Drew Chadwick DeVault / ddevault / SirCmpwn - Opinionated white-male-guilt-ridden software developer. Cancelled Hyprland and slandered it as "toxic" and transphobic. Hates X11 users and Hacker News. Lolicon.

[YukariTakeba]

DWL is comfy, I am just too lazy to bother cooding everything lol

You'd be shocked how easy it is to patch Suckless software; you can get away without knowing any C. Patches are simple enough to understand on their website; however, I would recommend using this patch list; having everything on one page makes it a lot more accessible. If you like i3/Sway, I'd give it a try; it's a hell of a lot faster and can be set up over the course of three beers--at least from my experience.

If you don't know C, I would recommend using Git so you can easily roll back any compatibility issues with patches; that being said, the source code is simple enough that you should be able to figure it out without much prior experience.

 

[mailfrawd]

Lunduke just posted a video about Jack Dorsey possibly getting cancelled, in part, due to a campaign by Drew. None of this is confirmed, so it could just be another Lundukism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuJbFkGXC8M

 

[Markass the Worst]

Lunduke just posted a video about Jack Dorsey possibly getting cancelled, in part, due to a campaign by Drew. None of this is confirmed, so it could just be another Lundukism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuJbFkGXC8M

Make sure to archive everything. (Preservetube still not working)

Spoiler: local archive

 

[torpig xmr]

Considering it's wayland you'd have to exclude men too

All of the people who work on wayland compositors make me want to switch back to X. Experimental HDR support be damned.

 

[s0m3dood]

I am very happy on Xorg + KDE and Xorg + i3wm. Every time I tried Wayland or any of the stuff in their bubble it would fail.
Sometimes spectacularly like a black screen, or other times just annoyances like no good EasyStroke replacement, Teamviewer not working, no RDP like XRDP + Xvnc/Xorg, not able to do SSH X11 forward, games stuttering, x11docker not working properly, KeePass + ydotool sucks compared to autotype on X11,...

I gave up and run wayland only stuff inside Cage. You can just move the cage-kiosk window around and it's like a wayland container.

 

[torpig xmr]

I am very happy on Xorg + KDE and Xorg + i3wm. Every time I tried Wayland or any of the stuff in their bubble it would fail.
Sometimes spectacularly like a black screen, or other times just annoyances like no good EasyStroke replacement, Teamviewer not working, no RDP like XRDP + Xvnc/Xorg, not able to do SSH X11 forward, games stuttering, x11docker not working properly, KeePass + ydotool sucks compared to autotype on X11,...

I gave up and run wayland only stuff inside Cage. You can just move the cage-kiosk window around and it's like a wayland container.

for me, waybar is the only thing that constantly crashes or freezes now in my hyprland+hyprsome setup. it is fucking annoying. I still have not figured out why it happens, it was fixed for a while when i updated the package. Now it is back to doing the freezing at least once a day. I just kill 9 that shit and restart the process. its not a big deal at all, but it is weird, annoying, and I know if I load up X with some other WM+panel, everything works perfectly.

 

[CEO of Gay]

The talk page has been removed (direct link, archive), and so has Dorsey's speaker page on the website (direct link, archive), likewise for Manik Surtani, another speaker and colleague of Dorsey at Block. I cannot find any official statements on this matter. Possibly before the deletion of these pages from the event organizers, Drew posted an update about his "protest" on January 20th (direct link, archive):

So, still a keynote in all but name. Great job, Drew! You sure showed them!

 

[Combustion Engine]

There's no reason to believe the "talk" will happen anymore. I'll write a rough timeline of events for future reference, only because they went their way to be as opaque about this as possible:

2025-01-16 (or earlier, and nobody paid attention before the "protest" announcement): Talk page (archive) goes up, mentions Dorsey and Surtani, links to Surtani's newly made page (archive). Scheduled for Sunday, from 12:00 to 12:30, it's categorized as a keynote.
2025-01-16: Drew posts "No billionaires at FOSDEM". The URL ends with "please", but it's not in the final blog title. (direct link, archive)
2025-01-16: FOSDEM announcement "Statement on planned protests during the upcoming FOSDEM 2025". (direct link, archive). Does not mention what "protests", but says something about "controversial" speakers, asks to contact them so they can comply with safety regulations at the event.
2025-01-16: Drew's first blog post is submitted on HN (direct link, archive). 207 comments, ultimately flagged, along with many comments in it, some of which talking and linking to the reports. You need an account and the setting showdead on to view them.
2025-01-17: Speaker page is made for Dorsey (archive) and is added to the talk links (archive), but without an avatar, that will be added the next day. The event is moved from "Keynotes" to "Main Track - Janson [room]", the Main Track page is likewise updated (archive).
2025-01-18: Some websites begin to cover the subject. CNX (direct link, archive, note the DeVault report being linked in the comments). Wikipedia page has subsections for 2023, 2024 and 2025 events added (link to event page, link to revision) by User:AyubuZimbale (link to profile, made in 2024-11-04). Among the referenced sources are the FOSDEM statement and CNX's article; Drew's blog post is also cited in "[...] within the open-source community due to ethical considerations", along with some others sources about how "open source developers" think Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are unethical.
2025-01-19: A certain Esther Payne (mastodon page) posts "FOSDEM and Billionaire Fascists" (direct link, archive), it has some details on the event if you can bear reading it.
2025-01-20: Drew posts "FOSDEM '25 protest" (direct link, archive). Acknowledges FOSDEM's statement, reports that the event has been moved from keynote to main track.
2025-01-21: The talk page is stealthily removed, so is Dorsey's (archive). FOSDEM's statement is submitted to HN (direct link, archive), a small discussion ensues.
2025-01-22: Payne publishes another blogpost "A call for transparency from FOSDEM" (direct link, archive), in response to the deletion of the pages.
2025-01-23: Drew posts "Join us to discuss transparency and governance at FOSDEM '25" (direct link, archive), updates previous page, mentions Payne's blogpost, the page also has images of the pamphlets prepared for the event.
2025-01-24: Lunduke covers this subject (direct link), "Jack Dorsey Keynote Cancelled After Protest Threat by Child Porn Enthusiast, Extreme Leftist".
2025-01-28: An article is made on LWN (no gift link available at this time, will become public February 6th, 82 comments so far). LWN is the first major site to write about it, and reports "The keynote has since been removed from the schedule, but there are still a number of lingering questions".
2025-01-29: Jack Dorsey posts an image of Drew's phamplet on X/Twitter. (direct link, archive). Make of that what you will.

Surtani has since been moved from the keynote (and later talk) with Dorsey to a new one called "Making the Financial World Open Source With FINOS" (direct link, archive), different room, track, time and with another speaker (Gabriele Columbro). I expect the organizers will expand on all this once the event, which will take place from tomorrow for two days, will be over.

 

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

It must be exhausting for people like Drew to be so miserable all the time.

 

[Kola]

Drew is Big Mad at crypto and LLMs.

https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externalizing-your-costs-on-me.html

Over the past few months, instead of working on our priorities at SourceHut, I have spent anywhere from 20-100% of my time in any given week mitigating hyper-aggressive LLM crawlers at scale. This isn’t the first time SourceHut has been at the wrong end of some malicious bullshit or paid someone else’s externalized costs – every couple of years someone invents a new way of ruining my day.

Four years ago, we decided to require payment to use our CI services because it was being abused to mine cryptocurrency. We alternated between periods of designing and deploying tools to curb this abuse and periods of near-complete outage when they adapted to our mitigations and saturated all of our compute with miners seeking a profit. It was bad enough having to beg my friends and family to avoid “investing” in the scam without having the scam break into my business and trash the place every day.

Two years ago, we threatened to blacklist the Go module mirror because for some reason the Go team thinks that running terabytes of git clones all day, every day for every Go project on git.sr.ht is cheaper than maintaining any state or using webhooks or coordinating the work between instances or even just designing a module system that doesn’t require Google to DoS git forges whose entire annual budgets are considerably smaller than a single Google engineer’s salary.

Now it’s LLMs. If you think these crawlers respect robots.txt then you are several assumptions of good faith removed from reality. These bots crawl everything they can find, robots.txt be damned, including expensive endpoints like git blame, every page of every git log, and every commit in every repo, and they do so using random User-Agents that overlap with end-users and come from tens of thousands of IP addresses – mostly residential, in unrelated subnets, each one making no more than one HTTP request over any time period we tried to measure – actively and maliciously adapting and blending in with end-user traffic and avoiding attempts to characterize their behavior or block their traffic.

We are experiencing dozens of brief outages per week, and I have to review our mitigations several times per day to keep that number from getting any higher. When I do have time to work on something else, often I have to drop it when all of our alarms go off because our current set of mitigations stopped working. Several high-priority tasks at SourceHut have been delayed weeks or even months because we keep being interrupted to deal with these bots, and many users have been negatively affected because our mitigations can’t always reliably distinguish users from bots.

All of my sysadmin friends are dealing with the same problems. I was asking one of them for feedback on a draft of this article and our discussion was interrupted to go deal with a new wave of LLM bots on their own server. Every time I sit down for beers or dinner or to socialize with my sysadmin friends it’s not long before we’re complaining about the bots and asking if the other has cracked the code to getting rid of them once and for all. The desperation in these conversations is palpable.

Whether it’s cryptocurrency scammers mining with FOSS compute resources or Google engineers too lazy to design their software properly or Silicon Valley ripping off all the data they can get their hands on at everyone else’s expense… I am sick and tired of having all of these costs externalized directly into my fucking face. Do something productive for society or get the hell away from my servers. Put all of those billions and billions of dollars towards the common good before sysadmins collectively start a revolution to do it for you.

Please stop legitimizing LLMs or AI image generators or GitHub Copilot or any of this garbage. I am begging you to stop using them, stop talking about them, stop making new ones, just stop. If blasting CO2 into the air and ruining all of our freshwater and traumatizing cheap laborers and making every sysadmin you know miserable and ripping off code and books and art at scale and ruining our fucking democracy isn’t enough for you to leave this shit alone, what is?

If you personally work on developing LLMs et al, know this: I will never work with you again, and I will remember which side you picked when the bubble bursts.

 

[Bloom Worm Cross Field]

These bots crawl everything they can find, robots.txt be damned, including expensive endpoints like git blame, every page of every git log, and every commit in every repo, and they do so using random User-Agents that overlap with end-users and come from tens of thousands of IP addresses – mostly residential, in unrelated subnets, each one making no more than one HTTP request over any time period we tried to measure – actively and maliciously adapting and blending in with end-user traffic and avoiding attempts to characterize their behavior or block their traffic.

We are experiencing dozens of brief outages per week, and I have to review our mitigations several times per day to keep that number from getting any higher. When I do have time to work on something else, often I have to drop it when all of our alarms go off because our current set of mitigations stopped working. Several high-priority tasks at SourceHut have been delayed weeks or even months because we keep being interrupted to deal with these bots, and many users have been negatively affected because our mitigations can’t always reliably distinguish users from bots.

The internet really is fucked nowadays. We're going to end up in a future where well-meaning sysadmins are begrudgingly led by governments and ad giants into converting the whole web into a verified one-to-one mapping between user and passport. Probably once the main western tech companies have scraped the whole internet, they'll want to pull the ladder up behind, at which point every powerful party will be pushing for user identification.

 

[teriyakiburns]

Drew is Big Mad at crypto and LLMs.

Ignoring the rant at the end about LLMs and such, I agree with him about the scrapers. Those fuckers (nearly all chinese) are raping the internet the same way china's fishing fleet is raping the oceans. They hoover up every bit of bandwidth available and are functionally no different to a DDOS.

 

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

Ignoring the rant at the end about LLMs and such, I agree with him about the scrapers. Those fuckers (nearly all chinese) are raping the internet the same way china's fishing fleet is raping the oceans. They hoover up every bit of bandwidth available and are functionally no different to a DDOS.

Sounds like Drew needs to start using Kiwiflare.

 

[Kola]

He chooses to take the stone age approach to this problem.

 

[Scorpion From MK]

https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externalizing-your-costs-on-me.html

Archive 1 / Archive 2

 

[s0m3dood]

Dumbass needs to learn how to poison the scrapers with a proper tarpit: https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/

Works wonders, and is pretty funny.

 

[Flatline]

All of my sysadmin friends

Every time I sit down for beers or dinner or to socialize with my sysadmin friends

What "friends"?

 

[Rusty Metal Skull Gun]

Dumbass needs to learn how to poison the scrapers with a proper tarpit: https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/

Works wonders, and is pretty funny.

I wonder if hiding the words "Tiananmen Square" somewhere on every page would have the same effect

 

[Panzerfrau]

I wonder if hiding the words "Tiananmen Square" somewhere on every page would have the same effect

Well, worked well enough for a Japanese university...

https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20241207/p2a/00m/0na/010000c

 

[x10r4]

Resistance from the tech sector
April 20, 2025 on Drew DeVault's blog

As of late, most of us have been reading the news with a sense of anxious trepidation. At least, those of us who read from a position of relative comfort and privilege. Many more read the news with fear. Some of us are already no longer in a position to read the news at all, having become the unfortunate subjects of the news. Fascism is on the rise worldwide and in the United States the news is particularly alarming. The time has arrived to act.

The enemy wants you to be overwhelmed and depressed, to feel like the situation is out of your control. Propaganda is as effective on me as it is on you, and in my own home the despair and helplessness the enemy aims to engineer in us often prevails in my own life. We mustn’t fall for this gambit.

When it comes to resistance, I don’t have all of the answers, and I cannot present a holistic strategy for effective resistance. Nevertheless, I have put some thought towards how someone in my position, or in my community, can effectively apply ourselves towards resistance.

The fact of the matter is that the tech sector is extraordinarily important in enabling and facilitating the destructive tide of contemporary fascism’s ascent to power. The United States is embracing a technocratic fascism at the hands of Elon Musk and his techno-fetishist “Department of Government Efficiency”. Using memes to mobilize the terminally online neo-right, and “digitizing” and “modernizing” government institutions with the dazzling miracles of modern technology, the strategy puts tech, in its mythologized form – prophesied, even, through the medium of science fiction – at the center of a revolution of authoritarian hate.

And still, this glitz and razzle dazzle act obscures the more profound and dangerous applications of tech hegemony to fascism. Allow me to introduce public enemy number one: Palantir. Under the direction of neo-fascist Peter Thiel and in collaboration with ICE, Palantir is applying the innovations of the last few decades of surveillance capitalism to implementing a database of undesirables the Nazis could have never dreamed of. Where DOGE is hilariously tragic, Palantir is nightmarishly effective.

It’s clear that the regime will be digital. The through line is tech – and the tech sector depends on tech workers. That’s us. This puts us in a position to act, and compels us to act. But then, what should we do?

If there’s one thing I want you to take away from this article, something to write on your mirror and repeat aloud to yourself every day, it’s this: there’s safety in numbers. It is of the utmost importance that we dispense with American individualism and join hands with our allies to resist as one. Find your people in your local community, and especially in your workplace, who you can trust and who believe in what’s right and that you can depend on for support. It’s easier if you’re not going it alone. Talk to your colleagues about your worries and lean on them to ease your fears, and allow them to lean on you in turn.

One of the most important actions you can take is to unionize your workplace. We are long overdue for a tech workers union. If tech workers unionize then we can compel our employers – this regime’s instruments of fascist power – to resist also. If you’re at the bottom looking up at your boss’s boss’s boss cozying up with fascists, know that with a union you can pull the foundations of his power out from beneath him.

More direct means of resistance are also possible, especially for the privileged and highly paid employees of big tech. Maneuver yourself towards the levers of power. At your current job, find your way onto the teams implementing the technology that enables authoritarianism, and fuck it up. Drop the database by “mistake”. Overlook bugs. Be confidently wrong in code reviews and meetings. Apply for a job at Palantir, and be incompetent at it. Make yourself a single point of failure, then fail. Remember too that plausible deniability is key – make them work to figure out that you are the problem.

This sort of action is scary and much riskier than you’re probably immediately comfortable with. Inaction carries risks also. Only you are able to decide what your tolerance for risk is, and what kind of action that calls for. If your appetite for risk doesn’t permit sabotage, you could simply refuse to work on projects that aren’t right. Supporting others is essential resistance, too – be there for your friends, especially those more vulnerable than yourself, and support the people who engage in direct resistance. You didn’t see nuffin, right? If your allies get fired for fucking up an important digital surveillance project – you’ll have a glowing reference for them when they apply for Palantir, right?

Big tech has become the problem, and it’s time for tech workers to be a part of the solution. If this scares you – and it should – I get it. I’m scared, too. It’s okay for it to be scary. It’s okay for you not to do anything about it right now. All you have to do right now is be there for your friends and loved ones, and answer this question: where will you draw the line?

Remember your answer, and if and when it comes to pass… you will know when to act. Don’t let them shift your private goalposts until the frog is well and truly boiled to death.

Hang in there.

Source/Archive
>Maneuver yourself towards the levers of power. At your current job, find your way onto the teams implementing the technology that enables authoritarianism, and fuck it up. Drop the database by “mistake”. Overlook bugs. Be confidently wrong in code reviews and meetings. Apply for a job at Palantir, and be incompetent at it. Make yourself a single point of failure, then fail.
Our chaotic evil Drew is so back after his recent display of total FOSDEM dominance.