Back in Canberra for Everything Open

Tuesday, January 27th, 2026 at 09:11pm

Last week I drove up to Canberra for the fourth Everything Open conference the spiritual successor to linux.conf.au, this was fitting as the last time I was in Canberra was for LCA back in 2013. I did post about the first Everything Open back in 2023, and while I did attend the subsequent conferences in Gladstone and Adelaide, I didn’t write anything substantial up about those, I took the lazy approach of just tooting and boosting on Mastodon.

So now that it has been a few days, what are the topics that have stayed with me?

AI… of course…

There were a few talks about AI but there were also a number of ad-doc conversations. Unlike some of my co-workers, I didn’t encounter anyone that was exicted about AI. The mood was more cautious, while it could be a useful tool eventually or in specific circumstance, there is currently too much hype and slop.

The talks specifically about AI that I went to were:

Keir Winesmith’s keynote provided two alternate meanings for “AI” that resonated with how I have been feeling:

  • Archival Intelligence – in that it is only drawing from what we have already put into archives, you might get a response that is new to you, but it is not new to the person that previously wrote it
  • Averaged Inputs – responses are what is statistically likely, so they will be at the middle of the bell curve, not bad and not good, just an average of what has been provided before

Another ongoing topic of these conferences is a blend of digital rights, community and maintenance, things that are getting harder and harder in this capitalist world:

A couple of these overlap with my views on AI, such as the exited developer can now generate shiny code faster but they will still not be around to deal with maintenance, some code may be generated but has it also been documented for those in the future to maintain?

While writing up this post I also looked back over some previous posts about conferences and I was reminded of the talks about rockstar developers at LCA 2017 in Hobart. While previously to get away with being a rockstar a person needed to have decent skills and the excitement/drive/obsession to churn out shiny things, now it is the AI models that are doing the heavy lifting.

As for how the conference itself was run, it doesn’t compare against the peak of LCA, but there was talk that it is gaining momentum. While nothing is set yet, there are moves towards Brisbane 2027. If that happens, I will be there.

However for now I need to ensure that my photos from the drive up, around and back from Canberra do not fall into the backlog…

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