Author | Lightnews

Dave Copeland @davetron5000.com · 2d

Did…someone try to assassinate you?!?!

Reposted by Dave Copeland

André Arko @indirect.io · 5d

the former maintainers of Bundler and RubyGems have a proposal: we want to move Ruby forward andre.arko.net/2025/10/26/w...

We want to move Ruby forward

On September 9, without warning, Ruby Central kicked out the maintainers who have cared for Bundler and RubyGems for over a decade. Ruby Central made these changes against the established project poli...

andre.arko.net

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Reposted by Dave Copeland

Andrea Fomera @afomera.dev · 5d

I wrote my most personal blog post to date.

It summarizes some of my personal feelings and experiences in the Ruby/Rails community.

afomera.dev/posts/2025-1...

Stop Giving Harm a Microphone

afomera.dev

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Dave Copeland @davetron5000.com · 8d

I use a modified version where I set `$debug` in a test causing an issue, then check it in the code to put debugging info

Xavier Noria @fxn.bsky.social · 8d

Debug technique I use in some occasions:

Define global variable $foo where you collect stuff, maybe in different places.

Then, at_exit { pp $foo }.

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Dave Copeland @davetron5000.com · 12d

We even talked to a dev who maintained one of the libs we used and they asked about issues we had they could help with - there were none! We just used the lib as designed and stayed within public API boundaries. Said lib was mature, so not buggy.

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Dave Copeland @davetron5000.com · 12d

Option 2 is a good idea - at a previous job the CTO was all-in on supporting OSS work, but the problem was that we used all our tools in vanilla ways - they worked and didn't need updates to accommodate us. Just donating money would've made more sense

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Dave Copeland @davetron5000.com · 14d

My takeaway is that you should never ever give GH or RubyGems ownership of your projects to anyone that you don't 100% trust to carry for the project in your absence. The RG/Bundler teams either didn't do that or misplaced their trust or both. (This doesn't excuse the actions taken of course)

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Dave Copeland @davetron5000.com · 15d

I swear to god the amount of admin required to prevent someone from getting something they are not "entitled" to is a lot - and I do not have exec function issues at all and am good at grinding/admin. I don't know how someone with a stressful job could deal much less more serious issues.

Dave Copeland @davetron5000.com · 15d

Current Status: 529 payment to my nephew's school lost in mail, $250 late fee. Cool.

Meanwhile, DME wants to swap batteries on my Dad's power chair which would leave him immobile for 1-2 months while we wait. Problem is the power cable, not batteries. Cool.

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Dave Copeland @davetron5000.com · 17d

Is this the thing you are using for Inline RBS? Or is there a more formal definition?

github.com/soutaro/rbs-...

GitHub - soutaro/rbs-inline: Inline RBS type declaration

Inline RBS type declaration. Contribute to soutaro/rbs-inline development by creating an account on GitHub.

github.com

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Dave Copeland @davetron5000.com · 19d

I’m surprised it uses optionality as a concept at all - seems more “ruby” to say NilClass is one of may return types - there’s very little special about as compared to other langs.

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Dave Copeland @davetron5000.com · 23d

#looptober Oct 7 - I think I need to master/normalize these - they seem really quiet.

Loving the TR-8, which I discovered has the 7x7 drum machines in it!

Oct 7, by Ephemeral 5000

track by Ephemeral 5000

ephemeral5000.bandcamp.com

Dave Copeland @davetron5000.com · 24d

Oops, forgot the link re: bsky.app/profile/dave...

ephemeral5000.bandcamp.com/track/oct-6

Dave Copeland @davetron5000.com · 24d

vim, to me, seems intuitive once you learn the concepts. My only ever exposure to emacs is that it seems like you just have to memorize a lot of stuff. Lots of examples like this.

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Dave Copeland @davetron5000.com · 24d

Rails and PHP are like this, too - PHP has a TON of stuff you just have to memorize. Rails is better designed, so you can take concepts and apply them more easily. Rails resists abstraction though, and it creates constant churn when figuring out how to manage complexity

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Dave Copeland @davetron5000.com · 24d

As alluded in my post, playing a live show with knob-per-function (or, building a complex app with utility CSS) can be extremely challenging. You have to memorize a lot of stuff by rote. Tachyons (and BrutCSS) are far more intuitive than Tailwind, and it's party of why I find Tailwind so painful

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Dave Copeland @davetron5000.com · 24d

This is exactly how CSS felt to me for a long time - you'd go and tweak something and the entire page would fall about (peter_griffin_window_blinds.gif here). Tachyons (or, I guess Tailwind) provides a "knob per function" with CSS, and is a great tool for learning CSS.

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Dave Copeland @davetron5000.com · 24d

In my list of synths, I don't own the Volcas any more, since they were just incredibly fussy to tweak or play with. It's also why I'm selling the Steampipe because while it has "knob-per-function", the knobs make no sense to me and usually just make everything worse.

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Dave Copeland @davetron5000.com · 24d

Re: musical gear, I realized that I don't care about "analog warmth" - I need the immediacy of being able to grab a knob and turn it and have it do something (what's called "knob-per-function").

Programming analogy here:

Immediacy, Menu-diving, and the Fun of Making a Mess

I know a lot of programmers play music. I do—not all that well—but I've been struck by something I've started to enjoy about retro music gear: immediacy....

buttondown.com

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Dave Copeland @davetron5000.com · 24d

To use it, navigate to the synth, then save to your home screen on iOS (an increasingly difficult and fraught process these days).

Source is here: https://github.com/davetron5000/synth-docs

Driven by good ole make, baby!

(To see the worst menu diving ever, checkout east beast "multi" functions)

GitHub - davetron5000/synth-docs: Summarized Docs on Synthesizers that can be read on a phone without need for PDFs

Summarized Docs on Synthesizers that can be read on a phone without need for PDFs - davetron5000/synth-docs

github.com

Dave Copeland @davetron5000.com · 24d

The music I make (e.g. in #looptober) is all "dawless", so only hardware synths/sequencers. To quickly remind myself what they can do and avoid going into the manuals on my phone, I made a PWA generator to capture quick docs/cheatsheets for each synth.

Menu Diving WTF

Quick Reference for common functions for Synths, that you can read on a phone

davetron5000.github.io

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Dave Copeland @davetron5000.com · 24d

The distorted thing in this track is a Cre8Audio East Beast. I wanted a mono synth for bass and it's super cheap. It does sound good, but it's kinda fussy and the menu diving is extremely unpleasant as it's toggling binary values on and off (except they don't map to actual binary).

Dave Copeland @davetron5000.com · 24d

#looptober for Oct 6, this time with more techno (I think?) sounds. I just got a TR-8, and the combo of it + the Drumbrute Impact sounds great in my headphones.

Steampipe is packed up & awaiting my listing on Reverb. I was also going to sell my Microfreak, but I think I might try harder to love it.

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Dave Copeland @davetron5000.com · 24d

So yes, I have a fax number. If I was thinking a head or knew more about how healthcare worked, the second I started helping my parents out, I wouldda got a cheap flip phone to use as the number instead of my own. Ah well.

Dave Copeland @davetron5000.com · 24d

I don't want phone calls, but as long as my Dad lives, I need them! Hope he lives a long&happy life, but day after his funeral, I'm silencing all calls except my wife.

(For non-USians, not sure how your healthcare system is, but ours is almost entirely based on voicemails, phone calls and faxes!)

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