Tag: Open Source
There is so much to love and celebrate. Reclaim joy. Be open. Forgive.
Taking stock of myself and the world, I reflect on the overwhelming joy of being alive on this Pale Blue Dot—from the billions keeping civilization running to the unpaid volunteers maintaining curl and OpenSSL—and argue that reclaiming joy is an act of resistance against systems built on scarcity and fear. People are inherently good, and there is always room for grace.
rarelens: building a rare-disease variant triage platform, and the four things I got wrong
An end-to-end rare-disease variant triage platform: a Nextflow pipeline, three execution backends behind one API call, Terraform for two cloud tracks, and a phenotype-driven ranking measured against 10,178 published cases. Including the model metric that collapsed to exactly random once I removed the feature doing all the work.
Games Are Allowed to End
PEAK has had its final major update. That doesn’t mean it is abandonware.
ActivityPub, the Fediverse, the IndieWeb/Open Media Network, and Techno Anarchism = Punk Rock
The premise of this article is that developing or using ActivityPub tools, participating in the Fediverse, publishing to the Indie Web / Open Media Network, and adopting the arsenal of the Techno Anarchist Manifesto are the new punk.
Normalized Fascism in Open Source: $12 Million Given to DHH
Open source has become a safe harbor for far-right politics, from David Heinemeier Hansson's white-nationalist rhetoric and the Omarchy Foundation's $12 million in patron funding to so-called apolitical projects that treat marginalized contributors as political, and why a united boycott of complicit tech companies is our only way forward.
My Switch to KeePass
I have been a satisfied user of online password managers for many years. It is a brilliant invention that enables people to set a unique and hard-to-guess password for every account they have. Recently, I have started using KeePass-based password managers, where I manage my own password database. 1Password 1Password was my first introduction to...
SAD MACHINE
Debian's recent vote to permit genAI contributions, alongside the questions raised by the IndieWeb is Punk manifesto, leads me to reflect on the harm-reduction case, the deskilling of creators, the NFT-like grift of genAI output, and the Potemkin village of an industry that has yet to find profitability.
the art of the block: building an atproto tool for gut-checking your next block
There is a very specific, almost poetic flavor of digital closure that occurs when you go to block someone on social media, only to discover they already beat you to the punch. Enter bsky-mutual-blocks: a lightweight browser client designed to check your Bluesky graph, cross-reference block lists, and reveal when the antipathy across the timeline is 100% reciprocal.
Creating an Open-source Blogging Studies Syllabus
Announcing a new open-source, asynchronous Blogging Studies syllabus that blends writing craft and independent web publishing, built on Codeberg. I trace the decline of free MOOCs, outline my curriculum's anti-capitalist and community-driven pedagogy, and invite contributors and learners to help shape it.
Beyond the 2D Bounding Box: Why Bioimage Deep Learning Is a Completely Different Beast and How BiaPy Tames It
[latexpage]https://github.com/lynchaos/biapy-hubhttps://lynchaos-biapy-hub-app-hlcmfj.streamlit.app/ If you have spent your machine learning career optimizing ResNets or YOLO on ImageNet and COCO, here is an inconvenient truth: standard computer vision has spoiled you. In standard computer vision, a batch is usually an RGB triplet $(B, 3, H, W)$ where $H, W \le 1024$. The pixels are isotropic, the spatial coordinates...
Zuckerberg Is Right About Open, Decentralized AI. He’s Also The Last Person You Should Trust To Deliver It
The reaction to Mark Zuckerberg's 6,500 word AI manifesto, "The Future is for Everyone," has been all over the map. Given the messenger and the topic, there's plenty of reasonable skepticism. 404 Media called it "deranged." TechCrunch pointed out that Zuck's manifesto is "exactly why people don't like AI." But then you have groups like...
The Password Database Is Dead, We just haven't buried it yet.
Modern Digital Identity relies on storing millions of credentials in a central server databases, creating high-value targets for breaches. By shifting the authentication to device-native hardware and ZKPs, we can eliminate database leaks risks entirely.
Self-Hosting my Zotero Library
After the big Pi Server V3 upgrade, I'm now comfortable enough to migrate my Zotero library to my own server and ditch another third-party solution in favour of complete control and essentially limitless storage. You can of course support the great open source Zotero project by buying storage directly from them, which I would wholeheartedly...
Goodbye File Browser, for Real This Time
Yesterday, I published the last planned release of File Browser. It includes a few security fixes and a notice about the wind-down of the project. Alongside it, I announced that this was the last planned release and updated the repository so that it's ready to be archived on September 1st. For many people this came as a surprise. For those who've been following the project from close by, probably not. Either way, I wanted to write a bit about the decision and how we got to this point.
What is Freeq
freeq is an IRC server. It speaks the protocol your 1999 client speaks, and it adds one thing IRC never had: every participant holds a cryptographic key.
Codeberg banned code it can't identify
Codeberg's members voted to ban projects mostly written by AI. They did not explain how anyone is supposed to prove that a project violates the rule.
Open models are decelerationist
people and planet need open models to win
What rebuilding five aging papers from scratch actually proves
A reproducible, cloud-scale reanalysis of five peer-reviewed studies on cellular aging, reprogramming, and rejuvenation, and an honest account of what survived contact with a shared pipeline.
Code For the People
New short documentary (< 20 minutes) via Automattic about Open Source and the Future of the Web. If you're already working in open source there won't be anything new here, and if you're part of the WordPress community you might even wonder if the timing of this has anything to do with the WP Engine...
Open Source American Kei Truck
I'm not a car guy, but I know enough about cars because I live in America and need them to do damn near anything. I know that making a cheap, open source car may be a fools errand but I'm interested. But I'm excited to see Mutiny try.
Life as a Developer Advocate: 6 Months at CodeRabbit
After 6 months as a Developer Advocate at CodeRabbit, I'm sharing what the role actually looks like day-to-day, what I shipped, and lessons learned along the way.
Your identity isn't your username
Your username is a label; your identity is a key you own. atproto splits who you are from what you're called, so you can rename freely, prove who you are with a domain you control, and carry one identity across the apps you use. Part of 'Apps as Views, Not Vaults': the things you make are yours; apps are just the viewers.
Your Agent Deserves Logs
How structured logs helped Codex fix a year-old bug, and why logs are the key to unlocking autonomous workflows.
Tanner Linsley built TanStack to outlive him
Tanner Linsley built TanStack into a thriving open source community. Now he needs to turn it into a sustainable business.
Who actually owns your network?
Every time I moved a community to a new platform, the exit cost members and history. Platforms come and go; the lock-in architecture underneath is why. Part of 'Apps as Views, Not Vaults': the things you make are yours; apps are just the viewers.
W Social and the ancient art of neighbourliness
Good behaviour matters more than good code
Announcing folk.zone: An attempt to build the IndieWeb commons myself.
Announcing folk.zone, a collection of free, community-run internet services I'm building as an IndieWeb commons. Including Mastodon, WriteFreely, Forgejo, Pixelfed, Lemmy, and more. All self-hosted on hardware in my living space. This is infrastructure for the common folk, not for enterprise or scale, inspired by omg.lol and rooted in the IndieWeb and Fediverse principles.
phpBB in 2026
Launched in June 2000, phpBB was, for a long time, a very common sight when using any online community. Today, with the huge rise is sites like Discord and Reddit, and even groups within social media behemoth Facebook, phpBB isn't as common - but it's still going strong. Web profiler BuiltWith tracks over 45,000 websites...
Remove Background Noise from Video Without Re-encoding: An Audio-Only Approach with DeepFilterNet3
A Python CLI tool that strips background noise from any video file using ML denoisers — while copying the video stream byte-for-byte. A 6 GB 4K file processes in minutes instead of hours.
Outsource your GitHub CI to a VPS: cheaper, faster, and a free backup server too
Self-hosted GitHub Actions runners on a small Hetzner VPS cut my CI wall-clock from ~12 minutes to ~3 minutes for about half the price of the GitHub-hosted minutes I was burning. Here's the full setup.
Make links to your blog render the custom "View publication" card + CTA
Short guide. The mechanism is simpler than it looks, and it doesn't involve any /.well-known file or DNS TXT record.
Announcing Fanfiction.lol: A Manifesto on Human Creativity and AO3
I deployed my own AO3 fork called fanfiction.lol, an independent fanfiction archive with no invite queue, fandom-agnostic moderation, and expanded content warnings. A manifesto on why fan communities deserve free infrastructure, the history of transformative works from Virgil to AO3, and the challenges of running a volunteer-powered archive at scale.
Software is changing
Open source maintainers are burning out, AI is flooding repos with plausible-looking garbage, and vulnerability scanners are outpacing human patches. Going closed source isn't the answer.
A Love Letter to Everything
My first IndieWeb Carnival entry—the theme is love letters, and I couldn't pick just one thing. A letter to the infrastructure that holds my corner of the internet together, to the strangers who maintain the open-source tools I depend on every day, and to the IndieWeb friends I've met over the past few months. And finally, to curiosity: the embarrassing willingness to fall in love with a static-site generator or a transit system or a protocol nobody's heard of, which I've come to believe is what kept me alive.
Building with love, and paying for it
How do you fund work people don't want to pay for?
The Future of Science Depends on Open Source Engineers
The processes of modern science, from how research gets funded and conducted to how it gets published, evaluated, and preserved, were never engineered. They emerged over hundreds of years, built by researchers and institutions one workaround at a time. What we call "the scientific system" is really a patchwork of customs, formats, and platforms that were never designed to work together, never stress-tested at scale, and never designed to evolve.
Elio Struyf - Front Matter CMS, Demo Time
Elio Struyf showcases Front Matter CMS for VS Code and Demo Time, his tool for creating flawless presentation demos and talks.
Good, Standard Work: Creating the Commons
A defence of digital stewardship, IndieWeb principles, Blackfoot models of collective flourishing, and what it means to plant seeds in a garden you'll never see. From Garrett Hardin's infamous 1968 essay to Elinor Ostrom's Nobel Prize-winning refutation, the tragedy of the commons was never inevitable. It was always a choice.
One size fits none: let communities build for themselves
How open protocols and agentic development could lead to a whole new generation of social applications.
ATmosphere Conf 2026: the internet built for people, not platforms
370 people in Vancouver, 500 online, all working on the same question: what does the internet look like when users own their data? Highlights from the AT Protocol community conference.
La veille de Wittouck - Fin mars 2026
7 best free open source business intelligence tools right now
The best free (and open source) open source business intelligence tools for startups, compared
hello svelte
migrating and redesigning my oss project
7 best free open source LLM observability tools right now
Compare the best free and open source LLM observability tools, including PostHog, Langfuse, Opik, OpenLLMetry, Phoenix, and Helicone.
Software Harm Reduction
genAI code is now in Python, curl, and systemd. We face an ethical crisis. Slopware means we have two possible responses: absolutism or harm reduction. This moment demands the same principled stand that free software absolutists have taken for decades.
The lore/backstory behing calling my virtual hacker/makerspace "Lairland HQ"
From creating my personal channel initially as #ajhalili2006-lair at Hack Club Slack to my current self-hosting homelab journey