Same Fight, Different Language

Same Fight, Different Language

The Python steering council has asked for development on the experimental JIT compiler to be suspended from the main branch, pending a new PEP, with a six-month deadline before the code gets removed entirely. The JIT was already in the Python 3.15 release notes, showing an eight-to-nine percent geometric mean performance improvement on x86 Linux, with full release expected in October. The Register reported it this week. The council's position is that proper process wasn't followed. The JIT team's position is that the code is already merged, working, and benchmarked. Pablo Galindo Salgado, speaking for the council, acknowledged that "we have not been as strict about following the process as a change of this complexity and reach deserves" — which is the council admitting that they approved the merges and are now saying they shouldn't have. The same announcement asks for a PEP and then describes the desired outcome as "a JIT infrastructure that can support multiple implementation strategies," which is asking for a different project, not a document. The panel's argument lands somewhere close to thirty years of watching this same pattern. Perl 6 announced in 2000, shipped as Raku in 2019, audience gone by then. Python 2 to 3 nearly died the same way until Guido cut Python 2 off. OpenSSL almost died because the foundation was three people and a Patreon. systemd shipped because Lennart stopped asking. Every functioning open-source project the panel can name has had one person who could say no and mean it. The committee isn't the structure that ships code. The committee is the structure that manages people who ship code. When the committee starts trying to ship the code itself, the code stops shipping. The work shipped. The process didn't. That's the part that doesn't change. Source Article Python JIT compiler project under threat after steering council says proper process wasn't followed [https://www.theregister.com/devops/2026/06/08/python-jit-compiler-may-be-removed/5252079] — Tim Anderson, The Register, June 8, 2026. Reporting on the Python steering council's request to suspend development on the experimental JIT compiler from the Python 3.15 main branch, the six-month deadline before code removal, Pablo Galindo Salgado's statement on behalf of the council acknowledging that earlier process was insufficient, the JIT team's response including Mark Shannon's concerns about contributor churn, and the council's description of the desired post-PEP architecture as "a JIT infrastructure that can support multiple implementation strategies." Panel * The Legacy Sysadmin * The DBA * The Startup Founder * The Goat Farmer's Counsel

Please Do Not Vibe

Rsync, the file synchronization utility that has quietly underpinned essentially every backup system in the Unix and Linux world since the mid-nineties, shipped a release earlier this year with regressions affecting incremental backup workflows. Users digging through the commit history found dozens of commits attributed to "tridge and claude" — that's Andrew Tridgell, the project's creator and a foundational figure in open-source infrastructure, working alongside Anthropic's Claude. A GitHub post titled, with the expletive sanitized, "Please Do Not Vibe Fuck Up This Software" lit the fuse. The Register reported it this week. Tridgell responded with a Medium piece called "Rsync and Outrage" defending his process. Forty years of software engineering experience. Every commit reviewed personally. AI tooling adopted in response to a flood of AI-generated security reports consuming his maintenance time. The defense is the strongest possible version of the position — the original maintainer is also the reviewer, the usual AI-PR concerns about review capacity don't apply, the tool adoption was a rational response to real operational pressure. The panel takes the defense seriously and engages with it on its merits. And the backups have regressions. That's the transaction the panel keeps returning to. The maintainer's standing is intact, the process defense holds, the response to the security-report flood was reasonable, and the incremental backup paths broke. The standard objection to AI-assisted contributions in open source — review capacity — doesn't apply here. So if the regressions still happen, the conclusion has to be something else: the kind of code being produced is harder to review than the code being replaced, the rewrite was the wrong unit of work for the tool, or the test coverage gap was always there and got surfaced by being broken. None of those are character flaws. They're decisions that produced an outcome. And the outcome is that some number of people are going to find out their incremental backups don't restore at three in the morning when they try to. Source Article "Please do not vibe f$%& up this software": Broken backups spark AI coding row in rsync communit [https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/04/please-do-not-vibe-f-up-this-software-broken-backups-spark-ai-coding-row-in-rsync-project/5251189] — Carly Page, The Register, June 4, 2026 Panel * The Legacy Sysadmin * The DBA * The Startup Founder * The Goat Farmer's Counsel

Continue to Function

Microsoft Office 2019 and Office 2021 for Mac, both sold as perpetual licenses, will drop into "reduced functionality mode" on July 13, 2026. After that date, customers who paid in full for the software can open files and view them, but cannot edit or save. The cause is a license-validation certificate scheduled to expire on that date — a date that was baked into the binary the day the software shipped. When Office 2019 reached end of support in October 2023, Microsoft's own support page told customers the apps would "continue to function." Last week, OSnews and the Consumer Rights Wiki noticed that the page had been quietly rewritten. The continue-to-function language was gone. No email to customers. No press release. The promise was edited out before the kill switch was scheduled to flip. The panel's argument lands on the simpler reading of the transaction. The customers paid. The software works. Microsoft is going to turn it off, remotely, because the customers won't pay again. Everything else — the EULA language, the business-model defense, the lifecycle framing — is decoration. The industry has spent thirty years smearing the distinction between owning a thing and leasing access to a thing, and now we live in the version where the lease can be ended whenever the vendor wants, on a date the vendor set, with a promise that gets edited out before the date arrives. Source Articles Microsoft Deliberately Bricking All Office For Mac 2019/2021 Installations [https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/06/02/1725210/microsoft-deliberately-bricking-all-office-for-mac-20192021-installations] — Slashdot, June 2, 2026. Coverage of OSnews and Consumer Rights Wiki reporting on the certificate expiration scheduled for Office 2019 and Office 2021 for Mac, the rewriting of the Microsoft support page to remove the continue-to-function language, the "reduced functionality mode" mechanic, and Microsoft's four officially recommended responses for affected customers. Panel * The Legacy Sysadmin * The DBA * The Startup Founder * The Goat Farmer's Counsel

Untapped Means Broken

Google is quietly emailing Android developers with offers to buy their source code. The pitch is "unlock new revenue" and "help transform tools and products." The actual ask is access to production codebases and archived side projects, to train Google's AI coding tools. Jason Koebler at 404 Media obtained the email and broke the story this week. The framing is partnership. The structure is procurement. The license is non-exclusive — which means the developer keeps the IP and Google gets a permanent, non-revocable right to use the code as training data. Once a model is trained on a codebase, the codebase is in the weights. You can sue Google for breach of contract; you cannot sue the model. The panel's argument lands on the simpler reading: Google has a product that doesn't work as well as the competition, and the data they need to make it better lives in the heads and laptops of small developers. The Reddit deal at sixty million produced Gemini telling users to eat glue. The phase-two content-owner deals didn't produce the quality the models needed. So Google is in phase three — cold-emailing individual developers because what the coding models actually need is non-public, real-world production code, and there is no aggregator who owns that. Nobody's getting rich. Google's getting incrementally less behind. And the code, including the parts the developer forgot was in there, becomes training data forever. Source Article Google is emailing Android developers asking to buy their source code [https://www.404media.co/google-is-quietly-buying-code-from-play-store-developers-to-train-ai/] — 404 Media, Jason Koebler, June 2026. Panel * The DBA * The Startup Founder * The Paranoid CISO * The Goat Farmer's Counsel

Should Be Making Executives Uncomfortable

Two convergent reports landed in the same week with the same conclusion. Bain & Company published survey findings on June 1 reporting that corporate AI investments are based on cost savings that haven't arrived. The consultancy told its own clients the situation "should be making executives uncomfortable." The same week, developer telemetry firm Faros published a study of 22,000 developers and 4,000 teams measuring what LLM-assisted coding actually does to operational metrics. The numbers: lead time for changes up nearly five-fold. Deployment frequency down eleven percent. Defect rates up fifty percent. System throughput, calculated via Little's Law, down somewhere between seventy and eighty percent. The consultancy that sold the savings model is telling clients to worry. The measurement firm is telling engineers what they already suspected. The procurement decks were written before either of those was measurable. The decks for next year are being written now, by the same people, on the same assumptions. The panel argues toward an editorial center the show has been on the record about for several episodes: the AI ROI isn't materializing the way the procurement narrative promised, and both the consulting class and the measurement class are now saying so. The convergence is the news. The pattern — consultancy sells the strategy, strategy doesn't pay off, consultancy sells the diagnostic — is older than the technology in the middle. Source Articles AI Savings Misses 'Should Be Making Executives Uncomfortable,' Bain Says [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-01/bain-finds-corporate-ai-investments-based-on-returns-that-haven-t-arrived] — Bloomberg, June 1, 2026. Bain & Company's survey of executives finding that AI deployment hasn't delivered the productivity gains modeled into business cases, and the consultancy's framing that executives should be worried about the gap between projected and realized savings. Talk Is Cheap: The Operational Impact of LLM Use, [https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap] May 31, 2026. Coverage of the Faros.ai [http://Faros.ai] study measuring operational metrics across 22,000 developers and 4,000 teams using LLM-assisted coding tools. The study finds decreased deployment frequency, increased lead time for features, and increased cost of defects, with a calculated system throughput drop between seventy and eighty percent using Little's Law. Panel * The Burnt-Out SRE * The DBA * The Startup Founder * The Goat Farmer's Counsel