Sam Stephenson

born, never asked 🏳️‍🌈 he/him

Website: https://sls.name
Location: Ciudad de México
Previously (2018–2024): [@sstephenson@mastodon.social](https://mastodon.social/@sstephenson )

Public Key

npub1tjs6ynjklqenx994dzl8my2sn6lktetrdadq053w2xtsjhmm0e5qgq87qz

NIP-05 Address

sstephenson_at_indieweb.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs9egdzfet0svenzj6k30naj9gfa0m9u43k7ks86gh9r9cftaahu6qprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntqyg8wumn8ghj7mn0wd68ytnhd9hx2aljfa5

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

nostr.wine

relay.damus.io

Author Public Key

npub1tjs6ynjklqenx994dzl8my2sn6lktetrdadq053w2xtsjhmm0e5qgq87qz

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Last Notes

2026-10-31 17:42:30 UTC

#caturday 🎃
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/117/536/754/607/408/915/original/7e79b0978c535b28.jpeg

2026-10-10 15:29:03 UTC

After many years as an Overcast user it looks like I now need to find a new podcast player. What are y’all using these days (on iOS)?

2026-10-07 16:56:46 UTC

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in case it matters to you, I had to unfollow this guy a couple years ago for blatant sinophobia

2026-09-22 17:31:15 UTC

TIL `:nth-child(... of ...)`: https://caniuse.com/css-nth-child-of

2026-09-20 16:00:12 UTC

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Korčula?
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/117/304/197/647/413/541/original/276e9e0b213f9276.jpeg

2026-09-19 19:07:51 UTC

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the *only* measure of its worth? really? you think readability, comprehensibility, maintainability, didacticism, and so on are worthless?

2026-09-17 15:28:05 UTC

kernel panic! on the bus
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/117/287/084/469/679/064/original/3617f21494b45260.jpeg

2026-09-03 15:05:44 UTC

💡Did you know? If someone writes something you appreciate, you can just send them a note to say thanks

2026-08-30 18:30:25 UTC

Finally got around to trying out Brat on Haiku. All the tests pass, though the suite is quite slow to run, upwards of 90 seconds with 8 vcpus under emulation. Without having done any real investigation, my guess is fork(2) is expensive. But it runs flawlessly, entirely from source, with nothing else installed on top of the base system. (Video at 2x speed)
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/117/185/879/842/960/544/original/b49029d03138759e.mp4

2026-08-26 13:44:27 UTC

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I vaguely remember this too. I think it was an issue with one of the late Intel generations

2026-08-25 17:48:19 UTC

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https://bsky.app/profile/aly.codes/post/3mtwb64obkc2w
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/117/157/407/795/055/048/original/a38efae55823759b.jpeg

2026-08-25 17:32:38 UTC

I see the vibe-coded dotfiles collection is going exactly as well as you’d think
“[Security] Stop USB device names from being executed as Hyprland Lua”
https://github.com/basecamp/omarchy/pull/8129

2026-08-18 22:20:01 UTC

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a quick way to distract them is to insult their power outlets

2026-08-06 17:27:39 UTC

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I worked closely with Jeremy Daer for many years and always looked up to him. Seems he’s fully cooked his brain now too. That PR is 100% slop. All I can say is I’m glad I was able to leave the cult when I did.

2026-08-06 17:12:17 UTC

If the “Ruby Hero” award meant anything, this year it’d go to @npub1tvl…cx46 for his stance here: https://github.com/faye/websocket-driver-ruby/pull/98#issuecomment-5194452712
But we can probably expect it to go to a Shopify employee for their work on yet another uncompetitive JIT or whatever.

2026-07-31 17:24:49 UTC

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oof. Nothing says “thank you” like a blog post written by a chat bot. 🫩
(Normally I’d try to be more diplomatic in how I phrase my criticism, but imo, if you have fully given in to the point of having agents lie to others under your name, you don’t really deserve the presumption of acting in good faith)

2026-07-31 02:12:00 UTC

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yeah, it’s terrifying and also really sad :(

2026-07-31 01:54:02 UTC

Wow, it appears Sam Ruby has fully cooked his brain with Claude. I just took a glimpse at his blog and it appears to be entirely slop now. Like literally just incoherent posts copied and pasted wholesale from LLM sessions. (Sam is, among other things, the author of the official Rails book.)
https://intertwingly.net/blog/
He also apparently has an “agent” running around submitting this slop and commenting on it on his behalf. See @pushcx’s comment here: https://lobste.rs/s/0yc3r0/lobste_rs_on_spinel#c_jxdrb6

2026-05-17 18:02:21 UTC

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personally I think we should check whether they sink or float first

2026-05-08 16:34:12 UTC

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but Jared, how do you plan to scale from PROMPT to IPO with that attitude?

2026-05-04 18:08:48 UTC

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thank you!

2026-05-04 17:57:53 UTC

I have updated my web site with a fresh bio and a note on how you can work with me: https://sls.name

2026-04-24 01:00:57 UTC

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friggin’ brainworms, man

2026-04-21 15:04:19 UTC

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it’s just me, no other collaborators at the moment. Not sure if tags can be protected

2026-04-20 19:18:37 UTC

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Here is the release workflow I ended up with. When I push a tag that starts with “v”, it extracts the changelog entries, publishes a release, and publishes a versioned package. When I push the tag “latest”, it force-publishes a package with the name “latest”, which has a stable URL https://codeberg.org/sstephenson/brat/src/branch/main/.forgejo/workflows/release.yml

2026-04-18 17:31:34 UTC

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It seems like this is not really possible now without manually creating a “latest” release object, and in that case maybe I should just set up a release workflow using the package registry instead
https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/packages/generic/

2026-04-18 16:06:38 UTC

Codeberg/Forgejo q.
My project has a series of tags: `v0.9.0`, `v0.10.0`, etc. Each tag has a release with a dist file attached.
The project also has a “floating” tag called `latest` which I manually update to point to the latest release tag.
I want a stable URL that lets me reference the attached dist file from the release pointed to by the `latest` tag. Possible? (/releases/tag/latest and /releases/tag/v0.10.0 point to the same commit, but the former does not show the notes or dist file)

2026-04-17 02:52:26 UTC

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(I believe there are people at Ruby Central who are genuinely trying to make things better, and I am sure it’s a difficult job for many reasons, but for the record: this was not a shitpost, and“you should join the board if you don’t want us to celebrate bigots” is not an acceptable response)

2026-04-17 01:13:34 UTC

One way Ruby Central could rebuild trust is to admit that the financial situation they find themselves in now is due to their decision last year to platform a transphobic white supremacist despite vocal opposition from the community. Instead, they are choosing to *thank* that person by name. Oh and they’re announcing some AI shit too.
https://rubycentral.org/news/a-new-chapter-for-ruby-central/

2026-04-05 16:21:31 UTC

I wish software people had an alternative word for “bootstrapping” that’s not so libertarian-coded

2026-03-21 21:02:41 UTC

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it’s so satisfyingly hyperreal, like banana Runts 😅

2026-03-21 19:01:51 UTC

I’m such a sucker for a good FM synth bell sound

2026-03-14 13:36:36 UTC

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I have been waiting so long for more Grása! what a delightful birthday surprise 😊

2026-03-08 15:17:45 UTC

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have you seen the new rubyonrails dot org btw?

2026-03-05 16:51:49 UTC

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“I then started in an empty repository with no access to the old source tree, and explicitly instructed Claude not to base anything on LGPL/GPL-licensed code.”
idk, it’s just baffling to me that a professional software developer who’s been maintaining a project for over a decade can so fundamentally misunderstand what LLMs do

2026-03-05 14:46:41 UTC

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Just… fuck you, dude
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/116/177/108/811/445/634/original/e97e48bba3487e97.jpeg

2026-03-05 14:40:21 UTC

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This issue has it all!
- Original copyright holder makes a straightforward claim of violation
- Sloppers try to defend it using the Oracle v Google ruling
- Armin “Plausibly Deniable” Ronacher shows up to do nothing but sow doubt
- Maintainer in question replies with a response obviously written by Claude, saying he instructed Claude not to reference any copyrighted code
https://github.com/chardet/chardet/issues/327

2026-03-05 14:33:23 UTC

Made the mistake of reading the Mark Pilgrim GitHub thread first thing this morning and now I’m in a terrible mood

2026-02-06 17:05:29 UTC

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“handcrafted” sounds a bit twee to my ears, but I’m jaded. I’ll give “handwritten” a shot in the README I’m currently writing :)

2026-02-06 16:58:42 UTC

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is “handwritten” the adjective we ought to use in readmes and such?

2026-02-04 18:04:08 UTC

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Brat is built with Brut, the Brutal Router for Unix Tools, a tiny, generic git-style command dispatcher. You can copy the main entrypoint, `bin/brat`, to another location, give it a different name, and use it to make your own command-line tools. https://codeberg.org/sstephenson/brat/src/branch/main/bin/brat
(I’ll document and release Brut separately, eventually…)

2026-02-04 17:56:25 UTC

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Like Bats, all Brat tests run with `set -e`, so every line in the test body is like an assertion. One of the bets Brat makes is that `set -x` (“xtrace”) output is all you need when a test fails

2026-02-04 17:53:02 UTC

In 2011 I created Bats, a test harness for bash, which went on to have a life of its own: https://github.com/bats-core/bats-core
Now I’m working on a 2026 take on the problem, this time targeting POSIX shell. It’s called Brat (the Brutal Runner for Automated Tests).
Here’s a video showing Brat running its own test suite, first serially, and again using 8 parallel jobs:
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/116/013/634/085/399/603/original/b4e46e116a698697.mp4

2026-01-20 18:58:22 UTC

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dear god

2026-01-17 16:46:59 UTC

The dollar continues to fall against the Mexican peso, worth 16.8% less since February of last year
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/115/911/453/206/298/836/original/b841c0b380d225be.png

2025-10-29 15:54:37 UTC

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a truly revolting turn. I loved her music and always thought of her as a queer icon

2025-10-02 19:23:12 UTC

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this is fucking bleak

2025-09-26 14:56:50 UTC

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gross 🤢

2025-09-26 14:45:05 UTC

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wow I could’ve sworn it was just yesterday he was threatening to put every dissenter on a no-hire list

2025-09-24 19:28:54 UTC

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37siegheils

2025-09-19 14:18:10 UTC

“Fiduciary responsibility” is a hell of a euphemism for “we were offered millions of dollars from a hostile donor in exchange for control of the RubyGems infrastructure”
https://rubycentral.org/news/strengthening-the-stewardship-of-rubygems-and-bundler/

2025-09-09 18:37:51 UTC

We were all thinking it, right? 🤢
https://cdn.masto.host/indiewebsocial/media_attachments/files/115/175/788/837/420/189/original/86092c8b3f29d592.jpeg

2025-09-04 14:52:28 UTC

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who called it Atlassian and not Ticketmaster

2025-05-29 17:04:08 UTC

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(more of a semantic point, I guess, and something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’m with you on everything else… it seems like the corporate capture is complete)

2025-05-29 16:18:27 UTC

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disagree — MINASWAN is alive and well, and imo is one of the root problems in the community. It’s a thought-terminating cliche that encourages “niceness” (tolerating assholes, keeping your real opinions to yourself) over “kindness.” It’s also straight-up hero worship, which, among other things, ignores the fact that Matz belongs to a famously bigoted, racist, homophobic religious institution.

2025-01-21 16:48:01 UTC

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yuuup

2025-01-21 16:23:55 UTC

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Rails Core Team: “What a great guy! I love to make him richer with my free labor 😍 #RubyFriends”
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9GzYoUFIkwE/maxresdefault.jpg

2024-10-09 18:33:22 UTC

Reminder that when a prominent bad actor with a history of racist, sexist, transphobic views happens to say something you agree with:
YOU DON’T HAVE TO SHARE IT.
And you certainly don’t have to share it while saying “Wow, I can’t believe I’m agreeing with this bigot, but here we are!”
It’s not remarkable that you agree. You’re supposed to. Abusers take advantage of your occasional credulity to launder their reputations and create plausible deniability.

2024-09-27 18:38:33 UTC

When you’re definitely not in a cult https://ruby.social/@andycroll/113210031079954340

2024-09-19 17:10:47 UTC

“Elon Musk lived in apartheid South Africa until he was 17. David Sacks…left aged five, and grew up in a South African diaspora family in Tennessee. Peter Thiel spent years of childhood in South Africa and Namibia, where his father was involved in uranium mining[…]. And Paul Furber, an obscure South African software developer and tech journalist living near Johannesburg, has been identified by two teams of forensic linguists as the originator of the QAnon conspiracy.”
https://archive.is/G2cH3