Good morning from Charlottesville, Virginia! ☕️
What a week. We started the week celebrating a man of compassion, peace, and love, a great American!
At the same time swore in a new President. A convicted felon and rapist. A man who doesn’t have a compassionate bone in his body. A man who only loves himself. In other words, a garbage human.
Like I said, what a week.
I hope you enjoy the links.
Instrumenting Thread Stalling in Ruby Applications
Another nice post that peaks under the hood of Ruby. I won’t spoil the mystery here. Go read the post. 😃
Microsoft is gearing up to ship two new versions of the Surface Laptop and Surface Pro that have smaller displays, designed to be lighter and more portable for people looking for a more travel-friendly PC. Both devices will be premium products, and feature display sizes roughly around 11- or 12-inches, my sources say.
I’ve wanted a Surface Pro since the original version shipped. I love the form factor and it runs a full blown operating system.
Hot on the heels of yesterday’s news that Nosferatu director Robert Eggers will follow his vampire movie with a 13-century werewolf thriller called Werwulf, and today’s news that Nosferatu is in the running for four Academy Awards, the Eggers news drops keeps landing: Deadline reports that Eggers has signed a deal to direct a sequel to Jim Henson’s 1986 fantasy Labyrinth.
How do you replace David Bowie? You don’t. Our youngest daughter loves this film and absolutely hates the idea of a sequel. Can’t say that I blame her.
Doom: The Dark Ages looks metal as hell and launches in May
We haven’t played a game on our XBox in ages. We’ve played some Mario Kart on the Switch but the XBox is basically a dust collector. But this game looks like it could be really interesting and anything called “metal as hell” is good in my book.
Matt Mastracci and Michael J. Sullivan • EdgeDB Blog
We’ve been working on a new HTTP fetch feature for EdgeDB, using reqwest as our HTTP client library. Everything was going smoothly: the feature worked locally, passed tests on x86_64 CI runners, and seemed stable. But then we noticed something strange: the tests started failing intermittently on our ARM64 CI runners.
This particular bug wouldn’t have happened on Windows because you can build the CRT to be thread safe. Of course they may have other issues on a Windows box. 😄
The web platform moves slowly, and I understand that can be frustrating for developers who want to innovate, but over a decade of consultancy experience has taught me time and time again that the alternative is much more restrictive in the long term. What’s brand new today starts to show its age much more quickly.
I figure a web developer type would understand this better than I. Doing work on native desktop or mobile computers could present the same issues but typically doesn’t. Our frameworks are provided by the platform vendor. Now, using them without an abstraction absolutely locks you into the platform and major changes are typically few and far between, but they absolutely do happen.😃
Stripe is laying off 300 people, but says it still plans to hire in 2025
Sigh. This is one of those companies I’d have applied to as an iOS developer if I were in the market for a job. Working on an SDK or component level would be a great deal of fun. To see them have layoffs is a real bummer and points to how fragile the tech sector remains.
Haas have restructured their race operations team with a series of changes that include appointing Laura Muller as the first female race engineer in Formula 1.
I’m still a bit miffed at Haas for firing Gunther Steiner but this move sounds like a good one.
So how hard could it be. As input we have something like in UTC, and we’d like to turn this into 1737094027, the notional (but not actual) number of seconds that have passed since 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC.
Don’t get me started on dates. We had to deal with all these issues when I was at Pelco. Just never, ever, convert the date from UTC in your system until you need to display it. It’s easy to convert it to local time then use it somewhere else like that.
Luckily we had a really great developer who understood these issues and built us a really great date class for handling all those sticky issues for us.
“It’s the most spontaneous thing I’ve ever been involved in” : the story of Mad Season, the grunge supergroup that Mike McCready hoped would save Layne Staley
For some reason the story of Layne Staley’s death really bothers me. His friends knew he was an addict and it caused a lot of problems in the band. But try as they might they could never get him to get help. He spent his final days locked away in his apartment, frightfully skinny, alone. Mike Starr, Alice In Chains bassist, visited Staley and begged him to go to the hospital. Staley wouldn’t hear it so Starr left. It’s believed it was the last time anyone saw Staley alive. He was discovered approximately two weeks later, partially decomposed, full syringe next to him. Sad, sad, ending to a talented soul.
Since the beginning, Railway’s compute has been built on top of Google Cloud Platform. The platform supported Railway’s initial journey, but it has caused a multitude of problems that have posed an existential risk to our business. More importantly, building on a hyperscaler prevents us from delivering the best possible platform to our customers.
Folks that run “bare metal” servers feel like race car mechanics to me and I love reading stories like this. There was a time when I wanted to be a Render Wrangler at Pixar. All that raw horsepower committed to making the greatest animated film on earth was attractive to me.
At the start of last summer, we announced that we would start working on ActivityPub support for Ghost to bring long-form publishing to the largest decentralised networking protocol on the web.
It’s been really nice to see more blogging platforms embrace ActivityPub and the Fediverse.
I’m a very happy user of Micro.blog and their integration with ActivityPub and the Fediverse is second to none. They also support cross posting to Tumblr and Bluesky, and of course Mastodon. You can even follow Micro.blog users from Mastodon. It’s really well done.
Entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban is ready to fund a TikTok alternative built on Bluesky’s AT Protocol, he shared in a TikTok video posted on Wednesday.
This is really interesting but I wonder why he’s thinking about using At Proto instead of ActivityPub and the Fediverse? Pixelfed and Loops have been picking up steam and it’s extremely nice to be able to follow someone on Pixelfed right from my Mastodon client. You can do the same with Loops. It’s just an amazing way to integrate all social media.
Politics
Jason DeRose and Sarah Ventre • NPR
“Let me make one final plea, Mr. President,” Bishop Mariann Budde said in her 15-minute sermon. “Millions have put their trust in you. And as you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” said Budde, as she appeared to look towards the president.
Bishop Budde has more guts than all those fat cat billionaires sitting behind his orangeness during his swearing in.
She is a real Christian. God is a god of love. Jesus’ message was all about love and compassion. Can’t these MAGA supporters see that? A lot of American Christians need to wake up. You’ve missed the message. Trump and his administration are all about cruelty. If that’s what you’re after, fine. Just don’t say you’re a Christian who follows the teachings of Jesus.
There was a prayer service at the National Cathedral on Tuesday, and Trump and Melania attended (this time not dressed as the Babadook), along with JD and Usha Vance and members of the Trump crime family and all kinds of others. And one of America’s greatest heroes, Mariann Edgar Budde, the Episcopalian bishop for Washington DC, decided to speak truth to power, softly and carrying a big stick, and that stick was J-E-S-U-S.
Elon Musk doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt
The man is a Nazi. It’s just that plain. When he put his hand over his chest and flung it out he could’ve left his palm facing inward, but he didn’t. He chose to turn it down.
He’s a Nazi. He’s a racist. He is trying to remake America into a white nation while he rapes, pillages, and plunders our resources for his own selfish goals. I have no idea what those are but he’s definitely up to something.
The evidence is now undeniable. In front of thousands at Donald Trump’s inauguration rally, Elon Musk - the world’s richest man and owner of X - performed not one but two Nazi salutes.
David Gutman • The Seattle Times
Judge in Seattle blocks Trump order on birthright citizenship nationwide
Birthright citizenship is right there in black and white in the Constitution. Trump is a nasty human being who deserves to be smacked around as often as possible. Of course that wouldn’t snap him out of it. He’s a narcissist and a sociopath. He only cares about himself.
