Links, September 26, 2025 • lyonheart

§Shopify, pulling strings at Ruby Central, forces Bundler and RubyGems takeover

If you work in or with open source, this is worth paying attention to, because something very similar happened last year.

My technology career got its start with the Ruby programming language, and while I haven’t really done any work in it professionally since 2014, I have many long-time friends who still work in it. Many have written off the disgusting racist views of the train framework guy as “well he’s not really involved anymore” in spite of his keynoting the latest conference, but this should be a wake up call to anyone still doing ruby work: your community’s infrastructure is under a hostile takeover.

The gist of it:

Here she conflates RubyGems.org (the source code) with the RubyGems Service operated by Ruby Central and running on the domain name rubygems.org.

Claiming that Ruby Central owns the RubyGems.org repository because it operates a service that uses the source code is like claiming you own Rails because you have a Rails app and sponsored someone who contributed a PR to the project.

Particularly telling to me:

Shopify specifically demanded that at least one of the RubyGems maintainers, André Arko, be excluded from returning to the project. André has been working on RubyGems for over a decade and was also one of the founders of Ruby Together, an organization that merged with Ruby Central.

André is among the best people I’ve met in the tech industry. If you’re still doing Ruby work, you should check out his new co-op project Spinel.

I believe this is a logical consequence of thinking that unpaid labor is part of a “supply chain”. The thing about online “communities” — software-related or not — is that governance is important.

§Huntington’s disease successfully treated for first time

Miracles still happen:

“This is the result we’ve been waiting for,” said Prof Ed Wild, consultant neurologist at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery at UCLH.

“There was every chance that we would never see a result like this, so to be living in a world where we know this is not only possible, but the actual magnitude of the effect is breathtaking, it’s very difficult to fully encapsulate the emotion.”

He said he was “a bit teary” thinking about the impact it could have on families.

§How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner

Hello! I am a developer. Here is my relevant experience: I code in Hoobijag and sometimes jabbernocks and of course ABCDE++++ (but never ABCDE+/^+ are you kidding? ha!) and I like working with Shoobababoo and occasionally kleptomitrons.

Writing for beginners is hard, and so many technical people do not understand this.

§The Dice Lab

They came across my feed recently, and I have a few of their dice: The dLX 60-sided alphabet die, and a Rhombic 12-sided die. My kid loves playing with the alphabet die.

§Suckerpinch

A friend introduced me to this Youtube channel, which I might best describe as “things people with a certain geekiness bent will find absolutely hilarious”, such as Harder Drive: hard drives we didn’t want or need or Reverse emulating the NES to give it SUPER POWERS!

§Hyper 8

Want to self-host some video? Especially now that the most viable alternative to Youtube has been acquired by private equity? Hyper 8 makes static sites and has a desktop app. This is really cool. For my own purposes, I wish things like this or Faircamp (a similar thing focused on audio) had ways to integrate into other static site publishing pipelines, but I love to see it, regardless.