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Winter colors

too cold for photos

Jotting down some thoughts. www.stefannibrasil.me/posts/notes/...

Look, it's a mess out there and you can react to that mess by deciding everyone else is a moron or you could react to it by deciding most people are trying to get by with a different context than yours and start working the problem. Those are your choices pretty much, can't choose "no mess"

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Have you noticed that digital products and services are getting worse? So have we! Today we are publishing our new report, Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future. vimeo.com/1168468796?f...

this is nice

I'm still writing code the hard way. I'm slow. I like to think critically about every line of code and fiddle with variable names until everything looks right. I treat code as a liability and try to ship only what's necessary. It's hard to imagine writing code any other way.

“A purely private language, which refers to experiences known only to the user, cannot function because there would be no distinction between following a rule correctly and merely thinking one is following it.

"it is easier to come up with a defensible idea than it is to come up with a productive one." "By calling for a theory to be more comprehensive (...) we paradoxically end up with less clarity. We lose information by adding detail."

New blog post on the high costs of coordination and the implications for large organizations: surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/01/24/b...

Evergreen

as somebody who trains adults, i've seen a lot of this my THING is that i'm really great at explanations that stick in people's minds but there's always like 10-20% of students who want to ask a question where the answer is literally just me repeating what i already said, but with their name

One must imagine Sisyphus rolling the boulder down into Plato's cave and everyone running Indiana Jones style

Do something nice to someone today, expecting nothing in return other than the joy of being a human being who cares about others ⭐

There are ways as a designer, design researcher, or technologist to deal with this. I talk about that. The most important one is to stop trying so hard to make a business case for your work before you really understand how decisions are being made. It will comes across as a threat or an annoyance.

negative productivity day: removed 120k lines to get 65% better performance. am I a -120,000x dev now? 😅⌨️ github.com/faker-ruby/f...

Loading Faker is 19% faster on version 3.6! 🔥 Give it a try! hexdevs.com/posts/optimi...

how to remove AI summaries from google: add "-ai" to your search. Creatig a custom search engine with "-ai" as a parameter is a good option for this. (see screenshot). Or use duckduckgo: noai.duckduckgo.com

"a zoom with 50 people is not a meeting. It's a webinar." - @stefannibrasil.me, 2026. Wise words. 😆

tech in 2026: "microwaving frozen meatloaf & the rise of the 1000x chef"

> Diplomacy, a communicative art, had been overwhelmed by communication. By August, the world was at war.

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If you need inspiration to keep going right now, may I recommend the story of Robert Smalls, who stole a confederate steamboat and piloted his family and almost 20 others to freedom and went on to become one of the first Black people elected to Congress ✊🏽 www.usatoday.com/story/life/b...

very cute 🦏

Use faker-ruby? Help us make it even better by answering this survey app.polling.com/forms/3103ca... Please share it with your Ruby friends :)

It moves! We can watch as the Kepler supernova remnant changes over a quarter of century in X-rays from Chandra. #aas247 chandra.si.edu/photo/2026/k...

it's cold 🌨️

THREAD. My parents' cat Bridget vanished. As the weeks dragged on they became ever more worried, so to distract himself my dad began to paint Bridget's adventures, imagining her travelling through time and popping up at some of art & music's most important moments. I've collected his work here...

The new website looks so good!! I think it looks even better in dark mode on mobile! The animations are so smooth and so good!!

TIL: you can paint a lot of things just with burnt sienna and ultramarine blue. 🟠🔵

don't automate the work that makes you feel alive.

As usual, it's the laws of physics that are the haters.

Faker v3.5.3 is live: github.com/faker-ruby/f... Check out our new README :)

In the spirit of Thanksgiving I'm gonna tell you part of how I deal with life. It is understanding all the little miracles that are comparatively worthless but emotionally salient. I go into a Waffle House and I hold that knife and I think about how recent our advanced metallurgy is. Like 70 years

There's no such thing as a single engineer or even a group of 5-10 engineers that can pull this off. It's not a solo nor a single-team task. The teams and individuals that have tried this burned through every ounce of their political capital at mach speed.

Hope beats fear. Never doubt it. 😉

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best halloween costumes

i wrote a lil essay a while ago about THE POWER OF FRAMES for creative work.

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...

It's interesting to contrast with the original vision for the computer. The LLM doesn't aim to be a "bicycle for the mind" (Jobs) nor extend senses and reach (MCLuhan) but displace cognition. Instead of a machine that does what you tell it, it's a machine that tells.

democracy is awesome 🎇🎉

this was a lovely episode

seeing the northern lights tonight 🌠🌌

can confirm

"The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently." —David Graeber

Doing the right thing is always the right thing, even when it’s the hard thing.

Sending my love to all RubyGems/Bundler maintainers. 🧡 We can't thank you enough for all the essential work you do, and all your contributions to the Ruby community. Gratitude, kindness and respect for all the OSS maintainers out there. 🙏