Dave Copeland

Can't forget to vote early in Washington, DC!

This is the thought process that lead to me deciding to write about AI. I hate the conclusions I've drawn here.

Here's a thought I'm having today. One of the reasons so many of us are ready to give our jobs away to AI is because we know they have always been bullshit jobs. For a long time now, we've been inventing jobs for people to do because we still require everybody to have a job to survive.

I'm Gonna Write About AI So I Can Process What is Going On naildrivin5.com/blog/2026/10/1…

This tracks. I should ask my gen-alpha family members if they truly, deeply, in the heart-of-hearts find it difficult to order take-out or book a restaurant reservation on their own.

I'm thinking the best strategy for making apps work with iPhone Duo is just don't bother.

This a core problem with Rails that won't be solved. The maintainer doesn't believe this is a real problem and the community either ridicules attempts to fix it or gets stuck in endless debates about code organization. There are good ideas out there - interested in hearing Brandon's…

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When you adopt a version manager in Rubyland, prepare to change every few years to the next one. rvm -> rbenv -> chruby -> asdf -> mise -> ??? Me? My docker-based setup has never failed and always works no matter what the braintrust at Apple do or what nonsense is happening with Linux.

I wrote an update on the dispute with Ruby Central over Bundler and RubyGems. I'm sad it's reached this point, especially since Ruby Central's conferences are a big part of what convinced me to join the Ruby community back in the day. andre.arko.net/2026/07/30/rub…

“It doesn’t matter whether ‘Matz is nice’” po-ru.com/2026/07/29/i...

DC, now is the time to hold Trump enablers in local party offices accountable. Vote for all 20 members of the FREE DC Slate by Tuesday June 16th at 8pm. We are a NEW DC Democratic Party takes bold collective action to protect our neighbors, put DC's wealth to work, and organize for people power!

15 years ago, I got married!! At our ceremony, we combined salt (we aren't religious butike to cook and salt historically was used as a covenant). We repeated it 5 years later and again today! We have a lot of salt lol.

They finally made the three shells from Demolition Man

Plex: extremely precious about metadata, shows you the stars, related movies, seasons, episode summaries etc. Plex Downloads: here's a fucking bag of .mkv files, randomly sorted, GL

True story: I gave the Apple AI thingy a pic of my son Warren holding a World Cup trophy replica and asked it to “blur the picture except for Warren [it usually knows who he is] and the cup”. And I kid you not, it sent me back a picture of Elizabeth Warren holding a coffee cup.

I worked with a designer who thought the only way to prevent people from having to re-login frequently was to have an app on the App Store. Because of this, he wanted us to spend 100,000's of USD building an app that was just a few web forms.

re: erin's quoted post - this is why I buy Tom Bihn. Quality materials, YKK zippers. They are expensive, but they actually hold their value really well on the used market, at least in my experience. Of note: I fucking love bags and would buy a zillion all the time if I could :)

Unfollowed pragmatic engineer. We don’t need more of David Rails

Towards an amicable resolution with Ruby Central andre.arko.net/2026/04/02/tow…

Update on Desktop Linux - I'm back to using it, xremap is the only thing making it usable for me, there's a ton of papercuts, fuck snap, but overall it's a solid dev machine. naildrivin5.com/blog/2026/03...

The Mediocre State of PWAs (via pwa.support, which I vibe coded for science) naildrivin5.com/blog/2026/03... [ sparing you all the tedious "Golly Gee Whiz Claude Code is whatever blah blah" post - cannot stand those ]

Happy to see Andre finally speaking publicly about the hostile Ruby Central takeover last year. RC is no longer a trustworthy steward for the Ruby community. I don't see how we repair this rift without Shan stepping down, she has been awful as ED. andre.arko.net/2026/03/03/f...

I have had some gigs like that: a CTO wants to do something that is scoped a well-suited for independent work (coordinated with anyone affected). It has to be done and can afford it, but the day to day eats them. You enter, do it, and shake hands.

TBH this is a good approach for any project - finish quickly and without incident. Don't ask permission for delivering quality work, either (however you want to define it). And make sure that each Friday, the entire team can walk away from the project, never to return, and it still has value.

If the AI code generators are capable of adding any feature to any codebase then there is no longer such a thing as technical debt. Tech debt - if it matters at all - is only relevant to people writing code.

The Death of a Software Craftsman (it happens a lot 'round here) naildrivin5.com/blog/2026/02/2… AI Abstinence? All in on Agents? Or resign yourself to becoming a niche craftsperson?

Aeronaut 1.6 is now available. This release adds support for selecting list items with the keyboard! • ▲ or K to move selection up • ▼ or J to move selection down • ↵ to perform the default action • ⌘J to go back to the selected item if you’ve scrolled it out of view • ⌘+click to deselect 1/2

Yes, I’ve had lots of requests for more keyboard shortcuts! These already work: • Scroll to top: ⌘+up-arrow • Switch tabs: ⌘1 through ⌘8 I’m planning to add a menu item for scroll to top to make it more discoverable. And arrow keys to move between posts is on my todo list.

I would love to understand why Synology decided to name this new version "$SAME_AS_CURRENT Update 1" instead of bumping the FIVE DIGIT PATCH NUMBER?!?!?!

Trying out @aeronautapp.com (was previously using a Safari web view of the Bluesky website). Much nicer, and look forward to whatever improvements they make.

The linked article is fucking depressing

Amazon's royalties always come in three transactions: deposit the amount I'm owed, then withdraw that exact same amount, then deposit that exact same amount again. Apple's and Kobo's royalties are deposited without incident, but almost no one seemingly buys tech books from them.

Tax season approaches here in the US. The US government had a (legit) great idea to create a single sign-on for all government services. In typical US fashion, why build one when you can build two at twice the price? I have moved stuff to login dot gov, but the IRS only accepts ID dot me. Cool.