PointlessOne :loading:

https://status.pointless.one/@pointlessone

Full stack web-developer (#Linux, #Ruby, #RubyOnRails, #HTML, #CSS, #JavaScript). #PrawnPDF maintainer. #Rust amateur.

Web: https://pointless.one

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Last Notes

2025-12-20 13:55:11 UTC

Just saw the new #Ruby web site. It looks nicer than the previous but something—I can’t quite put my finger on it—tells me that Ruby is now all but officially the Rails language. Which is a shame because Ruby is a great general purpose language. It could’ve been an awesome CLI language. It could've been a great data processing language. It's OK to put nebulous and abstract things like happiness and beauty before other things but not acknowledging any of the practical aspects leaves it for taking by outside forces.
It also clings to MINASWAN and puts Dave right next to Matz. 🙈 🙉 🙊

2025-11-18 08:56:51 UTC

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You write your own engine/static site generator, of course. But if you lose your mind only a little then probably Ghost, or WordPress if you’re OK ignoring the drama.

2025-10-11 15:42:33 UTC

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Could you show an example of an API you have in mind?
@npub1due…wk02

2025-10-11 11:48:04 UTC

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Yeah, I see what you're saying but until we get Namespace in Ruby there’s no way to implement gem namespaces.
The main issue is that gem namespaces have to be globally unique in order to avoid collisions you described. Two sources can have same namespaces in them and gems with same names in them. That is, you still can have ns/G(A) and ns/G(B).
Sources as gem namespaces is kinda the best we can have as URLs are unique already.
Granted, this messes a bit with mirrors and caches (e.g. Artifactory) that assume only one source exists. Caching proxies are still immediately useful. Mirrors can solve this by hosting multiple sources at different URLs. E.g. gem-mirror.com/rubygems/, gem-mirror.com/gem-coop/

2025-10-11 06:52:45 UTC

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> decentralized gem hosting along with namespace support at the package level
We already have it. Host your own small index. Gems are namespaced to `source`.

2025-10-10 11:31:34 UTC

Do I show some inherent bias I don't notice or do thing actually not add up in what Ruby Central does?
- Initially RC took away access to GH repos from the maintainers without communication with them.
- They justified this as a security tightening.
- They (through at least one board member) said it was forced because of some timeline they apparently didn't choose and was related to funding in some way.
- They also mention "the timeline that we were facing" in their update video. Making it sound as if it's an external factor outside of their control.
- Later (in the official statement) they again mention “firm timeline” but do not elaborate on its nature or source. This is the last time we hear about it even though it was—apparently—the driving force behind the initial access revocation.
- They removed access to gh repositories. They cite security concerns. It's a strange statement because deployment to .org is manual. You do not need to remove repo access to make sure .org is fine. Just don't deploy anything. It's also not how deployments are secured. You keep a separate for you have control over, you don't grab someone else's repo and cut their access to it.
- They try to justify the repo takeover by citing ReadMes: "managed by Ruby Central". It's hard to take it seriously. Since when ReadMe is an official legal document? To me it looks at best like a promotional material for RC.
- While .org repo takeover might have some remote semblance of logic behind it, other repos look much less convincing. Those are CLI tools. They have very little relation to the .org infra.
- RC also didn't take away actual access to the .org infra. Root access was kept in place to the people who were forced from the repos.
- RC put out a very formally sounding "post-incident review". It also tries really hard to frame it as a security incident pointing all fingers they have at Arko.
- In reality they took the wrong access away. They kept AWS access in place. They were informed of it by Arko. They actively relied on him to verify that they took AWS root access from him (after he reported it). They also failed to verify other credentials revocation. They relied—apparently, solely—on Arko for impact assessment.
- RC also involved lawyers to send letters with allegations to Arko's attorney.
So… RC demonstrates incompetence on multiple occasions. The keep fumbling comms, which, I guess, can be understood to a degree. It's hard to do that properly, especially in the light of such an impactful actions. But they also absolutely botched the security ops—the whole premise of their actions falls into question. It was questionable from the very beginning but now it's very hard to deny they botched it very hard. If anything they compromised security of .org by pissing off everyone who had access to it. It's great that those who were pissed off didn't do anything bad but RC can't claim its because of them.
RC (and some others) try to paint Arko as a villain in this whole ordeal. Maybe he's not perfect but so far I haven't seem much to back anything nefarious on his part. Sure, he's biased in his own favour—like everyone would've been—but so far his communication is much more transparent. Maybe he doesn't present all evidence but he at least presents some. RC, on the other hand, presents none and actively tries to wait this one out saying as little as possible.

2025-10-03 08:46:18 UTC

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fair. But there are also absolutely verifiable facts that don’t look good even on their own.

2025-10-03 08:26:56 UTC

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what makes me even sadder is that Matz retwits Dave’s railing against CoCs. As opposed to, say, enforcing Ruby’s community guidelines.

2025-09-30 23:02:48 UTC

There’s a very simple thing Ruby Central could do to greatly improve their standing with the Ruby community: reinstate access to repositories to everyone they took it from.
Instead they admit no wrongdoing apart from fumbled comms.
They fundamentally don’t understand how Open Source works. That in order to control what is deployed to rubygems.org they just need to make a fork in GH. It’s literally one click.
They insist it’s not a takeover. But I assure you if you tell anyone without naming the repo what happened here they will say it is a takeover.
Saying it three times doesn’t magically make it not a takeover.
This fundamental misunderstanding is what makes it so hard to believe in a positive outcome.
I mean, it may be that their decisions are not based on financing. It may be they acted in good faith. It may be that .org will operate largely indistinguishably to the external observer. But there’s simple no hope they understand the community they’re trying to be stewards to.

2025-09-24 19:46:36 UTC

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It's not exactly excellent but it's not too bad. I feel like bundler solved most of the gems issues long ago. Ruby itself is little bit trickier but even it is not that bad. rbenv solved it for me a while ago.
I feel like Python is much rougher in this regard. Recently uv seem to have changed the situation for better but before it (just a year or two ago, and in many project even today) dealing with conda and virtualenvs is a royal pita.
I feel like Rust got it mostly right. It's got rustup for the tooling and cargo for everything else. And I can't name a single time I had any issues with either.

2025-09-24 06:35:03 UTC

https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-programming-languages-2025
#Ruby is within top 20 in all rankings.
However, #Rust is higher. And I feel Rust’s on the upward trajectory while Ruby’s not so much.
Python is an amazing phenomenon. It’s amazing how Ruby being conceptually very similar and, arguably, better in many regards languages managed to miss on all fronts. It missed the scientific community’s adoption. Python was the language for scientific calculations and statistics for a long time. And now it became the AI language. Ruby stayed the Rails language.

2025-04-29 08:24:00 UTC

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There’s a reason we all still are looking for a perfect feed reader. Despite apparent simplicity of the idea there's a virtually infinite amount of special cases. You think you want a simpler slicker UI but you end up guessing if that `<select>` is a literal text or HTML markup in the post title. Or if you allow CSS in the posts and if you do how much? And eventually you end up with another imperfect reader, but now you maintain it.

2025-04-28 11:26:56 UTC

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Stay strong brothers. We all fight this demon.

2025-04-16 06:11:25 UTC

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doesn’t Inoreader do basically the same thing?

2025-04-15 10:41:58 UTC

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What do you mean? They catch an email and put it into a feed so I could read it in my feed reader and not email client. How is that stealing?

2025-04-15 07:36:19 UTC

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You can use https://ktnrs.com/ to turn newsletters into a feed for any reader to subscribe to.

2025-03-12 09:02:41 UTC

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https://status-assets.pointless.one/media_attachments/files/114/148/649/027/334/047/original/fb16dc29c9bb9dd6.png

2025-03-05 16:08:12 UTC

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Don't take it too seriously but I’m kinda having an irony overdose right now. For decades now everyone was dunking on Ukraine for having a “revolution” like once a decade. But we managed to topple a would-be dictator (and a putin marionette, too) and uphold the will of the people, and keep our democracy however imperfect. And the beacon of democracy in the land of the free with all the checks and balances can't have a political opposition with nearly equal representation in both houses of the parliament. No word from all those 2nd amendment people holding their guns so dear to raise against the tyranny either. I wonder if you should take a leaf from our book and go burn some tires before white house or senate.

2025-03-05 10:39:50 UTC

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But what are democrats gonna do? The whole thing in short: Trump bad, what he's doing is bad for you, Musk also bad, stop doomscrolling. Have I missed what dems are gonna do? Like anything specific at all?

2025-02-24 22:16:50 UTC

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I wonder why do you rebuild images? Isn’t that supposed to be your deployment artifact? Like, build once deploy… whatever.

2025-02-13 20:37:25 UTC

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OMG! I urgently need a clear png of this.
@npub1wj8…s0k4 @npub1pq7…vejx

2025-01-29 17:48:50 UTC

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Yeah, that was mostly a joke. I admit that writing style for this post is mostly accidental and it’s not the most precise one.
If you have corrections, I’m open to hear them even if they don't stir this post's point. At some point I intend to write about sustainability issues in FLOSS with a similar historical context. Maybe it’ll be useful there. And if not, than I’ll at least learn something.

2025-01-29 17:44:15 UTC

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Yes, sure. I’d love some innovation.
Though, I have to admit that protected files doesn’t exactly stray away too far from BDFL/core team model. After all, someone is responsible for choosing to protect those files and updating them when they need to be changed. If anything this is even more of a power assertion available to only few.

2025-01-29 12:20:41 UTC

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well… I have opinions.
⚠️ Strap in, long post.
BDFL/core team model came about way before forges. For example SourceForge started in 1999. Ruby in 1995, Linux and Python in 1991, Perl in 1987, and GNU itself started in early 1980s, to name a few. And that’s only the formal governance. Pretty much everything before that followed the informal BDFL model: someone made something, published it (with or without a license), people used it, some contributed patches back.
This is a very natural model if you accept any kind of ownership right. And that's everywhere nowadays. If you made something—it's yours. It's dishonourable to take a thing from someone else and tell everyone it's yours. It's acceptable, though, to pick up abandoned things and make them yours. That's how forking came about. In the early days of the internet there were examples of some programs being initially made by one person and over time replaced by the version changed by someone else. And they were usually named after the new developer. This practice was used both for forks and rewrites so it's a bit hard to get stats on which was more prevalent.
Anyway, since the early days of programming it was obvious to almost everyone that expertise is essential. Be it the domain knowledge of the problem solved by any specific program or "just" familiarity with the program code, language, tools, and systems it runs on. Either way it wasn't common and, in practical terms, BDFL/core team wasn't exactly easily replaceable.
Meanwhile at MIT, AI-bro Stallman was miffed that software stopped coming with its source code. He framed it as "ma freedom" argument, for two years tried to copy a competitor product. The product was a Lisp machine. It turned out there wasn't much market for that.
At the time a few things were happening in parallel. Personal computers were becoming affordable. I don't mean IBM PC but a small desktop computer a person could have at home. And these computers were becoming more powerful rapidly so they could do more things. All these computers required software. So absolute number of customers grew very fast. Proportion of regular people to businesses also shifted rapidly. With that piracy grew. And with the changes to Copyright Act (it classified software as literary works, and consequently made it copyrightable) vendors started restricting their software in an attempt to capture more profits. Software stopped coming with source code, copy protection was introduced, etc.
All this miffed Stallman quite a bit. His railing against proprietary software seemed to resonate with people at the time. So Stallman, in a true AI-bro style, pivoted. His new thing was software freedom absolutism, and his new product was a copy of Unix, and the new brand was GNU, of course. Internet memes weren't invented yet and it didn't seem appropriate to just say "all your code are belong to us" and Stallman thought he was very clever so he took this new software copyright thing and turned it inside out and made it a license. I have to admit, it is funny to use copyright to force people to release their code.
GNU license reflects Stallman's software freedom absolutism in terms of user rights in relation to software. It kinda has to because from the legal point of view software doesn't have agency, users do. One notable thing about GNU licenses (and by extension whole of Free Software) is that users lump in both regular software consumers and developers. There's no distinction in there. I assume, Stallman being a massive nerd didn't conceive of a person who might want to use software and can't write their own OS and a list interpreter to actually run it.
This consumer-developer unification has never been addressed by Stallman or Free Software Foundation. You can read all of the internet and the only mention of "maintainer" from official FSF-affiliated sources you'll find is GNU maintainer guide. And even that is not helpful at all on the governance model question. As far as I can tell Free Software expect every user to be a maintainer of their own fork. It doesn't matter whether the user maintains their own collection of patches by other users, write their own patches, or just uses a version provided by someone else–the user is essentially responsible for the software they use.
All this might've nice and dandy for idealistic hacker-types it didn't impress regular customers much. You see, non-developers couldn't do much with this software. There was no one to demand a refund or a fix from, no support either. Businesses wouldn't touch it with a 10 feet pole in fear that they might have to give up their strategic advantage. Political angle wan't very attractive to businesses either.
This didn't go unnoticed for too long. Open Source Initiative forked off Free software to "reframe the discourse to reflect a more commercially minded position". They recognised the issues with free software adoption and wanted to fix it. They though that Free Software is too restrictive to thrive in the business environment so they relaxed some restrictions. Particularly, they remove the infectious nature of GNU licenses in their own licenses. In commercial interest's eyes Free Software looks like "some commie shit" and Open Source is more of a "do whatever". This, of course, worked. While it took some time to prove it legally, "do whatever" is what businesses like and Open Source adoption is very popular now.
One thing Open Source didn't fix is consumer-developer unification. Open Source being a relaxed version of Free Software dropped all requirements to what users have to do (e.g. release their changes) and mostly focused on what they can't do (expect quality, lay blame, etc.). Regular software users (consumers) are of no little consequence to FLOSS because they can not violate terms of any GNU or OSI license.
Like in Free Software, Open Source is not concerned with how software actually comes to be. Governance model is strictly outside of sphere of concern of both Open Source and Free Software.
So… This is why "fork off" and "patches are welcome" are common In FLOSS. In a sense, FLOSS has implicit expectation of universal expertise because of consumer-developer unification and because it doesn't acknowledge existence of expertise at all.
By the way, I think, this is the source of all the sustainability issue of FLOSS but this I'll leave it for another time.
Free Software has a lot of political baggage but doesn't address cultural aspects of software at all. Open Source, by extension, doesn't either. This includes relationships between different kinds of actors in FLOSS (consumers, maintainers, developers, businesses, etc.). Governance models are exactly that: different arrangements of those relationships. And since FLOSS doesn't specifically address the cultural aspect we fallback to general cultural background.
As I said at the very beginning, BDFL is a natural default. We, customary accept that the person who made a thing owns the thing. We respect that ownership and on the honorary basis we strive to maintain that ownership. We contribute back instead of forking because it's generally seen as not good to take a thing from someone else claim for ourselves.
This is where FLOSS clashes with the cultural background. FLOSS says that copyright is all there's. You write some code, it's yours forever. From the legal point of view it's true. But code is not all there is. Software is not just a bunch of patches floating around. Someone has to put them in the right order and make sure that it's minimally functional. Someone has to compile it and put in a package that users can install to use the software. Someone has to write release notes. There's a lot of work outside of writing code that goes into software. We, collectively, respect all that work. Not only in software but in general. Almost everyone agrees that it's respectable to do hones useful work for the benefit of the broader collective.
BDFL is also a natural expertise focus. They probably have some domain expertise if they write software to solve those problems. They also have the most exposure to the source code of the program and know it through and through. This makes them the most qualified person to solve any issue with the software or to add new features.
Here FLOSS drops the ball too. Is I said, it doesn't acknowledge existence of expertise one bit. But in the cultural background we had respect for people who know things since before they actually knew them. Even at the dawn of civilisation the most respected people in a tribe were elders and shamans. Elders lived for a while and saw a bunch (empirical experts) and shamans communed with gods, spirits, and forces of nature (theoretical experts). Since then expertise was recognised and respected in every society.
BTW, core team is more or less an extension of BDFL. Or alternatively, you can view BDFL as a special case of one-person core team.
This natural default of BDFL/core team was not invented by forges. It was just recognised as the most popular and just codified by forges. Be it SorceForge, GNU Savannah, or GitHub the default of BDFL/core team governance model is not invented by them. It might be reinforced by them but I don't think it's their duty to change it.
I have to say that I'm kinda excited about federated forges (e.g. Forgejo and F3 initiative) but I don't think it has any bearing on the BDFL/core team model. I see it more as a solution to centralisation and commercial vendor lock in (think de-Googling equivalent for GitHub/GitLab).
I don't think any particular forge, or any different piece of software can address cultural aspects of software development (FLOSS or otherwise). And I don't see FLOSS itself—as in FSF or OCI—will ever address them.
#FreeSoftware #OpenSource #FOSS #FLOSS #FSF #OCI #BDFL

2025-01-04 23:18:09 UTC

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yeah, I know. I just don’t have an x acc and the heat map itself most likely comes from a paper anyway.

2025-01-04 23:10:43 UTC

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maybe this then?
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.14737

2025-01-04 22:00:41 UTC

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maybe this?
https://arxiv.org/html/2405.17399v2

2024-12-14 08:34:04 UTC

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Color me surprised. In the current iteration of SSU everything so far was very meh at best. Sony desperately wants Spider-Man to be part of it but if you compare Marvel Speder-Man and, say, Madam Web you’ll see a vast gulf in every aspect: story, acting, cinematography, sound, effects, everything.

2024-12-05 05:39:29 UTC

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you probably should ask Slack directly.

2024-12-02 14:16:28 UTC

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Unfortunately, I run my own instance, so…
I think the way Mastodon is explained often includes too much irrelevant information. For the most part Mastodon is no worse than your regular social media. You go to a site and sign up. Following people in other instances a bit weird but otherwise OK. Almost none of the fedi stuff is relevant to the actual use of the platform for an average user.

2024-09-21 19:17:02 UTC

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Cat
https://status-assets.pointless.one/media_attachments/files/113/177/146/819/344/341/original/22e41c088029fa59.jpeg
https://status-assets.pointless.one/media_attachments/files/113/177/147/132/898/205/original/73d2f2d641f4b788.jpeg

2024-08-30 14:53:27 UTC

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- Are you a bus driver?
- Oh, I wish I were.
- What do you do then?
- I’m a guard. Well, Information Security but it’s just a fancy title.

2024-08-12 20:57:11 UTC

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I don’t have internet at home so I give my friend a list of toots and then come with my hard drive and copy them off of his computer. We do this like every other week. More time to hang out, too. About once every 3 month we gather with all our friends and share the best toots.