According to today's FT, “Wall Street learns to love blockchain”. But the article provides only a very fuzzy picture of the technology. To help, I summarized the absolute essentials of blockchain technology in fewer than 500 simple words at www.spinellis.gr/blog/2026080...

For decades the accepted management wisdom has been for managers to delegate tasks and for organizations to outsource activities that aren’t core to their operations. Here's my take on how AI agents enter the picture of delegation and outsourcing. www.spinellis.gr/blog/2026071...

Over the past few days I used #OpenAI #Codex to perform a fairly extensive and demanding software code change. Here you can find all my 78 prompts documented and classified, and, based on them, my take on the role of experts in the age of agentic AI. www.spinellis.gr/blog/2026070...

Artificial intelligence seems to be increasingly matched with marketing stupidity.

Properly documenting AI-generated code commits is essential in both industry and education. Here is my proposal for a suitable set of Git commit headers. www.spinellis.gr/blog/2026070...

This is the pocket computer-history museum I use for introductory presentations: 7AK7 computer vacuum tube, metal-can transistor, SSI chip, exposed EPROM and CPU chip, RAM / SSD storage and RPi zero. Demoed it yesterday to high-school students in YES, our Youth Entrepreneurship Seminar. yes.aueb.gr

What a time to live in! We're discussing about AI recursive self-improvement and AGI. And we're also managing IT systems with cryptic tags and by adding "000_" to first names so that they appear on top of the list. (The list is from icse2027.hotcrp.com/users/pc)

A recent report on falsely-attributed research papers www.jmir.org/2026/1/e104934 and a commentary on it www.luxuriousmagazine.com/false-author... paint a bleak picture. Here are the @erictopol.bsky.social incident retractionwatch.com/2026/04/23/e... and my case study doi.org/10.1186/s410....

Have you noticed that reviewing AI-generated code is devilishly hard? Cognitive psychology and the workings of large language models give us four clues on why this happens. Read more at www.spinellis.gr/blog/2026052...

Highly ironic that a published peer-reviewed journal article on AI hallucinations and the trust crisis in artificial intelligence contains (probably AI-generated) orphan in-text citations. doi.org/10.1016/j.te...

Can you see the image smudges? I thought that my screen was dirty, but it turns out that the smudges are part of the Microsoft Office toolbar (visible in Word, Excel PowerPoint). Can't imagine what development process and bloat resulted in what looks like freehand drawing being part of it. Ideas?

Today we launch a new run of the popular and award-winning MOOC on the use of Unix Tools for data, software and production engineering. This year follow the course to improve your understanding of AI Agents' actions and your interaction with them. More information at www.spinellis.gr/unix/?utm=bs...

Generative AI upends the goals and nature of empirical software research. Here are my notes from Emerson Murphy-Hill's MSR's keynote talk on the topic. www.spinellis.gr/blog/2026041...

Vibe coding toward the incident horizon 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. […] Read the complete text at www.spinellis.gr/blog/2026030...

The video of my #FOSDEM 2026 talk on integrating the Fourth Research Edition Unix tape into the GitHub Unix history repository is now available online: ftp.belnet.be/mirror/FOSDE...

Several news outlets reported the amazing discovery of a 1970s Fourth Edition Research Unix magnetic tape. I incorporated the tape’s source code into the Unix History Repository hosted on GitHub and studied the code’s composition. Here's what I found. www.spinellis.gr/blog/2025122...

The LaTeX Korrektor: A funny video series addressing serious LaTeX style infractions. Andreas Zeller (a German), like Dr. Strangelove, convincingly fakes familiar stereotypes. (He also suggests compounding German words as an alternative to the em-dash.)

Andreas Zeller@andreaszeller.bsky.social · 8mo ago

Can one reject papers because of bad typography? The LaTeX Korrektor 4/6 - Math Mode: www.youtube.com/shorts/mc8ro... #LaTeX #LaTeXKorrektor Missed previous episodes? This playlist has them all: www.youtube.com/watch?v=EhsM...

I just received an AI-generated GitHub pull-request that incorrectly replaced 450 test code lines with a comment. Be VERY CAREFUL when reviewing out-of-the-blue PRs these days. AI-generated ones are likely to contain difficult-to-spot faults hidden as plausible fixes. github.com/dspinellis/g...

Στις 5 Νοεμβρίου λήγει η διορία της διαδικασίας έκδοσης του Προσωπικού Αριθμού.Με τη γεννήτρια γραμμάτων προσωπικού αριθμού μπορείτε να επιλέξετε εσείς έναν καλό συνδυασμό γραμμάτων για τον προσωπικό σας αριθμό. Θα τη βρείτε στο www.balab.aueb.gr/genpa/

I just added a note in the advice for writing LaTeX documents GitHub repository to avoid using the “itemize” environment, when you're describing elements. The “description” environment is better for this purpose. github.com/dspinellis/l...

A feature in Nature journal published today takes us through the fascinating and frightening world of fake authors, reviewers, and articles. It mentions my recent work on fake articles attributed to known scholars. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

How to spot fake scientists and stop them from publishing papers

Journals are considering doing identity checks to expose fake authors — but there are downsides.

nature.com

Fun, fun, fun! I'm running a binary tournament merge to combine 64 SQLite databases (83 GB in total) into one. More details in doi.org/10.1109/MS.2...

A big problem with reviewing GenAI-written text is that it is often (by design) very plausible but it can also be incorrect or superfluous, therefore requiring substantial concentrated effort to detect.

Following the permanent loss of 858TB data due to a fire in a South Korea government datacenter, here's a reminder on the several technologies that are NOT backup solutions: koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2025-10...

NIRS fire destroys government's cloud storage system, no backups available

A fire at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) Daejeon headquarters destroyed the government’s G-Drive cloud storage system, erasing work files saved individually by some 750,000 civil se...

koreajoongangdaily.joins.com

Saw the following hidden deep inside the Linux kernel arm compilation commands. I don't think that the arguments were arbitrarily ordered 😃 ar mPiT init/main.o vmlinux.a arch/arm/kernel/head.o

Why I Choose Email Over Messaging 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. www.spinellis.gr/blog/2025092...

With all the GenAI buzz we tend to forget the value of 100% correct deterministic tools. Thank you Rust clippy!

TIL that setting Turnitin checks to *include* bibliographic references (a check typically disabled, as it generates false positive matches) can help identifying hallucinated generative AI references (as these are less likely to appear elsewhere).

A special place in Hell is reserved who those who create in their programs custom editing areas where the operating system's keyboard editing bindings, copy, paste, and our macros stop working.

Since search is dead, how soon do you think Google Scholar is headed for the Google Graveyard? I'm betting it's soon, and academia is NOT prepared

Google Scholar Is Doomed

Academia built entire careers on a free Google service with zero guarantees. What could go wrong?

hannahshelley.neocities.org