Do one of the things that makes you feel better, because if you aren't doing any of that, you will run down. Today I did some writing. I'm a writer, & if I don't write, I run down. It's very easy for me to forget this, despite decades of knowing it. And so I am here to remind you to do your things.

Let's observe a master of camouflage working its magic. 🐙 What amazing aliens of the deep.. #cephalopod #marinelife #intelligence #camouflage

Hello again, everything is still scary and hard and the tech job market is wild right now, so here's my semi-regular thread of open jobs I've found where your work could make the world better (or at least, not make it worse)

museums are cool because the people who work there are like look at this neat thing and you're like wow that is neat and you just do it over and over again until it is time to go

This thread is the best refutation of social-media doomerism that I have seen.

Let's talk about generative AI, contaminated information, and rhubarb. Once upon a time, Europe was at war. Food was scarce, and the government of the quote-unquote United Kingdom looked for alternatives. 1/

Hey, get that flu shot. Knowing folks who are catching this current flu and it's kicking them in the teeth -- the shot will, worst case scenario, prevent it from taking you to the hospital or the morgue. It might knock it out quicker for you or even help you duck catching it. (Mask up, too.)

Open up this picture fully. Then look at the surface of Mars. Then look up to the top right. Spot Mars' moon Phobos high in the sky. Then notice the bright spot beside Phobos. That's Earth.

Happy new year! My all sky camera imaged the sky every 15 seconds and this picture shows what happened in the sky in 2025. It shows the length of the night and day with the hourglass shape, the monthly lunar cycle with the diagonal bands, the elevation of the Sun at local noon, and lots of clouds.

ZJIT is available starting in Ruby 4.0! Please try it out on your test suite, maybe in a staging environment, and let us know how it goes! railsatscale.com/2025-12-24-l...

Pushing the "make it worse" button on a $3.5B project sounds insane, right? While I'm always excited for more transit in Canada, the Finch West LRT is showing #Ottawa something NOT to do for our future rapid lines like the Baseline Transitway. Let's talk about two crucial words: Signal Priority.

Happy to announce that Gem Fellowship applications are now open! If you're a Ruby open source maintainer, this grant program is for you. 💎 https://gem.coop/fellowship/

The power of ordering from an indie bookstore!

When your ambassador is SO deranged that Time Magazine says, "Yeah, that quote sounds real".

a common defence of genAI is it’s a tool, and tools are neutral and can be used in good or bad ways but LLMs and transformers are tools - chatGPT is a *product*, openAI are using the tools in a bad way! it‘s like arguing Amazon exploitative practices can be mitigated by shopping well with them

So I was invited to accept an award for "imagination in service to society." This forced me to think a bit about what "imagination," "service" and "society" mean to me. Here's the speech I delivered last night: buttondown.com/charliejane/...

Announcing the Gem Fellowship, a grant program for improvements to Ruby-related open source projects. gem.coop/fellowship/ Want to improve your favorite gem? Submit a proposal, starting next month.

One year, 4,464 calls, 92% required no police intervention. The Alternative Neighbourhood Crisis Response (ANCHOR) in Centretown is sending the right people to help in cases of mental health or substance use crises. It represents the de-tasking of police and it works. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

AUTHORS!! Remember that case where a bunch of authors sued AI for stealing their work? And WON? Well, the settlement money has been announced. Each WORK that got thefted will be compensated $3k (split 50/50 bw publisher + author). So authors will be compensated $1500 per WORK stolen. More here:

@gianttourtiere.bsky.social What were you doing at that church Evan

Sometimes when people ask me why I’m wearing a mask I say I’m traveling or have some important thing soon and can’t afford to get sick and miss it and that’s pretty much always true but I think it would be nice if it were more normalized to just say “I don’t want to get sick” and leave it at that

It’s really important that #Vancouver’s Downtown Business Association, who were originally against bike-lanes, are now among their most vigourous supporters, because of ACTUAL EVIDENCE that they’re better for downtown business than any street parking they replaced. Safe bike-lanes mean business.

Another STUNNING image from JWST, this time of the Red Spider Nebula—the vast, wispy, gaseous remains of a now-dead star, the white dwarf core still glowing in the centre.

📣THREAD: It’s surprising to me that so many people were surprised to learn that Signal runs partly on AWS (something we can do because we use encryption to make sure no one but you–not AWS, not Signal, not anyone–can access your comms). It’s also concerning. 1/

Tragically, once you introduce costly signaling, all mathematics is impure. COMIC ◆ www.smbc-comics.com/comic/signal-4 PATREON ◆ www.patreon.com/ZachWeinersm... STORE ◆ smbc-store.myshopify.com

This article does a wonderful job of reminding me why I love Ruby so much. The core language is just so elegant. https://tech.stonecharioteer.com/posts/2025/ruby-blocks/

It’s been ten years since this promise. Canadians are still waiting for a voting system where every vote truly counts. It’s time to finish what was started in 2015 and deliver proportional representation. #cdnpoli

The Iron Cabaret has been putting up fantastic shows! I saw this one opening night and it is the best one yet. If you're in Ottawa and enjoy circus arts, dance, and burlesque, you don't want to miss it.

If I had room, I'd have a tree up year-round...

I tried to explain why I don't believe the recent accusations toward my former teammates, as well as how the Ruby and Rails Infra team at Shopify operates and why it can be trusted. byroot.github.io/opensource/r...

Damn. This is amazing. £325 per week, paid monthly, for 3 years - and the result was a profit for the Irish economy: www.citizensinformation.ie/en/employmen...

A generational fumble by Ruby Central is now complete. Anyway, I'm happy that the people who disagreed decided to get up and Do Something By Coding. I love to see that and can 100% get behind it 👍

We are alarmed by reports that Germany is on the verge of a catastrophic about-face, reversing its longstanding and principled opposition to the EU’s Chat Control proposal which, if passed, could spell the end of the right to privacy in Europe. signal.org/blog/pdfs/ge...

Ruby community: Look, we can be angry about what's happening, we can raise our complaints, but under no circumstances should anyone _ever_ harass someone's families, coworkers, or friends. That is completely unacceptable, and wholly against the ethos of the language. We must do better.

This is super useful! I'd love to see this added to gem by default.

My goodness, this poem. A beautiful, savage, blunt explanation of why we study war and conflict and also why military history is not and should not be just 'for the boys.' The poem is moving in its unwillingness to whitewash the many tombs of war, as we should too should be unwilling.

The more I think about this, the more I wonder if the best way forward is to transfer rubygems/bundler ownership to the Ruby org. Then keep responsibility of rubygems.org. After all, rubygems is the only default gem that isn't owned by ruby itself: github.com/ruby/ruby/bl...

New: the world of Ruby has gone completely off the rails over the past few weeks. Developers suddenly locked out, corporate pressure, and claims of a "hostile takeover" of one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure for the internet we all rely on everyday www.404media.co/how-ruby-wen...

I prefer to think of open source as open cooperation. A pooling of resources between parties with converging needs, where everybody contributes according to their ability, and everybody get strictly more than they put in.

A Handy Guide [1/4]

Good morning. Immigration is good. Trade is good. There are nuances but they are narrow enough that free and open movement of people and goods should be the default.

The Disney brand, and the USA brand, sinking together. Parody from Dutch TV www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vRX...

Hey, #ruby folks! I've been one of the #RubyGems maintainers for the last decade. Ruby Central has forcefully taken control of the RubyGems organization on GitHub, the `rubygems-update` and `bundler` gems on rubygems[.]org, and more. You can read the details here: pup-e.com/goodbye-ruby...

That’s how censorship operates in the USA (and many places) government pressure is used to force people & groups to self-censor. It’s a constant pattern: The majority of censorship is self-censorship, but the majority of self-censorship is deliberately cultivated by an outside power. It’s the goal

My team has members from the US and Canada, but all our gatherings have been in Canada and I would not attend one in the US. Just not worth the risk.

I wrote a book called "Stories Are Weapons" which is a history of psychological war in the United States. In it, I describe how the US military came to a simple definition of rhetoric used for destructive purposes in war (so-called psyops) vs. for democratic debate. Want to know what it is? (1/3)

Just wow 😵‍💫 #MolluscMonday

Here, have some birds perched on appropriate/delightful signage. You're welcome. 🧵 ⤵️ 1. Black Vulture (Coragyps atratus) by tysmith on iNaturalist

This 🧵 is long so please bear with me. It is compiles evidence in a historical timeline on how effective #COVIDVaccines are. When a pandemic ends we quickly and easily forget the tools that got us out of it. So here is my labour day gift to you prompted by this headline.

Our letter to @ottawapolice.bsky.social regarding their refusal to provide crash victims w insurance info. Withholding insurance info from injured parties is contrary to the HTA & has harmful affects on peoples' recoveries, especially pedestrians & cyclists. www.thebikinglawyer.ca/post/ottawa-...