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  Something I'm really struggling with right now as a part of a large engineering org is that almost every single individual's development workflow has diverged _significantly_. The divide isn't so simple as "using AI" and "human coding", and it's not just a sliding scale. It's which tools are used, how they're used, what the expectations are for the humans, and for the teams, every step of the way. Almost every week people show off some new tool or app...

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  I met Brian Poindexter today at our local Summerfest. He’s running for Congress to unseat the odious Max Miller, and more importantly to fight for working class families. He’s a real one - genuine guy, not a career politician. When we took this picture he told us to make sure to post it and spread the word https://poindexterforcongress.com/ #ohio #uspol

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  Today is a bad day to use MM-DD-YY format. 27-07-26 It looks incredibly like yesterday's date to anyone who sanely expects year to come first ala ISO-8601 2026-07-27 MM-DD-YY is _terrible_ . I beg you, never use that format.

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  I spent most of my day redesigning a backend authentication library which was a total yak shave stemming from changing a constant integer. I might accidentally be a security engineer now. 😅

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  I enjoyed The Odyssey. It’s a good theater movie. For a long movie I thought it flew by. Oh, and the sound design was excellent all the way through.

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  It’s that time of year again when I have to decide whether or not to renew gardengnomefeet.com

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  Hot take: the VAST majority of the time you should be deleting database records and avoiding creating a `deleted_at` flag and carrying deleted things in your database. Once you have active/inactive records, all your queries get more complicated, and you need to think a LOT more about how the lifecycle of these records works in connection with its relations and other biz logic. It gets hairy quickly.

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  I'm still learning jj vcs, and here's a confusion I have. In my workflow I might push a bookmark to a git remote, need to make changes, `jj commit` and then want to push the new commits. I can `jj bookmark advance` however that moves the bookmark to @ which is an empty commit of my working set. Why would I _ever_ want to bookmark that? Obviously I want to advance the bookmark to `@-` I hear there's a config revsets.bookmark-advance-to I can set to @- But why that de...

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  I’ve never been able to articulate with specificity about my concern with using your database as your job queue, and I came across an article with concrete examples of how postgres can break down under queueing workloads: https://richyen.com/postgres/2026/05/04/postgres_job_queue.html There is nothing about ruby in this article, but I suspect (without verifying) it’s 100% applicable to rails database job queues.

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  I do not love that Google Gemini calls its AI skills or whatever “gems”. Not to be confused with Ruby’s gems. Now I have to mentally disambiguate in business conversations depending on context. I only care about the Ruby ones, and have little interest in peoples’ markdown files.

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  Well crap, my eagerly awaited 3DS Fire Emblem game arrived… and was an empty jewel case. Son of a #retrogaming

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  A stray brain cell fired, reminding me of the BBS game Legend of the Red Dragon, which got me wondering what “Seth Able” was doing. Did some sleuthing, and I guess the developers name was “Seth Robinson” (not “Able” - did I misremember? A pseudonym? Anyway). He’s in Japan and has a small game company, posting regularly on his website https://rtsoft.com/ #retrogaming

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  I successfully used jj to rebase a commit (revset?), arrange some commits, and squash. Pushing changes to github was/is still a slight headscratcher to me - it’s at the intersection of jj and git - but still, I got it done and it wasn’t too painful. I like the jj log . There’s still git-like stuff I’m trying to either translate or unlearn for jj, but I’m less lost than yesterday. 🦾 #git #jj

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  Am I the only one who feels this way about Kalita Wave coffee filters? #coffee

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  Another rubocop/standardrb gripe: Style/EmptyLiteral: Use hash literal {} instead of Hash.new Nah, I have my own heuristics for when to use which one. If it's inside a block with braces, I assert that: # the "approved" butthole syntax let(:params) { {} } looks worse than # ain't nothing wrong with this let(:params) { Hash.new } #rubocop #standardrb #ruby

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  It’s not true that half of people are below average intelligence. Half of people are below median intelligence, though.

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  I picked up jj to learn today, and have gotten lost pretty quick. Learning is hard - it’s hard to conjure a beginner’s mind when you’ve got a fairly well-built mental model in something similar

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  Realistically I think AI is creating security vulnerabilities that are huge, glaring problems far outpacing the vulnerabilities they are catching. Remember Moltbook, for example?

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  Yellow onions are superior to red onions.

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  I’m not sure how to respond to well-meaning peoples’ AI PRs. I was looking at an RSpec one, and… it needs a lot of work. That work becomes the reviewer’s, though, and I would almost end up rewriting it myself. I’m glad I am only on the periphery of this stuff

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  A random communication "trick" I've been working on for years is to replace my usage of the word "but" with "and". Avoiding negation feels much clearer, because you come across as less-conflicted. Give it a try. For example: We need to frobulate, but that means bingaling --> We need to frobulate, and that means bingaling

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  Conventional commit format sucks. What you really want is to use git trailers. The subject line of a commit message is PRIME real estate, and shouldn't be wasted on tools https://alchemists.io/articles/git_trailers https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/

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  I have been binge watching Tojima Wants To Be a Kamen Rider, and I don’t know why I’m hooked but I am. The riders fight each other more than Shocker. I think the background music contributes bigly to my enjoyment. It’s so cheesy but charming also. https://crunchyroll.com/series/GT00364945/tojima-wants-to-be-a-kamen-rider #anime #crunchyroll

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  I really need to start meditating again. It’s weird how some obviously-positive habits can be hard for me to keep.