https://www.spinellis.gr/blog The Internet soapbox of Diomidis Spinellis dds Text Diomidis D. Spinellis Web Log https://www.spinellis.gr/blog 2004-08-20T18:00:00-03:00 en weekly 2 2003-01-01T12:00+00:00 blog.pl 3c6ad07 2025-12-24 23:55:57 +0200 https://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss https://www.spinellis.gr/dds.gif https://www.spinellis.gr/blog https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20260413 In a keynote presentation at the 2026 Mining Software Repositories Emerson Murphy-Hill, a star researcher at Microsoft, presented his view on the role of an empirical software engineering researcher in the age of generative AI. His talk focused on three themes: the durability, differentiation, and dissemination of research. https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20260413 Diomidis Spinellis Text Empirical software research in the age of AI https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20260413 2026-04-13T14:06:11-00:00 en https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20260302 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. The curve is real, the funding is real, and the demos are so real that they must be watched on a stage with dramatic lighting, because ordinary lighting reveals too much. The modern model does many things remarkably well—summarization, translation, code generation—and then it will confidently assert that 9 is a prime number “depending on your threat model,” which is how you know you’re witnessing history. https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20260302 Diomidis Spinellis Text Vibe coding toward the incident horizon https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20260302 2026-03-02T16:44:31-00:00 en https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20251223 Several news outlets reported the discovery of a 1970s Fourth Edition Research Unix magnetic tape at the University of Utah in July 2025 and its successful restoration. This is a significant find, because up to now only the Fourth Edition’s manual was thought to have survived. Over the past few days I incorporated the tape’s source code into the Unix History Repository hosted on GitHub (see it here ) and studied the code’s composition. https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20251223 Diomidis Spinellis Text An initial analysis of the discovered Unix V4 tape https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20251223 2025-12-23T18:18:55-00:00 en https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20250926 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. https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20250926 Diomidis Spinellis Text Why I choose email over messaging https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20250926 2026-03-02T16:47:22-00:00 en https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20250626 Two widely-reported court rulings in San Francisco found that employing copyrighted works to train Large Language Models (LLMs) fell within the law’s “fair use” provisions. The fact that writers brought these lawsuits shows that they felt wronged by the use of their works to train LLMs without their permission. What should we make of those rulings? https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20250626 Diomidis Spinellis Text Is it legal to use copyrighted works to train LLMs? https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20250626 2025-06-26T12:07:56-00:00 en https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20250520 Some open source software I wrote decades ago was distributed with the then-current BSD license, which included an advertising clause. This hinders the code’s reuse and distribution, so I’m hereby declaring that the clause’s requirements no longer apply to my code, and that the corresponding clause can be deleted from it. https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20250520 Diomidis Spinellis Text I’m removing the BSD advertising clause https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20250520 2025-05-20T11:09:41-00:00 en https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20250411 Generative AI (GenAI) systems, such as ChatGPT, can help students as their personal tutor, by allowing them to study what interests them, by providing in depth explanations to topics they didn’t quite understand, by assessing their work and problems with it, and by providing shortcuts to parts of their work that aren’t directly relevant to what they want to learn. However, students sometimes misuse GenAI to derive answers for work they were supposed to conduct on their own as part of their learning, or accept its answers uncritically. For the first type of misuse part of the blame occasionally also lies with educators for giving out-of-class assignments that GenAI can perform with ease. For the second type of misuse students must learn to avoid using unverified GenAI output. Needless to say that in both cases the misuse of AI may also constitute academic fraud and violate their university’s code of conduct. Here is my take on the practicalities of the two cases. https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20250411 Diomidis Spinellis Text The perils of GenAI student submissions https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20250411 2025-04-11T03:31:35-00:00 en https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20241015 In an IEEE Software “Adventures in Code” column titled Modular Data Analytics I describe the benefits and use of simple-rolap , a tool suite for relational online analytical processing. I have built simple-rolap based on the Unix make tool and a few shell scripts. With make approaching its 50th birthday, before writing the column I looked for possible modern and better alternatives I might be ignoring. https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20241015 Diomidis Spinellis Text Unix make vs Apache Airflow https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20241015 2024-10-15T11:19:35-00:00 en https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20240805 A key part in scientific writing is a description of related work. This section establishes what is known in the given area and the new publication’s contribution. It also provides a signal to reviewers and readers regarding the study’s innovativeness, credibility, and thoroughness. A paper with a shallow related work section may well have overlooked important relevant work that would have supported its theory building, methods, or conclusions. A mistake often made in related work sections is to present them as a laundry list ( A did X , B did Y ), often in chronological order. https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20240805 Diomidis Spinellis Text How (and how not) to present related work https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20240805 2024-08-05T10:43:27-00:00 en https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20240205 I’ve been working with exceptions offered by languages, such as Java and Python, for more than 20 years, invariably as their consumer: catching them when raised by an API and then doing my thing. For the systems I worked on, exception handling mostly involved either quitting the program with an error or re-prompting the user to fix some input. Consequently, my view of them was as a fancy error handling mechanism: syntactic sugar and static enforcement for checking a function’s successful completion. Recently, I refactored the error handling in Alexandria3k , a library and a command-line tool providing efficient relational query access to diverse publication open data sets. Through this the full power of exceptions clicked for me. I suspect that others may share my previously limited appreciation of exception handling, so here is a brief description of the refactoring. https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20240205 Diomidis Spinellis Text An exception handling revelation https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20240205 2024-02-05T15:48:57-00:00 en https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20230901 TomTom recently announced it would stop operating their supporting infrastructure by the end of September following its earlier decision to exit the wearables market . This means that its products, such as sports watches, will become effectively useless, as they will no longer be able to export their activities and sync them with tracker sites. Throwing away an otherwise fine watch only because its maker decided to shut down its proprietary infrastructure seems like a sad waste. Here is how you can download the watch’s data and upload it to Strava , a popular activity tracker, using open source software. https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20230901 Diomidis Spinellis Text Extending the life of TomTom wearables https://www.spinellis.gr/blog/20230901 2023-11-03T15:57:39-00:00 en