The following is a valid DOS COM executable that prints "HELLO" in the lower right corner of the screen.

You can copy these emoji into a text editor, and save it as EMOJI.COM. it should be 141 bytes.

It will run in DosBox-X, with the following options:

cpu cputype=8086
machine cga

🐸☺️🐰🐎♐🗃️🧯🧯🧯🐮💗🦮🪏♐🐰🐹🗃️🧯🧯🧯🧯💗🪗🧯😗🧮🫪😗🧮😗🐮😪😔⭐

may god have mercy on my soul.

Picard leadership tip: Resources are always limited. Time, expertise, material, energy. Don’t prioritize foolishness when you have been tasked to solve real problems.

FWIW I think Zverok has the analysis just about right: https://mu.social/profile/zverok.bsky.social/post/3mrtuu6fbsc2k

It doesn’t matter whether “Matz is nice”
https://po-ru.com/2026/07/29/it-doesnt-matter-whether-matz-is-nice
#ruby #blog

IMO one of the core functional issues (There are plenty of non-functional ones too, of course) with people who use LLMs for writing code is: It strips away friction.

You can’t first “make the change easy”, if you never realize the change was hard to begin with, because you never felt the friction of trying to make the change yourself.

LLMs rob us of one of *the* core signals to whether our code is working with us, or against us.

Semi-annual blathering about AI:

I still don't use any AI code in my work, but I have to review more and more of it these days. One of the things bothering me about that these days is just how lacking in personality that code is.

RenderMan is a code base which is now over forty years old. It is a collection of idiosyncratic styles written by equally idiosyncratic people.

(1/10)

I missed that Artichoke Ruby was wound down. This well-written article celebrates doing things for your own education, pushing the industry forward as a result.

If you haven't seen Artichoke before, @_lopopolo did really great work for years on it.

https://hyperbo.la/w/winding-down-artichoke-ruby/

💯

Someone or something registered pdfarranger dot net and makes it look like an official page. No clues on who or why.

This is not us. I hate this. Please take it down. Please downvote and report this to search engines where you can.

Please do let us know if there is something we can do about it. (We don't have any funds.)

Boosts appreciated.

Hey all, I have a big favour to ask.

At the beginning of the week, a large client that we had 100% expected to get started with a large project this month has dropped out at the most inconvenient time for us.

My team at @neighbourhoodie and I are looking for any and all projects we might be able to help with, the sooner the better.

We are really good at turning manual and/or analogue processes into digital ones, especially, but not limited to, if parts of the process need to work while a person or device is offline.

We have proven this repeatedly by making substantial contributions to fighting a Ebola epidemic, testing the first ever Ebola vaccine and distributing the very first COVID vaccinations to all eligible Bavarians.

We are also really good at taking your prototypes and turn them into real-life, secure, reliable, fast and scalable systems that you can bet your company on for years. From UX to SRE, we got you covered.

You need a frontend for a backend service you’ve built, we got you. You need a backend for a mobile app or game you’ve built, we got you.

We also excel at designing, building and debugging distributed database systems of all sizes and shapes. If you sync your photos with tools from the large red brick company, we helped with that.

We can help migrate your infrastructures from US clouds to EU hosters (within reason). Wanna move from GitHub to a self-hosted or managed Forgejo? Get in touch!

Additionally, in the past three years we helped 15+ FOSS projects from systemd, to GNOME, to PHP and PyPI, as well as Servo and Log4j with maintenance and security tasks in all sorts of programming languages and environments. We can help with yours, too.

We can also help join your team (remotely, CE[S]T) to augment any current projects you’re need accelerated.

I’m happy to answer any question you might have.

And I appreciate any leads and all boosts <3

https://neighbourhood.ie

Meet Spinel 👋 https://spinel.coop/blog/meet-spinel/

You don't see people from the frontier models brag about how many vulnerabilities they FIXED, only how many they FOUND.

Hanami 3.0 is here and in full bloom 🌸

This is our most complete release yet: mailers, i18n, and Minitest now built in, your apps faster by default, and plenty more!

https://hanakai.org/blog/2026/06/30/hanami-3-0-in-full-bloom

1.5 h movie: hell no, that's too much of a commitment
4h youtube video essay: aw yiss

So if anyone needs a designer, freelance/part time or full time (but remote cos I'm out in the wilds) then do please let me know. #FediHire

Edit: Got some feedback. As well as all the design and accessibility experience they said I'm really kind, approachable and good to talk to. So there's that. Little bit of a boost there!

Quick SVG survey 🗳️

What are your pain points with SVG? What features are missing? What bugs matter the most?

PDF generation in Ruby is complicated. There are three realistic choices, really: Prawn (low level, move-here-then-draw-this type operations), wkhtmltopdf (pull in AN ENTIRE BROWSER and render to PDF) and HexaPDF which seems cool but has kind of a weird license? But I had a brain moment last week and spent some time making this: https://github.com/johanhalse/bandoola

I'm #hiring a Principal Software Engineer for the Web Team at Raspberry Pi.

A hands-on, individual contributor role. You'd set technical direction, do code review and pairing, and ship code every week. Mostly Rails, Hotwire and Tailwind CSS with PostgreSQL, plus some React and Go (for Raspberry Pi Connect).

Permanent, full-time, in our Cambridge office. Direct applications only, no recruiters please.

Full spec and how to apply: https://apply.workable.com/raspberrypi/j/4C389130B2

Closes Wednesday 15 July.

#rubyjobs

I am not an expert. I am an old person with opinions. There’s a difference.

So #bundler added support for cooldowns.

https://blog.rubygems.org/2026/06/03/cooldown-let-new-gems-be-vetted.html

Aside: This feature is mostly developed by Claude. I haven't reviewed the code. Maybe it's fine. Maybe hsbt did actually read, understood, and guided all the code generated here. But in any case it's kinda depressing that even #Ruby, "a Programmer's Best Friend" language with goals like happiness and fun is outsourced to AI that neither can have fun, nor can be happy, nor have friends.

Anyway, I don't fully get the appeal. My main point of contention is that it's a solution trice removed from the problem.

The problem is "supply chain security". Sometimes malicious packages get pushed to package registries. It's not that much of a problem if the package is completely new as it doesn't have users yet and people tend to be cautious about new packages. But it's a problem for established projects that get compromised. They have a lot of users and many people depend on them. So a compromised package with lots of users needs very little time to get installed all over and execute its evil plots.

Someone noticed that it doesn't take much time for people to notice that something's not right. Just days, even mere hours. And they came up with a solution: what if we don't install packages right as they get released but wait, say, a week?

It's a self-defeating strategy. Imagine everyone does this. No one installs packages until they get a week old. How will people know if something's not right if no one's using the package?

The whole thing depends on someone noticing that something's not right. But the fewer people use the package the lower the chance that someone will notice. Package cooldowns work great for the small fraction of users in the beginning. But the closer cooldowns adoption goes to 100% the less effective it becomes.

It also implicitly relies on someone noticing an issue. And someone investigating it. Someone needs to a) install the package, b) notice the issue, c) investigate it. None of this is guaranteed by cooldowns.

A more explicit strategy would be that every package needs a certain amount of reviews from the users to become generally available. So every package upon release becomes available on the index for review. A package manager notifies users that a new version is available in staging and they can help it move along. The package is not available for automatic installation. There's a diff to the previous version that people can review. This is my first idea and it certainly can be improved but, as an example… Users who reviewed the package and approved it can install it right away. The package becomes generally available once a certain amount of reviews came in. E.g. 0.5% of weekly downloads, or 5, 10, 20, etc. approvals from highly trusted well known people in the community who are not involved in the project.

As opposed to cooldowns this explicitly depends on actual reviews. Unlike cooldowns, wider adoption improves efficiency: more reviews—faster availability. It also promotes the "best practice" of actually reading the code you install.

Now, to make it a thing I need a catchy name for it. I'm taking suggestions.