Luis Villa

Luis Villa

@lu.is

Programmer-turned-lawyer, trying to build human(e) futures. Day job: SonarSource. Boards: Creative Commons, OpenET (open water data), CA Housing Defense. Also: 415, dad. Past: Wikipedia, Moz, 305 Also: https://lu.is + https://social.coop/@luis_in_brief

7K followers 2K following10.3K posts

Pinned

I didn’t set it out this way, but another way of thinking about both of these outfits is that one is what I wear when I need to remind engineers that I’m really a lawyer, and very much vice-versa.

Luis Villa@lu.is

Besides the generic set of grey-fabric suits: - a golden-yellow tie my father bought me, with a tie tack of my NASA grandfather’s; I’ve never loved the generic red power tie - in certain very niche tech lawyer situations, this reminder that There Are Rules, Dammit

in 2027 I resolve to respect my Cuban heritage by (checks notes) using more Ricky Ricardo gifs

Luis Villa@lu.is

Me, getting supplies from suppliers and in turn supplying things to others: a supply chain going on in this establishment? Shocking

Also more seriously I think the quoted post is why I struggle so much with “but my open source is not a supply chain”: you’re taking supplies of code, refashioning it, and supplying it to others! And they’re taking it from you! It’s a supply chain!

A very weird one that pushes a lot of boundaries! one that has very different moral valences than most supply chains! etc etc But still things being supplied, in a chain.

The supply chain caught up with me last night @miriamposner.com

Luis Villa reposted

Kiah Stokes is the unlikely star of these grueling WNBA Finals: defector.com/kiah-stokes-...

defector.comKiah Stokes Is The Unlikely Star Of These Grueling WNBA Finals | DefectorSAN FRANCISCO — Moments after the Golden State Valkyries wrapped up a dominant, ugly, 64-55 Game 5 win, the home PA announcer pulled in Valkyries center Kiah Stokes for an on-court interview. The…

This is the one I can’t get over when people tell me that Palantir is unusually evil. It is very bad, and it is very big, but California companies building computers and software to kill innocents is older than most of us on this website and we’re all pretty damn old.

tweety fish oh wow like a chimera or something spoooky@sifu.tweety.fish

100% of early computer research was military, and not dual-use, either. It was specifically for war.

View full thread

Though I gotta admit that I was not ready for “you know who else liked floating point numbers” bsky.app/profile/ursc...

This post is unavailable.

Once you’ve finished the pop history version of Dormouse, graduate to @histoftech.bsky.social whose book Programmed Inequality is both fascinating and infuriating. bsky.app/profile/hist...

Mar Hicks@histoftech.bsky.social

Yep, when I titled the first chapter in my book “War Machines” I wasn’t being hyperbolic. And even tech workers themselves have long recognized this—for example, take this 1971 pamphlet from the group Computer People for Peace:

This is the one I can’t get over when people tell me that Palantir is unusually evil. It is very bad, and it is very big, but California companies building computers and software to kill innocents is older than most of us on this website and we’re all pretty damn old.

tweety fish oh wow like a chimera or something spoooky@sifu.tweety.fish

100% of early computer research was military, and not dual-use, either. It was specifically for war.

a lot more tech people should read, as a starter, What the Dormouse Said, in which computers get bombed because they are associated with the defense industry.

It was bad then, and is bad now, but if you’re going around saying “oh before AI tech was good and now it is bad” or anything along those lines... that’s just some completely ahistorical nonsense.

I may have to run this on all the open source licenses and see what happens

Luis Villa@lu.is

TIL: someone has ported English to Rust github.com/Aaryan-Kapoo...

github.comGitHub - Aaryan-Kapoor/english-rs: English, rewritten in Rust: grammar as trait bounds, pronouns as borrows, and englishc, a compiler with rustc-style diagnostics for proseEnglish, rewritten in Rust: grammar as trait bounds, pronouns as borrows, and englishc, a compiler with rustc-style diagnostics for prose - Aaryan-Kapoor/english-rs

shockingly this reports very few issues in existing open source licenses, which means either open source license drafting is better than I assumed or this tool needs to be much more sadistic or both

yup yup yup

Ben Recht@beenwrekt.bsky.social

The world needs a high-quality, truly open language model. I wrote about why it’s necessary and why it’s easier to build than you might think.

argmin.netThe World Is Something We Make...and we can make a truly open language model.

I have no idea if this is any good but hell yes, normalize these sorts of articles. Looking at you, @nytimes.com

Erika Hall@erikahall.bsky.social

"Get a bunch of old WIRED editors together these days and it doesn’t take more than one drink before we start asking each other whether we enabled the worst parts of the tech world’s rise to power. " www.wired.com/story/how-el...

wired.comHow Elizabeth Holmes Tricked WIRED—and Everyone ElseWIRED was the first magazine to cover Theranos and its enticing billionaire founder. There were warning signs even then.

It's not the headline, but I've come around to "founder control of voting is very bad and a healthy democracy would outlaw it"

tweety fish oh wow like a chimera or something spoooky@sifu.tweety.fish

This is going to be a tremendous victory for hideously bad governance strategies that should be illegal, I hope everybody’s ready for that.

this this this bsky.app/profile/sifu...

tweety fish oh wow like a chimera or something spoooky@sifu.tweety.fish

"because the technology we're building has the potential to either wipe out life on earth or install a new era of tyranny it is vitally important that it be controlled by a secretive cabal of unelected god-kings" uh actually point of order?

Oh mannnnnnn

conputer dipshit@davidcrespo.bsky.social

the talk doesn't quite put it this way but I had a revelation reading it: it's completely backwards to be generating plans and code alone and then collaborating on the review. we should be doing nearly all our collaboration on the planning. we do this in various ways already but it should be More

View full thread

Also if folks have plugin/tooling for planning out state machines (could be creative, eg drawing them on an iPad as an image and feeding them to the beast?) I’m all ears, have a few projects that need highly rigorous processes right now.

(both responses to this were "mermaid", which I've now integrated into a plannotator workflow, and has already helped me find a big conceptual issue in my current sideproject, huzzah!)

mild take: new Levellers would be more interesting than new Luddits

sarcastic parrot@monkchips.com

TIL - The Rosemary Branch pub in Islington is named after the Leveller political movement.

en.wikipedia.orgLevellers - Wikipedia

Having a lot of "so many great books, so little time" FOMO.

Miriam Posner@miriamposner.com

I’ve been thinking about maybe assigning it in my critical data studies class because everything we talk about with data—how to parameterize it, how to order it, how to link it to other objects, how we break it into pieces—is all there, in a very tangible way. news.northeastern.edu/2021/10/14/h...

news.northeastern.eduThe Surprising History of the Lowly Filing CabinetCraig Robertson's latest book focuses on how the invention of the filing cabinet liberated American capitalism and inspires new technology.

#carrypropheciesolympics #carryshitolympics

Cathy Tuttle@cathytuttle.bsky.social

𝘔𝘢𝘤𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘩 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘯𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘷𝘢𝘯𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘴𝘩𝘦𝘥 𝘣𝘦 𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘭 𝘎𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵 𝘉𝘪𝘳𝘯𝘢𝘮 𝘞𝘰𝘰𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘩𝘪𝘨𝘩 𝘋𝘶𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘯𝘦 𝘏𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘚𝘩𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘢𝘨𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘵 𝘩𝘪𝘮 𝘣𝘺 𝘤𝘢𝘳𝘨𝘰 𝘣𝘪𝘬𝘦 Moving trees by bike in Leadenhall Market, London.

It's easy as a modern Californian to just take for granted that we're integrated into the intellectual life of the Whole World when that's a barely-outside-of-living-memory thing.

Erik Fredner@fredner.org

New essay with Luca Messarra out in American Literary History! We use Library of Congress data to show the geographic dispersion of archived US literary publishing over the twentieth century, and discuss the material changes that made it happen. doi.org/10.1093/alh/...

If I were still doing the openml newsletter, this would be a fascinating list to document and have tracked over time. Serious open source has had this discussion, and concluded it. Now we need to move on: how do we rebuild the new collaboration? how do we invest in testing and security?

Nafnlaus 🇮🇸🇪🇺🇺🇦@nafnlaus.bsky.social

I love that Linux itself is on that list.

lol, and then right after this in my timeline. Sob. A lot of very, very good FOSS people, whose hearts and traditional skills are in the right places, are on Mastodon. I want to bring them along for this ride and I have no idea how. bsky.app/profile/mits...

Armin Ronacher@mitsuhiko.at

The poll so far between Twitter, Bluesky and Mastodon. I think it looks less absurd than last time, but still pretty clear that the base is divided. bsky.app/profile/mits...

I have no idea what is happening in the rest of this thread and I don’t care because this is just the meanest cut you’ll see all day.

The Questionable Authority@questauthority.bsky.social

Aaron, I've read a number of your legal filings against a certain member of that group. He doesn't need $3,000/hour attorneys to deal with that stuff; $300/hour ones would be more than adequate.

Need a new, more carbon neutral expression for “now we’re cooking with gas“

Chris Elmendorf@cselmendorf.bsky.social

CA cities that disapprove housing projects are in a world of hurt. New Court of Appeal decision sets up developer lawsuits for damages, at least where state law requires a ministerial permit (SB 35/423, AB 2011, SB 684, and more). Shi v. Palos Verdes. threadreaderapp.com/thread/21141...

Improvement I learned about today: roll up air mattresses for hiking now pack 2-3x as much fluff into the same compressed volume as they did 20ish years ago when I last bought one. MAGIC.

Michael Druker 🇨🇦@mdruker.app

Social media loves talking about how everything is getting worse. But what’s something that you’ve seen get _better_ in your lifetime?

Oh mannnnnnn

conputer dipshit@davidcrespo.bsky.social

the talk doesn't quite put it this way but I had a revelation reading it: it's completely backwards to be generating plans and code alone and then collaborating on the review. we should be doing nearly all our collaboration on the planning. we do this in various ways already but it should be More

Some takeaways from reading this amazing talk; I should: - demand many more diagrams of state machines - I should use Lavish a lot more - I should reevaluate my current inclination to talk less, code more; but how to talk-collaborate effectively is going to be hard

Luis Villa reposted

Digital Tolkien Project

@digitaltolkien.com

Tolkien's light as a licensing history: Two Trees: open access, geoblocked Silmarils: all rights reserved, oath-enforced Sun & Moon: lossy public release Eärendil's star: CC0 Galadriel's Phial: CC BY-SA White Tree: a fork lineage

Luis Villa reposted

@erikahall.bsky.social

"What could be stupider than Freedom Fries?" I ask.

lol, of course NIMBY @rbreich.bsky.social endorsed the NIMBY in the race.

Mission Local@missionlocal.org

Tom Steyer endorsed Scott Wiener for Pelosi’s House seat, while former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich endorsed Connie Chan. missionlocal.org/2026/10/stey...

missionlocal.orgElection Extra! Dueling congressional endorsements from Tom Steyer and Robert ReichTom Steyer endorsed Scott Wiener for Nancy Pelosi’s House seat, while former Labor Secretary Robert Reich endorsed Connie Chan.

This should be the cause of soul-searching for every California state politician.

Joey Politano🏳️‍🌈@josephpolitano.bsky.social

In fact, Texas' solar generation has grown so much that it's surpassed California to become America's largest solar-producing state Texas already had a heavy lead in utility-scale solar, but has now passed California even when you include rooftop

This is hella fun.

This post is unavailable.

TIL that Wicker is not a remake of The Wicker Man.

Reactor Magazine@reactorsff.bsky.social

GOOD NEWS, THE HEADLINE SAYS IT ALL:

reactormag.comWicker's Sex Scenes Are Steamier Than the Directors Expected - ReactorBeds were broken

good reminder that I should revisit the Heavy Metal Umlaut page and what it tells us now about Wikipedia after LLMs (cc @jonudell.bsky.social )

Kieran Healy@kjhealy.co

Truly unironically, fantastic job everyone. Very well-played.

Luis Villa reposted

Sean Martin McDonald

@seanmartinmcdonald.bsky.social

I wish that when we talked about #digitalsovereignty that the discussions included the large number of government-mandated Internet shutdowns - both literally, and as a clear example of how singular, nationalist control is (obviously) not an inherent, unambiguous good.

That’s it, rationalizations are done, can’t top this one

Ed@ed3d.net

/turns towards camera, stares

@agrobbonta.oag.ca.gov when are you going to go after this company that sells defective, deadly products?

San Francisco Chronicle@sfchronicle.com

A Tesla driver told officials he was using the car’s full self-driving mode when he fatally struck a 71-year-old man crossing a Solano County highway, according to California Highway Patrol.

bit.lyS.F. Tesla driver who fatally struck man crossing highway said car was in full-self-driving modeA Tesla driver told officials he was using the car’s full self-driving mode when he fatally struck a 71-year-old man crossing a Solano County highway, according to California Highway Patrol.