RE: https://econtwitter.net/@TimHarford/116375811993176529

And this is what #LLMs s destroy.

The human joy of just figuring shit out.

Doesn't matter if it's useful now. Someday it could be invaluable. Or it may not.

Like how people studied bees and ants to understand how they decided on the best routes between their homes and their food.

That understanding ended up embodied in how packet routing happens on the internet.

You would not be reading this if people had not studied the social behaviour of ants.

One of my favorite features of the Baochip-1x is the BIO. It's an I/O coprocessor that is based on the PicoRV32, with custom register extensions to allow direct access to GPIOs from the ISA.

Read more about the BIO at this blog post: https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/2026/bio-the-bao-i-o-coprocessor/ I go in-depth into the architecture and its trade-offs relative to the PIO, and conclude by working through a couple of coding examples.

POV: we’re all living on the most beautiful tiny blue dot in the universe… and a handful of greedy nature-wrecking billionaires are ruining it for all of us.

Earth could be the perfect place, with a future that works for everyone, not just a few.

@moses_izumi @elly @justsoup @noisytoot @stilic @weirdtreething (compositor requires at least GLES2 iirc, else it does sw rendering and yes that'll be slow)

@moses_izumi @noisytoot @elly @weirdtreething @justsoup @stilic It could also very well be broken GPU drivers or something

@noisytoot @moses_izumi @elly @justsoup @stilic @weirdtreething Latest GNOME with wayland runs completely fine on HD4000 (while being quite slow on GNOME+X11) so I'm not sure how KDE wayland would run this badly

@moses_izumi @elly @weirdtreething @justsoup @stilic

> The security thing kinda comes down to postmarketOS prioritizing hardware support above all else: for better or worse.

What do you mean by that? Hardware may be our priority but it isn't the *only* priority.

> - packaging more applications for APK, instead of falling back on the Flatpak ecosystem
> [shipping gobs of libraries doesn't make sense on phones, especially if there's no microSD slot]

apk is the main way of getting apps installed in postmarketOS. Many postmarketOS maintainers also maintain a few packages in Alpine aports and some of them are even Alpine developers. Things like the GNOME and KDE stacks have some postmarketOS folks involved. KDE was originally packaged by a postmarketOS developer.

If you feel there's a lack of apps in apk, then the Alpine folks certainly wouldn't mind more people getting involved packaging :)

Unless you're talking about the immutable version, Duranium, which does currently prioritize Flatpak, however it is still in its very early days and much more WIP than "classic" postmarketOS.

> - pairing KDE Plasma with a more lightweight window manager and/or compositor
> [Wayland backend runs like crap on my Intel HD 4000 and UHD 620 laptops]
> [X11 backend is fine, but XFCE is still faster]
> [Discover takes an annoying amount of time to load on my i5-3320M]

We won't alter desktop environments beyond what is officially supported upstream. These are things you can do yourself. You can even use different desktop environments like XFCE4, LXQt, MATE, sway, and plenty more :)

That being said, Plasma Mobile runs quite well on my ancient tablet, which only has 4x Cortex-A9 + Mali400, and that is Wayland-only. I've heard lots of progress towards making KDE more lightweight, and I've been told it can even run on ancient 20 year-old hardware mostly fine.

> - shipping images with a non-UEFI bootloader

80% of device ports ship images without UEFI support, so I'm also not sure what you're talking about, unless maybe you mean the generic-x86_64 device port.

No one has added BIOS to that port yet, you're welcome to step in and do it. But I will say that I'm writing this from a 2011-era laptop booted to postmarketOS over UEFI, so UEFI is not *that* new either (I even have a 2006 MacBook which also supports EFI)

> - providing a dedicated pmbootstrap liveCD
> [as a recovery thing]

There's os-installer for that I think, would that be enough for you? A bunch of other prebuilt x86_64 images are available too which can be used for recovery, though changes are persistent (maybe we could support nonpersistent livecd).

> - making a Wine frontend, just to have one last laugh at the Windows RT and Mobile situations

apk add wine and have some fun ;)

@elly @justsoup @moses_izumi @stilic @weirdtreething also see: OpenBSD (lots of hardening, lots of mitigations, but for what?)

@weirdtreething @elly @justsoup @moses_izumi @stilic A lot of it depends on your threat model though. If you want *good* security for your usecase, you need to understand your threat model. It is useless to harden everywhere if you don't even know what you're protecting from.

@weirdtreething @elly @moses_izumi @justsoup @stilic Yeah I think Aster meant people just installing stock pmOS as-is with no changes anywhere and thinking they're completely secure. Of course if you're concerned and/or know what you're doing, you can harden it yourself somewhat easily. But also, no security is much better than a false sense of security.

@justsoup @weirdtreething @elly @stilic it isn't necessarily unmaintainable?

SECURITY ADVISORY: musl libc up through 1.2.6 (present version) is affected by CVE-2026-40200 affecting qsort with large arrays.

Unless you have a setup with at least tens of terrabytes of virtual memory, this does not affect 64-bit systems, only 32-bit ones. But all users should patch.

https://www.openwall.com/lists/musl/2026/04/10/3

@elly @justsoup @stilic doesn't mean you can't implement it yourself though

@elly @justsoup @stilic it is worth noting however that there are no integrity checks on boot in pmOS right now.

With that being said, I will admit there's one LLM I do use, but it is one that does not waste my VALUABLE time.

It's the STANDARD ed...LLMitor!!!!

$ ed
hi how are you?
?
please rewrite u-boot in python
?
????
?

Assisted-by: My own human brain cells

Assisted-by: My own human brain cells

And no, I am not limiting me mentally by not using AI. In fact, I think quite the opposite. Using LLMs to generate code, or really just having someone else write code, I wouldn't really know much how it all works exactly. Sure, I can study the code and better understand, but if I write it all myself, I then have a *MUCH* better landscape of how it works, I can visualize the overall structure in my head, it all makes sense and the feeling that I know exactly what it does because I wrote it is so good I can't let AI takeover.

Even if everyone around me would use AI, I still will not. Many people around me run Windows or MacOS, yet I'm a Linux user, have been one for years, and will remain a Linux user. The "everyone uses it so I should use it" argument is just worthless. Why use Linux then? Free Software? ActivityPub? IRC/Matrix/XMPP? Wayland? the list goes on

I want to reiterate, there is *NO* way I EVER use LLMs to write code. For me, programming is more than just a task, it's my dream hobby, and I can't afford having it taken by unethical dumb AI bots