Planet Debian
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Joey Hess: Debian and the sirens
Thirty years ago I became a Debian developer. Twelve years ago I left the project. I left because it seemed that the Debian ship had become too slow to turn, too barnacled with a series of individually OK decisions that each added a little bit of friction and a little less flexability. That made Debian strongly what it is, but prevented it from fruitfully exploring the vast possibility space of what it could be.
Debian will probably resolve today to allow LLM use in Debian development. I'm writing before the vote results
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: corels 0.0.6 on CRAN: Microfix
An updated version of the corels package is now on CRAN! The ‘Certifiably Optimal RulE ListS (Corels)’ learner provides interpretable decision rules with an optimality guarantee—a nice feature which sets it apart in machine learning. You can learn more about corels at its UBC site.
This released fixes an issue discovered on one of the test machines used by Brian Ripley. If and when C
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Otto Kekäläinen: The growing divide between AI hype and software engineering reality
It is widely accepted that there is an AI bubble in the financial markets at the moment. The moderate opinion is however that LLMs are constantly improving and will eventually take over more and more tasks from humans and increase productivity. But are LLMs actually getting smarter, or just better at fooling us?
There is a growing faction of technical experts that argue that LLMs are actually so bad for real progress, that they are banning their use and requiring human-only work to ensure quality and efficient use of humans’ time. A recent ...
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Dirk Eddelbuettel: prrd 0.0.7 at CRAN: Maintenance
A new minor release of prrd arrived at CRAN this morning: the a first release in two and a half years. prrd facilitates the parallel running [of] reverse dependency [checks] when preparing R packages. It is used extensively for releases I make of Rcpp, RcppArmadillo,
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Gunnar Wolf: As far as LLMs go in Debian, I think that 936241857
I believe that, in the context of Debian voting, we are better off when we know the opinion of our peers, however, since the 2022-001 vote, it is no longer the case. Still, some DDs have disclosed the way they are voting on the 2026-002 General Resolution currently in progress, regarding LLM usage in Debian. So, here goes my vote and reasoning as briefly as possibl. This is the ballot I sent to
...devotee, the Debian -
Dirk Eddelbuettel: linl 0.0.6 on CRAN: Maintenance
A new release of our linl package for writing LaTeX letters with (R)markdown is now on CRAN. linl makes it easy to write letters in markdown, with some extra bells and whistles thanks to some cleverness chiefly by Aaron.
This version is mostly maintenance: updates to the continuous integration setup, as well as updates to packaging including use of Authors@R in DESCRIPTION. No functional changes, no new code, or new features.
The NEWS
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Raphaël Hertzog: Debian’s General Resolution on AI and LLM
As a Debian developer, I have had to cast a vote for the General Resolution named LLM usage in Debian (progress report here). This was not an easy task for me…
It’s a good thing that the vote is secret so that people are not scared of voting according to their own beliefs. I have Debian friends on the whole spectrum of opinions that are represented here, and I hesitated twice on sharing my own thoughts for fear
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Ian Jackson: Debian LLM GR - Summary of the options
Debian LLM GR - Summary of the options
Introduction
LLMs have finally made it to the ultimate stage of Debian’s governance processes, a General Resolution of all the project’s full
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Matthew Garrett: Hooking an old magicJack adapter to modern Asterisk
I’m on a VPN setup with several friends that, obviously, includes a VoIP network. I also have an old magicJack adapter and a deep and abiding need to use hardware in ways I should not. There was obvious synergy here.
Plugging in the magicJack gives a USB vendor id of 0x06e6, which belonged to a company called TigerJet who made a range of chips for hooking up phones to computers, either via USB or PCI. Some more digging suggested that it was a 580 part, and someone had conveniently
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Tim Retout: TF RAID
My hobby: following GOV.UK to look for interesting announcements. Today was an update on the MOD’s Rapid AI Delivery Taskforce which was previously announced in June during London Tech Week.
I like this line: “Success is measured in operational advantage delivered, not technology demonstrated.” To me it recalls “Working software is the primary measure of progress” from