The Observability Trap: Why I Built Lapsoss to Break Vendor Chains
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
Posts tagged "open-source"
Rude by Default: Why Directness Protects Open Source
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 Deputy Woods Deflection: Month One on Habitat-10
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.
Blackship: A FreeBSD Jail Orchestrator That Understands State
Announcing Blackship - declarative jail management with dependency graphs, state machines, circuit breakers, and ZFS-first design.
AWS Fired the One Employee Who Gave a Damn
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.
The Bloat Industry: 30,000 Lines to Count Pageviews
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.
CrystalMeet
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.
Helmsman: Stop Writing AGENTS.md That Lies to Half Your Models
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.
Kaunta Is Rust Now. Postgres Did Not Notice.
In March I shipped Kaunta as a Go binary. It is Rust now, in the same repository, on the same database. The port was cheap because the logic already lived in PostgreSQL. What changed is who owns the layers underneath.
Macroaggression
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.
Matz Told Me Why
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.
MDMA
CrystalMeet got rejected, so this time I am doing science. MDMA is built for a cluster of inference engines that you spawn at will on the machines you already own. It started with a GPU shared by processes that could not see each other's memory.
My Name Is Nobody
Part 1 stopped mid-thought on purpose. That's how software is going to feel: you depend on it, then the signal stops.
OpenSourceShit Part 1: The Math Broke
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.
OpenSourceShit Part 2: The Parasites
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.
OpenSourceShit Part 3: The Impersonators
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.
OpenSourceShit Part 4: The Closing
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.
Parasites With a Term Sheet
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.
The Namespace Locusts
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.
The Soviets* Landed First
In For All Mankind, the Soviets reach the Moon first and NASA keeps the cameras. Noiseless started in 2021 because the official Elasticsearch gem refuses to talk to OpenSearch. Basecamp shipped its Active Search in 2026.
Turkey Belongs to Two Worlds
closure_tree said no to multiple parents for fourteen years. dag_me is the yes: DAGs for ActiveRecord, with cycles rejected inside PostgreSQL.
Vibe Reporting: When Your Bug Is Just A Feeling You Haven't Debugged
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.
The Drawer Discovery: Sol 821 on Mars
Captain Seuros has been on Mars for two years. When a fresh colonist finds old tech in a drawer, it sparks a conversation about the difference between owning your hardware and being owned by it. Sometimes the best gear isn't the premium brand.
Arming the State Guards: Captain Seuros vs. The 9-Year GitHub Issue
How a Moroccan captain finally implemented the most requested state_machines feature after 9 years of maintainer paralysis. Featuring the RMNS Atlas Monkey and emergency warp protocols.