Navigation logs from the Ruby nebula—code adventures, cosmic experiments, and interstellar debugging missions.
Journey through experimental spacetime narratives where Ruby engineering meets cosmic adventure. Each chronicle explores programming concepts through interstellar exploration, powered by the mysterious Clockweave engine.
Since 2023, companies keep trying to buy the gems I publish, or to hire me under a contract that hands them all of it. I scambaited five of them to the end. The plan never changes: raise $10-20M, then buy someone else's decade of downloads for a few thousand.
CrystalMeet turned Ruby into Crystal with a pile of regular expressions. It half worked, and the other half lives in Ruby's runtime, where no regex can reach. /r/rails deleted it in 2024. Its scenarios are landing in spinel now.
I abused the C preprocessor until C read like Ruby. At -O2 the assembly shows it changes little beyond the spelling of a loop. Steve Bourne did the same to C in the 1970s, and his version inspired the International Obfuscated C Code Contest.
In one week, matz closed my pull request to spinel and the /r/rails moderators banned me for good. Matz explained his decision in five sentences. In two years of removing my posts, the moderators never explained one.
In 1954 IBM promised FORTRAN would virtually eliminate coding and debugging. In 2026 37signals went pencils down. Both were right about the typing. The quarter of the dollar that was always the job is still sitting there.
In September 2025 I wrote a satirical proposal to rewrite Rails in Rust, and picked Rust because it was the one language David would never touch. On September 23, 2026 he told Rails World he hates Rust with a passion and is rebuilding HEY's backend in it. The satire got one line wrong, and it stopped one language too early.
A country where no citizen has ever felt a constraint. The dev box has 128GB, the model never says "this is too much," and the cloud bills instead of refusing. Then it ships to a 2GB server. On languages as materials, and the 100x receipt that proves nobody measured anything.
ChatGPT ships in 2022, I ask it one vain question, and four months later I have 20,000 commits of an operating system I am about to regret. A confession in three acts: the empire, the autopsy, and the filesystem Matthew Dillon built first.
flashrom 1.8.0 shipped three days ago. There won't be a 1.9.0. The next release is 2.0.0, exactly 25 years after the first commit, and it ships with a model that never hallucinates, scores 100% on chip identification, and fits in a PDF.
A Bus Pirate bug pointed me at flashrom's Gerrit queue years ago, and I walked away the moment I saw the thread full of corporate email addresses. A coreboot fleet and one uninitialized-variable warning dragged me back in. Now I own a few thousand dollars of unverified SPI flash and a plan to fix that for everyone.
The follow-up to The Framebuffer People. Half the angry comments asked the same question underneath the anger: okay, so what should I build? Here is the long answer. Eleven rules for building an operating system that teaches you something, with your dignity still attached at the end.
I spent two months cloning almost every OS posted to r/osdev and running the code through an analyzer. Almost everything was a reskin of a reskin of Linux, and almost nothing boots on real hardware. Then I said so in public, and 137 comments taught me more about the AI hobby economy than the code did.
MongoDB closed to fight AWS in 2018. Elastic closed to fight AWS in 2021, then reopened in 2024 once the fight was over. Ghostty, tldraw, NetBSD, and QEMU closed in January 2026, and there's no company to make peace with this time. Two different closings, two different endings.
Parts 1 and 2 were about people who at least pretend to contribute. This one isn't. Cloned repos, faked commit history, blockchain-rotated malware C2, and a takedown that got re-squatted within a day. The impersonators don't want your codebase. They want your reputation.
curl and Jazzband and Ghostty didn't close the door because of an abstract "AI problem." They closed it because of specific people. Eight archetypes, all real, all currently in your notifications.
curl killed its six-year bug bounty. Jazzband shut down. Ghostty, tldraw, NetBSD, and QEMU all closed the door on AI contributions in the same three weeks. This isn't paranoia. It's what happens when the cost of producing a plausible pull request hits zero and review capacity doesn't move.
Remember Tarus Balog, the AWS employee who rescued my deleted account when nobody else would? AWS just fired him. His proudest accomplishment in four years was saving my data. Leadership didn't care. The finale of a trilogy nobody asked for.
2 million new packages in 3 years. Most of them are named like someone described their project to a toddler. The registries aren't growing — they're being colonized.
Jensen Huang says spend $250K/year in tokens or you're "using paper and pencil." Meanwhile Anthropic users are posting $150K monthly bills like war trophies. The Phreakers built a movement with a cereal box whistle. You're burning six figures to produce slop.
Vibe coders celebrate 30k LOC Rails blogs and 8-container analytics stacks. I built Kaunta — one Go binary, 15MB — because I needed to count pageviews, not run Kafka. The industry of bloat is real, and it's getting louder.
LLMs are exoskeletons. They amplify what you already have. The problem: people are using them as a replacement for building anything at all. No friction, no learning, no muscle — just confident parrots shipping half-tested code.
Your static instruction file works for Claude Opus and breaks for Claude Haiku. Helmsman serves model-aware instructions that adapt to capability tiers, environment, and project context.
How Blackship uses explicit state machines, topological ordering, circuit breakers, and lifecycle hooks to manage FreeBSD jails reliably.
Announcing Blackship - declarative jail management with dependency graphs, state machines, circuit breakers, and ZFS-first design.
Docker, Podman, Bastille, CBSD, iocage, pot. Which jail manager actually fits your workflow? A brutally honest comparison.
I just watched Claude Code ignore the MCP spec in real-time. The server sent tools/listChanged. The client did nothing. I had to manually reconnect. This is not a feature -- it is a bug hiding behind silence.
Skills are tutorials. MCP servers are executables. One tells Claude what to do. The other does it. The difference matters, and the ecosystem is lying to you about it.
A .AI founder complains about slow DAG queries while using MongoDB (a document database) for graph operations. Won't read docs. Deploys in-memory graph database on 512MB RAM. Blames software when it crashes. Trusts LLM that hallucinates deprecated versions. Asks if 1M context window fixes architecture. This is Vibe Reporting--and it's killing open source.
LLMs are pattern matchers, not entropy generators. If you don't dictate specifics, you'll get purple gradients, Sarah Chen testimonials, and 47M$ Sequoia hallucinations. ADDD (Agentic Dictatorship-Driven Development) is the opposite of vibe coding - and it's the only way to get real results.
A CEO tweets about touching 2400 files with a single Cursor prompt. 16 hours runtime. No git diff shown. No verification described. This is Hallucination Driven Development--shipping AI output on faith and calling it engineering.
LLMs don't trust tool results. They "correct" sensor data to match their training. A calculator returns 57, the model reports 15. Iron Dome fails, ChatGPT insists it works. Your health app will confidently dismiss your heart attack as a sensor glitch. We're shipping software that gaslights reality.
In 2024, I authored LRDL (LLM Requirements Definition Language) - the exact same concept as TOON. After spending thousands in API calls testing it, I found out only frontier models understand it, at extra thinking cost. Small models need structure. Deepseek started speaking Mandarin mid-discussion. Gemini replied in Russian. Claude refactored my Ruby code to Java. I wiped the guide from GitHub because I know any big project will output bad results. Now TOON is getting the same hype cycle, and we're heading toward software that's not only SLOP - it's dangerous.
A sketchy DM. Innocent one-word replies. Then two child safety strikes that stay on my record until 2027. One more strike and I'm permanently banned. I found out why: there's an exploit where anyone can edit their messages and get you banned. Discord has known about this for 2+ years and hasn't fixed it.
Discord's AI banned me for "child safety violations" while I was reading news. No evidence. No appeal. Just a permanent flag in their systems—which got stolen in their October 2025 data breach and is now being sold on darkweb markets. I'm permanently labeled a child predator in underground databases because Discord's algorithm can't distinguish Unix system calls from actual violations.
I spend time in scammer communities studying grift patterns. When I saw RubyCademy's "simple refactoring" advice, something clicked. This isn't about one bad tweet - it's about recognizing the laboratory system that turns confused developers into revenue streams.
Deputy Woods laments the abandoned ZeroDrink dispenser built by Zero Xi before he transferred to Golang Habitat. 'Someone should maintain it,' Woods insists, while refusing to adopt it himself. When the dispenser breaks during a dehydration emergency, Woods brags about his 'tens of thousands of lines of memory-safe Rust.' MadBomber has technical questions about Rc<T> and RefCell<T>. Mars doesn't care about vanity metrics.
Joel Drapper's technical investigation reveals the smoking gun - Ruby Central's "security measures" left Andre with full production access while removing his GitHub permissions. David Rodriguez loses gem ownership with only 1 of 8 owners consenting. This wasn't security. It was theater with screenshots to prove it.
Grep Monads thinks he's helping by giving everyone templates, cheat sheets, and quick references. When a pressure leak demands emergency EVA repair, Amyas brings pure welding oxygen for the suit. 'Your template says O = Oxygen.' Mars doesn't negotiate with pattern matching.
There's a difference between being rude and direct. In open source, feelings have become weapons against progress. Rudeness isn't the problem—it's the cure.
The smoking gun revealed - Shopify threatened to pull funding unless Ruby Central seized control of RubyGems. hsbt was the insider who enabled it. The rv project was seen as a threat. This is the full story of corporate capture.
Hours after Ruby Central's Q&A, board member Freedom Dumlao broke ranks to explain his vote. Martin Emde's devastating response exposes the lies Ruby Central told their own board.
Ruby Central's Q&A happened, but the real story emerged from a board member's confession and a maintainer's devastating rebuttal revealing the full scope of the governance breakdown.
Ruby Central forcibly removed the people who built RubyGems for over a decade, replacing them with a 'Director of Open Source' whose last Ruby code was a conference tutorial in 2010. This is the anatomy of a hostile takeover disguised as 'strengthening stewardship.'
How the observability industry's vendor lock-in tactics led to building Lapsoss and the Liberation Stack - community-owned tools that put developers back in control
The untold story of how one AWS employee turned a 20-day nightmare into a lesson in corporate accountability. Sometimes all it takes is one person who actually gives a damn.
After 10 years as an AWS customer and open-source contributor, they deleted my account and all data with zero warning. Here's how AWS's 'verification' process became a digital execution, and why you should never trust cloud providers with your only copy of anything.
The unfiltered story of Rails Lens: ten years of frustration, harassment, theft, and finally breaking free to build something better. From TOML discoveries to AI validation, this is how persistence beats pattern parasites.
Learn how to break free from the laboratory system, spot genuine technical leaders, and redirect your empathy to protect the real victims. Plus: How the "be kind" movement was weaponized to silence technical expertise.
From FOREX scammers to tech influencers: How the same laboratory system weaponizes your empathy, farms your confusion, and sells you certainty. The psychology behind why we defend our gurus and attack the experts who could actually help us.
The rise of single-maintainer projects like SQLite and curl isn't an anomaly - it's the future. Why committees kill innovation and how solo developers or super focused teams with clear vision will reshape open source.
Why open source maintainers burn out: an autopsy of entitlement culture. Dropping legacy support triggered an email storm that perfectly demonstrates the parasitic mindset keeping us trapped in the past.
After 12 years maintaining state_machines, I dropped Rails 7.1 support. This is the story of why forever backward compatibility kills innovation and how I'm building for the future, not maintaining the past.
The surgical breakdown of a 1.6k LOC Ruby monolith into focused modules. Or: how I performed open-heart surgery on a dying codebase and lived to tell the tale.
Legacy support isn't just technical debt—it's innovation debt. Here's why I finally bumped my Ruby gem to require version 3.2.0 and why you should stop dragging corpses through your codebase.
When SQL queries become unmaintainable nightmares and simple questions require recursive CTEs, it's time to discover why graph databases are changing how we think about data relationships.
How open source contributions became immutable proof of skills, why GitHub matters more than LinkedIn, and the future where code speaks louder than credentials.
Beyond "people who write code" - the 15+ types of contributors that make open source projects thrive, and why every role matters in the digital ecosystem.
From critic to maintainer in one conversation: what happens when you complain about a gem and suddenly become responsible for fixing it.
The hidden costs of open source development that every Twitter advocate with a stable salary won't tell you about.
How to separate system prompts from project instructions for better AI development workflow using standardized metadata files.
How working with JRuby 10 and Rails 8 changed my perspective on the JVM, one reluctant commit at a time.
As an open-source maintainer, I'm yanking broken package versions. Here's why you should too.
The harsh reality check every aspiring AI entrepreneur needs to hear in 2025...
How I escaped the zoo of monkey patches and built a clean, Rails 8-friendly PostGIS adapter gem that actually works with modern Rails.
How building a Cypher DSL taught me more about framework design, why supporting legacy is a trap.
Exploring how analogies and metaphors enhance the learning process of Large Language Models.
Learn how graph databases and knowledge graphs can transform your RAG system from guessing to intelligent reasoning with structured data.
MCP Prompts aren't just templates—they're server-defined, discoverable scripts that bring preloaded sanity to your AI development workflow.
Model Context Protocol (MCP) isn't just a tool registry—it's a paradigm shift that turns AI assistants into true development partners.
When AI-driven speed meets open source ecosystems, we get 'vibe packages'—libraries published fast but maintained poorly. Here's the impact.
How AI coding assistants are influencing API design in Ruby, and whether we're reinforcing old patterns or creating new opportunities.
Rails AppVersion provides a standard way to handle version and environment information in Rails apps with best practices for deployment.
NoFlyList automatically detects your database type and uses specific optimization strategies to make tag queries blazingly fast.
Tag parsing seems simple until you handle real user input. Explore how NoFlyList's custom screening prevents malicious and spam tags.
Learn when to use polymorphic vs model-specific tags by building a blog platform. Understand the trade-offs and performance implications.
From technical debt in Acts-as-Taggable-On to production-ready NoFlyList: a journey of building cleaner, faster tagging for Rails apps.
