Keynotes
Beyond Output: What LLMs Do to Open Source Communities
LLMs have quietly slid into the toolbox of nearly every developer, and the conversation around them has narrowed to a single, tired question: do they work? Do they make us more productive? Do they generate tech debt or pay it down? These are not stupid questions. But they are small ones, and they let us avoid the bigger one. Because open source was never really about output. It is about people who show up, disagree, review each other's work, mentor newcomers, argue in threads, and choose again and again to build something together they could not build alone. It is a fabric of relationships and mutual respect held together by trust. So the honest question is not "does the LLM make this person faster?" It is: what do these systems do to that fabric?
Listening to the Universe: Building the Einstein Telescope
In 2015, humanity heard the universe for the first time. Two black holes, more than a billion light-years away, spiralled into each other and sent a ripple through the fabric of spacetime itself — a signal so faint that measuring it meant detecting a change smaller than a thousandth of the width of a proton. We caught it. That detection opened an entirely new way of observing the cosmos, and it earned a Nobel Prize. The Einstein Telescope is the next chapter. It is a third-generation gravitational-wave observatory: more than 30 kilometres of tunnels, 250 metres underground, laser interferometer arms 10 kilometres long, cooled and isolated from every passing truck and every distant earthquake so it can listen ten times more sensitively than anything we have today. And there is a real chance it gets built right here, beneath the Euregio Meuse-Rhine, a short drive from where we are sitting.