Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 30 to February 06.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Emmanuele Bassi says

The GTK developers published the report for the 2026 GTK hackfest on their development blog. Lots of work and plans for the next 12 months:

• session save/restore
• toolchain requirements
• accessibility
• project maintenance

and more!

Glycin ↗

Sandboxed and extendable image loading and editing.

Sophie (she/her) reports

Glycin 2.1.beta has been released. Starting with this version, the JPEG 2000 image format is supported by default. This was made possible by a new JPEG 2000 implementation that is completely written in safe Rust.

While this image format isn’t in widespread use for images directly, many PDFs contain JPEG 2000 images since PDF 1.5 and PDF/A-2 support embedded JPEG 2000 images. Therefore, images extracted from PDFs, frequently have the JPEG 2000 format.

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

Resources ↗

Keep an eye on system resources

nokyan says

This week marks the release of Resources 1.10 with support for new hardware, software and improvements all around! Here are some highlights:

• Added support for AMD NPUs using the amdxdna driver
• Improved accessibility for screen reader users and keyboard users
• Vastly improved app detection
• Significantly cut down CPU usage
• Searching for multiple process names at once is now possible using the “|” operator in the search field

In-depth release notes can be found on GitHub .

Resources is available on Flathub .

gtk-rs ↗

Safe bindings to the Rust language for fundamental libraries from the GNOME stack.

Julian 🍃 announces

I’ve added another chapter for the gtk4-rs book. It describes how to use gettext to make your app available in other languages: https://gtk-rs.org/gtk4-rs/stable/latest/book/i18n.html

Third Party Projects

Ronnie Nissan announces

This week I released Sitra, an app to install and manage fonts from google fonts. It also helps devs integrate fonts into their projects using fontsource npm and CDN.

The app is a replacement to the Font Downloader app which has been abandoned for a while.

Sitra can be downloaded from flathub

Arnis (kem-a) announces

AppManager is a GTK/Libadwaita developed desktop utility in Vala that makes installing and uninstalling AppImages on Linux desktop painless. It supports both SquashFS and DwarFS AppImage formats, features a seamless background auto-update process, and leverages zsync delta updates for efficient bandwidth usage. Double-click any .AppImage to open a macOS-style drag-and-drop window, just drag to install and AppManager will move the app, wire up desktop entries, and copy icons.

And of course, it’s available as AppImage. Get it on Github

Parabolic ↗

Download web video and audio.

Nick reports

Parabolic V2026.2.0 is here!

This release contains a complete overhaul of the downloading engine as it was rewritten from C++ to C#. This will provide us with more stable performance and faster iteration of highly requested features (see the long list below!!). The UIs for both Windows and Linux were also ported to C# and got a face lift, providing a smoother and more beautiful downloading experience.

Besides the rewrite, this release also contains many new features (including quality and subtitle options for playlists - finally!) and plenty of bug fixes with an updated yt-dlp .

Here’s the full changelog:

• Parabolic has been rewritten in C# from C++
• Added arm64 support for Windows
• Added support for playlist quality options
• Added support for playlist subtitle options
• Added support for reversing the download order of a playlist
• Added support for remembering the previous Download Immediately selection in the add download dialog
• Added support for showing yt-dlp’s sleeping pauses within download rows
• Added support for enabling nightly yt-dlp updates within Parabolic
• Redesigned both platform application designs for a faster and smoother download experience
• Removed documentation pages as Parabolic shows in-app documentation when needed
• Fixed an issue where translator-credits were not properly displayed
• Fixed an issue where Parabolic crashed when adding large amounts of downloads from a playlist
• Fixed an issue where Parabolic crashed when validating certain URLs
• Fixed an issue where Parabolic refused to start due to keyring errors
• Fixed an issue where Parabolic refused to start due to VC errors
• Fixed an issue where Parabolic refused to start due to version errors
• Fixed an issue where opening the about dialog would freeze Parabolic for a few seconds
• Updated bundled yt-dlp

Shell Extensions

subz69 reports

I just released Pigeon Email Notifier , a new GNOME Shell extension for Gmail and Microsoft email notifications using GNOME Online Accounts. Supports priority-only mode, persistent and sound notifications.

Miscellaneous

Arjan reports

PyGObject 3.55.3 has been released. It’s the third development release (it’s not available on PyPI) in the current GNOME release cycle.

The main achievements for this development cycle, leading up to GNOME 50, are:

• Support for do_dispose and do_constructed methods in Python classes. do_constructed is called after an object has been constructed (as a post-init method), and do_dispose is called when a GObject is disposed.
• Removal of duplicate marshalling code for fields, properties, constants, and signal closures.
• Removal of old code, most notable pygtkcompat and wrappers for Glib.OptionContext/OptionGroup .
• Under the hood toggle references have been replaced by normal references, and PyGObject sinks “floating” objects by default.

Notable changes include for this release include:

• Type annotations to Glib and GObject overrides. This makes it easier for pygobject-stubs to generate type hints.
• Updates to the asyncio support.

A special thanks to Jamie Gravendeel, Laura Kramolis, and K.G. Hammarlund for test-driving the unstable versions.

All changes can be found in the Changelog .

This release can be downloaded from Gitlab and the GNOME download server .If you use PyGObject in your project, please give it a spin and see if everything works as expected.⁦

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

A few months ago I joined ROOST (Robust Open Online Safety Tools) to build our open source community that would be helping to create, distribute, and maintain common tools and building blocks for online trust and safety. One of the first events I wanted to make sure we attended in order to build that community was of course FOSDEM , the massive annual gathering of open source folks in Brussels, Belgium.

Luckily for us, the timing aligned nicely with the v1 release of our first major online safety tool, Osprey , as well as its adoption by Bluesky and the Matrix.org Foundation. I wrote and submitted a talk for the FOSDEM crowd and the decentralized communications track, which was accepted. Our COO Anne Bertucio and I flew out to Brussels to meet up with folks, make connections, and learn how our open source tools could best serve open protocols and platforms.

Brunch with the Christchurch Call Foundation

Saturday, ROOST co-hosted a brunch with the Christchurch Call Foundation where we invited folks to discuss the intersection of open source and online safety. The event was relatively small, but we engaged in meaningful conversations and came away with several recurring themes. Non-exhaustively, some areas attendees were interested in: novel classifiers for unique challenges like audio recordings and pixel art; how to ethically source and train classifiers; ways to work better together across platforms and protocols.

Personally I enjoyed meeting folks from Mastodon, GitHub, ATproto, IFTAS, and more in person for the first time, and I look forward to continuing several conversations that were started over coffee and fruit.

Talk

Our Sunday morning talk “Stop Reinventing in Isolation” (which you can watch on YouTube or at fosdem.org ) filled the room and was really well-received.

Cassidy and Anne giving a talk. | Photos from @matrix@mastodon.matrix.org

In it we tackled three major topics: a crash course on what is “trust and safety”; why the field needs an open source approach; and then a bit about Osprey, our self-hostable automated rules engine and investigation tool that started as an internal tool built at Discord.

Q&A

We had a few minutes for Q&A after the talk, and the folks in the room spurred some great discussions. If there’s something you’d like to ask that isn’t covered by the talk or this Q&A, feel free to start a discussion ! Also note that this gets a bit nerdy; if you’re not interested in the specifics of deploying Osprey, feel free to skip ahead to the Stand section.

When using Osprey with the decentralized Matrix protocol, would it be a policy server implementation?

Yes, in the Matrix model that’s the natural place to handle it. Chat servers are designed to check with the policy server before sending room events to clients, so it’s precisely where you’d want to be able to run automated rules. The Matrix.org Foundation is actively investigating how exactly Osprey can be used with this setup, and already have it deployed in their staging environment for testing.

Does it make sense to use Osprey for smaller platforms with fewer events than something like Matrix, Bluesky, or Discord?

This one’s a bit harder to answer, because Osprey is often the sort of tool you don’t “need” until you suddenly and urgently do. That said, it is designed as an in-depth investigation tool, and if that’s not something needed on your platform yet due to the types and volume of events you handle, it could be overkill. You might be better off starting with a moderation/review dashboard like Coop, which we expect to be able to release as v0 in the coming weeks. As your platform scales, you could then explore bringing Osprey in as a complementary tool to handle more automation and deeper investigation.

Does Osprey support account-level fraud detection?

Osprey itself is pretty agnostic to the types of events and metadata it handles; it’s more like a piece of plumbing that helps you connect a firehose of events to one end, write rules and expose those events for investigation in the middle, and then connect outgoing actions on the other end. So while it’s been designed for trust and safety uses, we’ve heard interest from platforms using it in a fraud prevention context as well.

What are the hosting requirements of Osprey, and what do deployments look like?

While you can spin Osprey up on a laptop for testing and development, it can be a bit beefy. Osprey is made up of four main components: worker, UI, database, and Druid as the analytics database. The worker and UI have low resource requirements, your database (e.g. Postgres) could have moderate requirements, but then Druid is what will have the highest requirements. The requirements will also scale with your total throughput of events being processed, as well as the TTLs you keep in Druid. As for deployments, Discord, Bluesky, and the Matrix.org Foundation have each integrated Osprey into their Kubernetes setups as the components are fairly standard Docker images. Osprey also comes with an optional coordinator, an action distribution and load-balancing service that can aid with horizontal scaling.

Stand

This year we were unable to secure a stand (there were already nearly 100 stands in just 5 buildings!), but our friends at Matrix graciously hosted us for several hours at their stand near the decentralized communications track room so we could follow up with folks after our talk. We blew through our shiny sticker supply as well as our 3D printed ROOST keychains (which I printed myself at home!) in just one afternoon. We’ll have to bring more to future FOSDEMs!

When I handed people one of our hexagon stickers the reaction was usually some form of, “ooh, shiny!” but my favorite was when someone essentially said, “Oh, you all actually know open source!” That made me proud, at least. :)

Interesting Talks

Lastly, I always like to shout out interesting talks I attended or caught on video later so others can enjoy them on their own time. I recommend checking out:

• Community moderation in Matrix
• Open Source Security in Spite of AI

• Breakfast with some of the team. Taxi to the venue laden with beavers. Distributed these to various hard-working people.
• Gave a talk scraping the surface of why writing your own office suite from scratch is really foolish, although an increasingly popular folly these days:
  
• More wandering, grabbed some lunch, gave a talk with Stephan on on&off collaborative editing:
  
• Out to the XWIKI drinks party & dinner in the evening. /ul>

Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from January 23 to January 30.

GNOME Core Apps and Libraries

Document Viewer (Papers) ↗

View, search or annotate documents in many different formats.

lbaudin announces

Papers can now be used to draw freehand annotations on PDF documents (ink), as well as add text to them! These features were merged this week and are now available in GNOME nightly, more details in this blog post .

GTK ↗

Cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces.

Emmanuele Bassi reports

As usual, a few GTK developers are meeting up before FOSDEM for the planning hackfest; we are discussing the current state of the project, and also where do we want to go in the next 6-12 months:

• the new SVG rendering code
• accessibility
• icons and other assets
• platform support, especially Windows and Android
• various improvements in the GLib code
• the state of various dependencies, like gdk-pixbuf and accesskit
• whether to introduce unstable API as an opt in for experimentation, before finalising it

You can follow along the agenda, and the notes here: https://pad.gnome.org/gtk-hackfest-2026

We are also going to be at the GNOME social event on Saturday in Brussels, so make sure to join us!

Emmanuele Bassi says

Matthias just released a new GTK 4.21 developers snapshot , in time for GNOME 50’s beta release. This release brings various changes:

• the state saving and restoring API has been made private; we have received feedback by early adopters, and we are going to need to go back to the drawing board in order to address some issues related to its use
• GSK shaders are now autogenerated
• GTK does not depend on librsvg any more, and implements its own SVG renderer, including various filters
• the Inspector has a heat map generator
• SVG filters can be used inside CSS data URLs
• GtkAspectFrame’s measurement has been fixed to properly (and efficiently) support more cases and fractional sizes

Additionally, we have multiple fixes for Windows, macOS, and Android. Lots of things to look forward for the 4.22 stable release!

GNOME Circle Apps and Libraries

gtk-rs ↗

Safe bindings to the Rust language for fundamental libraries from the GNOME stack.

Julian 🍃 announces

After a quite long hiatus, I continued writing on the gtk4-rs book. This time we introduce the build system Meson. This sets the stage for more interesting features like internationalization: https://gtk-rs.org/gtk4-rs/stable/latest/book/meson.html

Mahjongg ↗

Match tiles and clear the board

Mat announces

Mahjongg 49.1 has been released, and is available on Flathub . This release mainly focuses on usability improvements, and includes the following changes:

• Implement pause menu with ‘Resume’ and ‘Quit’ buttons
• Add Escape keyboard shortcut to pause game
• Pause game when main window is obscured
• Pause game when dialogs and menus are visible
• Don’t allow pausing completed games
• Don’t show confirmation dialog for layout change after completing game
• Fix text entry not always receiving focus in Scores dialog
• Translation updates

Third Party Projects

Danial reports

We are announcing an important update to Carburetor , our tool for easily setting up a Tor proxy. This release focuses on crucial improvements for users in Iran, where Tor remains one of the few reliable ways to stay connected.

Following the massacre of protesters by Iran state which reportedly led to the killing of more than 60,000 individuals in a couple of days (this includes shooting injured people into the head on the hospital beds), the Internet and all other means of communications such as SMS and landlines suffered a total shutdown. After dozen of days, network access is now very fragile and heavily restricted there.

In response, this update adds support for Snowflake bridges with AMP cache rendezvous, which have proven more reliable under current conditions. To use them, ensure these two bridges are included in your inventory:

snowflake 192.0.2.5:80 2B280B23E1107BB62ABFC40DDCC8824814F80A72 url=https://snowflake-broker.torproject.net/ ampcache=https://cdn.ampproject.org/ front=www.google.com tls-imitate=hellorandomizedalpn
snowflake 192.0.2.6:80 8838024498816A039FCBBAB14E6F40A0843051FA url=https://snowflake-broker.torproject.net/ ampcache=https://cdn.ampproject.org/ front=www.google.com tls-imitate=hellorandomizedalpn

We’ve also removed the previous 90 seconds connection timeout, as establishing a connection now often takes much longer due to extreme throttling and filtering, sometimes more than 10 minutes.

Additionally, dependencies like Tor and pluggable transports have been updated to ensure better stability and security.

Stay safe. Keep connected.

justinrdonnelly announces

I’ve just released a new version of Bouncer. Launching Bouncer now opens a dashboard to show the status of required components and configurations. Longtime users may not notice, but this will be especially helpful for new users trying to get Bouncer up and running. You can get Bouncer from Flathub !

Jeffry Samuel says

Alpaca 9 is out, now users can now implement character cards to make role-play scenarios with their AI models, this update also brings changes to how Alpaca integrates Ollama instances, simplifying the process of running local AI even more. Check out the release discussion for more information -> https://github.com/Jeffser/Alpaca/discussions/1088

Daniel Wood reports

Design, 2D computer aided design (CAD) for GNOME sees a new release, highlights include:

• Enable clipboard management (Cut, Copy, Paste, Copy with basepoint, Select All)
• Add Cutclip Command (CUTCLIP)
• Add Copyclip Command (COPYCLIP)
• Add Copybase Command (COPYBASE)
• Add Pasteclip Command (PASTECLIP)
• Add Match Properties Command (MA)
• Add Pan Command (P)
• Add Zoom Command (Z)
• Show context menu on right click
• Enable Undo and Redo
• Improved Trim (TR) command with Arc, Circle and Line entities
• Indicate save state on tabs and header bar
• Plus many fixes!

Design is available from Flathub:

https://flathub.org/apps/details/io.github.dubstar_04.design

slomo announces

GStreamer 1.28.0 has been released! This is a major new feature release, with lots of exciting new features and other improvements. Some highlights:

• GTK4 is now shipped with the GStreamer binaries on macOS and Windows alongside the gtk4paintablesink video sink
• vulkan plugin now supports AV1, VP9, HEVC-10 decoding and H264 encoding
• glupload now has a udmabuf uploader to more efficiently share video buffers, leading to better perf when using, say, a software decoder and waylandsink or gtk4paintablesink
• waylandsink has improved handling for HDR10 metadata
• New AMD HIP plugin and integration library
• Analytics (AI/ML) plugin suite has gained numerous new features
• New plugins for transcription, translation and speech synthesis, etc
• Enhanced RTMP/FLV support with HEVC support and multi-track audio
• New vmaf element for perceptual video quality assessment using Netflix’s VMAF framework
• New source element to render a Qt6 QML scene
• New GIF decoder element with looping support
• Improved support for iOS and Android
• And many, many more new features alongside the usual bug fixes

Check the extensive release notes for more details.

rat reports

Echo 3 is released! Echo is a GUI ping utlity.

Version 3 brings along two notable features: instant cancelling of pings and a “Trips” tab showing details about each trip made in the ping.

As well as smaller changes to the layout: removed the ping options expander and moved error messages below the address bar.

Get it on Flathub: https://flathub.org/en/apps/io.github.lo2dev.Echo

Pipeline ↗

Follow your favorite video creators.

schmiddi reports

Pipeline 3.2.0 was released. This release updates the underlying video player, Clapper, to the latest version. This in particular allows specifying options passed to yt-dlp for video playback, including cookies files or extractor arguments. Besides that, it also adds some new keyboard shortcuts for toggling fullscreen and the sidebar, and fixes quite a few bugs.

One important note: Shortly before the release of this version, YouTube decided to break yt-dlp. We are working on updating the yt-dlp version, but as a temporary workaround, you can add the following string to the yt-dlp extraction arguments configurable in the preferences: youtube:player_client=default,-android_sdkless .

Shell Extensions

Just Perfection says

Just Perfection extension is now ported to GNOME Shell 50 and available on EGO. This update brings bug fixes and new features, including toggles for backlight and DND button visibility.

Internships

lbaudin announces

Malika is now halfway through her Outreachy internship about signatures in Papers and has made great progress! She just published a blog post about her experience so far, you can read it here .

That’s all for this week!

See you next week, and be sure to stop by #thisweek:gnome.org with updates on your own projects!

Maintaining an open source project in your free time is incredibly rewarding. A large project full of interesting challenges, limited only by your time and willingness to learn. Years of work add up to something you’ve grown proud of. Who would’ve thought an old project on its last legs could turn into something beautiful?

The focus is intense. So many people using the project, always new things to learn and improve. Days fly by when time allows for it. That impossible feature sitting in the backlog for years, finally done. That slow part of the application, much faster now. This flow state is pretty cool, might as well tackle a few more issues while it lasts.

Then comes the day. The biggest release yet is out the door. More tasks remain on the list, but it’s just too much. That release took so much effort, and the years are adding up. You can’t keep going like this. You wonder, is this the beginning of the end? Will you finally burn out, like so many before you?

A smaller project catches your eye. Perhaps it would be fun to work on something else again. Maybe it doesn’t have to be as intense? Looks like this project uses a niche programming language. Is it finally time to learn another one? It’s an unfamiliar project, but it’s pretty fun. It tickles the right spots. All the previous knowledge helps.

You work on the smaller project for a while. It goes well. That larger project you spent years on lingers. So much was accomplished. It’s not done yet, but software is never done. The other day, someone mentioned this interesting feature they really wanted. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to look into it? It’s been a while since the last feature release. Maybe the next one doesn’t have to be as intense? It’s pretty fun to work on other projects sometimes, too.

The hobby lives on. It’s what you love doing, after all.

Nearly 10 years ago, I first looked into this for Evince but quickly gave up. One year and a half ago, I tried again, this time in Papers. After several merge requests in poppler and in Papers, ink and free text annotations support just landed in Papers repository!

Therefore, it is now possible to draw on documents and add text, for instance to fill forms. Here is a screenshot with the different tools:

This is the result of the joint work of several people who designed, developed, and tested all the little details. It required adding support for ink and free text annotations in the GLib bindings of poppler, then adding support for highlight ink annotations there. Then several things got in the way adding those in Papers; among other things, it became clear that an undo/redo mechanism was necessary and annotations management was entangled with the main view widget. It was also an opportunity to improve document forms, which are now more accessible.

This can be tested directly from the GNOME Nightly flatpak repository and new issues are welcomed.

Also, this is a new blog and I never quite introduced myself: I actually started developing with GTK on GTK 2, at a time when GTK 3 was looming. Then I took a long break and delved again into desktop development two years ago. Features that just got merged were, in fact, my first contributions to Papers. They are also the ones that took the most time to be merged! I became one of Papers maintainers last March, joining Pablo (who welcomed me in this community and stopped maintenance since then), Markus, and Qiu.

Next time, a post about our participation in Outreachy with Malika's internship !

Dark mode: Manual Signature Implementation

Light mode: When there is no added signature

Reaching the midpoint of this project feels like a good moment to pause, not because the work is slowing down, but because I finally have enough context to see the bigger picture.

At the start, everything felt new: the codebase, the community, the workflow, and even the way problems are framed in open source. Now, halfway through, things are starting to connect.

Where I Started

When I began working on Papers, my main focus was understanding the codebase and how contributions actually happen in a real open-source project. Reading unfamiliar code, following discussions, and figuring out where my work fit into the larger system was challenging.

Early on, progress felt slow. Tasks that seemed small took longer than expected, mostly because I was learning how the project works, not just what to code. But that foundation has been critical.

Photo: Build failure I encountered during development

What I’ve Accomplished So Far

At this midpoint, I’m much more comfortable navigating the codebase and understanding the project’s architecture. I’ve worked on the manual signature feature and related fixes, which required carefully reading existing implementations, asking questions, and iterating based on feedback. I’m now working on the digital signature implementation, which is one of the most complext part of the project and builds directly on the foundation laid by the earlier work.

Beyond the technical work, I’ve learned how collaboration really functions in open source:

• How to communicate progress clearly
• How to receive and apply feedback
• How to break down problems instead of rushing to solutions

These skills have been just as important as writing code.

Challenges Along the Way

One of the biggest challenges has been balancing confidence and humility, knowing when to try things independently and when to ask for help. I’ve also learned that progress in open source isn’t always linear. Some days are spent coding, others reading, debugging, or revisiting decisions.

Another challenge has been shifting my mindset from “just making it work” to thinking about maintainability, users, and future contributors. That shift takes time, but it’s starting to stick.

What’s Changed Since the Beginning

The biggest change is how I approach problems.

I now think more about who will use the feature, who might read this code later, and how my changes fit into the overall project. Thinking about the audience, both users of Papers and fellow contributors, has influenced how I write code, documentation, and even this blog.

I’m also more confident participating in discussions and expressing uncertainty when I don’t fully understand something. That confidence comes from realizing that learning in public is part of the process.

Looking Ahead

The second half of this project feels more focused. With the groundwork laid, I can move faster and contribute more meaningfully. My goal is to continue improving the quality of my contributions, take on more complex tasks, and deepen my understanding of the project.

Most importantly, I want to keep learning about open source, about collaboration, and about myself as a developer.

Final Thoughts

This midpoint has reminded me that growth isn’t always visible day to day, but it becomes clear when you stop and reflect. I’m grateful for the support, feedback, and patience from GNOME community, especially my mentor Lucas Baudin. And I’m so excited to see how the rest of the project unfolds.

Its a crazy time to be part of the tech world. I’m happy to be sat on the fringes here but I want to try and capture a bit of the madness, so in a few years we can look back on this blogpost and think “Oh yes, shit was wild in 2026”.

(insert some AI slop image here of a raccoon driving a racing car or something)

I have read the blog of Geoffrey Huntley for about 5 years since he famously right-clicked all the NFTs . Smart & interesting guy. I’ve also known the name Steve Yegge for a while, he has done enough notable things to get the honour of an entry in Wikipedia. Recently they’ve both written a lot about generating code with LLMs. I mean, I hope in 2026 we’ve all had some fun feeding freeform text and code into LLMs and playing with the results, they are a fascinating tool. But these two dudes are going into what looks like a sort of AI psychosis, where you feed so many LLMs into each other that you can see into the future, and in the process give most of your money to Anthropic.

It’s worth reading some of their articles if you haven’t, there are interesting ideas in there, but I always pick up some bad energy. They’re big on the hook that, if you don’t study their techniques now, you’ll be out of a job by summer 2026. (Mark Zuckerborg promised this would happen by summer 2025, but somehow I still have to show up for work five days every week). The more I hear this, the more it feels like a sort of alpha-male flex, except online and in the context of the software industry. The alpha tech-bro is here, and he will Vibe Code the fuck out of you. The strong will reign, and the weak will wither. Is that how these guys see the world? Is that the only thing they think we can do with these here computers, is compete with each other in Silicon Valley’s Hunger Games?

I felt a bit dizzy when I saw Geoffrey’s recent post about how he was now funded by cryptocurrency gamblers ( “two AI researchers are now funded by Solana”) who are betting on his project and gifting him the fees. I didn’t manage to understand what the gamblers would win. It seemed for a second like an interesting way to fund open research, although “Patreon but it’s also a casino” is definitely turn for the weird. Steve Yegge jumped on the bandwagon the same week ( “BAGS and the Creator Economy” ) and, without breaking any laws, gave us the faintest hint that something big is happening over there.

Well…

You’ll be surprised to know that both of them bailed on it within a week. I’m not sure why — I suspect maybe the gamblers got too annoying to deal with — but it seems some people lost some money. Although that’s really the only possible outcome from gambling. I’m sure the casino owners did OK out of it. Maybe its still wise to be wary of people who message you out of the blue wanting to sell you cryptocurrency.

The excellent David Gerard had a write up immediately on Pivot To AI: “Steve Yegge’s Gas Town: Vibe coding goes crypto scam” . (David is not a crypto scammer and has a good old fashioned Patreon where you can support his journalism). He talks about addiction to AI, which I’m sure you know is a real thing.

Addictive software was perfected back in the 2010s by social media giants. The same people who had been iterating on gambling machines for decades moved to California and gifted us infinite scroll . OpenAI and Anthropic are based in San Francisco. There’s something inherently addictive about a machine that takes your input, waits a second or two, and gives you back something that’s either interesting or not. Next time you use ChatGPT, look at how the interface leans into that!

(Pivot To AI also have a great writeup of this: “Generative AI runs on gambling addiction — just one more prompt, bro!” )

So, here we are in January 2026. There’s something very special about this post “Stevey’s Birthday Blog” . Happy birthday, Steve, and I’m glad you’re having fun. That said, I do wonder if we’ll look back in years to come on this post as something of an inflection point in the AI bubble.

All though December I had weird sleeping patterns while I was building Gas Town. I’d work late at night, and then have to take deep naps in the middle of the day. I’d just be working along and boom, I’d drop. I have a pillow and blanket on the floor next to my workstation. I’ll just dive in and be knocked out for 90 minutes, once or often twice a day. At lunch, they surprised me by telling me that vibe coding at scale has messed up their sleep. They get blasted by the nap-strike almost daily, and are looking into installing nap pods in their shared workspace.

Being addicted to something such that it fucks with your sleeping patterns isn’t a new invention. Ask around the punks in your local area. Humans can do amazing things. That story starts way before computers were invented. Scientists in the 16th century were absolute nutters who would like… drink mercury in the name of discovery. Isaac Newton came up with his theory of optics by skewering himself in the eye. (If you like science history, have a read of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle Coding is fun and making computers do cool stuff can be very addictive. That story starts long before 2026 as well. Have you heard of the demoscene ?

Part of what makes Geoffrey Huntley and Steve Yegge’s writing compelling is they are telling very interesting stories. They are leaning on existing cultural work to do that, of course. Every time I think about Geoffrey’s 5 line bash loop that feeds an LLMs output back into its input, the name reminds me of my favourite TV show when I was 12.

Which is certainly better than the “human centipede” metaphor I might have gone with. I wasn’t built for this stuff.

The Gas Town blog posts are similarly filled with steampunk metaphors and Steve Yegge’s blog posts are interspersed with generated images that, at first glance, look really cool. “Gas Town” looks like a point and click adventure, at first glance. In fact it’s a CLI that gives kooky names to otherwise dry concepts,… but look at the pictures! You can imagine gold coins spewing out of a factory into its moat while you use it.

All the AI images in his posts look really cool at first glance. The beauty of real art is often in the details , so let’s take a look.

What is that tower on the right? There’s an owl wearing goggles about to land on a tower… which is also wearing goggles?

What’s that tiny train on the left that has indistinct creatures about the size of a foxes fist? I don’t know who on earth is on that bridge on the right, some horrific chimera of weasel and badger. The panda is stoicly ignoring the horrors of his creation like a good industrialist.

What is the time on the clock tower? Where is the other half of the fox? Is the clock powered by …. oh no.

Gas Town here is a huge factory with 37 chimneys all emitting good old sulphur and carbon dioxide, as God intended. But one question: if you had a factory that could produce large quantities of gold nuggets, would you store them on the outside ?

Good engineering involves knowing when to look into the details, and when not to. Translating English to code with an LLM is fun and you can get some interesting results. But if you never look at the details, somewhere in your code is a horrific weasel badger chimera, a clock with crooked hands telling a time that doesn’t exist, and half a fox. Your program could make money… or it could spew gold coins all around town where everyone can grab them.

So… my AI predictions for 2026. Let’s not worry too much about code. People and communities and friendships are the thing.

The human world is 8 billion people. Many of us make a modest living growing and selling vegetables or fixing cars or teaching children to read and write. The tech industry is a big bubble that’s about to burst. Computers aren’t going anywhere, and our open source communities and foundations aren’t going anywhere. People and communities and friendships are the main thing. Helping out in small ways with some of the bad shit going on in the world. You don’t have to solve everything. Just one small step to help someone is more than many people do.

Pay attention to what you’re doing. Take care of the details. Do your best to get a good night’s sleep.

AI in 2026 is going to go about like this:

It’s Friday so it’s time for another GNOME Foundation update. Much of this week has been a continuation of items from last week’s update , so I’m going to keep it fairly short and sweet.

With FOSDEM happening next week (31st January to 1st February), preparation for the conference was the main standout item this week. There’s a lot happening around the conference for GNOME, including:

• Three hackfests (GNOME OS, GTK, Board)
• The Advisory Board meeting
• A GNOME stand with merchandise
• A social event on the Saturday
• Plenty of GNOME-related talks on the schedule

We’ve created a pad to keep track of everything. Feel free to edit it if anything is missing or incorrect.

Other activities this week included:

• Last week I reported that our Digital Wellbeing development program has completed its work. Ignacy provided a great writeup this week , with screenshots and a screencast of the new parental controls features. I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Endless for funding this important work which will make GNOME more accessible to young people and their carers.
• On the infrastructure side, Bart landed a donate.gnome.org rewrite, which will make the site more maintainable. The rewrite also makes it possible to use the site’s core functionality to run other fundraisers, such as for Flathub or GIMP.
• GUADEC 2026 planning continues, with a focus on securing arrangements for the venue and accommodation, as well as starting the sponsorship drive.
• Accounting and systems work also continues in the run up to the audit. We are currently working through another application round to unlock features in the new payments processing platform. There’s also some work happening to phase out some financial services that are no longer used, and we are also working on some end of calendar year tax reports.

That’s it for this update; I hope you found it interesting! Next week I will be busy at FOSDEM so there won’t be a regular weekly update, but hopefully the following week will contain a trip report from Brussels!