An Emacs rite of passage is to fork code-review and fix the bitrot. My turn has come. https://codeberg.org/rossabaker/code-review Between forge and code-review, I am starting to see a path to a tractable notification system. At the very least, I see a path to spending less time on github.com […]

Opened the season with a scoreless draw, but the weather is perfect. I'm claiming one point for the result and a second for the fresh air. #youthsoccer #indianapolis

So, I got carded last night while drinking a Diet Pepsi in my late forties.

It'd be nice as an industry to have something in between 'vibe coding' and 'artisanal burnout'

In this channel: submitting esoteric permissive licenses for approval after finding them five crates deep. In that channel: Claude Code goes brrrrrrr. The duality of Slack.

This interstate should be renumbered to start at Mile Zero and get more negative the deeper in you get.

Jumped on the human.json bandwagon. Some good discussion tonight at IndieWeb meetup about how it relates to a blogroll. I don't see why they couldn't both be supported from the same source of truth. https://codeberg.org/robida/human.json #humanjson #indieweb

Does the default indentation of quoted lists in Emacs bother you? Me too, so I packaged up a Stack Overflow answer from 2019: https://codeberg.org/rossabaker/better-calculate-lisp-indent.el #emacs

In open source, features tend to outlast their original contributors. Each one you reject hurts your contributor base, but each one you accept may become your burden later. Features can always be dropped, but it's not the original contributor who takes the reputational hit for breaking changes […]

> Error: WARNING: A terminally deprecated method in sun.misc.Unsafe has been called has a lot of dramatic words for something that the build is able to move past

Google separates its search index crawlers from its more malignant Vertex and Gemini crawlers. I tried to let the former through, but now they're falling into the detection for fake Chromes, and all my pages have re-indexed as Iocaine-generated poison. It is utterly exhausting to run a public […]

I don't stick forks in electric sockets. I don't enter crosswalks when a Tesla is approaching. But I *was* foolish enough to adopt a VC-backed company's dev tooling. https://astral.sh/blog/openai

I was caught off guard by a #DecemberAdventure in March. This one's only a week, and a busy one at that. I'm spring cleaning my Emacs configuration. I started from nil, scratching at what itches, and restricting myself to Emacs builtins to see what could be left behind. The first thing I deeply […]

My grandfather was a kind man. After something unenjoyable, he would brighten up and describe experiencing it thrice: "first, last, and only!" Tonight just gave me three reasons to think about him.

We deserve a nap. #Dachshund #coonhound

With everyone adding markdown files these days, I propose CLOD.md, a place where collaborators can share geological trivia or composting tips. https://codeberg.org/rossabaker/clod.md/src/branch/main/CLOD.md

There’s a meme going around that an Open Source project “can’t” prevent LLM use by contributors because there’s no technical means to enforce this. This is idiotic and shows just how disingenuous slopmongers will be when told they can’t just submit slop. Did you know there’s also no technical […]

I just saw a truck with two pairs of truck nutz. It's an Indiana four-leaf clover.

Copyleft is simple: share with others as others shared with you. Some say that large laundering models render it obsolete. I say it exposes those whose grasp of the social contract stalled out in kindergarten. It's as vital as ever. #copyleft

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@mitsuhiko/116177282859842761 > I think society is better off when we share, and I consider the GPL to run against that spirit by restricting what can be done with it. > ... > Content licensed under the Creative Commons attribution-noncommercial-sharealike License. 🤌🏼💋

Codeberg and GitHub each have their share of incidents, but one tends to get grace from its users, and the other derision. That's a reflection of how they treat their users. While they sort it out: isn't it nice to be on a platform with shared values? #codeberg #github

I rarely remember dreams. But for the last few days, I can't stop thinking about a fast food place named "Garlic Circus." It looks like a Hardee's. Surely that was a dream?

Does it bother you that your coreutils human-readable units default to base 1024 while your Emacs modeline is in base 1000? There are dozens of us! Not kibidozens, but, dozens! Well, I made a minor-mode: https://codeberg.org/rossabaker/iec-mode-line.el #emacs

"Dedicated Followed of Fashion" (The Kinks, 1966) is a song about software engineering.

I am competitive, I am a programmer, and I am disgusted by the phrase "competitive programming."

96th Street Nickel Plate Bridge is finally open! The days are getting longer, and so is the jogging trail. This will be good for the soul. #indianapolis #fishers

RE: https://radikal.social/@henry/116143876277203506 When I said I enjoy glue work, this is not the end state I had in mind.

Wishing my fellow Hoosiers a relieving Adjournment Sine Die today. I'm celebrating with a tenderloin, even if the bill to make that the state sandwich stalled. #indiana

It's Google Summer of Code season! Celebrate by firing up your Slopomatic 3000 and then badgering tired maintainers with slash commands as though they're bots. Do it in enough repos, and maybe you'll become a "contributor" in about as many repos as you end up banned. Not that you'll visit any of […]

I get a lot of free credit monitoring offers from data breaches, but a university that I have no relationship with just leaked an address I haven't lived at in 25 years. Anyway, reset the counter to zero.

Person behind us tonight at the symphony grumbled through the opening piece by Chen that it "wasn't Beethoven," then snored through the last two movements of the Beethoven. I hope he enjoyed what came between!

Because open source is global, we can't introduce ourselves by walking into the room and splatting out a wet fart. The closest approximation is to open an unsolicited PR with an LLM.

Inspired by tonight's Homebrew Website Club, set up Miniflux on NixOS as an RSS reader. The grieving period for Google Reader, which was a questionable choice even before its demise, has officially concluded. Better a decade late than never. #miniflux #rss

#Mercury #Moon

Scored this sweet neck piece at a Mardi Gras party in a church basement. I'm going to start wearing it to the Rust meetings at work. #mardigras #rust

Riffing on a new flake parts project, Le Grille. Similar to Shell Game, but it also tries to keep the treefmt config in sync. Adding a language should add not just a devshell, but a treefmt config using the same tool versions. Also takes care of some other boilerplate, like deadnix+statix+nixfmt […]

I wish I could share the ISO's performance of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony as a timeline cleanse. If you've got about 90 minutes and need a cleanse, find a recording wherever you find music. #indysymphony #classicalmusic

Friday night open source, 2021: work on libraries with thousands of downloads that serve millions of users Friday night open source, 2026: helping an OpenBSD user get past my scraper defenses to read my mediocre website, wondering if we're the last two humans on the Internet

Tech is making me cranky lately. Here are two dogs watching winter slowly recede.

"Engineering was never about the code, it's about the outcomes" is like "basketball was never about the rebounds, it's about the outcomes". Absolutely. And if you stop practicing boxing out and replace your frontcourt with three foot tall robots, you're not going to like the outcome.

[Drives a hot dog-shaped car through the window.] [Stumbles out wearing a hot dog costume.] Here's what we plan to do for maintainers! https://github.blog/open-source/maintainers/welcome-to-the-eternal-september-of-open-source-heres-what-we-plan-to-do-for-maintainers/ #github

**The F8s Manifesto** F8s is how we move our profession beyond software engineering. [fart noises]

Job hunting sucks. Especially in 2026. If you apply and submit an authentic code sample, however rough, I will reciprocate by making time for an interview. Slop wastes both our time.

People keep saying "the things you learn now won't be useful in six months" and "you're falling behind." I've focused on more durable skills and feel pretty confident they'll be needed to clean up the mess.

My new motto is RIIR, RIOC.¹ ¹ - Rewrite It In Rust, Rewrite It On Codeberg.

It's -3°F outside, furnace is out, and no appointments until Monday. Not a great weekend to be an alopetic dog or a tropical fish around here.

Since Claude respects AGENTS.md about as well as it respects most else, it receives dedicated instructions. https://codeberg.org/rossabaker/no-agents.md/src/commit/main/CLAUDE.md

Spent entirely too long tracing a waybar quirk down to the fact my canonical time zone identifier has three components. I went as far as to write some C++ and step through gdb. The root causes, one technical and one legislative: * https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=122567 * […]

This pianist memorized Rachmaninov's entire third concerto, and I can't even remember where I parked. Great show, though. #indysymphony

My wife bought this sweatshirt on a campus visit in 1996. She doesn't care about football. It was just cold. I met her the next year. I kept the shirt. I'd bring it out after IU's infrequent and modest victories, and she would make fun of it and me […] [Original post on social.rossabaker.com]