GoKawiil
Tech News
The Debian Project has voted to allow developers to use generative AI tools when producing contributions to the project, provided the resulting work meets Debian's existing standards. The decision clarifies that contributors remain fully responsible for reviewing, testing, and validating any AI-assisted code or documentation before submission, regardless of the tools used to create it.
An opinion piece argues that Salesforce's strong recent earnings undercut the widely held 'SaaSpocalypse' theory, which assumed AI agents would soon replace most enterprise software. The author contends investors have wiped out roughly $2 trillion in software valuations by wrongly asking whether AI can perform a task, rather than whether a company controls data or infrastructure AI agents actually need to function.
Recent AI advances allow solo entrepreneurs to delegate entire workflows rather than single tasks—AI can now operate browser-based software, build simple apps from plain-language instructions, and direct multiple specialized agents toward a shared business goal. A demonstration highlighted seven such capabilities, including recovering lost customers and building internal tools to fix operational bottlenecks. An Intuit QuickBooks study found 78% of small businesses using AI saw productivity gains, and 43% reported revenue increases.
New York City's emergency 911 system failed to connect roughly 1,700 calls following a recent software update. City officials have not detailed how long the outage lasted or how many callers were affected during the disruption.
A longtime GitHub user since 2012 has migrated all private repositories to a self-hosted Forgejo instance and cancelled his subscription, including Copilot. He cites frequent outages and instability, alongside distrust over how GitHub's parent company uses developer code to train AI models.
Jernej Barbič, a computer science professor at the University of Southern California, has received a 2025 technical achievement Academy Award for creating Ziva VFX, software that simulates realistic muscle, fat and skin for digital humans and creatures. The technology, launched in 2016 through his startup Ziva Dynamics and later acquired by Unity Technologies in 2021, has appeared in more than 60 films including Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.
A contributor argues that enterprise AI pilots often succeed technically but fail to change business outcomes because they operate alongside existing workflows rather than inside them. The piece traces this to fragmented, inconsistent decision-making processes across teams, which limits how much impact any AI system can have once deployed.
A commentary piece introduces the German word Verschlimmbesserung—an attempted fix that makes things worse—to describe common SaaS updates that break workflows or move UI elements without real benefit. The author traces this to management incentive structures, citing Eliyahu Goldratt's idea that flawed metrics produce flawed behavior, arguing teams ship unnecessary changes because release frequency, not actual improvement, is what gets measured and rewarded.
At the FOSSY conference held this year at the University of British Columbia, developer Timothy Sample presented on bootstrappable builds, a lesser-known cousin of reproducible builds. He explained the concept as a chain of increasingly capable compilers that starts from a tiny, fully auditable seed program and eventually builds an entire modern Linux user space. Sample traced his own decade-long involvement in the effort back to his early use of GNU Guix, a functional package manager similar to Nix.
A group of contributors, drawing on their experience building and scaling apps on the Heroku platform, published a methodology called the Twelve-Factor App. It outlines a set of practices for building software-as-a-service applications that can use any programming language or backing services like databases and queues, aiming to reduce software erosion and ease collaboration among developers.
Salesforce shares jumped over 20% Thursday, marking its second-best trading day ever, after the company posted stronger-than-expected second-quarter results and unveiled an expanded partnership with Anthropic. The deal includes a new plugin called Claudeforce, which lets sales teams pull data through Anthropic's Claude chatbot, and was announced by CEOs Marc Benioff and Dario Amodei during a CNBC appearance.
Salem Robotics, founded by veterans of UT Austin robotics research and Los Alamos National Laboratory, is building software that lets existing mobile robots perform hazardous industrial inspections such as radioactive contamination smears and leak detection checks. The system focuses on precise, constrained manipulation—keeping a probe normal to a surface or within a tight offset from a pipe—while accounting for kinematics, joint limits, and collisions. The company demonstrated its software running on real robot hardware in a launch video.