The IT Blog

  • Who Holds Up the Internet? (And Why I Send Them Coffee Money)

    The other day, I stumbled across this visualization / article: a breakdown / reminder of who actually keeps the internet running. It’s based on that well known xkcd comic: “All modern digital infrastructure”, resting on a hastily constructed brick.

    Reality is even more absurd than the joke

    Every calendar invite that lands on time. Every cron job that fires at the right minute. Every flight that takes off when the schedule says it should. A huge part of that works only because a handful of people maintain the code in their spare time — unpaid.

    Take the timezone database, for example. For decades, it’s been maintained largely by one guy: Paul Eggert, a lecturer at UCLA. In his free time. For free. Without it, your phone’s clock would be wrong, flights would miss connections, and global trade would grind to a halt.

    And he’s not alone. Behind every login, every payment, every subscription, there’s a stack of open source software that someone keeps running, often for free, voluntarily — while the rest of us surf through social media and maybe pay subscriptions to companies.

    The Funding Gap, in Actual Numbers

    Yes, some companies do fund this work. OpenSSF’s Alpha-Omega distributes $7+ million a year, and just received another $12.5 million in grants from Anthropic, AWS, GitHub, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.

    And while 12 Million might sound huge, it’s just a fraction of a percent (~0.0012% on average) of their annual revenues, if my research is not totally off.

    Even Germany has a public agency for it: the Sovereign Tech Agency has poured €61.6 million of tax money into open source since 2022, because apparently waiting for industry to step up wasn’t a plan.

    Appreciate them. Genuinely.

    But it’s still a drop in the ocean compared to what runs on top of it (remember: ~0.001% of revenue … but hey, we can fly tourists to space!)

    For every company that funds open source, there are dozens building entire businesses on the same stack without giving anything back. Not a cent. Not a merged code contribution. And for most people, it’s not even stinginess — it’s sheer unawareness: The software just works. Nobody ever asks “who makes it work?”. That’s the real tragedy: The infrastructure is so good at being invisible that the people maintaining it are, too.

    It’s about security, too

    And unfortnately, this isn’t just a charity / appreciation topic: In 2024, a bad actor spent two years earning the trust of a maintainer of a tiny compression library most people had never heard of: xz, used by nearly every Linux system on Earth (including smartphones). The resulting backdoor came within inches of shipping in every major Linux distribution. One person. One project. That’s how thin the ice is that we’re all skating on.

    My Small Ritual

    But I don’t just want to shout “someone should do something”. I try to do my part of it:

    Every time I (re)install a tool I rely on, when a major update lands, or when a piece of software saves me hours of my evening (or around christmas time) I donate some Euros. (Which can make setting up a new machine an expensive day btw.)

    You don’t have to copy that. But just give it a thought: What did the open source you use save you this year? In hours? In uptime? In things that just worked? Isn’t that worth a bit?

    Where to Send Money (Without Having to Judge Every Project Yourself)

    If you don’t want to check out where the maintainer(s) are and how to donate to them: You don’t need to audit your whole setup. There are a couple of umbrella organizations that pool donations and distribute them to maintainers and projects at scale:

    OrganizationFocusWhy It Matters
    OpenSSFSecurity audits & critical infrastructureSecurity!
    Software Freedom ConservancyLegal defense (Git, QEMU, Selenium, etc.)Fights patent lawsuits, enforces copyleft
    NumFOCUSScientific computing (NumPy, pandas, Jupyter)Powers data science & AI
    Apache Software Foundation300+ projects (Kafka, Hadoop, etc.)The backbone of big data
    NLnet FoundationSmall, essential projectsA lot of small cotributors
    Direct to a maintainerGitHub Sponsors, Open Collective, Maintainer’s homepageWhen a specific tool saved your week

    Most of these are US nonprofits. Donations to them are not tax-deductible in Germany – but that shouldn’t stop you. If you prefer a German option, you might want to check out the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE).

    The Whole Ask

    The internet runs on a handful of people in their spare time.

    A coffee – or five – goes a long way. Also think about the emotional support: What it means if small appreciations are not only expressed with a star on Github.

    Especially in times where costs for RAM and disks are skyrocketing. Those developers also need hardware to do their work.

    Sources & Further Reading

    Fediverse reactions

  • Read: The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical.

    I finally read an article that I have in an open Tab since a couple of weeks. I procrastinated, because it was rather long (> 5500 words) and I didn’t just want to rush through it.

    The article is “An epochal shift The turbulent AI era is here. The choices we make now are critical.” from Bill Gates.

    I wasn’t sure what to expect from it to be honest. And I was prepared to just skip it after a couple of paragraphs if it turned out to go into a full AI-Utopia. I just have enough of that recently to be honest. — But I didn’t do so.

    The transition to the AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history. Right now, we are not preparing adequately for that transition. If the world takes the right steps, AI will be a force for good and leave everyone better off.

    Bill Gates, Aug 26, 2026

    What I liked is that it’s neither hype nor doom. He names who (or which jobs) might / will be hit first and he advocates for policies for the future, because AI can bring big improvements — but also big harms. And those policies would hardly be heard from any of the current Tech gigants, like AI “Governance”, Human Reserved Jobs and taxing robots / AI.

    Still, his assumption is a rapid and inevitable adoption. But well, he obviously believes in the technology as he is also financially invested in such companies as he says openly. Nevertheless, I find it quite valid to think about and prepare for this scenario. Because I think it’s better to have a plan, even if one dislikes the scenario.

    Check it out: https://www.gatesnotes.com/a-turbulent-ai-era-and-critical-choices-to-make

    Fediverse reactions

  • Read: We are going to kill “unalive”

    I just read Anil Dash’s post about some internet jargon. And, I first thought “yeah well, that’s the algorithm game”. But then, it became — once more — apparent to me, what it actually means. And Anil nails it quite well with this:

    “One of the things that’s most concerning to me is that an entire generation has grown up not realizing how extreme it is that their very language is being chosen for them by platforms run by people who hate that generation’s ability to express itself, and who hate the things it has to say.”

    @anildash@me.dm

    And it’s not just about avoiding certain words, but also behaviour: adding the right words to be found, putting links in comments or just avoiding them, etc. (BTW: I once was shadowbanned on Instagram with my photography profile .. likely because I used the word “shots” ..)

    This is not freedom of speech. This is a trick game we shouldn’t have to play. And we do not have to, we just need to leave those platforms. I love my blogs, I love my fediverse accounts, … Yes, on a fediverse server I also have to play by the rules of that server. But these are social rules, not rules of engagement. And I am free to switch to another server.

    Read the full article: https://www.anildash.com/2026/10/06/kill-unalive.
    And try out the fediverse!:

    Fediverse reactions

  • Read: The Boring Internet

    The internet we know isn’t gone — it is being hidden under platform noise. And it seems like big platforms want to make us forget that this internet still exists. But while platforms rise and fall, the real internet is built on simple, open protocols like email, chat, and feeds — and they remain.

    Terry Godier’s essay “The Boring Internet” is a reminder: the web’s heart beats in the quiet, reliable tools. No algorithms, no ads, no need for growth, no monetization, no corporations, but freedom to create, explore and connect.

    Check out the Essay: “The Boring Internet“

    And follow him on Mastodon as well: @tg@indieweb.social

    Fediverse reactions

  • It’s All About Adoption (Or: We Just Don’t Want to Change)

    One thing I’ve seen a lot is how we love to debate whether Tool A is better than Tool B — especially when we already have Tool B in place. Or we ask if Tool A, which might be 5% better, is worth the switch. Yet, the problem we often like to ignore? We forget the most important but inconvenient part: the users and whether they’ll actually use it.

    Even if a new tool is slightly better or cheaper, I always point to the adoption rate. Sure, replacing a tool with one that’s 5% better sounds great. But have you checked how many people are actually using the current tool? If only 10% of your team is on board, a 5% improvement for that 10% won’t improve your situation lot. On the other hand, increasing adoption from 10% to 50% means 5x the people are leveraging more efficiency — just by getting more people to use what’s already there.

    Of course, if you can improve the tool and the adoption rate, that’s ideal! But in reality, you usually have to choose — time and budget don’t stretch forever. And even if you switch tools, don’t expect miracles if you haven’t thought about adoption as well.

    But even if you do get users on board, there’s another problem we rarely talk about: the learning curve. Introducing a new tool —especially something like AI — comes with a cost.

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  • GPT-Live … And the Engineering Behind It

    Finally I took the time to read OpenAI’s post about their GPT-Live Realtime system.

    If you’re interested in how to build such low-latency systems, I definitely recommend to check it out. But what I also had in mind while reading the article was the “no one needs programmers anymore in the age of AI” … Oh really? Well I don’t know how many people were involved in the whole project – and I’m pretty sure they used AI in the coding parts. But the whole process to get there, knowing how / where to measure latencies, how to circumvent them, enhancing the WebRTC protocol and designing a new, faster standard, checking geo-location impact, shadow testing, etc … Oh boy, do I see people talking and engineering tasks there.

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  • How to configure LogRetention with journald

    Whenever you have a regular process, you definitely want to have some proper logging. But the very next thought after mentioning “logging” should be “LogRetention”. Especially when the process is executed automatically. No matter how often — as soon as the execution isn’t a one off, log rotation & log retention are a topic.

    LogRotate

    Especially on linux, it’s just so easy: use logrotate for example. Just one simple config file /settings and you’re set up with log rotation, compression and retention.

    journald & journalctl

    On my miniPC, I tried to avoid writing a lot of own log files but whent with journald and piped all logs into it. And never thought about retention. – Until today.

    I just set up another process and during testing, I noticed that I had more than 2.5gb of log files (journalctl --disk-usage) … dating back until very long. A quick check of the /etc/systemd/journald.conf confirmed that I missed some settings.

    journald has quite an elaborate set of options, just check the man page. Without big evaluation, I’ guess I’m fine with:

    Compress=yes
SystemMaxUse=100M
SystemMaxFileSize=5M
MaxRetentionSec=1month

    Also, don’t forget to reload …

    sudo systemctl restart systemd-journald

    And don’t spend a second thinking about overflowing logs any more…

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  • My code vanishes from the web

    As a lot of people, I had most of my code published on GitHub. During my (reduce the amount of US services), I decided that I want to move my code somewhere else. Codeberg came totally handy and was recommended a lot.

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  • (why) I do not like Excel / Spreadsheets

    It seems like I’ve earned a reputation at work for hating Excel.

    We recently had a workshop with different stations and flipboards about how to improve some processes etc. And well – I added a lot of “less spreadsheets” sticky notes. After a while someone approached me and asked what my problem with Excel was – if I maybe just don’t know how to use it.

    But no, my reluctance to spreadsheets comes from the very bad experience together with automation. Let me explain: Very often, Excel (or any spreadsheet) is used as a not-very-well structured database in some process. And whenever you try to add more automation to this process or want to re-use the data, we come to one of two scenarios:

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  • Against Information Hoarding

    I am an information hoarder. I am somehow unhappy if I don’t get new information, new insights, new aspects. That’s not limited to technology but to literally everything.

    And since I do more and more self-hosting, I have two services on my candidates list: Readeck and Linkwarden. Then, with the rise of AI, the whole topic of AI managed second brain “LLM Wiki” came up, allowing to hoard even more information.

    And yet … I still do not use either of them.

    And even though it would be cool to play around with the technology, my main questions before setting up one ofthe tools are:

    • Did I ever miss something?
    • Does it solve an actual problem?

    And currently .. both are no for me.

    I just stumbled across Joan Westenberg’s article “5 Rules for a Second Brain You’ll Actually Use” with the more than accurate subtitle: “Tend a Garden, Don’t Fill a Warehouse”.

    And that just nails it so well for me: I do have my note taking (currently in Joplin) for all kinds of intersting stuff, plus the articles that I share here in the “Recommended Read” category. And .. I do not NEED more.

    I achieved to live a simple enough life so that I have no projects or so that are so complex that I need more organization than that. And I’m happy with it :-)

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