négativement. Avec horreur, je perçus en moi un vague instinct de cliquer pour me débarrasser plus vite de cet email corvée.

Cette expérience m’inspira la nouvelle « Les imposteurs », lisible dans le recueil « Stagiaire au spatioport Omega 3000 et autres joyeusetés que nous réserve le futur » (qui est justement disponible à -50% jusqu’au 15 décembre ou à prix normal, mais sans frais de port chez votre libraire).

• Stagiaire au spatioport Omega 3000 à -50% (pvh-editions.com)

L’autocomplétion manipule notre intention, cela ne fait aucun doute. Et s’il y a bien quelque chose que je souhaite préserver chez moi, c’est mon cerveau et mes idées. Comme un footballeur préserve ses jambes, comme un pianiste préserve ses mains, je chéris et protège mon cerveau et mon libre arbitre. Au point de ne jamais boire d’alcool, de ne jamais consommer la moindre drogue : je ne veux pas altérer mes perceptions, mais, au contraire, les affiner.

Mon cerveau est ce que j’ai de plus précieux, l’autocomplétion même la plus basique est une atteinte directe à mon libre arbitre.

• The reason why i don't use AI or even code completion (unixdigest.com)

Mais, avec les chatbots, c’est désormais une véritable économie de l’intention qui se met en place. Car si les prochaines versions de ChatGPT ne sont pas meilleures à répondre à vos questions, elles seront meilleures à les prédire.

Non pas à cause de pouvoir de divination ou de télépathie. Mais parce qu’elles vous auront influencé pour vous amener dans la direction qu’elles auront choisie, à savoir la plus profitable.

• Des marchands d’attention aux architectes de l’intention (danslesalgorithmes.net)

Une partie de l’intérêt disproportionné que les politiciens et les CEOs portent aux chatbots vient clairement de leur incompétence voire de leur bêtise. Leur métier étant de dire ce que l’audience veut entendre, même si cela n’a aucun sens, ils sont sincèrement étonnés de voir une machine être capable de les remplacer. Et ils sont le plus souvent incapables de percevoir que tout le monde n’est pas comme eux, que tout le monde ne fait pas semblant de comprendre à longueur de journée, que tout le monde n’est pas Julius.

• Mon collègue Julius (ploum.net)

Mais, chez les plus retors et les plus intelligents, une partie de cet intérêt peut également s’expliquer par le potentiel de manipulation des foules. Là où Facebook et TikTok ont ponctuellement influencé des élections majeures grâce à des mouvements de foule virtuels, une ubiquité de ChatGPT et consorts permet un contrôle total sur les pensées les plus intimes de tous les utilisateurs.

Après tout, j’ai bien entendu dans l’épicerie de mon quartier une femme se vanter auprès d’une amie d’utiliser ChatGPT comme conseiller pour ses relations amoureuses. À partir de là, il est trivial de modifier le code pour faire en sorte que les femmes soient plus dociles, plus enclines à sacrifier leurs aspirations personnelles pour celles de leur conjoint, de pondre plus d’enfants et de les éduquer selon les préceptes ChatGPTesques.

Contrairement au fait de résoudre les « hallucinations », problème insoluble, car les Chatbots n’ont pas de notion de vérité épistémologique, introduire des biais est trivial. En fait, il a été démontré plusieurs fois que ces biais existent déjà. C’est juste que nous avons naïvement supposé qu’ils étaient involontaires, mécaniques.

Alors qu’ils sont un formidable produit à vendre à tous les apprentis dictateurs. Un produit certainement rentable et pas très éloigné du ciblage publicitaire que vendent déjà Facebook et Google.

Un produit qui apparaît comme parfaitement éthique, approprié et même bénéfique à l’humanité. Du moins si on se fie à ce que nous répondra ChatGPT. Qui confirmera d’ailleurs son propos en pointant vers plusieurs articles scientifiques. Rédigés avec son aide.

Fuck, ik word volgende week 57! Eigenlijk heb ik daar best vrede mee, net als met mijn kalend hoofd. Maar anderzijds stellen mensen zich af en toe de vraag wie ze zijn en ook daar ben ik geen uitzondering op. Ik ben onder andere…

Source

Mais c’est plus joli !

La nouvelle version de votre site web est inutilisable, vos emails sont longs et illisibles, vos slides et vos graphiques sont creux. Mais j’entends bien votre argument pour justifier toute cette merde :

C’est plus joli !

On fout tout en l’air pour faire « joli ». Même les icônes des applications sont devenues indistinguables les unes des autres, car « c’est plus joli ».

Le joli nous tue !

R.L. Dane réalise que ce qui lui manque le plus est son ordinateur en noir et blanc. Non pas parce qu’il veut revenir au noir et blanc, mais parce que le fait que certains ordinateurs soient en noir et blanc forçait les designeurs à créer des interfaces lisibles et simples dans toutes les conditions.

• What I Do and Don't Miss About MacOS (rldane.space)

C’est exactement ce que je reproche à tous les sites web modernes et toutes les apps. Les concepteurs devraient être forcés de les utiliser sur un vieil ordinateur ou sur un smartphone un peu ancien. C’est joli si on a justement le dernier smartphone avec les derniers espiogiciels à la mode.

Je conchie le « joli ». Le joli, c’est la déculture totale, c’est Trump qui fout des dorures partout, c’est le règne du kitch et de l’incompétence. Votre outil est joli simplement parce que vous ne savez pas l’utiliser ! Parce que vous avez oublié que des gens compétents peuvent l’utiliser. Le joli s’oppose à la praticité.

Le joli s’oppose au beau.

Le beau est profond, artistique, réfléchi, simple. Le beau requiert une éducation, une difficulté. Un artisan chevronné s’émerveille devant la finesse et la simplicité d’un outil. Le consommateur décérébré lui préfère la version avec des paillettes. Le mélomane apprécie une interprétation dans une salle de concert là où votre enceinte connectée impose un bruit terne et sans relief à tous les passants dans le parc. Le joli rajoute au beau une lettre qui le transforme : le beauf !

Oui, vos logorrhées ChatGPTesques sont beaufs. Vos images générées par Midjourney sont le comble du mauvais goût. Votre chaîne YouTube est effrayante de banalités. Vos podcasts ne sont qu’un comblage d’ennui durant votre jogging. Le énième redesign de votre app n’est que la marque de votre inculture. Vos slides PowerPoint et vos posts LinkedIn sont à la limite du crétinisme clinique.

Thierry Crouzet parle de l’addiction à plaire. Mais même cela est faux. On ne veut pas réellement plaire, juste obéir à des algorithmes pour augmenter notre nombre de followers. On veut un profil qui fait « joli ».

• Dans un monde où tout est faux, pratiquons le headbang (tcrouzet.com)

Contre le rose bonbon kitch, le headbanging. Contre le technofascisme, le technopunk ringard !

• La complainte du technopunk ringard (ploum.net)

Oui, mais, ça marche !

Le joli est un bonbon, une sucrerie. Cela n’a jamais été aussi vrai que sur les réseaux sociaux, une analogie que j’utilise depuis plus d’une décennie.

• Pour une alimentation intellectuelle saine et variée (ploum.net)

Sur son gemlog, Asquare approndit le concept de manière très intéressante : iel suggère que moins les sucreries sont bonnes, plus on en consomme. (oui, c’est sur Gemini, un truc pas joli pour lequel il faut un navigateur dédié et ça n’a rien à voir avec l’IA de Google)

• "Social" Media is Unsatisfying (asquare.srht.site)
• Mon explication du protocole Gemini

Et ça a du sens : si vous mangez un morceau d’un excellent chocolat avec une tasse de thé de qualité, vous n’aurez pas envie d’en prendre 10 morceaux, de vous gaver. À l’inverse, un chocolat industriel donne une légère satisfaction, mais pas suffisante, on en veut toujours plus.

C’est pareil avec les réseaux sociaux : au plus vous scrollez sur des trucs vaguement intéressants, au plus vous continuez. La merde est addictive ! Et au plus il y a du contenu, au plus la qualité moyenne baisse, cela a été démontré.

• Condorcet, les réseaux sociaux et les producteurs de merde (ploum.net)

Ce qui n’est pas sympa pour la merde, car, comme me le signalent de nombreux lecteurs, la merde est un excellent compost pour faire pousser de bonnes choses. Ce n’est pas le cas des réseaux sociaux, qui font surtout pousser le crétinisme et le fascisme.

À l’opposé de cette « jolie merde », si vous êtes abonnés, comme moi, à d’excellents blogs, vous lisez un article et cela vous fait réfléchir. Le carnet de Thierry Crouzet de novembre, par exemple, me fait beaucoup réfléchir. Après l’avoir lu, je n’ai pas envie de papillonner. Je m’arrête, je me pose des questions, j’ai envie d’y penser, mais aussi de le savourer.

• Carnet de Thierry Crouzet, novembre 2025 (tcrouzet.com)

Mais rien ne vaut pour moi la saveur, la beauté d’un bon livre !

L’artisanat derrière la beauté des livres

Je rencontre trop de gens qui me confient aimer beaucoup la lecture, mais n’avoir « plus le temps de lire ». Les mêmes, par contre, sont hyper actifs sur les réseaux sociaux, sur d’infinis groupes Whatsapp ou Discord. C’est comme prétendre n’avoir pas assez faim pour manger ses légumes parce qu’on mange des bonbons toute la journée. Forcément, on a un distributeur dans notre poche ! Et le bonbon n’étant pas vraiment satisfaisant, on reprend un autre… C’est pareil pour certains livres à grand succès produits à la chaîne !

Mais je parlais plus haut du fait qu’apprécier la beauté nécessite la compétence. Les éditions PVH ont justement décidé de se mettre à nu, d’exposer le travail derrière chaque livre pour justifier le prix de l’objet. C’est quelque chose que je remarque : mieux on comprend un travail, au plus on l’apprécie. Cela s’oppose à la nourriture industrielle sous blister qui présuppose de « ne pas savoir comment c’est fait ».

• PVH éditions se met à nu (pvh-editions.com)
• Les frais de fonctionnement de la structure suisse (pvh-editions.com)

Outre ces explications, deux de mes livres sont à -50% jusqu’au 15 décembre. Si vous n’avez pas de librairie près de chez vous, c’est l’occasion de rentabiliser les frais de port (qui ont explosé, merci la poste française).

• Printeurs à -50%
• Stagiaire au spatioport Omega 3000 à -50%
• Opération de Noël : plein de livres à -50%
• Soutenez Ploum, achetez un livre ! (ploum.net)

L’artisanat derrière l’écriture

PVH vient de sortir un roman de fantasy écrit à 10 mains : « Le bastion des dégradés ».

• Le bastion des dégradés (pvh-editions.com)

Julien Hirt, un des co-auteurs et l’auteur de Carcinopolis (que je recommande chaudement si vous n’êtes pas une âme sensible), nous décrit le processus dans un billet passionnant.

Les auteurs sont comme les chats : il est notoirement difficile de leur apprendre à marcher au pas.

• Écrire " Le Bastion des dégradés " (julienhirtauteur.com)

À la lecture du billet, la première chose qui me vient à l’esprit, c’est que je suis impatient de lire ce roman. Ce sont tout·e·s des potes dont j’ai lu au moins un des romans, le mélange doit être ébouriffant !

La seconde chose, c’est que ça donne envie de faire pareil. Je regrette de ne pas vivre en Suisse. Comme dit Julien, la Suisse romande est à la fantasy ce que la Scandinavie est au polar. Mais moi, je suis en Belgique !

Bon, après, j’avoue que déjà je suis plus SF que fantasy, mais écrire dans un cloud en chattant, ce serait très très difficile pour moi. Je serais plutôt du genre à vouloir écrire dans un dépôt git en échangeant sur une mailing-liste. Un peu comme si je développais un logiciel libre. Comme le dit Marcello Vitali-Rosati, l’outil a une énorme influence sur l’écriture.

• Du savoir-faire de la révision d'épreuves à l'abrutissement du suivi de modification de Word (blog.sens-public.org)

Je ferais plus facilement partie d’un collectif geek-SF, dans la mouvance Neal Stephenson/Charlie Stross/Cory Doctorow. Mais, comme le dit très bien Julien, il faut trouver des complémentarités. Les geeks-SF manquent trop souvent de poésie.

Je repousse sans cesse l’écriture de la suite de Printeurs, mais plus j’y pense, plus je crois que ça pourrait être un projet collectif. J’aime beaucoup par exemple « Chroniques d’un crevard », nouvelle issue du Recueil de Nakamoto. Je trouve que l’univers est parfaitement compatible avec celui de Printeurs.

• Le recueil de Nakamoto (pvh-editions.com)

Trouver le beau derrière le joli

Vous voyez le résultat ? Le fait de tenter de consommer de bonnes choses me donne des idées, me donne envie de produire moi-même des choses. J’éprouve de la gratitude envers les gens qui écrivent des choses que j’aime et avec qui je peux échanger « entre êtres humains ». C’est parfois tellement fort que j’ai l’impression d’être dans un âge d’or !

• Un nouvel âge d’or de l’imaginaire ? (ploum.net)

Bon, peut-être un peu trop, car j’ai trop d’idées qui se bousculent, je rencontre trop de gens intéressants. Finalement, la beauté est partout dès qu’on fait l’effort de mettre maintenir le « joli » à distance. S’il n’y avait pas tant de belles choses à découvrir, je pourrais peut-être me consacrer plus à l’écriture…

Sous les jolis pavés, la beauté de la plage !

Is Pixelfed sawing off the branch that the Fediverse is sitting on?

In January 2025, I became aware that there was a real problem with Pixelfed, the "Instagram inspired Fediverse client". The problem is threatening the whole Fediverse. As Pixelfed received a lot of media attention, I choose to wait. In March 2025, I decided that the situation was quieter and wrote an email to Dansup, Pixelfed’s maintainer, with an early draft of this post. Dan’s promptly replied, in a friendly tone. But didn’t want to acknowledge the problem which I’ve confirmed many times with Pixelfed users. I want to bring the debate on the public place. If I’m wrong, I will at least understand why. If Dan is wrong on this very specific issue, we will at least open the debate.

This post will be shared to my Fediverse audience through my @ploum@mamot.fr Mastodon account. But Pixelfed users will not see it. Even if they follow me, even if many people they follow boost it. Instead, they will see a picture of my broken keyboard that I posted a week ago.

• Ploum’s real Fediverse timeline (mamot.fr)

That’s because, despite its name, Pixelfed is NOT a true Fediverse application. It does NOT respect the ActivityPub protocol. Any Pixelfed user following my @ploum@mamot.fr will only see a very small fraction of what I post. They may not see anything from me for months.

But why? Simple! The Pixelfed app has unilaterally decided not to display most Fediverse posts for the arbitrary reason that they do not contain a picture.

This is done on purpose and by design. Pixelfed is designed to mimic Instagram. Displaying text without pictures was deliberately removed from the code (it was possible in previous versions) in order to make the interface prettier.

This is unlike a previous problem where Pixelfed would allow unauthorised users to read private posts from unknowing fediverse users, which was promptly fixed.

• Pixelfed leaks private posts from other Fediverse instances (fokus.cool)

In this case, we are dealing with a conscious design decision by the developers. Being pretty is more important than transmitting messages.

Technically, this means that a Pixelfed user P will think that he follows someone but will miss most of the content. On the opposite, the sender, for example a Mastodon user M, will believe that P has received his message because M follows him.

This is a grave abuse of the protocol: messages are silently dropped. It stands against everything the Fediverse is trying to do: allow users to communicate. My experience with open protocols allows me to say that it is a critical problem and that it cannot be tolerated. Would you settle for a mail provider which silently drop all emails you receive if they contain the letter "P"?

The principle behind a communication protocol is to create trust that messages are transmitted. Those messages could, of course, be filtered by the users but those filters should be manually triggered and always removable. If a message is not delivered, the sender should be notified.

In 2025, I’ve read several articles about people trying the Fediverse but leaving it because "there’s not enough content despites following lot of people". Due to the Pixelfed buzz in January, I’m now wondering: "how many of those people were using Pixelfed and effectively missing most of the Fediverse content?"

The importance of respecting the protocol

I cannot stress enough how important that problem is.

If Pixelfed becomes a significant actor, its position will gravely undermine the ActivityPub protocol to the point of making it meaningless.

Imagine a new client, TextFed, that will never display posts with pictures. That makes as much sense as the opposite. Lots of people, like me, find pictures disturbing and some people cannot see pictures at all. So TextFed makes as much sense as Pixelfed. Once you have TextFed, you realise that TextFed and PixelFed users can follow each other, they can comment on post from Mastodon users, they can exchange private messages but they will never be able to see post from each other.

For any normal users, there’s no real way to understand that they miss some messages. And even if you do, it is very hard to find that the cause is the absence of pictures in them make them "not pretty enough" to Pixelfed developers. Worse of all : some Mastodon posts do contain a picture but are not displayed in Pixelfed. That’s because the picture is from a link preview and was not manually uploaded. Try to explain that to your friends that reluctantly followed you on the Fediverse. Have a look at any Mastodon account and try to guess which posts will we showed to the Pixelfed followers!

That’s not something any normal human is supposed to understand. For Pixelfed users, there’s no way to see they are missing on some content. For Mastodon users, there’s no way to see that some of their audience is missing on some content.

With a broken trust in the protocol, people will revert to create Mastodon accounts to follow Mastodon, Pixelfed accounts to follow Pixelfed and Textfed to follow Textfed. Even if it is not 100% needed, that’s the first intuition. It’s already happening around me: I’ve witnessed multiple people with a Mastodon account creating a Pixelfed account to follow Pixelfed users. They do this naturally because they were used to do that with Twitter and Instagram.

Congratulations, you have successfully broken ActivityPub and, as a result, the whole Fediverse. What Meta was not able to do with Threads, the Fediverse did it to itself. Because it was prettier.

• How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) (ploum.net)

Pixelfed will be forced to comply anyway

Now, imagine for a moment that Pixelfed takes off (which is something I wish for and would be healthy for the Fediverse) and that interactions are strong between Mastodon users and Pixelfed users (also something I wish for). I let you imagine how many bug reports developers will receive about "some posts are not appearing in my followers timeline" or "not appearing in my timeline".

This will result in a heavy pressure for Pixelfed devs to implement text-only messages. They will, at some point, be forced to comply, having eroded trust in the Fediverse for nothing.

Once a major actor in a decentralised network starts to mess with the protocol, there are only two possible outputs: either that actor lose steam or that actor becomes dominant enough to impose its own vision of the protocol. In fact, there’s a third option: the whole protocol becomes irrelevant because nobody trust it anymore.

What if Pixelfed becomes dominant?

But imagine that Pixelfed is now so important that they can stick to their guns and refuse to display text messages.

Well, there’s a simple answer: every other fediverse software will now add an image with every post. Mastodon will probably gain a configurable "default picture to attach to every post so your posts are displayed in Pixelfed".

And now, without having formerly formalised it, the ActivityPub protocol requires every message to have a picture.

That’s how protocol works. It already happened: that’s how all mail clients started to implement the winmail.dat bug.

• The Winmail.dat Syndrome (ploum.net)

Sysadmins handling storage and bandwidth for the Fediverse thank you in advance.

We are not there yet

Fortunately, we are not there yet. Pixelfed is still brand new. It still can go back to displaying every message an end user expect to see when following another Fediverse user.

I stress out that it should be by default, not a hidden setting. Nearly all Pixelfed users I’ve asked were unaware of that problem. They thought that if they follow someone on the Fediverse, they should, by default, see all their public posts.

There’s no negotiation. No warning on the Pixelfed website will be enough. In a federated communication system, filters should be opt-in. If fact, that’s what older versions of Pixelfed were doing.

But, while text messages MUST be displayed by default (MUST as in RFC), they can still be displayed as less important. For example, one could imagine having them smaller or whatever you find pretty as long as it is clear that the message is there. I trust Pixelfed devs to be creative here.

The Fediverse is growing. The Fediverse is working well. The Fediverse is a tool that we urgently need in those trying times. Let’s not saw off the branch on which we stand when we need it the most.

UPDATE: Dansup, Pixelfed Creator, replied the following on Mastodon:

We are working on several major updates, and while I believe that Pixelfed should only show photo posts, that decision should be up to each user, which we are working to support.

• Dansup’s toot (Dec 4th 2025)

• Illustration by David Revoy, CC-By-SA

Or How I Discovered That Fusion Is… Fine, I Guess

Last night I did something new: I went fusion dancing for the first time.
Yes, fusion — that mysterious realm where dancers claim to “just feel the music,” which is usually code for nobody knows what we’re doing but we vibe anyway.
The setting: a church in Ghent.
The vibe: incense-free, spiritually confusing.

Spoiler: it was okay.
Nice to try once. Probably not my new religion.

Before anyone sharpens their pitchforks:
Lene (Kula Dance) did an absolutely brilliant job organizing this.
It was the first fusion event in Ghent, she put her whole heart into it, the vibe was warm and welcoming, and this is not a criticism of her or the atmosphere she created.
This post is purely about my personal dance preferences, which are… highly specific, let’s call it that.

But let’s zoom out. Because at this point I’ve sampled enough dance styles to write my own David Attenborough documentary, except with more sweat and fewer migratory birds.

Below: my completely subjective, highly scientific taxonomy of partner dance communities, observed in their natural habitats.

Balfolk – Home Sweet Home

Balfolk is where I grew up as a dancer — the motherland of flow, warmth, and dancing like you’re collectively auditioning for a Scandinavian fairy tale.

There’s connection, community, live music, soft embraces, swirling mazurkas, and just the right amount of emotional intimacy without anyone pretending to unlock your chakras.

Balfolk people: friendly, grounded, slightly nerdy, and dangerously good at hugs.

Verdict: My natural habitat. My comfort food. My baseline for judging all other styles.

Fusion: A Beautiful Thing That Might Not Be My Thing

Fusion isn’t a dance style — it’s a philosophical suggestion.

“Take everything you’ve ever learned and… improvise.”

Fusion dancers will tell you fusion is everything.
Which, suspiciously, also means it is nothing.

It’s not a style; it’s a choose-your-own-adventure.
You take whatever dance language you know and try to merge it with someone else’s dance language, and pray the resulting dialect is mutually intelligible.

I had a fun evening, truly. It was lovely to see familiar faces, and again: Lene absolutely nailed the organization. Also a big thanks to Corentin for the music!
But for me personally, fusion sometimes has:

• a bit too much freedom
• a bit too little structure
• and a wildly varying “shared vocabulary” depending on who you’re holding

One dance feels like tango in slow motion, the next like zouk without the hair flips, the next like someone attempts tai chi with interpretative enthusiasm. Mostly an exercise in guessing whether your partner is leading, following, improvising, or attempting contemporary contact improv for the first time.

Beautiful when it works. Less so when it doesn’t.
And all of that randomly in a church in Ghent on a weeknight.

Verdict: Fun to try once, but I’m not currently planning my life around it.

Contact Improvisation: Gravity’s Favorite Dance Style

Contact improv deserves its own category because it’s fusion’s feral cousin.

It’s the dance style where everyone pretends it’s totally normal to roll on the floor with strangers while discussing weight sharing and listening with your skin.

Contact improv can be magical — bold, creative, playful, curious, physical, surprising, expressive.
It can also be:

• accidentally elbowing someone in the ribs
• getting pinned under a “creative lift” gone wrong
• wondering why everyone else looks blissful while you’re trying not to faceplant
• ending up in a cuddle pile you did not sign up for

It can exactly be the moment where my brain goes:

“Ah. So this is where my comfort zone ends.”

It’s partnered physics homework.
Sometimes beautiful, sometimes confusing, sometimes suspiciously close to a yoga class that escaped supervision.

I absolutely respect the dancers who dive into weight-sharing, rolling, lifting, sliding, and all that sculptural body-physics magic.
But my personal dance style is:

• musical
• playful
• partner-oriented
• rhythm-based
• and preferably done without accidentally mounting someone like a confused koala

Verdict: Fascinating to try, excellent for body awareness, fascinating to observe, but not my go-to when I just want to dance and not reenact two otters experimenting with buoyancy. Probably not something I’ll ever do weekly.

Contra: The Holy Grail of Joyful Chaos

Contra is basically balfolk after three coffees.
People line up, the caller shouts things, everyone spins, nobody knows who they’re dancing with and nobody cares. It’s wholesome, joyful, fast, structured, musical, social, and somehow everyone becomes instantly attractive while doing it.

Verdict: YES. Inject directly into my bloodstream.

Ceilidh: Same Energy, More Shouting

Ceilidh is what you get when Contra and Guinness have a love child.
It’s rowdy, chaotic, and absolutely nobody takes themselves seriously — not even the guy wearing a kilt with questionable underwear decisions. It’s more shouting, more laughter, more giggling at your own mistakes, and occasionally someone yeeting themselves across the room.

Verdict: Also YES. My natural ecosystem.

Forró: Balfolk, but Warmer

If mazurka went on Erasmus in Brazil and came back with stories of sunshine and hip movement, you’d get Forró.

Close embrace? Check.
Playfulness? Check.
Techniques that look easy until you attempt them and fall over? Check.
I’m convinced I would adore forró.

Verdict: Where are the damn lessons in Ghent? Brussel if we really have to. Asking for a friend. (The friend is me.)

Lindy Hop & West Coast Swing: Fun… But the Vibe?

Both look amazing — great music, athletic energy, dynamic, cool moves, full of personality.
But sometimes the community feels a tiny bit like:

“If you’re not wearing vintage shoes and triple-stepping since birth, who even are you?”

It’s not that the dancers are bad — they’re great.
It’s just… the pretentie.

Verdict: Lovely to watch, less lovely to join.
Still looking for a group without the subtle “audition for fame-school jazz ensemble” energy.

Zouk: The Idea Pot

Zouk dancers move like water. Or like very bendy cats.
It’s sexy, flowy, and full of body isolations that make you reconsider your spine’s architecture.

I’m not planning to become a zouk person, but I am planning to steal their ideas.
Chest isolations?
Head rolls?
Wavy body movements?
Yes please. For flavour. Not for full conversion.

Verdict: Excellent expansion pack, questionable main quest.

Salsa, Bachata & Friends: Respectfully… No

I tried. I really did.
I know people love them.
But the Latin socials generally radiate too much:

• machismo
• perfume
• nightclub energy
• “look at my hips” nationalism
• and questionable gender-role nostalgia

If you love it, great.
If you’re me: no, no, absolutely not, thank you.

Verdict: iew iew nééé.
Fantastic for others. Not for me.

Tango: The Forbidden Fruit

Tango is elegant, intimate, dramatic… and the community is a whole ecosystem on its own.

There are scenes where people dance with poetic tenderness, and scenes where people glare across the room using century-old codified eyebrow signals that might accidentally summon a demon.

I like tango a lot — I just need to find a community that doesn’t feel like I’m intruding on someone’s ancestral mating ritual. And where nobody hisses if your embrace is 3 mm off the sacred norm.

Verdict: Promising, if I find the right humans.

Ballroom: Elegance With a Rulebook Thicker Than a Bible

Ballroom dancers glide across the floor like aristocrats at a diplomatic gala — smooth, flawless, elegant, and somehow always looking like they can hear a string quartet even when Beyoncé is playing.

It’s beautiful. Truly.
Also: terrifying.

Ballroom is the only dance style where I’m convinced the shoes judge you.

Everything is codified — posture, frame, foot angle, when to breathe, how much you’re allowed to look at your partner before the gods of Standard strike you down with a minus-10 penalty.

The dancers?
Immaculate. Shiny. Laser-focused.
Half angel, half geometry teacher.

I admire Ballroom deeply… from a safe distance.

My internal monologue when watching it:
“Gorgeous! Stunning! Very impressive!”
My internal monologue imagining myself doing it:
“Nope. My spine wasn’t built for this. I slouch like a relaxed accordion.”

Verdict: Respect, awe, and zero practical intention of joining.
I love dancing — but I’m not ready to pledge allegiance to the International Order of Perfect Posture.

Ecstatic Dance / 5 Rhythms / Biodanza / Tantric Whatever

Look.
I’m trying to be polite.
But if I wanted to flail around barefoot while being spiritually judged by someone named Moonfeather, I’d just do yoga in the wrong class.

I appreciate the concept of moving freely.
I do not appreciate:

• uninvited aura readings
• unclear boundaries
• workshops that smell like kombucha
• communities where “I feel called to share” takes 20 minutes

And also: what are we doing? Therapy? Dance? Summoning a forest deity?

Verdict: Too much floaty spirituality, not enough actual dancing.
Hard pass.

Conclusion

I’m a simple dancer.
Give me clear structure (contra), playful chaos (ceilidh), heartfelt connection (balfolk), or Brazilian sunshine vibes (forró).

Fusion was fun to try, and I’m genuinely grateful it exists — and grateful to the people like Lene who pour time and energy into creating new dance spaces in Ghent.

But for me personally?
Fusion can stay in the category of “fun experiment,” but I won’t be selling all my worldly possessions to follow the Church of Expressive Improvisation any time soon.
I’ll stay in my natural habitat: balfolk, contra, ceilidh, and anything that combines playfulness, partnership, and structure.

If you see me in a dance hall, assume I’m there for the joy, the flow, and preferably fewer incense-burning hippies.

Still: I’m glad I went.
Trying new things is half the adventure.
Knowing what you like is the other half.

And I’m getting pretty damn good at that.

Amen.
(Fitting, since I wrote this after dancing in a church.)

Don’t Do Snake Oil Writing

In computer security, it is often said that the fact you don’t see any vulnerability in the code you write is no proof that your code is secure. It is proof that you are blind to all the mistakes you made in your shitty code.

The less competent you are, the more confident you will be and the more vulnerable code you will write.

And people will exploit vulnerabilities of your code. Even if you honestly believe in your aptitude, you will end up writing "snake-oil" security systems.

• Schneier on Security (www.schneier.com)

But I’m not a cryptographer. I’m a writer.

When you use an LLM to generate text, the fact that you find the output good doesn’t mean that it is good. It only means that you are blind to the shit you’ve generated.

The simple idea that you think you could get people read your bland generated text and not notice is the proof that you are totally incompetent at writing. You should not trust yourself with that the same way I would never trust myself to check if LLM-generated source code is secure.

Did you really expect nobody to notice that your text was generated? Seriously?

People will notice how stupid your writing is. Some, like myself, will be offended. Other will simply walk away with a bad feeling. One sure is certain: nobody will think it is interesting. Nobody will care about what you wrote. People will simply stop reading you. People will stop sharing you, stop discussing about your writing.

Because you are doing snake-oil writing.

Fortunately, the cure is very simple.

Even if you think that what you produce is bad, be honest, straight. People will notice that you want to improve. Some will even offer advice. You will learn. You will make mistakes, which is an essential part of learning. If you acknowledge those mistakes, people will appreciate your work even more.

Writing secure code is not about magical genius thinking from behind a Guy Fawkes mask. It is about tediously learning patterns of vulnerabilities, about humility that you can’t catch everything alone.

Writing text is not about doing beautiful sentences. It is thinking about the information you really want to transmit. Some really good writers make awful sentences. But they are still good because each sentence gives you something, because you feel information and emotions flowing from the writer to you.

If you are tempted to use an LLM to generate a text, don’t publish the output of the LLM. Publish the prompt! That’s where your information is. It is what people want to hear.

You were tricked into doubting your own ability to write and to use a very costly text generator instead of trusting yourself. This impairs your ability to learn, to improve while insulting all the people that may read you. Like a cocaine addict, you are destroying yourself and destroying your reputation by screaming like a maniac. But you feel good because your brain is altered to believe that "you are better and more productive".

Stop the slop while you can.

If you are holding an MBA and using LLM to generate marketing content, it may be too late. If that’s the case, follow Bill Hicks advice and, please, kill yourself!

• Picture by Jeff Nelson

Nos comptoirs virtuels

La façade d’un grand café parisien. Zoom sur l’enseigne un peu décrépie ornée d’un pouce blanc sur fond de peinture écaillée : « Le Facebook ».

Intérieur bondé. Moyenne d’âge : 55-60 ans. Les murs sont recouverts de publicité. Les clients sont visiblement tous des habitués et alternent entre ballons de rouge et bières.

— Depuis qu’on peut plus fumer, c’est quand même plus pareil.
— Tout ça c’est la faute de communisses sissgenres !
— Les quois ?
— Les sissgenres. C’est un mot qu’y disent pour légaliser la pédophilie.
— Je croyais qu’on disait transse ?
— C’pareil. Enfin, je crois. Un truc de tarlouzes.
— En tout cas, on peut même plus se rouler une clope en paix !

Une voix résonne provenant d’une table voisine :
— Mon petit fils a fait premier au concours de poésie de son lycée.

Toute la salle crie « Bravo ! » et applaudit pendant 3 secondes avant de reprendre les conversations comme si rien ne s’était passé.

Fondu

Une cafétéria aux murs blancs couverts de posters motivationnels dont les images sont très visiblement générées par IA. Les clients portent tous des costumes-cravates ou des tailleurs un peu cheap, mais qui font illusion de loin. Tous consomment du café dans un gobelet en plastique qu’ils remuent légèrement avec une touillette en bois. Un petit pot contient des touillettes usagées sous une inscription « Pour sauver la planète, recyclez vos touillettes ! »

Gros plan sur Armand, visage bien rasé, lunettes, pommettes saillantes. Il a l’air stressé, mais essaie d’en imposer avec son sourire nerveux.

— Depuis que je fréquente « Le Linkedin », mon rendement de conversion client a augmenté de 3% et j’ai été officiellement nommé Marketing Story Customers Deputy Manager. C’est une belle réussite que je dois à mon réseau.

La caméra s’éloigne. On constate que, comme tous les autres clients, il est seul à sa table et en train de parler à un robot qui acquiesce machinalement.

Fondu

L’endroit branché avec des lumières colorées qui clignotent et de la musique tellement à fond que tu ne sais pas passer commande autrement qu’en hurlant. Des néons hyper design dessinent le nom du bar : « Instagram »

Les cocktails coûtent un mois de salaire, sont faits avec des jus de fruits en boîte. De temps en temps, un client fait une crise d’épilepsie, mais tout le monde trouve ça normal. Et puis les murs sont recouverts de posters géants représentant des paysages somptueux.

La barbe de trois jours soigneusement travaillée, Youri-Maxime pointe un poster à sa compagne.
— Cette photo est magnifique, on doit absolument aller là-bas !

Estelle n’a pas 30 ans, mais son visage est gonflé par la chirurgie esthétique. Sans regarder son compagnon, elle répond :
— Excellente idée, on prendra une photo là, je mettrai mon bikini jaune MachinBazar(TM) et je me ferai un maquillage BrolTruc(TM).
— Trop génial, répond le mec sans quitter des yeux son smartphone. Il me tarde de pouvoir partager la photo !

Fondu

Un ancien entrepôt qui a été transformé en loft de luxe. Briques nues, tuyauteries apparentes. Mais c’est intentionnel. Cependant, on sent que l’endroit n’est plus vraiment entretenu. Il y a des la poussière. Des détritus s’accumulent dans un coin. Les toilettes refoulent. Ça pue la merde dans tout le bar.

Au mur, un grand panneau bleu est barré d’un grand X noir. En dessous, on peut lire, à moitié effacé : « Twitter ».

Dans des pulls élimés et des pantalons de velours, une bande d’habitués est assise à une table. Chacun tape frénétiquement sur le clavier repliable de sa tablette.

Une bande de voyous s’approchent. Ils ont des tatouages en forme de croix gammées, d’aigles, de symboles vaguement nordiques. Ils interpellent les habitués.

— Eh, les mecs ! Vous faites quoi ?
— Nous sommes des journalistes, on écrit des articles. Ça fait 15 ans qu’on vient ici pour travailler.
— Et vous écrivez sur quoi ?
— Sur la démocratie, les droits des trans…

Un nazi a violemment donné un coup de batte de baseball sur la table, éclatant les verres des journalistes.

— Euh, enchaine aussitôt un autre journaliste, on écrit surtout sur le grand remplacement, sur les dangers du wokisme.

Le nazi renifle.

— Vous êtes cool les mecs, continuez !

Fondu

Exactement le même entrepôt sauf que cette fois-ci tout est propre. Le panneau, tout nouveau, indique « Bluesky ». Quand on s’approche des murs, on se rend compte qu’ils sont en fait en carton. Il s’agit d’un décor de cinéma !

Il n’y a pas d’habitués, le bar vient d’ouvrir.

— Bienvenue, lance le patron a la foule qui entre. Je sais que vous ne voulez pas rester à côté, car c’est devenu sale et rempli de nazis. Ici, pas de risque. Tout est pareil, mais décentralisé.

La foule pousse un soupir de satisfaction. Un client fronce les sourcils.

— En quoi est-ce décentralisé ? C’est pareil que…

Il n’a pas le temps de finir sa phrase. Le patron a claqué des doigts et deux cerbères sortis de nulle part le poussent dehors.

— C’est décentralisé, continue le patron, et c’est moi qui prends les commandes.
— Chouette, murmure un client. On va pouvoir avoir l’impression de faire un truc nouveau sans rien changer.
— En plus, on peut lui faire confiance, réplique un autre. C’est le patron de l’ancien bar. Il l’a revendu à un nazi et a pris une partie de l’argent pour ouvrir celui-ci.
— Alors, c’est clairement un gage de confiance !

Fondu

Une vielle grange avec de la paille par terre. Il y a des poules, on entend un mouton bêler.

Un type dans une chemise à carreaux élimée appuie sur un vieux thermos pour en tirer de la bouillasse qu’il tend à ses clients.

— C’est du bio issu du commerce équitable, dit-il. Du Honduras. Ou du Nicaragua ? Faut que je vérifie…
— Merci, répond une grande femme aux cheveux mauves d’un côté du crâne, rasés de l’autre côté.

Elle a un énorme piercing dans le nez, une jupe en voilettes, des bas résille troués et des chaussettes aux couleurs du drapeau trans qui lui remontent jusqu’aux genoux. Elle va s’asseoir devant une vieille table en tréteaux sur laquelle un type barbu en t-shirt « FOSDEM 2004 » tape fiévreusement sur le clavier d’un ordinateur Atari qui prend la moitié de la table. Des câbles sortent de partout.

Arrive une vieille dame aux yeux pétillants. Elle s’appuie sur une canne d’une main, tire un cabas à roulettes de l’autre.

— Bonjour tout le monde ! Vous allez bien aujourd’hui ?

Tout le monde répond des trucs différents en même temps, une poule s’affole et s’envole sur la table en caquetant. La vieille dame ouvre son cabas, faisant tomber une pile de livres de la Pléiade, un Guillaume Musso et une botte de poireaux.

— Regardez ce que je nous ai fait ! Une enseigne pour mettre devant le portail.

Elle déplie un ouvrage au crochet de plusieurs mètres de long. Inscrit en lettres de laine aux coloris plus que douteux, on peut vaguement déchiffrer « Mastodon ». Si on penche la tête et qu’on cligne des yeux.

— Bravo ! C’est magnifique ! entonne une cliente.
— Il fallait dire « Fediverse » dit un autre.
— Est-ce que ça ne rend pas l’endroit un peu trop commercial ? Faudrait pas qu’on devienne comme le bar à néon d’en face.
— Ouais, c’est sûr, c’est le risque. Faudrait que les clients d’en face viennent ici, mais sans que ce soit commercial.
— C’est de la laine bio, continue la vieille dame.

Dans l’étable, une vache mugit.

• Photo par Rama

La complainte du technopunk ringard

Certains d’entre vous me lisent en étant abonnés via RSS ou via la newsletter. D’autres tombent par hasard sur certains de mes billets lorsque ceux-ci sont partagés sur des forums ou des réseaux sociaux. Peut-être que ce billet est le premier que vous découvrez de ce blog ! Si c’est le cas, bienvenue !

Mais il existe une troisième catégorie de lecteurs et lectrices : celles et ceux qui, tout simplement, se décident à aller de temps en temps sur ce site pour voir si j’ai publié des articles et si les titres les intéressent.

Étant moi-même accro au RSS, fréquentant des blogueurs qui parlent de leur nombre d’abonnés, de leurs mailings-listes, j’oublie trop souvent que cette simple solution est possible. C’est un lecteur qui me l’a expliqué lors d’une séance de dédicaces :

— Je suis ton blog depuis des années, j’ai presque tout lu depuis au moins 10 ans !
— Ah, génial. Tu es abonné au RSS ?
— Non.
— À la mailing-liste ?
— Non.
— Tu me suis sur Mastodon ?
— Non, je n’utilise pas les réseaux sociaux.
— Comment tu fais alors pour me suivre ?
— Ben, de temps en temps, je me demande si t’as écrit un article et je tape « www.ploum.net » dans la barre de mon navigateur et je rattrape mon retard.
— …

Enfoncé le ploum ! Lorsqu’on est le nez dans le guidon comme moi, on oublie parfois la simplicité, la liberté du web. Influencé malgré moi par une faune linkedinesque de junkies des statistiques, j’oublie trop souvent qu’un billet de blog s’adresse aussi (et même avant tout) à des personnes qui ne me connaissent pas, qui n’ont pas lu tous mes billets depuis 6 mois, qui ne savent pas ce qu’est le protocole Gemini.

Le papillonnage, la sérendipité sont l’essence de l’être humain. Et, cerise sur le gâteau, il est impossible de comptabiliser, de quantifier ce genre de lecteurs. Un usage autrefois normal, mais aujourd’hui incroyablement rebelle et anticapitaliste du web. Un usage technopunk !

La fin des crêtes

Non, je n’ai jamais porté de crête colorée ni de veste à clous. Mais je roule à vélo ! D’ailleurs, mon dernier roman s’intitule « Bikepunk ».

• Bikepunk, le livre
• Et c’est justement le bon moment pour l’acheter !

Dans son livre « L’odyssée du pingouin cannibale », le dandy punk Yann Kerninon fait une analyse intéressante du mouvement punk. Si celui-ci était indéniablement provocant et choquant dans les années 70, il est devenu ensuite la norme. Hurler, baiser et se bourrer la gueule ne sont que des choses normales, divertissantes. Kurt Cobain, héritier du mouvement punk, s’est suicidé lorsqu’il a compris que sa rébellion, son dégoût du système n’était qu’un énième spectacle consolidant le système en question.

La crête colorée n’est plus choquante, au contraire, elle rapportera des likes sur Instagram ! Ce qui devient punk, ce qui choque, c’est d’envoyer chier toutes les métriques, de refuser les diktats (des réseaux) sociaux, d’utiliser un dumbphone, de ne pas être sur Whatsapp, de ne pas être au courant des résultats des matchs de foot ni même du nom de l’émission de télé à la mode.

Essayez et vous verrez que votre entourage vous regardera avec un air d’incompréhension totale. De choc !

Alors que si vous hurlez « No Future » sur une place, je suis sûr que les passants vous filmeront pour récolter des likes.

Le rejet de la mode

La philosophie punk, à la base, c’est le refus total de la mode, de la tendance. Être technopunk, c’est donc se passionner pour les technologies vieilles, ennuyantes, sans budget marketing.

• Prefer boring technology. (itwont.work)

Terence Eden parle de ces technologies ouvertes qui existent en arrière-plan, n’attendant que l’occasion propice pour révéler leur utilité. La radio amateur. Les QR codes, qui ont soudain été popularisés durant la pandémie, parce que soudainement nécessaire.

• Long term technologies, waiting in the background (shkspr.mobi)

Il en est de même selon lui pour le Fediverse : personne ne le remarque encore. Mais il est là et le restera jusqu’au moment où on aura besoin de lui. Le rachat de Twitter aurait pu être ce moment. Cela n’a pas été le cas. C’est pas grave, ce sera pour la prochaine fois.

Car les gens sont des moutons crétins. Celleux partis de Twitter sont allés sur Bluesky juste parce que le marketing prétendait que c’était « décentralisés ». Et puis c’était nouveau tout en étant exactement pareil.

J’avais, à l’époque alerté sur le fait que Bluesky était aussi décentralisé que la cryptomonnaie Ripple : c’est-à-dire pas du tout.

• About Bluesky and Decentralisation (ploum.net)

À ce tarif, Facebook est également décentralisé : ben oui, leur infrastructure repose sur des serveurs redondants décentralisés. Vous croyez que j’exagère ?

Patatas vient de découvrir que l’équipe Bluesky travaille en secret sur des algorithmes pour cacher certaines réponses qui ne plaisent pas.

• Chicken Caesars: they're messing with your Bluesky feed (thedabbler.patatas.ca)

Et comme le dit Patatas, il y a bien des tentatives de créer des solutions indépendantes pour se connecter au réseau BS, mais, premièrement, c’est très compliqué et, deuxièmement, presque personne ne les utilisera et donc c’est comme si elles n’existaient pas.

Je le dis depuis 2023 : Bluesky n’est pas décentralisé et ne peut, par sa conception même, pas l’être. Le protocole AT n’est qu’un écran de fumée pour faire croire aux programmeurs qui ne creusent pas trop que la décentralisation future est crédible. C’est un outil marketing.

Ces technologies qui attendent leur moment

C’est pareil pour le protocole XMPP, qui permet de chatter de manière décentralisée depuis 20 ans. Les gens préfèrent Whatsapp ? Pas grave, XMPP attendra d’être vraiment indispensable. Ou cette mode absurde de passer les salons de discussions sur des technologies propriétaires, y compris pour les communautés Open Source. Slack, Telegram maintenant Discord. La plus-value par rapport à un serveur IRC est à peu près nulle. C’est juste du marketing ! (oui, mais les émojis sont plus jolis… ta gueule !)

C’est aussi pour cela que j’aime tellement le réseau Gemini. C’est littéralement technopunk !

• Gemini, le protocole du slow web (ploum.net)

Quoi ? C’est compliqué ? Faut faire un effort ? C’est pas joli ? C’est élitiste ? Et tu crois qu’entretenir une crête colorée sur le sommet de son crâne, c’est à la portée de tout le monde ? Bien sûr qu’être technopunk ça demande un effort. Tu voudrais que tout soit facile, sans apprendre et joli justement dans l’esthétique à la mode que t’impose un marketeux défoncé ? Mais retourne dans les jupes de Zuckerberg !

Devoir apprendre et pouvoir apprendre sont des éléments indissociables de la low-tech !

• Petit manifeste low-tech (ploum.net)

La ligne de commande, ça aussi c’est punk. C’est pas joli, mais c’est hyper efficace : toute personne qui te voit utiliser ton ordinateur part en hurlant. Tes proches font venir un exorciste.

C’est pas pour rien que j’ai créé un navigateur web et gemini qui fonctionne en ligne de commande. Il s’appelle… Offpunk !

• Offpunk, an offline-first command-line browser (offpunk.net)

Oui, je lis les blogs et le web en ligne de commande. Rien à battre de vos polices de caractères choisies avec amour, de vos mises en pages CSS, de vos javascript pourris. On n’a de toute façon pas les mêmes goûts !

Punk et politique

La philosophie punk, opposition frontale au Thatcherisme, est indissociable de la politique. Et la technologie est complètement politique. Les GAFAM sont désormais complètement fascistes, comme le résume très bien mart-e.

• Les Big Techs avec Trump, et après ? (mart-e.be)

Tu te disais ptêtre parfois que si t’avais vécu sous Pétain en 43, t’aurais été résistant. Ben si tu utilises les GAFAMs parce que plus facile/plus joli/tout le monde le fait/pas le choix, j’ai le regret de t’informer que non. T’es pas du tout résistant. En fait, tu es en train de mettre une affiche « travail - famille - patrie » sur la porte de ta maison. Exactement pour les mêmes raisons que ceux qui l’ont fait à l’époque.

Cyberpunk

C’est pas pour rien que le genre dystopique qui a accompagné l’essor d’Internet s’appelle… Cyberpunk. « Cyberpunk » est également le nom d’un récent essai d’Asma Mhalla qui décrit parfaitement la situation : nous vivons dans une dystopie fasciste avec une idéologie très assumée et si tu n’en ressens pas les effets, c’est juste que t’es pas encore dans les populations visées, que tu te plies bien à tout, que t’as ton petit compte Gmail, Whatsapp, Facebbok et Microsoft pour bien faire comme tout le monde en espérant que ta blancheur de peau, ton hétérosexualité cisgenre et ton compte en banque te permettent de passer entre les gouttes.

T’as essayé de n’avoir aucun de ces comptes ? De ne pas avoir un smartphone Apple ou Android ? Et bien tu verras comme de simples choses comme payer un ticket de bus ou ouvrir un compte en banque sont compliquèes, comme tu deviens un paria pour ne pas simplement obéir aux règles édictées par une poignée de multinationales fascistes !

À propos de cyberpunk, la version audio de mon roman Printeurs est désormais gratuite sur Les Mille Mondes :

• Livres audio de PVH éditions (lesmillemondes.com)

Syfy le décrit comme « encore plus sombre et anticapitaliste » que le Neuromancien de Gibson. Et il est sous licence libre, disponible sur toutes les bonnes plateformes pirates. Parce que Fuck Ze System !

Bon, après, si t’es un bourgeois qui peut se permettre de lâcher une tite pièce, n’hésite pas à le commander chez ton libraire ou sur le site PVH.

• La Ploumerie (pvh-editions.com)
• Soutenez Ploum, achetez un livre ! (ploum.net)

Parce que les livres papiers et les libraires, ça, c’est vraiment hyper technopunk, mon adelphe !

• Illustration de Maluqueer

I use the lightweight Kubernetes K3s on a 3-node Raspberry Pi 4 cluster.

And created a few ansible roles to provision the virtual machines with cloud image with cloud-init and deploy k3s on it.

I updated the roles below to be compatible with the latest Debian release: Debian 13 Trixie.

With this release comes a new movie ;-)

The latest version 1.3.0 is available at: https://github.com/stafwag/ansible-k3s-on-vms

Have fun!

delegated_vm_install 2.1.1

stafwag.delegated_vm_install is available at: https://github.com/stafwag/ansible-role-delegated_vm_install

2.1.1

Changelog

• Added stafwag.libvirt to requirements
• Added stafwag.package_update to requirements

2.1.0

Changelog

• Added Debian 13 template
• Added Debian 13 single node examples
• Updated 3 node example to Debian 13

virt_install_vm 1.2.0

stafwag.virt_install_vm 1.1.0 is available at: https://github.com/stafwag/ansible-role-virt_install_vm

1.2.0

Changelog

• Added Debian 13 template and example
• Set graphics to VNC

qemu_img

stafwag.qemu_img 2.3.3 available at: https://github.com/stafwag/ansible-role-qemu_img

1.2.0

Changelog

• Corrected ansible lint errors
• Updated convert to array
  • Updated conversion to array to be compatible with the latest ansible versions
  • Added debugging

When you move out of a cohousing, you don’t just pack your boxes — you pack your shared life.
And in our case, that meant making an inventory of everything that lived in the house at Van Ooteghem:
Who takes what, what gets sold, and what’s destined for the containerpark.

To keep things organised (and avoid the classic “wait, whose toaster was that again?” discussion), we split the task — each person took care of one room.
I was assigned to the living room.

I made photos of every item, uploaded them to our shared Dropbox folder, and listed them neatly in a Google spreadsheet:
one column for the Dropbox URL, another for the photo itself using the IMAGE() function, like this:

=IMAGE(A2)

When Dropbox meets Google Sheets

Of course, it didn’t work immediately — because Dropbox links don’t point directly to the image.
They point to a webpage that shows a preview. Google Sheets looked at that and shrugged.

A typical Dropbox link looks like this:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/abcd1234efgh5678/photo.jpg?dl=0

So I used a small trick: in my IMAGE() formula, I replaced ?dl=0 with ?raw=1, forcing Dropbox to serve the actual image file.

=IMAGE(SUBSTITUTE(A2, "?dl=0", "?raw=1"))

And suddenly, there they were — tidy little thumbnails, each safely contained within its cell.

Making it fit just right

You can fine-tune how your image appears using the optional second argument of the IMAGE() function:

=IMAGE("https://example.com/image.jpg", mode)

Where:

• 1 – fit to cell (default)
• 2 – stretch (fill the entire cell, may distort)
• 3 – keep original size
• 4 – custom size, e.g. =IMAGE("https://example.com/image.jpg", 4, 50, 50) (sets width and height in pixels)

Resize the row or column if needed to make it look right.

That flexibility means you can keep your spreadsheet clean and consistent — even if your photos come in all sorts of shapes and sizes.

The others tried it too…

My housemates loved the idea and started adding their own photos to the spreadsheet.
Except… they just pasted them in.
It looked great at first — until someone resized a row.
Then the layout turned into an abstract art project, with floating chairs and migrating coffee machines.

The moral of the story: IMAGE() behaves like cell content, while pasted images are wild creatures that roam free across your grid.

Bonus: The Excel version

If you’re more of an Excel person, there’s good news.
Recent versions of Excel 365 also support the IMAGE() function — almost identical to Google Sheets:

=IMAGE("https://www.dropbox.com/s/abcd1234efgh5678/photo.jpg?raw=1", "Fit")

If you’re still using an older version, you’ll need to insert pictures manually and set them to Move and size with cells.
Not quite as elegant, but it gets the job done.

Organised chaos, visual edition

So that’s how our farewell to Van Ooteghem turned into a tech experiment:
a spreadsheet full of URLs, formulas, furniture, and shared memories.

It’s oddly satisfying to scroll through — half practical inventory, half digital scrapbook.
Because even when you’re dismantling a home, there’s still beauty in a good system.

As a long-time Radiohead fan I was happy to see video of their first gig in many years and although did enjoy the set I don’t have the feeling I’m missing out on anything really. Great songs, great musicians but nothing new, nothing really unexpected (not counting a couple of songs that they only very rarely perform live). I watched the vid and then switched to a The Smile live show from 2024…

Source

After days of boxes, labels, and that one mysterious piece of furniture that no one remembers what it belongs to, we can finally say it: we’ve moved! And yes, mostly without casualties (except for a few missing screws).

The most nerve-wracking moment? Without a doubt, moving the piano. It got more attention than any other piece of furniture — and rightfully so. With a mix of brute strength, precision, and a few prayers to the gods of gravity, it’s now proudly standing in the living room.

We’ve also been officially added to the street WhatsApp group — the digital equivalent of the village well, but with emojis. It feels good to get those first friendly waves and “welcome to the neighborhood!” messages.

The house itself is slowly coming together. My IKEA PAX wardrobe is fully assembled, but the BRIMNES bed still exists mostly in theory. For now, I’m camping in style — mattress on the floor. My goal is to build one piece of furniture per day, though that might be slightly ambitious. Help is always welcome — not so much for heavy lifting, but for some body doubling and co-regulation. Just someone to sit nearby, hold a plank, and occasionally say “you’re doing great!”

There are still plenty of (banana) boxes left to unpack, but that’s part of the process. My personal mission: downsizing. Especially the books. But they won’t just be dumped at a thrift store — books are friends, and friends deserve a loving new home.

Technically, things are running quite smoothly already: we’ve got fiber internet from Mobile Vikings, and I set up some Wi-Fi extenders and powerline adapters. Tomorrow, the electrician’s coming to service the air-conditioning units — and while he’s here, I’ll ask him to attach RJ45 connectors to the loose UTP cables that end in the fuse box. That means wired internet soon too — because nothing says “settled adult” like a stable ping.

And then there’s the garden. Not just a tiny patch of green, but a real garden with ancient fruit trees and even a fig tree! We had a garden at the previous house too, but this one definitely feels like the deluxe upgrade. Every day I discover something new that grows, blossoms, or sneakily stings.

Ideas for cozy gatherings are already brewing. One of the first plans: living room concerts — small, warm afternoons or evenings filled with music, tea (one of us has British roots, so yes: milk included, coffee machine not required), and lovely people.

The first one will likely feature Hilde Van Belle, a (bal)folk friend who currently has a Kickstarter running for her first solo album:
Hilde Van Belle – First Solo Album

I already heard her songs at the CaDansa Balfolk Festival, and I could really feel the personal emotions in her music — honest, raw, and full of heart.
You should definitely support her!

The album artwork is created by another (bal)folk friend, Verena, which makes the whole project feel even more connected and personal.

So yes: the piano’s in place, the Wi-Fi works, the garden thrives, the boxes wait patiently, and the teapot is steaming.
We’ve arrived.
Phew. We actually moved.

If you prefer your content/ data not to be used to train LinkedIn’s AI, you can opt out at https://www.linkedin.com/mypreferences/d/settings/data-for-ai-improvement (but only until tomorrow, Nov 3rd?). Crazy that this requires an explicit opt-out by the way, it really should be opt-in (so off by default). More info about this can be found at tweakers.net by the way. Feel free to share…

Source

You know how you can make your bootloader sing a little tune?
Well… what if instead of music, you could make it play Space Invaders?

Yes, that’s a real thing.
It’s called GRUB Invaders, and it runs before your operating system even wakes up.
Because who needs Linux when you can blast aliens straight from your BIOS screen?

From Tunes to Lasers

In a previous post — “Resurrecting My Windows Partition After 4 Years ” —
I fell down a delightful rabbit hole while editing my GRUB configuration.
That’s where I discovered GRUB_INIT_TUNE, spent hours turning my PC speaker into an 80s arcade machine, and learned far more about bootloader acoustics than anyone should.

So naturally, the next logical step was obvious:
if GRUB can play music, surely it can play games too.
Enter: GRUB Invaders.

What the Heck Is GRUB Invaders?

grub-invaders is a multiboot-compliant kernel game — basically, a program that GRUB can launch like it’s an OS.
Except it’s not Linux, not BSD, not anything remotely useful…
it’s a tiny Space Invaders clone that runs on bare metal.

To install it (on Ubuntu or Debian derivatives):

sudo apt install grub-invaders

Then, in GRUB’s boot menu, it’ll show up as GRUB Invaders.
Pick it, hit Enter, and bam! — no kernel, no systemd, just pew-pew-pew.
Your CPU becomes a glorified arcade cabinet.

How It Works

Under the hood, GRUB Invaders is a multiboot kernel image (yep, same format as Linux).
That means GRUB can load it into memory, set up registers, and jump straight into its entry point.

There’s no OS, no drivers — just BIOS interrupts, VGA mode, and a lot of clever 8-bit trickery.
Basically: the game runs in real mode, paints directly to video memory, and uses the keyboard interrupt for controls.
It’s a beautiful reminder that once upon a time, you could build a whole game in a few kilobytes.

Technical Nostalgia

Installed size?

Installed-Size: 30
Size: 8726 bytes

Yes, you read that right: under 9 KB.
That’s less than one PNG icon on your desktop.
Yet it’s fully playable — proof that programmers in the ’80s had sorcery we’ve since forgotten.

The package is ancient but still maintained enough to live in the Ubuntu repositories:

Homepage: http://www.erikyyy.de/invaders/
Maintainer: Debian Games Team
Enhances: grub2-common

So you can still apt install it in 2025, and it just works.

Why Bother?

Because you can.

Because sometimes it’s nice to remember that your bootloader isn’t just a boring chunk of C code parsing configs.
It’s a tiny virtual machine, capable of loading kernels, playing music, and — if you’re feeling chaotic — defending the Earth from pixelated aliens before breakfast.

It’s also a wonderful conversation starter at tech meetups:

“Oh, my GRUB doesn’t just boot Linux. It plays Space Invaders. What does yours do?”

A Note on Shenanigans

Don’t worry — GRUB Invaders doesn’t modify your boot process or mess with your partitions.
It’s launched manually, like any other GRUB entry.
When you’re done, reboot, and you’re back to your normal OS.
Totally safe. (Mostly. Unless you lose track of time blasting aliens.)

TL;DR

• grub-invaders lets you play Space Invaders in GRUB.
• It’s under 9 KB, runs without an OS, and is somehow still in Ubuntu repos.
• Totally useless. Totally delightful.
• Perfect for when you want to flex your inner 8-bit gremlin.

We hebben de sleutels nog niet, maar ik plan toch al een verhuisdag op woensdag 29 oktober. (To be confirmed, maar het komt dichterbij!)

Waar ik hulp bij kan gebruiken

• Bananendozen verhuizen — ik zorg dat het meeste op voorhand is ingepakt.
  Ruwe schatting: zo’n 30 dozen (ik heb ze niet geteld, ik leef graag gevaarlijk).
• Demonteren en verhuizen van meubels:
  • Boekenrek (IKEA KALLAX 5×5)
  • Kleerkast
  • Bed
  • Bureau
• Diepvries verhuizen (van de keuken op het gelijkvloers naar de kelder in het nieuwe huis).

De dozen en meubels staan nu op de 2de verdieping. Ik probeer vooraf al wat dozen naar beneden te sleuren — want trappen, ja.

Assembleren van meubels op het nieuwe adres doen we een andere dag.
Doel van de dag: niet overprikkeld geraken.

Wat ik zelf regel

Ik voorzie een kleine bestelwagen via Dégage autodelen.

Wat ik nog nodig heb

• Een elektrische schroevendraaier (voor het IKEA-spul).
• Handige, stressbestendige mensen met een vleugje organisatietalent.
• Enkele auto’s die over en weer kunnen rijden — zelfs al is het maar voor een paar dozen.
• Emotionele support crew die op tijd kunnen zeggen: “Hey, pauze.”

Praktisch

• Oud adres: Ledeberg
• Nieuw adres: tussen station Gent-Sint-Pieters en de Sterre
• Afstand: ongeveer 4 km
  (Exacte adressen deel ik met de helpers.)

Ik maak een WhatsApp-groep voor coördinatie.

Afsluiter

Verhuisdag Part 1 eindigt met gratis pizza’s.
Want eerlijk: dozen sleuren is zwaar, maar pizza maakt alles beter.

Wil je komen helpen (met spierkracht, auto, gereedschap of goeie vibes)?
Laat iets weten — hoe meer handen, hoe minder stress!

class AbstractCommand : public QObject
{
    Q_OBJECT
public:
    explicit AbstractCommand(QObject* a_parent = nullptr);
    Q_INVOKABLE virtual void execute() = 0;
    virtual bool canExecute() const = 0;
signals:
    void canExecuteChanged( bool a_canExecute );
};

AbstractCommand::AbstractCommand(QObject *a_parent)
    : QObject( a_parent )
{
}

AbstractConfigurableCommand::AbstractConfigurableCommand(QObject *a_parent)
    :   AbstractCommand( a_parent )
    , m_canExecute( false ) { }

bool AbstractConfigurableCommand::canExecute() const
{
    return m_canExecute;
}
void AbstractConfigurableCommand::setCanExecute( bool a_canExecute )
{
    if( a_canExecute != m_canExecute ) {
        m_canExecute = a_canExecute;
        emit canExecuteChanged( m_canExecute );
        emit localCanExecuteChanged( m_canExecute );
    }
}

#include 

#include "CompositeCommand.h"

/*! \brief Constructor for a empty initial composite command */
CompositeCommand::CompositeCommand( QObject *a_parent )
    : AbstractCommand ( a_parent ) {}

/*! \brief Constructor for a list of members */
CompositeCommand::CompositeCommand( QList a_members, QObject *a_parent )
    : AbstractCommand ( a_parent )
{
    foreach (AbstractCommand* member, a_members) {
        registration(member);
        m_members.append( QSharedPointer(member) );
    }
}

/*! \brief Constructor for a list of members */
CompositeCommand::CompositeCommand( QList> a_members, QObject *a_parent )
    : AbstractCommand ( a_parent )
    , m_members ( a_members )
{
    foreach (const QSharedPointer& member, m_members) {
        registration(member.data());
    }
}

/*! \brief Destructor */
CompositeCommand::~CompositeCommand()
{
    foreach (const QSharedPointer& member, m_members) {
        deregistration(member.data());
    }
}

void CompositeCommand::executeAsync()
{
    foreach (const QSharedPointer& member, m_members) {
        member->executeAsync();
    }
}

bool CompositeCommand::canExecute() const
{
    foreach (const QSharedPointer& member, m_members) {
        if (!member->canExecute()) {
            return false;
        }
    }
    return true;
}

/*! \brief When one's canExecute changes */
void CompositeCommand::onCanExecuteChanged( bool a_canExecute )
{
    bool oldstate = !a_canExecute;
    bool newstate = a_canExecute;
    foreach (const QSharedPointer& member, m_members) {
        if ( member.data() != sender() ) {
            oldstate &= member->canExecute();
            newstate &= member->canExecute();
        }
    }

    if (oldstate != newstate) {
        emit canExecuteChanged( newstate );
    }
}

/*! \brief When one's execution completes */
void CompositeCommand::onExecutionCompleted( )
{
    m_completedCount++;

    if ( m_completedCount == m_members.count( ) ) {
        m_completedCount = 0;
        emit executionCompleted();
    }
}


void CompositeCommand::registration( AbstractCommand* a_member )
{
    connect( a_member, &AbstractCommand::canExecuteChanged,
             this, &CompositeCommand::onCanExecuteChanged );
    connect( a_member, &AbstractCommand::executionCompleted,
             this, &CompositeCommand::onExecutionCompleted );
}

void CompositeCommand::deregistration( AbstractCommand* a_member )
{
    disconnect( a_member, &AbstractCommand::canExecuteChanged,
                this, &CompositeCommand::onCanExecuteChanged );
    disconnect( a_member, &AbstractCommand::executionCompleted,
                this, &CompositeCommand::onExecutionCompleted );
}

void CompositeCommand::handleCanExecuteChanged(bool a_oldCanExecute)
{
    bool newCanExecute = canExecute();
    if( a_oldCanExecute != newCanExecute )
    {
        emit canExecuteChanged( newCanExecute );
    }
}

void CompositeCommand::add(AbstractCommand* a_member)
{
    bool oldCanExecute = canExecute();

    QQmlEngine::setObjectOwnership ( a_member, QQmlEngine::CppOwnership );
    m_members.append( QSharedPointer( a_member ) );
    registration ( a_member );

    handleCanExecuteChanged(oldCanExecute);
}

void CompositeCommand::add(const QSharedPointer& a_member)
{
    bool oldCanExecute = canExecute();

    m_members.append( a_member );
    registration ( a_member.data() );

    handleCanExecuteChanged(oldCanExecute);
}

void CompositeCommand::remove(AbstractCommand* a_member)
{
    bool oldCanExecute = canExecute();

    QMutableListIterator > i( m_members );
    while (i.hasNext()) {
        QSharedPointer val = i.next();
        if ( val.data() == a_member) {
            deregistration(val.data());
            i.remove();
        }
    }

    handleCanExecuteChanged(oldCanExecute);
}

void CompositeCommand::remove(const QSharedPointer& a_member)
{
    bool oldCanExecute = canExecute();

    deregistration(a_member.data());
    m_members.removeAll( a_member );

    handleCanExecuteChanged(oldCanExecute);
}

After a few months of maintaining ‘desinformatizia’ We took away their mystery.