The masterwork of Terry A. Davis is his eclectic operating system, TempleOS, which he worked on until his tragic death in 2018. In terms of technical excellence, TempleOS rates well in some respects and poorly in others. For example, it earns the achievement, coveted in OS dev circles, of being self-hosted.1 TempleOS is written in Terry’s own bespoke dialect of…
Drew DeVault
https://drewdevault.com/ · 32 posts · history since 2024 · active
5 Jun
2 Jun
Following up on my earlier announcement that I was forking Vim, I’m happy to announce the first release of my fork today: Vim Classic 8.3.0. I have written a release announcement for vim-classic.org, which you can read here. Happy editing!
20 May
I redesigned my blog! I decided to put some more personality into it this time, after over a decade of the minimalist style. This short post is just an excuse to show up in your feed reader so you can go look at it. Cheers! Also: I’m trying out fedi again. You can find me here: @drew@social.freebitcoin.gay.
15 May
No comment on this PR may mention the following topics: Long-term social or economic impact of LLMs The environmental impact of LLMs Anything to do with the copyright status of LLM output Moral judgements about people who use LLMs We have asked the moderation team to help us enforce these rules. – Add an LLM policy for rust-lang/rust, GitHub
1 May
Back when Copilot first came out, I immediately disliked it. But I decided to give it a fair shake and tried to evaulate it in good faith. I wasn’t interested in paying for it, but they had a form for FOSS community members to apply for a free subscription, so I filled it out and gave it a shot. Once…
21 Apr
Kiwi Farms is a web forum that facilitates the discussion and harassment of online figures and communities. Their targets are often subject to organized group trolling and stalking, as well as doxing and real-life harassment. Kiwi Farms has been tied to the suicides of three people who were victims of harassment by the website. – Wikipedia: Kiwi Farms About three…
19 Apr
15 years ago, on December 11th, 2010, at the bold age of 17, I wrote my first blog post on the wonders of the Windows Phone 7 on Blogspot. I started blogging as a kid at the behest of a family friend at Microsoft, who promised she’d make sure I would become the youngest Microsoft MVP if I started blogging.…
28 Mar
So apparently rsync is slop now. When I heard, I wanted to drop a quick note on my blog to give an alternative: tar. It doesn’t do everything that rsync does, in particular identifying and skipping up-to-date files, but tar + ssh can definitely accomodate the use case of “transmit all of these files over an SSH connection to another…
25 Mar
Vim is important to me. I’m using it to write the words you’re reading right now. In fact, almost every word I have ever committed to posterity, through this blog, in my code, all of the docs I’ve written, emails I’ve sent, and more, almost all of it has passed through Vim. My relationship with the software is intimate, almost…
29 Jan
I’ve gotten a lot of flack throughout my career over my disdain towards test-driven development (TDD). I have met a lot of people who swear by it! And, I have also met a lot of people who insisted that I adopt it, too, often with the implied threat of appealing to my boss if appealing to me didn’t work. The…
12 Jan
As you may recall, circa 2022-2023 I was working on a microkernel written in Hare named Helios. Helios was largely inspired by and modelled after the design of seL4 and was my first major foray into modern OS development that was serious enough to get to a somewhat useful state of functionality, with drives for some real hardware, filesystems, and…
8 Nov 2025
You might have seen an article making the rounds this week, about a young man who ended his life after ChatGPT encouraged him to do so. The chat logs are really upsetting. Someone two degrees removed from me took their life a few weeks ago. A close friend related the story to me, about how this person had approached their…
22 Oct 2025
Some time ago, I noticed some new organization called FUTO popping up here and there. I’m always interested in seeing new organizations that fund open source popping up, and seeing as they claim several notable projects on their roster, I explored their website with interest and gratitude. I was first confused, and then annoyed by what I found. Confused, because…
24 Sept 2025
US politics has been pretty fascist lately. The state is filling up concentration camps, engaging in mass state violence against people on the basis of racialized traits, deporting them to random countries without any respect for habeas corpus, exerting state pressure on the free press to censor speech critical of the current administration, and Trump is openly floating the idea…
17 Sept 2025
In the wake of the largest supply-chain attack in history, the JavaScript community could have a moment of reckoning and decide: never again. As the panic and shame subsides, after compromised developers finish re-provisioning their workstations and rotating their keys, the ecosystem might re-orient itself towards solving the fundamental flaws that allowed this to happen. After all, people have been…
20 Aug 2025
I’ve been on the lookout for a scripting language which can be neatly embedded into Hare programs. Perhaps the obvious candidate is Lua – but I’m not particularly enthusiastic about it. When I was evaluating the landscape of tools which are “like Lua, but not Lua”, I found an interesting contender: Wren. I found that Wren punches far above its…
8 Aug 2025
Last week, Armin and I worked together on the latest release of Himitsu, a “secret storage manager” for Linux. I haven’t blogged about Himitsu since I announced it three years ago, and I thought it would be nice to give you a closer look at the latest release, both for users eager to see the latest features and for those…
30 Jun 2025
Today, we’re looking at two case studies in how to respond when reactionaries appear in your free software community. Exhibit A It is a technical decision. The technical reason is that the security team does not have the bandwidth to provide lifecycle maintenance for multiple X server implementations. Part of the reason for moving X from main to community was…
9 Jun 2025
Tech workers have long resisted the suggestion that we should be organized into unions. The topic is consistently met with a cold reception by tech workers when it is raised, and no big tech workforce is meaningfully organized. This is a fatal mistake – and I don’t mean “fatal” in the figurative sense. Tech workers, it’s time for you to…
5 May 2025
My spouse and I are on vacation in Japan, spending half our time seeing the sights and the other half working remotely and enjoying the experience of living in a different place for a while. To get here, we flew on British Airways from London to Tokyo, and I entertained myself on the long flight by browsing the interactive flight…
20 Apr 2025
As of late, most of us have been reading the news with a sense of anxious trepidation. At least, those of us who read from a position of relative comfort and privilege. Many more read the news with fear. Some of us are already no longer in a position to read the news at all, having become the unfortunate subjects…
4 Apr 2025
I had a fun idea for a small project this weekend, and so I quickly put it together over the couple of days. The result is Price Perspective. Humor me: have you ever bought something, considered the price, and wondered how that price would look to someone else? Someone in the developing world, or a billionaire, or just your friend…
27 Mar 2025
Notice: linkhut has started to use generative AI tools upstream. Consequently, I have withdrawn my endorsement of the project. It must have been at least a year ago that I first noticed linkhut, and its flagship instance at ln.ht, appear on SourceHut, where it immediately caught my attention for its good taste in inspirations. Once upon a time, I had…
17 Mar 2025
This blog post is expressing personal experiences and opinions and doesn’t reflect any official policies of SourceHut. Over the past few months, instead of working on our priorities at SourceHut, I have spent anywhere from 20-100% of my time in any given week mitigating hyper-aggressive LLM crawlers at scale. This isn’t the first time SourceHut has been at the wrong…
13 Feb 2025
I’d like to write about intellectual property in depth, in this first of a series of blog posts on the subject. I’m not a philosopher, but philosophy is the basis of reasonable politics so buckle up for a healthy Friday afternoon serving of it. To understand intellectual property, we must first establish at least a shallow understanding of property generally.…
23 Jan 2025
Good news: it appears that Jack Dorsey’s FOSDEM talk has been cancelled! This is a follow up to two earlier posts, which you can read here: one and two. I say it “appears” so, because there has been no official statement from anyone to that effect. There has also been no communication from staff to the protest organizers, including to…
20 Jan 2025
Update: Dorsey’s talk was cancelled! See the update here. Last week, I wrote to object to Jack Dorsey and his company, Block, Inc., being accepted as main track speakers at FOSDEM, and proposed a protest action in response. FOSDEM issued a statement about our plans on Thursday. Today, I have some updates for you regarding the planned action. I would…
16 Jan 2025
Update: Dorsey’s talk was cancelled! See the update here. Jack Dorsey, former CEO of Twitter, ousted board member of BlueSky, and grifter extraordinaire to the tune of a $5.6B net worth, is giving a keynote at FOSDEM. The FOSDEM keynote stage is one of the biggest platforms in the free software community. Janson is the biggest venue in the event…
25 Sept 2024
In November of last year, I wrote Richard Stallman’s political discourse on sex, which argues that Richard Stallman, the founder of and present-day voting member of the board of directors of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), endorses and advocates for a harmful political agenda which legitimizes adult attraction to minors, consistently defends adults accused of and convicted of sexual crimes…
30 Aug 2024
Ugh. Drew’s blogging about Rust again. – You I promise to be nice. Two years ago, seeing the Rust-for-Linux project starting to get the ball rolling, I wrote “Does Rust belong in the Linux kernel?”, penning a conclusion consistent with Betteridge’s law of headlines. Two years on we have a lot of experience to draw on to see how Rust-for-Linux…
16 Jul 2024
We are living through an interesting moment in source-available software.1 The open source movement has always had, and continues to have, a solid grounding in grassroots programmers building tools for themselves and forming communities around them. Some looming giants brought on large sums of money – Linux, Mozilla, Apache, and so on – and other giants made do without, like…
24 May 2024
I needed a bit of a break from “real work” recently, so I started a new programming project that was low-stakes and purely recreational. On April 21st, I set out to see how much of a Unix-like operating system for x86_64 targets that I could put together in about a month. The result is Bunnix. Not including days I didn’t…