Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 08/10/2026Possibly, but look at shift in the number of farmers in developed countries over the past centuries. 110
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 08/10/2026Thinking will become a hobby. For the bulk of today’s cognitive work, the writing’s on the wall: AI will take over. Read more at www.spinellis.gr/blog/2026100...spinellis.grblog dds: 2026-10-08 — Thinking will become a hobby 112
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 04/09/2026Human developers still highly relevant! It took me six days to fix a subtle but critical bug. The issue's and fix's complexity make me think AI couldn't possibly handle it. If you want to prove otherwise though your prompting, access, and credits to a frontier model, drop me an email. 040
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 29/08/2026Extracting information to aid debugging (here a binary tournament merge failure) can often be productively automated with Unix command-line tools. awk '$4 == "BEGIN" && $8 { print $8 " -> " $7}' file.log | dot -Tsvg >diagram.svg 010
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 19/08/2026The rg (ripgrep) command, popularized by #Codex, violates so many tenets of the Unix philosophy it makes me want to cry. Its added functionality could be a “find … | grep … | xargs grep …” shell script. Its implementation effort should have focused just into making grep faster at its original job.en.wikipedia.orgUnix philosophy - Wikipedia 041
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 18/08/2026Many prestigious scientific venues have suffered from papers containing hallucinated citations. We can throw tools at the problem (I provide an example) but I think it's more important to fix its root cause. www.spinellis.gr/blog/2026081... 041
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 12/08/2026Apart from confidentiality concerns, another risk of reviewing papers with GenAI is hallucinations. Here are two examples from ChatGPT's (5.6 Sol) review of my own work with *a given PDF*. It took me several minutes to uncover each, so a long AI-generated review could take hours to verify. 010
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 03/08/2026According to today's FT, “Wall Street learns to love blockchain”. But the article provides only a very fuzzy picture of the technology. To help, I summarized the absolute essentials of blockchain technology in fewer than 500 simple words at www.spinellis.gr/blog/2026080...spinellis.grblog dds: 2026-08-03 — Blockchain technology in 500 simple words 000
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 15/07/2026For decades the accepted management wisdom has been for managers to delegate tasks and for organizations to outsource activities that aren’t core to their operations. Here's my take on how AI agents enter the picture of delegation and outsourcing. www.spinellis.gr/blog/2026071... 122
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 08/07/2026Over the past few days I used #OpenAI #Codex to perform a fairly extensive and demanding software code change. Here you can find all my 78 prompts documented and classified, and, based on them, my take on the role of experts in the age of agentic AI. www.spinellis.gr/blog/2026070...spinellis.grblog dds: 2026-07-08 — Why agentic AI needs better experts 051
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 03/07/2026Artificial intelligence seems to be increasingly matched with marketing stupidity. 042
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 02/07/2026Properly documenting AI-generated code commits is essential in both industry and education. Here is my proposal for a suitable set of Git commit headers. www.spinellis.gr/blog/2026070... 010
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 30/06/2026This is the pocket computer-history museum I use for introductory presentations: 7AK7 computer vacuum tube, metal-can transistor, SSI chip, exposed EPROM and CPU chip, RAM / SSD storage and RPi zero. Demoed it yesterday to high-school students in YES, our Youth Entrepreneurship Seminar. yes.aueb.gr 020
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 27/06/2026What a time to live in! We're discussing about AI recursive self-improvement and AGI. And we're also managing IT systems with cryptic tags and by adding "000_" to first names so that they appear on top of the list. (The list is from icse2027.hotcrp.com/users/pc) 010
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 27/06/2026A recent report on falsely-attributed research papers www.jmir.org/2026/1/e104934 and a commentary on it www.luxuriousmagazine.com/false-author... paint a bleak picture. Here are the @erictopol.bsky.social incident retractionwatch.com/2026/04/23/e... and my case study doi.org/10.1186/s410.... 120
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 23/05/2026Have you noticed that reviewing AI-generated code is devilishly hard? Cognitive psychology and the workings of large language models give us four clues on why this happens. Read more at www.spinellis.gr/blog/2026052... 095
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 16/05/2026Highly ironic that a published peer-reviewed journal article on AI hallucinations and the trust crisis in artificial intelligence contains (probably AI-generated) orphan in-text citations. doi.org/10.1016/j.te...doi.orgRedirecting 022
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 12/05/2026Can you see the image smudges? I thought that my screen was dirty, but it turns out that the smudges are part of the Microsoft Office toolbar (visible in Word, Excel PowerPoint). Can't imagine what development process and bloat resulted in what looks like freehand drawing being part of it. Ideas? 010
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 07/05/2026Today we launch a new run of the popular and award-winning MOOC on the use of Unix Tools for data, software and production engineering. This year follow the course to improve your understanding of AI Agents' actions and your interaction with them. More information at www.spinellis.gr/unix/?utm=bs... 011
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 13/04/2026Generative AI upends the goals and nature of empirical software research. Here are my notes from Emerson Murphy-Hill's MSR's keynote talk on the topic. www.spinellis.gr/blog/2026041... 030
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 11/03/2026Unless you need something that's only available in R / Perl, consider using a more mainstream language, like Python or Java. Been there and saw that the switching cost was lower than the cost of staying there. 010
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 02/03/2026It's unclear how the cited example was generated. Was it really summarization, or was the model given the freedom to add its own spice? My experience is that state-of-the-art models are quite good (though not perfect) at summarization. 120
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 02/03/2026Vibe coding toward the incident horizon We are living through a golden age of generative AI: a time when progress is both breathtaking and somehow still unable to reliably open a PDF without hallucinating the author’s middle name. […] Read the complete text at www.spinellis.gr/blog/2026030...spinellis.grblog dds: 2026-03-02 — Vibe coding toward the incident horizon 030
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 02/02/2026The video of my #FOSDEM 2026 talk on integrating the Fourth Research Edition Unix tape into the GitHub Unix history repository is now available online: ftp.belnet.be/mirror/FOSDE... 083
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 23/12/2025Several news outlets reported the amazing discovery of a 1970s Fourth Edition Research Unix magnetic tape. I incorporated the tape’s source code into the Unix History Repository hosted on GitHub and studied the code’s composition. Here's what I found. www.spinellis.gr/blog/2025122... 0188
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 04/12/2025The LaTeX Korrektor: A funny video series addressing serious LaTeX style infractions. Andreas Zeller (a German), like Dr. Strangelove, convincingly fakes familiar stereotypes. (He also suggests compounding German words as an alternative to the em-dash.) 130
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 07/11/2025I also get substantial benefit from it, so I can't say it is. I think it's more akin to nuclear energy: bit potential, big risks. 030
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 07/11/2025I just received an AI-generated GitHub pull-request that incorrectly replaced 450 test code lines with a comment. Be VERY CAREFUL when reviewing out-of-the-blue PRs these days. AI-generated ones are likely to contain difficult-to-spot faults hidden as plausible fixes. github.com/dspinellis/g... 0113
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 01/11/2025Στις 5 Νοεμβρίου λήγει η διορία της διαδικασίας έκδοσης του Προσωπικού Αριθμού.Με τη γεννήτρια γραμμάτων προσωπικού αριθμού μπορείτε να επιλέξετε εσείς έναν καλό συνδυασμό γραμμάτων για τον προσωπικό σας αριθμό. Θα τη βρείτε στο www.balab.aueb.gr/genpa/ 034
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 27/10/2025I just added a note in the advice for writing LaTeX documents GitHub repository to avoid using the “itemize” environment, when you're describing elements. The “description” environment is better for this purpose. github.com/dspinellis/l... 041
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 22/10/2025A feature in Nature journal published today takes us through the fascinating and frightening world of fake authors, reviewers, and articles. It mentions my recent work on fake articles attributed to known scholars. www.nature.com/articles/d41...nature.comHow to spot fake scientists and stop them from publishing papersJournals are considering doing identity checks to expose fake authors — but there are downsides. 082
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 18/10/2025Fun, fun, fun! I'm running a binary tournament merge to combine 64 SQLite databases (83 GB in total) into one. More details in doi.org/10.1109/MS.2... 1383
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 09/10/2025A big problem with reviewing GenAI-written text is that it is often (by design) very plausible but it can also be incorrect or superfluous, therefore requiring substantial concentrated effort to detect. 182
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 07/10/2025Real backups must to be automatically maintained as multiple encrypted, integrity-checked, tested, monitored, and documented historical copies, on different media, offsite, and offline or immutable. 012
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 07/10/2025RAID, snapshots, Apple Time Machine, Windows Volume Shadow, cloud storage, availability zone mirroring, database replication, Git/GitHub, DRBD. These are all useful, but NOT true backups. 112
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 07/10/2025Following the permanent loss of 858TB data due to a fire in a South Korea government datacenter, here's a reminder on the several technologies that are NOT backup solutions: koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2025-10...koreajoongangdaily.joins.comNIRS fire destroys government's cloud storage system, no backups availableA fire at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) Daejeon headquarters destroyed the government’s G-Drive cloud storage system, erasing work files saved individually by some 750,000 civil se... 172
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 03/10/2025Saw the following hidden deep inside the Linux kernel arm compilation commands. I don't think that the arguments were arbitrarily ordered 😃 ar mPiT init/main.o vmlinux.a arch/arm/kernel/head.o 052
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 26/09/2025Why I Choose Email Over Messaging My colleagues and friends know that I prefer to communicate with them via email rather than chat messaging. There are many benefits in such a choice. You may want to consider them and adopt the same stance. www.spinellis.gr/blog/2025092... 094
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 23/09/2025The proposed changes are well reasoned and documented. More thought could have been given to asking for shorter proposals. A good proposal takes months to write, which is time not devoted to research. 010
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 19/09/2025With all the GenAI buzz we tend to forget the value of 100% correct deterministic tools. Thank you Rust clippy! 0134
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 06/09/2025TIL that setting Turnitin checks to *include* bibliographic references (a check typically disabled, as it generates false positive matches) can help identifying hallucinated generative AI references (as these are less likely to appear elsewhere). 051
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 30/08/2025A special place in Hell is reserved who those who create in their programs custom editing areas where the operating system's keyboard editing bindings, copy, paste, and our macros stop working. 061
Reposted by Diomidis SpinellisHannah Shelley, MLIS (Maggots, Lycanthropes & Ice Skeletons) @hannahshelley.site · 13/08/2025Since search is dead, how soon do you think Google Scholar is headed for the Google Graveyard? I'm betting it's soon, and academia is NOT preparedhannahshelley.neocities.orgGoogle Scholar Is DoomedAcademia built entire careers on a free Google service with zero guarantees. What could go wrong? 54967410
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 27/08/2025Google Scholar's lack of an API hinders automation and scientometric studies. In common with all proprietary academic databases, searches are opaque and non-replicable. With the Alexandria3k Python package you can run sophisticated queries on your laptop. dspinellis.github.io/alexandria3k/ 0123
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 24/08/2025That's a first! As I write a program's error message, I catch myself thinking whether GenAI will be able to understand it and produce a useful suggestion. (It does.) 030
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 14/08/2025Many years ago I contributed to #GraphViz code for several new node shapes, including UML notes. Now #ChatGPT advises me how to use them! 😃 050
Reposted by Diomidis SpinellisPeter Hilton @hilton.org.uk · 09/08/2025This kind of thing looks like an opportunity for a new generation of developers to make their mark in open source 051
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 08/08/2025What are the challenges and gains when porting legacy systems software written in C into #Rust? Here's my own experience porting the BSD Unix / macOS stream editor sed into Rust as part of #uutils. IEEE Software article: doi.org/10.1109/MS.2... Source code: github.com/uutils/sed/github.comGitHub - uutils/sed: Rewrite of sed in RustRewrite of sed in Rust. Contribute to uutils/sed development by creating an account on GitHub. 0176
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 07/08/2025I'm sure psychologists have a diagnostic name for this disorder. 010