@ancoghlan@mastodon.social

Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Aug 04, 2026

Replying to @coderanger@cloudisland.nz

@coderanger@cloudisland.nz Viewing on mobile or desktop? GH are fond of their "actual timestamp on mouse hover" displays, which don't translate well to touchscreens.

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Jul 31, 2026

RE: @bert_hubert@eupolicy.social

I did not expect a wild @gvwilson@mastodon.social to appear while reading this...

eupolicy.social

bert hubert 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇺🇦: "AI: Considerations for people who make decisions.…" - EUpolicy.social - A Mastodon

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Jul 30, 2026

Today in "You must be really confident you won't ever be held liable for that", *Docusign* offered to use AI to summarise the agreement I had been asked to sign. (I declined, naturally)

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Jul 27, 2026

Replying to @benno@eigenmagic.net

@benno@eigenmagic.net @daisy@cloudisland.nz This question assumes we actually read the message before cancelling the alarm.

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Jul 26, 2026

Replying to @glyph@mastodon.social

@glyph@mastodon.social Law, finance, and other fields (including education and certified engineering) have far more well developed notions of "duty of care" than software development in general, let alone FOSS in particular. It's why conduct that isn't technically illegal can still cost people their ability to practice.

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Jul 22, 2026

RE: @CosmicRami@aus.social

I'm planning to head somewhere down Dubbo way with @prophetkristy@dftba.club for this.

aus.social

CosmicRami: "🚨TWO YEARS FROM TODAY! 🚨 TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE OVE…" - Aus.Social

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Jul 22, 2026

Replying to @ancoghlan@mastodon.social

@freakboy3742@cloudisland.nz It does make me wonder if some law firm in some jurisdiction will see if they can spin up a plausible emotional distress class action.

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Jul 22, 2026

Replying to @freakboy3742@cloudisland.nz

@freakboy3742@cloudisland.nz https://thenextweb.com/news/aws-billing-bug-billion-dollar-estimates came up in the "other articles" when I was reading https://thenextweb.com/news/tech-giants-hidden-off-balance-sheet-debt-ai just now

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Jul 21, 2026

Replying to @0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange

@0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange Drawing attention to this is very much appreciated! Up to chapter 14 already :)

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Jul 15, 2026

RE: https://mastodon.social/@mshelton/116920794602281891 Is "bots will be bots" the new "boys will be boys"?

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Jul 05, 2026

Replying to @nedbat@hachyderm.io

@nedbat@hachyderm.io @pfmoore@mastodon.social Because "project" has semantic implications which are not correct in the general case, whereas "virtual environment" is a mere behavioural description in the same sense as "virtual machine" (to contrast them with the underlying "real" runtime environments that Python installations provide by default). Many virtual environments ("how they work") are associated with a specific project ("what they're for"), but far from all of them.

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Jul 05, 2026

Replying to @ellie@ellieayla.net

@ellie@ellieayla.net @grimalkina@mastodon.social Submerged is one I would also recommend.

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Jun 29, 2026

Replying to @nedbat@hachyderm.io

@nedbat@hachyderm.io With type hinting, the cultural difference became a second technical difference (tuple[int] is a 1 entry tuple, you have to write tuple[int, ...] to indicate arbitrary length, but list[int] is inherently arbitrary length and there is no notation for differing types at specific indexes)

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Jun 28, 2026

Boosted by

Furbland's Very Value = 71 Account™ @GroupNebula563@mastodon.social

Replying to @xgranade@wandering.shop

@xgranade@wandering.shop This thread reminded me that the "informed vs implied" consent problem isn't new (since even when followed, robots.txt is an opt-out protocol).

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Jun 06, 2026

Replying to @b0rk@social.jvns.ca

@b0rk@social.jvns.ca Yeah, pretty much. There's an awful lot of documentation and code out there that doesn't describe its minimum version requirements or its platform or configuration limitations, so as soon as you deviate from "I'm running the most extensively used and/or documented version on the most common platform in the most common configuration", both LLMs and regular internet searches will feed you a lot of nonsense, but the LLM output often makes the problem less obvious.

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Jun 06, 2026

Sometimes I wonder how much of my AI skepticism is fuelled by the fact that a decent chunk of $dayjob is getting tools originally written for Linux to play nice with Windows dev environments, so a significant subset of the documented functionality doesn't work (with no written caveats), and plenty of the publicly available example projects don't work either (since they assume execution from a Linux environment, where WSL itself qualifies, but a Windows client to a WSL service doesn't)

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Jun 06, 2026

RE: @arstechnica@mastodon.social

Dare we believe that the mania is abating?

(I almost used "hope" in that sentence, but that's the wrong word for something that's going to be a frickin' mess when it finally happens)

mastodon.social

Ars Technica: "S&P 500 blocks fast SpaceX entry, won’t waive rul…" - Mastodon

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Jun 06, 2026

One of the more irritating elements of "CEO with a vested interest said a thing" "journalism" is when almost the entire article is uncritically rehashing whatever nonsense the CEO is spouting before mentioning in the final paragraph "they have an IPO pending", instead of the headline being "CEO spouts desperate nonsense to try to juice up their IPO" (with the lead paragraph noting that the aim is to reach levels that may satisfy their venture capitalist investors)

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Jun 05, 2026

Having reason to contemplate the differences between "obviously not broken" and "not obviously broken" (this is not an uncommon state of affairs, just especially applicable today).

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Jun 02, 2026

RE: @mkb@mastodon.social

I was familiar with the original, and concur that this is still well worth the watch :)

mastodon.social

mkb: "This is an interesting variation of an amazing #p…" - Mastodon

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Jun 02, 2026

Sometimes applications have features where I am utterly mystified as to the requirements or past history of backwards compatible updates in the face of changing requirements that could have led to the feature existing. Current example: long lived Artifactory API tokens that explicitly *can't* be revoked without deleting the user's entire account (they still have expiry dates, it's just that the user and admins are actively prevented from revoking them early).

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · May 13, 2026

Replying to @xgranade@wandering.shop

@xgranade@wandering.shop @pathunstrom@ngmx.com "Running meaningful surveys is hard, what if we just made shit up instead?"

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · May 13, 2026

Replying to @xgranade@wandering.shop

@xgranade@wandering.shop @mcc@mastodon.social I do wonder at what point the various Android phone manufacturers decide G have gone too far, conclude they can still sell phones without Play et al, and switch to GrapheneOS (or their own hard fork, since these things can never be simple)

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · May 10, 2026

Replying to @glyph@mastodon.social

@glyph@mastodon.social @xgranade@wandering.shop In the default Android client it flips to a "Hide results" button, I hit that, and can then vote.

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · May 10, 2026

Replying to @cratermoon@zirk.us

@cratermoon@zirk.us Yeah, the article structure is very odd in general. That pull quote was the bit that really hurt my brain, though.

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · May 10, 2026

"It’s making developers dramatically more effective, but it’s also introducing security vulnerabilities, increasing technical debt, and producing code that can be difficult to maintain." is one heck of a sentence that appears to be relying on a rather novel definition of the word "effective" to be in any way coherent. (It's a pull quote from https://thenewstack.io/acm-vibe-coding-ai-agent/ that pretty much brought my brain to a juddering halt from the level of cognitive dissonance it implies)

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · May 06, 2026

Replying to @daedalus@eigenmagic.net

@daedalus@eigenmagic.net A rant on that point from a decade ago (not all the specifics aged well, but the underlying thesis still intrigues me): https://blog.gardeviance.org/2016/04/the-robots-are-coming-for-whom-bell.html

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · May 03, 2026

Replying to @joshbressers@infosec.exchange

@joshbressers@infosec.exchange Yeah, I think it's generally a good thing myself (the responsiveness that's desirable for a good SRT isn't reasonable to expect from volunteers, and involving vendor/redistributor employees is one way of addressing that gap). It "just" needs to be done with awareness of the potentially conflicting interests.

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · May 03, 2026

Replying to @joshbressers@infosec.exchange

@joshbressers@infosec.exchange The one case where downstream vendors can still get advance notice? When they're actually directly employing people on the project level security response teams (which is a potentially double edged sword from the project's side, since it means volunteers don't have to do security response without compensation for their time, but risks bringing those dubious corporate incentives you mentioned up to the project level)

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · May 02, 2026

Replying to @Tattie@eldritch.cafe

@Tattie@eldritch.cafe Duff thwack (cricket ball bouncing on the ground, then hitting the bat).

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · May 02, 2026

Random thought: tales of golems often include some kind of motivating script stored in the golem's head. System prompt?

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · May 02, 2026

Replying to @grimalkina@mastodon.social

@grimalkina@mastodon.social Reading this thread reminded me of https://blog.aurynn.com/2015/12/16-contempt-culture/ (about the use of contempt as an in-group/out-group marker, and the assorted problems associated with that)

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Apr 30, 2026

Replying to @hynek@mastodon.social

@hynek @hugovk @davidism I may be tempting fate by mentioning it, but I'm mildly surprised we don't see anyone pointing to the crash bug reproducers we have in CPython's testing folder and saying "security flaws!" (anyone in a position to exploit them is already able to run arbitrary Python code and probably has more interesting code snippets they could be running instead).

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Apr 29, 2026

Replying to @scollovati@sociale.network

@scollovati @mitsuhiko @swheritage I too opened the reply thread to mention https://www.softwareheritage.org/ and not only found it had already been mentioned multiple times, but also that the project had a Mastodon account :)

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Apr 28, 2026

Replying to @hynek@mastodon.social

@hynek@mastodon.social @mwb@fosstodon.org True, interpreting that as a burnout symptom *is* an interpretation rather than a demonstrable fact, but I think it's a defensible one.

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Apr 28, 2026

Replying to @mwb@fosstodon.org

@mwb@fosstodon.org @hynek@mastodon.social Aye, your write-up of why you felt a fork was necessary is excellent, and you seem to have a good idea of what you're letting yourself in for :) It's just frustrating that the overall collective endeavour that is open source still relies so heavily on "maintainer A burns out, maintainers B, C, and D take up the burden" rather than being able to figure out more reliable ways to mitigate the frequency of burnout amongst project founders facing ever increasing user expectations.

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Apr 28, 2026

Replying to @hynek@mastodon.social

@hynek@mastodon.social A pillow/PIL-style long term replacement would also be largely fine at the ecosystem level. But yeah, always mixed feelings around the human implications of maintenance situations deteriorating to the point that wholesale forks seem necessary (and that's before the paranoid part of my brain starts pondering the potential impact on supply chain security concerns).

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Apr 26, 2026

Interesting read from @bert_hubert@eupolicy.social last year on what useful things may be left standing when the LLM bubble inevitably pops: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/an-ai-premortem/

eupolicy.social

bert hubert 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇺🇦 (@bert_hubert@eupolicy.social) - EUpolicy.social - A Mastodon server for the EU bubb

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Apr 25, 2026

Replying to @ancoghlan@mastodon.social

(This does of course assume that the relevant conference submission process provides such a notes field. Even if they don't have one, though, that's likely a sign to forgo the tantalising hints entirely rather than deciding to use them anyway and risk having your proposal rejected for lacking sufficient detail)

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Apr 25, 2026

Tip for anyone writing conference talk submissions: it's potentially fine to put tantalising hints for the audience in your proposed abstract & description. It's *not* fine to leave the *reviewers* guessing as to what you're actually going to talk about (that's part of why there is a whole separate field for notes visible only to reviewers!).

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Apr 24, 2026

Replying to @mhoye@cosocial.ca

@mhoye@cosocial.ca And China were hardly slacking with all their "Belt & Road" initiatives *before* the US took a voluntary dive

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Apr 21, 2026

Replying to @xssfox@cloudisland.nz

@xssfox @gdayitsjack I feel like there should be a UDP joke there, but I am unable to recover it. (Sorry, not sorry 😄)

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Apr 21, 2026

Replying to @gdayitsjack@tech.lgbt

@gdayitsjack I mostly go "It's a trap!" and let it hang forlornly in the ether, an unmade connection

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Apr 20, 2026

Replying to @daedalus@eigenmagic.net

@daedalus My reaction to needing to replace my devices long ago stopped being "Cool, new toy!" and instead became "Ugh, now I need to rediscover all the various off switches for the assorted user hostile default behaviours". The sheer entitlement of the entire industry just oozes through in the way everything assumes it has a legitimate right to demand our attention immediately rather than on a schedule of our own choosing.

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Apr 20, 2026

Starting to think I may need to follow a colleague's example and indefinitely set https://nohello.info/ as my status at work.

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Apr 20, 2026

Replying to @coderanger@cloudisland.nz

@coderanger @raiderrobert @AlSweigart I can see it working for genuinely local things, but for online communities aiming for global reach, requiring geographic proximity to at least one existing member is a harsh filter to apply.

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Apr 19, 2026

Replying to @andrewnez@mastodon.social

@andrewnez@mastodon.social Sadly as expected 😕

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Apr 19, 2026

Replying to @andrewnez@mastodon.social

@andrewnez@mastodon.social Dare we hope they are also speed running the resolutions?

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Apr 19, 2026

Replying to @glyph@mastodon.social

@glyph @mttaggart "vibe-addled" perhaps? Again by direct analogy to "drug-addled". Might still be too confrontational for the kind of interventional stance you're exploring, but other substance abuse derived terms and phrases may also be helpful there ("vibe abuse", "compulsive vibing", etc) "vibesick" itself makes me think "seasick" rather than "dopesick", so I have my doubts it will land the way you want it to. One novel option that fits the times did just occur to me though: "vibe-cooked"

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Alyssa Coghlan @ancoghlan@mastodon.social · Apr 18, 2026

Replying to @aparrish@friend.camp

@aparrish I see some of the numbers being thrown around for sovereign AI "investments", and can't help but think "What could that money have achieved via the basic mechanism of 'hire people to work on the open source projects that government is already using'?" The hundreds of millions of dollars getting thrown around would hire rather a lot of developers, designers, tech writers, etc, for quite a few years.

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Alyssa Coghlan

Posts

bert hubert 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇺🇦: "AI: Considerations for people who make decisions.…" - EUpolicy.social - A Mastodon

CosmicRami: "🚨TWO YEARS FROM TODAY! 🚨 TOTAL SOLAR ECLIPSE OVE…" - Aus.Social

Ars Technica: "S&P 500 blocks fast SpaceX entry, won’t waive rul…" - Mastodon

mkb: "This is an interesting variation of an amazing #p…" - Mastodon

bert hubert 🇺🇦🇪🇺🇺🇦 (@bert_hubert@eupolicy.social) - EUpolicy.social - A Mastodon server for the EU bubb

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