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 · 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 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 · 07/10/2025Following 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 · 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 (Metadata, Lattes & Impostor Syndrome) @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? 54960409
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
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 09/07/2025Ever wondered why car ergonomics have gone down the drain as touch screens replaced buttons to drive down costs? This reader comment on an @financialtimes.com article on the topic says it all. 2111
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 27/06/2025My LLM coding interactions taught me that their benchmark results vastly overstate their capabilities. The paper by M. Mancoridis et al. “Potemkin Understanding in LLMs” explains and formalizes my feeling. Benchmarks derived from human tests are unsuitable for LLM assessment. doi.org/10.48550/arX... 0122
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 26/06/2025This week two US courts ruled in favor of AI's use of copyrighted works to train LLMs. How is such a use legal? Should it be legal? Two questions with very different answers. More (and an explanation of the audio cassette's relevance) at www.spinellis.gr/blog/20250626/ 052
Reposted by Diomidis SpinellisDorothy Bishop @deevybee.bsky.social · 19/06/2025Predatory journals should not mess with Diomidis Spinellis (@coolsweng.bsky.social) doi.org/10.1186/s410... N.B.this journal, full of AI-generated crap has DOIs and is listed in Crossref, but not DOAJ.doi.orgFalse authorship: an explorative case study around an AI-generated article published under my name - Research Integrity and Peer ReviewBackground The proliferation of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has facilitated the creation and publication of fraudulent scientific articles, often in predatory journals. This study investig... 0148
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 13/06/2025The fascinating story of how Microsoft Office developers moved from a proprietary version control system to Git. danielsada.tech/blog/carreer...danielsada.techPart 7: Office Migration from Source Depot to Git, or how I learned to love DevEx. | Daniel Sada Caraveo | Developer Productivity & CulturePart 7 of my software journey, getting to know developer experience. 011
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 11/06/2025Here's how machine learning can be applied to detect risky software changes and thereby increase the reliability of a large bank's IT systems. medium.com/ing-blog/lev...medium.comLeveraging AIOps for Enhanced Change Reliability at INGFrom an Idea to Moving to Production 010
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 29/05/2025Wow! The Rust compiler correctly guessed the correct method I should be calling. Helpful and very impressive error handling! 091
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 27/05/2025In 2023 a fake AI-generated scientific article was falsely attributed to me. I was not the scheme's only victim. My study, just published in the Research Integrity and Peer Review journal, analyzes what going on and who profited from the mass publication of AI-generated articles. rdcu.be/enQqG 0115
Reposted by Diomidis SpinellisAdolfo Neto @adolfoneto.elixiremfoco.com · 23/05/2025Manifesto on Technical Debt published🚀. It was the result of a Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (LZI) workshop. 111
Diomidis Spinellis @coolsweng.bsky.social · 20/05/2025Long time due! I’m removing the BSD advertising clause from any software I wrote in the past. www.spinellis.gr/blog/20250520/ 010