In short, every shithead you don't ban costs you ten other customers. "A [potentially regular] customer doesn't say anything but never comes back" doesn't register with you as An Event the way that kicking someone out (temporarily or permanently) does, so it's extremely easy to miss it.

I have 3 axioms that help me decide when to talk to people I disagree with: 1. To debate a subject is to concede that the subject is debatable. 2. To reason with a person is to concede that the person is reasonable. 3. To ask for evidence of a claim is to concede that the claim might be true.

MESSAGE.ANS, 1994-07-17 from Hacker Chronicles 2 (CD-ROM)

Importantly, HIS MAJESTY THE WORM's gots jokes

Here's a new one for core GitHub functionality becoming unreliable: I typed `#1843` to link a PR and the picker autocompleted 5 unrelated issues/PRs, mislabeling all of them as #1843. I need to prioritize exporting issues + PRs, I feel like I'm making a mistake by leaving that data at risk of loss.

Has anyone seen something like a wall outlet with a USB port... AND the cable permanently attached? Asking for a household where everyone borrows charging cables to leave in the Phantom Zone, never to be seen again. I'm griping a little, but trying to help solve a real hassle.

Prompted by my neighbors going out of town for the holiday and leaving their alarm clock on... iOS can play various white noises. Settings -> Accessibility -> Audio & Visual -> Background Sounds (worth adding to Control Center). I think it's intended for tinnitus, but also useful for light sleepers.

I'll stream Lobsters Office Hours in about 40 minutes. I'm going to take a holiday break (happy holidays!) so the following stream will be Monday Jan 5. There's some PRs from @chael.codes to improve dev setup, plus some controller maintenance. Drop in anytime for the next couple hours.

I love some of these urgent warnings I get nowadays. Great, remind me again in a year or two.

No Lobsters office hours stream this morning. I’ve been sick the last couple days. I’m pretty much fine now but would lose my voice.

I'll stream Lobsters office hours in 45 minutes, drop in anytime with questions about the site or just to see maintenance. Last week's performance fixes and bot blocking have held up, so my plan is transparency on the bot blocking + response on recent slop thread. Info: https://push.cx/stream

Is this what happens the Monday after we start normalizing the identification of corporate devices in our software? 🤔

iFixit has fallen 😔🕯️

I try to stay grateful for free things but I am losing my cool with how GitHub can no longer count to 10 comments without taking off its socks.

I've been doing a lot of performance work on Lobsters for the recent slowdown, and today will be a similarly high-performance Office Hours stream... by being just an hour this morning. Bring your topics, or I can ramble about the bot that was >80% of hits for a week. https://push.cx/stream for info

At 3:19 AM this morning I snapped away from a heart-pounding nightmare... that my blog had published all of my incomplete draft posts.

Appropriately, I'm running a little slow getting started on Lobsters Office hours... and the site is running slow because of a dumb spambot that's been hammering it all weekend. I'll work on that and chat abotu the site, starting now: https://twitch.tv/pushcx

Real irritating puzzle: is there no way with Rack to access the raw client headers? I'm debugging a problem and want to see the actual header sent. I care if the client sent "user-agent" vs "user_agent" vs "User-Agent", but they all seem to be smashed to HTTP_USER_AGENT. Dude, where's my data?

Overheard: “No, I watched a WHOLE YouTube video about this, man.”

I'm not going free to stream Lobsters office hours today, something big came up. I expect to pick back up on Monday.

You’re absolutely right — you are Pagliacci. It would certainly be difficult for you to attend your own performance! I should not have given such paradoxical advice, and I apologize deeply for the error. There is no excuse for my failure.

I'll stream Lobsters office hours in about an hour. There's some great frontend PRs to check out fixing comment lines and adding opengraph preview images, but most it's open door time where you can drop in to chat about the site. https://push.cx/stream

Does anyone have a contact at Google that I could ping about one of their users having a stereotypical psychotic break with heavy encouragement from Gemini? Angels, alchemy, proof of magic, conspiracy, etc. Guy's emailed me a couple times and is getting worse.

I know not to judge a book by it's cover, but I have started judging a book by its index comma lack thereof. A good index is real work, and I'm coming around to noticing a pattern that if the publisher didn't think the book was worth the effort, it's not very good.

I'll stream Lobsters office hours in about 40 minutes. PRs are quiet, but luckily (?) I've got plenty of bugs to fix. Drop in to chat about the site or just see what maintenance looks like. More info: https://push.cx/stream

This was a thoughtful interview about an ML with great dev experience on the JS ecosystem, which is a compelling combination. I found a nice 3rd party writeup of its current state: lobste.rs/c/pqdn4v

https://www.npr.org/2025/11/18/nx-s1-5564064/calvin-and-hobbes-bill-watterson-40-years-comic-strip-lee-salem You either die a Calvin or live long enough to see yourself become the Calvin's dad.

Streaming Lobsters office hours now: https://twitch.tv/pushcx - I found a queue of unreported bugs, so there's plenty of maintenance to watch. But mostly it's time for open discussion, so drop in with any questions about the site. (more info: https://push.cx/stream)

Bellingcat’s contact email has always been a magnet for people with fairly unusual views; paranoid delusions, sprawling conspiracies, the works. But recently, the pattern has shifted, we’re seeing more and more emails clearly written with ChatGPT.

Lobsters Office Hours streams in about an hour. I've got that username UI to finish up if you want to watch maintenance, but mostly it's open door time, you can drop in with questions anytime. More info and archive: https://push.cx/stream

Google used to have a page up about how ads would always be distinct from search results. They wrote it when ads were in a blue box off to the side, but it was up for years after it was false. Hm, and it was removed 4-8 weeks after I mentioned it on HN: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4025...

my kingdom for an empty room in which a horrible alien and/or robot appears, for no reason, after which there is no explanation for why that happened, how it got in there, or whose fault it was

Lobsters office hours is starting now: https://twitch.tv/pushcx Little bit of a late start and I'll probably only run for 1.5h because I'm a bit swamped today, but drop in to chat about the site or see what maintenance looks like. Background and archive at https://push.cx/stream

Forgot to pre-announce, but I'm starting the Lobsters Office Hours stream now, if you want to drop in with questions about the site: https://twitch.tv/pushcx (more info: https://push.cx/stream)

As friends get hooked on and hollowed out by short-form video, a small thing that brings joy (probably only to me) is that you can make any youtube link look like a shorts link. So when they send things I'll never watch I can reply with similar links like m.youtube.com/shorts/sJNK4...

Incredibly good post on game design by Raph Koster: https://www.raphkoster.com/2025/11/03/game-design-is-simple-actually/ Probably takes a half-hour to read and a year to learn, which is much nicer than the couple decades it would take otherwise.

We're shaking up the Lobsters Office Hours stream in about 50 minutes. I'll be hosted by https://twitch.tv/chaelcodes - she streams open source Rails development, and she volunteered to take on a modmail feature: https://github.com/lobsters/lobsters/issues/1782 Should be fun, see you soon.

The distinction between high and low culture is a scam created to sell less low culture.

This month I'm focusing on Lobste.rs! I've been really enjoying @push.cx's Twitch streams, and now I want to contribute! All streams at 15:00 UTC. * 11/6 - @push.cx joins as a special guest * 11/13 - 🦞 * 11/20 - No Stream - I'm at @sfruby.com ✨ * 11/27 - No Stream - Thanksgiving 🦃

This early draft for an alternative to the familiar, painfully clunky PR workflow looks really promising. I've can only find a 5 month old comment of mine lobste.rs/c/mdk1co but I have been wanting something better for a long while.

Lobsters office hours will stream in about 30 minutes. I plan to catch up on PRs, improve the username change UI, and following last weekend's partial outage, maybe add Anubis ONLY FOR KNOWN BAD BOT ASINS (pls be chill). Plus a clever jujutsu revset for feature branches. Info: https://push.cx/stream

The cat has canceled this morning's Lobsters office hours stream by jumping up and spilling my cup of coffee over basically everything on my desk, including a bunch of important paperwork. I'm going to be cleaning all morning and am not in a great mood to present. Perp attached. Will do PRs ~lunch.

I'll start Lobsters office hours in a few minutes after a family phone call. On Saturday we finally got swamped by badly-behaved crawlers and Cadey helped with some info from Anubis, which I'd like to protect the site with today. Drop in anytime to talk about the site, https://push.cx/stream

I dropped by a friend's block club and the homeowners had 3 topics: 1. Host said bring baked goods and people brought so much the table overflowed and the host freaked out that he'd be left with it. 2. Speed bumps, yes or no. 3. ICE is evil. All decent people must resist until it's disbanded.

Anyone have the link for a recent post about jujutsu where the author described having stacked + independent feature branches with examples feature-1 and -2, then main, then an empty merge commit "------" rolling them up, then long-lived feature branches above it? I liked it and can't find it again.

Whoops, I got distracted by writing a long comment about jujutsu and healthy online communities, so the Lobsters office hours stream starts a little late today. Here's that comment: lobste.rs/c/63u8je and I'll be ready to get the stream rolling in a few minutes: push.cx/stream

I'll stream Lobsters Office Hours in about 40 minutes. If I can fix a couple bugs quick enough (hat approval, username linking) I'll resume work on story merging UI, which recently had a small meta thread: https://lobste.rs/c/3ssni6 Drop in to chat or watch, https://push.cx/stream for more bg.

Apropos of everything over in Ruby packaging, I asked to see the exclusive license for the Rails trademark mentioned in the first sentence of https://rubyonrails.org/trademarks. RF responded that it "isn't a public document" (which is why I asked) but I guess means they decline to make it public.

A small data modeling tip: if you have a state machine with a state that's reachable from every other (eg "order cancelled", "staff override", "delayed"), you should probably have two state machines.

Forgot to make my early announcement, but I'll stream Lobsters Office Hours in about 10 minutes. Drop in with questions about the site or codebase. I hope to wrap up that backfill of username data, maybe come back to story merging UI. push.cx/stream