iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 23h

dumb git question: in a merge-based workflow, if you’re working on a branch, is there any reasonable way to integrate new changes from `main` back into your branch without using `git rebase`? I have this belief that there are people who only use merge commits and not rebase but I don’t […]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 07/10/2026

this week I learned that during a merge conflict, you can get a list of all commits involved in the conflict that touched a file with: $ git log --merge FILENAME Seems super useful if there are a lot of commits being merged (like in a big rebase) but only a couple of them touched that file

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 07/10/2026

Thinking this morning about how much of teaching is just taking the time to listen. Hearing what someone’s actual computer problem is and then addressing it is so much harder than just telling them what I think is interesting or cool. And sometimes I don’t know the answer to their actual […]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 05/10/2026

has anyone written a man page SYNOPSIS parser that somehow (?? I have no idea what I mean by this) helps folks understand what they mean? I was talking to a friend the other day who said they were having a hard time understanding the rules of the SYNOPSIS […] [Original post on social.jvns.ca]

The ssh SYNOPSIS:

ssh [-46AaCfGgKkMNnqsTtVvXxYy] [-B bind_interface] [-b bind_address] [-c cipher_spec] [-D [bind_address:]port] [-E log_file]
[-e escape_char] [-F configfile] [-I pkcs11] [-i identity_file] [-J destination] [-L address] [-l login_name] [-m mac_spec]
[-O ctl_cmd] [-o option] [-P tag] [-p port] [-R address] [-S ctl_path] [-W host:port] [-w local_tun[:remote_tun]] destination
[command [argument ...]]
ssh [-Q query_option]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 03/10/2026

RE: hachyderm.io/@molly0xfff/1173742139… finally signed up for a paid subscription to support Molly White’s cryptocurrency reporting loved her 2024 talk on the how building things on the web is magic too xoxofest.com/2024/videos/molly-white

hachyderm.io

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 02/10/2026

one of the many good things about asking people questions instead of LLMs is that today i had a question about a project so i went to the discord to ask and the person said “oh no the software doesn’t do that but maybe we could change it so that it could”

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 02/10/2026

I’m working on a list of questions you might want to ask about the Git workflow when joining a new team gist.github.com/jvns/600e510958c4b9… Would love ideas for other questions that would be useful to know the answer to!

gist.github.com

questions.md

GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 01/10/2026

one thing about making a Django site is that dealing with these residential proxy scrapers is tough. It’s definitely easier to handle with a Go server that’s faster or a static site. The site doesn’t even have anything useful to scrape! I don’t really want to use Anubis since it’s a bit […]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 29/09/2026

Is there a QR code generator that 1. is a website 2. is free, no account needed 3. is not secretly also a link shortener 4. does not look like a scam 5. does not include extra branding (the way the Chrome one does) a friend just asked me this and I really could not find one

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 22/09/2026

periodic reminder that Wizard Zines has an education policy if you want to use them in your university courses! wizardzines.com/education

wizardzines.com

Education

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 21/09/2026

Are you interested in learning how to use Git for the first time? (or almost the first time) we're looking for Git beginners to give us feedback on a Git tutorial! The tutorial will be open source when it's released, so you'll be helping many future beginners! Sign up here […]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 16/09/2026

in Lisbon for Git Merge / JJ Con this week

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 09/09/2026

i've started getting a lot of emails (maybe one every few days) that appear to be LLM generated from people asking for some kind of feedback or collaboration on their LLM-generated app feels sad because honestly I used to like when people emailed me about something cool they mad and now I just […]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 08/09/2026

RE: social.jvns.ca/@b0rk/11715682750188… in case you missed it: wizard zines is now shipping European orders from Europe!

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 04/09/2026

what's your favourite way to get a progress bar when copying a bunch of files over SSH? (tar/pv? rsync? something else?)

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 31/08/2026

interesting to read this article (in french) about how some movies are no longer distributed www.lapresse.ca/cinema/chroniques/2… the only way I could find one of the movies in this article was to borrow the DVD from the library, and then I […]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 25/08/2026

big news about the Wizard Zines store: print orders from Europe now ship from a European warehouse in Germany!!! We've been having a lot of issues with duties & fees for European customers because of shipping from the US so I'm very excited for this. get your zines here […]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 24/08/2026

how do you think about how SSH public key authentication works (versus passwords) and what about your mental model makes you trust it? please only answer if you _don't_ understand the math of how RSA (or elliptic curves etc) works, I'm interested in exploring what it means to understand the […]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 20/08/2026

what are your favourite commands to run over ssh (like `ssh user@host "COMMAND"`)? the only thing I have in my history right now is: ssh user@host 'tcpdump -i any BPF_FILTER_GOES_HERE -w -' > out.pcap to quickly get a local pcap file

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 19/08/2026

i'm contemplating writing something basic about copying files over ssh with rsync but the only thing I can think of is how I can never remember how the trailing slash works and it makes me avoid using rsync whenever possible

excerpt from the SSH man page

rsync -avz foo:src/bar/ /data/tmp

a trailing slash on the source changes this behavior to transfer all files from the directory src/bar on the machine foo into the /data/tmp/.
A trailing / on a source name means "copy the contents of this directory". Without a trailing slash it means "copy the directory".
This difference becomes particularly important when using the --delete option.

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 19/08/2026

what are your favourite settings to set in ~/.ssh/config?

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 18/08/2026

lazyweb: I'm curious about how to get a list of all of the different "kinds" of things SSH can do. my impression is that there's: - open a terminal session - just run one command - TCP port forwarding - X11 forwarding - copy files and that these all separate "commands" or "protocols" inside […]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 17/08/2026

wondering today about how people are intended to learn how to use openssh (as a user, not as an administrator) www.openssh.org has the reference documentation, but I feel like there must be another document somewhere that's intended for use by beginners that I'm not finding

openssh.org

OpenSSH

the main OpenSSH page

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 17/08/2026

trying to make a list of everything I ever do with SSH

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 13/08/2026

these SSH polls are reminding me that (though I'm not a security person) I'm a big believer that security systems should allow users to be inattentive and lazy and confused and to do the thing that seems the most convenient instead of the the thing that might be the most secure, and to still […]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 11/08/2026

finally got my copy of @grimalkina’s The Psychology of Software Teams! excited to dig in

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 06/08/2026

been making a single-page app with pocketbase.io this week and it's been a nice experience. I like making single-page JS apps with a Go backend API and this means that I don't have to write the Go backend. Really impressive project given that it's built by one person in their spare time.

pocketbase.io

PocketBase - Open Source backend in 1 file

Open Source backend in 1 file with realtime database, authentication, file storage and admin dashboard

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 27/07/2026

if you could wave a magic wand and improve one page in the Git documentation, which one would it be?

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 23/07/2026

made some tiny git zines to give out at a “git for beginners” workshop we’re doing

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 21/07/2026

wizard zines has its first translation! How Git Works is now available in Korean, translated by ByteFreaksStudio inf.run/XYiAR I do not know how to read Korean but it's very cool to see :)

The "combining diverged branches" page, translated into Korean

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 19/07/2026

Every so often I consider self-hosting my own website, but I'm feeling more and more like I do not want to do that, I want an organization that I can trust to take care of things so that I do not have to. And enough control and open standards so that if something goes wrong, I can migrate. the […]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 10/07/2026

is there a good website with stats on who owns ipv4 addresses globally? (like which countries have the most IPs?). i know it's sort of a poorly defined question

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 30/06/2026

TIL that a) if you're running a process in a VM (like on shared hosting) then the process's CPU can be "stolen" by other processes on the host b) htop can show how much of the CPU is "stolen" with the "Detailed CPU time" setting c) htop has a settings menu if you press "S" […]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 30/06/2026

what issues do you run into when trying to figure out how to configure Git? thinking about whether the structure of git-scm.com/docs/git-config could be improved

git-scm.com

Git - git-config Documentation

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Reposted by Julia Evans

Shauna @shauna.social.coop.ap.brid.gy · 26/06/2026

Anyone else deeply get why people want to cognitively offload everything they can to AI? The world is So Much right now. We're all juggling a thousand tasks and chores. Why is my tablet not charging? Why wasn't my prescription filled yesterday? Gotta pay my quarterly estimated taxes, find a new […]

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 25/06/2026

asking for a friend: how do you buy ipv4 addresses in 2026? are there recommended brokers to use? how long is the process? (in europe)

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 23/06/2026

i finally wrote an interactive git branch switcher with fzf that I like using #!/bin/bash git checkout $(git branch | fzf | sed 's/^[* ] //') (it also uses `git branch --sort=-committerdate or something so the most recent branch is first)

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 22/06/2026

i started doing a more complicated project with sqlite as a backend and I'm starting to feel more constrained by the db level write lock

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Julia Evans @b0rk.social.jvns.ca.ap.brid.gy · 22/06/2026

i love this blog post, it's always so difficult for me to think about timezone issues and this is such a great example of how the way you model time data depends on what you're doing! www.crunchydata.com/blog/british-co… (like, if there's an appointment at 4PM […]

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