Arwa Mahdawi is right:
'the foreigners we should worry about are not desperate people on small boats, they’re billionaires with rocket ships'!
Elon Musk (and his fellow right wing billionaires) are a real & present danger to our democracy & the sooner our political class stop dismissing this danger (not least because some are on the payroll of the billionaire Right) & get real about joining those defending our rights, the better.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/16/british-democracy-under-threat-elon-musk
Andres Freund will join us for Talking Postgres E31 to discuss "What went wrong (and what went right) with AIO" (Asynchronous I/O). Join live on September 17, 2025 @ 10:00am PT in #talkingpostgres on the Microsoft Open Source Discord.
#Open Source
AI slop
Morning slop: https://hackerone.com/reports/3340109
Closed in minutes. Reporter banned.
I cannot state this clearly enough: David Heinemeier Hanson can go fuck himself right into the sea.
DHH is the antithesis of everything the Ruby community has always stood for, and I am once again begging for the #Rails team to completely cut ties with this shitstain, via a hard fork if necessary.
I will be the *first* to switch my gemfile over to a fascist-free Rails.
@gerrymcgovern Ah, and since this seems to be making the rounds: it's time for my occasional reminder of one especially unpleasant aspect of the LLM hype storm.
LLMs take advantage of a faulty heuristic many (probably most, but don't have exact stats) people have about human intelligence: namely, someone or something that produces fluent and grammatically coherent text about a wide range of topics, on demand, is "intelligent".
This is a very compelling heuristic and also very wrong.
In the case of LLMs, it's wrong in the way we're all talking about here: it leads people to see thinking or reasoning in the statistical word salad these beasties produce.
But it's even more of a problem when people invert the heuristic and turn it into "someone or something is *not* producing fluent text about a wide range of topics, therefore they are *not* intelligent". This mirror-world version causes enormous social harm to people who for whatever reason (autism, selective mutism, etc.) can't speak the way people expect they would be able to "if they were smart".
Some pictures from the lightning talks round we had after lunch.
Join us for an afternoon with more talks and debates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tJYEuIpzch4
Pictures by honkingelephant.com
@pgstef #PostgreSQL Person of the Week interview with Stefan Fercot: https://postgresql.life/post/stefan_fercot/
@floord #PostgreSQL Person of the Week interview with Floor Drees: https://postgresql.life/post/floor_drees/
@intrbiz #PostgreSQL Person of the Week interview with Chris Ellis: https://postgresql.life/post/chris_ellis/
Edco Wallet opening the PGDay Lowlands Warmup #Meetup at Lunatech in #Rotterdam
Floor Drees ( @floord ) doing Social Media at the PGDay Lowlands Warmup #Meetup at Lunatech in #Rotterdam
Josef Machytka ( @JosefMachytka ) presenting a Lightning Talk at the PGDay Lowlands Warmup #Meetup at Lunatech in #Rotterdam
PostgreSQL, Linux, Java, and more. Lover of computers, electronics and Open Source. European. Lib Dem. Lead Technical Strategist nexteam.co.uk