Piotr Szotkowski 🛡️

On behalf of Piotr

It is with great sadness that I inform of the passing of Piotr on July 29th, after his long fight with cancer. He was a great man, great engineer, a wonderful husband, father, brother and son. A dedicated Ruby community member. He will be sincerely missed

Piotr's wife, Monika

Please consider me on a coding/work hiatus at least till the end of September, due to health reasons. 🫠

I was heavily offlined the last few weeks, so I’ll have Opinions™ more end-of-August at best! But my Vim clumsiness finally pays back, the basic bindings are the most I ever learnt. 😇

... and this is why I don't like to talk to journalists. I made an exception for The Economist: sent over 7 pages of details on the comp landscape and told them they can use it, plus quote from @pragmaticengineer.com as long as they link it.

They used my chart, redrew it as their own, did not link.

It's happened: the trimodal nature of software engineering compensation made it to the Economist!

Disappointingly though, they did not link to the original article (they never do AFAIK), they redraw the image, and do not call it trimodal. Feels like "ripping off" my research, not gonna lie.

@martalempart.bsky.social wygrała z @OrdoIuris o słynne zdanie, którego nie mogła przez lata wypowiadać.
To znaczy, że nie musicie się bać mowić, że Ordo Iuris to finansowani przez Kreml fundamentaliści.

GitHub - trifectatechfoundation/sudo-rs: A memory safe implementation of sudo and su. A memory safe implementation of sudo and su. Contribute to trifectatechfoundation/sudo-rs development by creating an account on GitHub.

Ubuntu 25.10 will replace sudo with sudo-rs: github.com/trifectatech...

GitHub managed to make the files changed tab slower than it was before. This is astoundingly bad. 6 seconds to load the top of the page. 10 seconds to register hovering over a link. If you switch away to another tab and switch back, you need to wait about 2 seconds for it to render again. 🧵

A couple comments about what I’ve been learning about algo engineering, but first off: if you’re interested in helping us improve Discover and all of our algorithmic systems, we are hiring algo engineers jobs.gem.com/bluesky/am9i...

Right, apologies. 🤦‍♂️

You can mutate the array because you have access to the passed-by-value pointer to it (`a`), but you can’t repoint it (this is why `a += [3]` doesn’t change the caller’s variable).

This is also why you can’t mutate immediates.

This is because `a += [3]` is syntactic sugar for `a = a + [3]` – you are not modifying `a`, you create a new local `a` from the passed-in `a`.

`a.push(3)` is a call on the original `a` that modifies it.

(Ruby is pass-by-reference except some objects are immediates, like small integers… 😱)

Can they do Polishness next? My paternal-paternal great-grandpa was Czech, my maternal-paternal one was Silesian, the majority of them identified as Poles probably, keine Ahnung – Poland didn’t exist for 123 years (that’s five generations?).

And then what does it mean to be Catalonian.

(There’s also the infuriating ‘employees have to be in the office three times a week because we can’t trust them to not be doing another job in parallel’.)

happy women having sex with robots day for those who celebrate

…or, just now – I had my daily blood pressure records in Obsidian oldest-first, but the list grew long and I’d rather add to the top of it:

tac blood_pressure.md | sponge blood_pressure.md

like Popular with Friends (one of the official ones)?

bsky.app/profile/did:...

this technology that i cant even get my own employees to use without literally threatening them is definitely going to be profitable one day

Neil Brown neil@mastodon.neilzone.co.uk: Sometimes, I receive questions which leave both me, and the person asking, bamboozled. > Your website loads so quickly! What CDN do you use? There is no CDN. It is just really small and simple, mostly text. > Sure, but is that Cloudflare, or...? None. It is a tiny website, just a few kilobytes per page, on a tiny server, at my home, connected to the Internet via my ISP, Andrews & Arnold. > But are you / they in the cloud? No. The webserver is in Newbury, in my garage. > Neil, please can you pass my questions to your technical person? I don't think you understand, your website cannot be in your home. It must be in the cloud or have a CDN. *Neil puts on glasses and false nose and moustache*

Worth a watch:

Head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, on so-called "agentic AI" and the difference between how it's described in the marketing and what access and control it would actually require to work as advertised.

On Monday of this week, Hamas' Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip published an updated list of those killed in the war, a 1,227-page chart, arranged from youngest to oldest. The Arabic-language document includes the deceased person's full name, the names of the father and grandfather, date of birth and ID number. Unlike previous lists, this compilation notes the precise age of children who were under the age of one year when they were killed. Mahmoud al-Maranakh and seven more children died on the same day they were born. Four more children were killed on the day after they entered the world, five others lived to the age of two days. Not until page 11, following 486 names, does the name appear of the first child who was more than six months old when he was killed.

The death toll of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza is now estimated at 100,000

The list is 1,227 pages long.

The first 11 pages are names of babies dead before the age of 6 months.

The first 381 pages are all children.

archive.is/2025.06.28-0...

The crowd at the Budapest Pride is massive, in defiance of Orban

www.cnn.com/2025/06/28/e...

Google search for “all you can eat buffet near me” Al Overview To find an all-you-can-eat buffet near you, you can use online search engines like Google or Yelp, specifying "all you can eat buffet near me". These searches will typically provide a list of nearby restaurants offering buffet-style dining, including their addresses, contact information, and customer reviews. You can also refine your

The singularity is awesome

Budapest Pride thread, from the ground

Tried to use Gemini to fix a bug in Ruby. It made a change that caused Ruby segv, told me it's too dangerous to continue, and then gave me instructions as to how to report the bug 🤣

It’s every parent’s nightmare, isn’t it? you check your child’s bulletproof backpack and find a picture book about gay penguins

A city skyline at night, reflected off of water in the foreground, with a large moon rising behind.

Going through some old stuff of mine I found a random side project I threw together back in 2017. It generates an image of a random city skyline at night, then produces a random name and description of the city. (Pretty silly, to be honest.)

jamisbuck.org/skylines/

Back in the day, Twitter used to be really good if I set up a thread to connect freelancers with clients. Let's see if Bluesky can do it.

Clients: if you're looking for freelancers/contractors, get in the comments

Freelancers/contractors: get in comments

Everyone else: boosts appreciated

Couple charged with selling tap water as "innovative product" to Poland's biggest power plant for €5m

A husband and wife have been charged with defrauding Bełchatów, Europe's largest coal power plant, out of €5 million by supplying it for years with what they claimed was an "innovative product" to help reduce emissions but was actually just slightly modified tap water.

The Ruby extension v0.10.0 for @zed.dev is out, featuring Herb LSP by @marcoroth.dev and bundle-aware debugger support. Happy vide coding!