iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 08/08/2026

I don’t know what’s up with the trend of command terminals auto-copying text when you highlight it, but then clearing the clipboard when you use the “copy” hotkey, but it is incredibly frustrating. It breaks decades of clipboard interaction in two critical ways. This didn’t need “innovation”.

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Reposted by Kevin Menard

Unsloth AI @unsloth.ai · 20/07/2026

Introducing Unsloth for AMD 🚀 You can now train & run LLMs on your AMD hardware • We collaborated with AMD to enable you to train & run 500+ models on AMD GPUs • Works on Windows, WSL, Linux • Train Qwen, Gemma on just 3GB VRAM GitHub: github.com/unslothai/un... Blog: unsloth.ai/docs/basics/...

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 18/06/2026

I'm not loving the trend of using emoji to kick off every bullet point in a release log. It's a wall of text with distracting, bright colored pictograms that are very vaguely related. And they really don't help any more than textual category headers.

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Reposted by Kevin Menard

Laurence Tratt @ltratt.bsky.social · 15/04/2026

C interpreters underlie many of our most widely used language implementations -- but they're slow. Wouldn't it be great if we could turn them into JIT compiling VMs? This video shows what happens when we do just that to the normal Lua VM (first) and "yklua" (Lua w/JIT, second).

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 11/03/2026

If you believe a .env file with passwords and/or API keys isn’t a configuration file with secrets in it, I don’t think you’re being honest with yourself.

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Reposted by Kevin Menard

Rob Sheridan @rob-sheridan.com · 12/02/2026

In London 2009, Gary Numan made a surprise appearance with NIN to play Numan's "Metal" & "Cars." I filmed it in one unbroken shot from the middle of the stage with a handheld DSLR. Here's the full video, savor the Dudes Rock energy of two legends doing a big mutual respect ("Cars" starts at 6:38):

youtube.com

NIN + Gary Numan: "Metal" / "Cars" Live in London 2009, Single-Shot On-Stage Video by Rob Sheridan

YouTube video by Rob Sheridan

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

It’s nice that we’re able to craft new TruffleRuby releases on our own schedule again. We’ll be shipping bug fixes faster going forward.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 13/01/2026

This is a huge release for TruffleRuby. It’s our first under our new org. If you’ve been hesitant about contributing because of the CLA, please note that we no longer have one. We can also release more frequently so please report bugs or open PRs.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 14/12/2025

I’ve got a friend in Massachusetts who is suspected of a financial cybercrime and has been brought in multiple times to chat with a detective. Based on the technical details it sounds specious to me. Does anyone know of a law firm or legal resource specializing in cybercrime that can help?

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

It blows my mind seeing devs making well into 6 figures writing crappy commits because "git is hard". We shouldn't tolerate it any more than we would crappy tests. Commits are a useful work product and a bare minimum for collaborating with others (as well as future you). Dump git if it's that bad.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 07/12/2025

Cloudflare is ruining the Internet. It’s absurd how much of my life is wasted proving I’m not a bot because I use iCloud Private Relay. God forbid I want a modicum of privacy that isn’t routed through their own privileged VPN. I can’t believe we gave the whole web experience to Cloudflare & Google.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 11/10/2025

I despise so-called "opinionated formatters". While I consistency in formatting, most of these formatters will apply conditional rules that break consistency. And there are far more important attributes to me than consistency, such as legibility and comprehension. Alas, I must say goodbye to nixfmt.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 10/10/2025

Vibe coding is the great equalizer. Now all code I look at can be as difficult to comprehend as optimized Perl, regardless of language.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 28/09/2025

Yet another example of why auto-upgrading to the latest version of every library in the name of security is a farce developers created because “convenience” often isn’t a winning argument. Ideally you’d vet every upgrad. Sadly, that’s inext to impossible in JS land. www.koi.security/blog/postmar...

koi.security

First Malicious MCP in the Wild: The Postmark Backdoor That's Stealing Your Emails | Koi Blog

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 19/09/2025

Arguing against self-hosting because a SaaS company will handle security better vastly misunderstands how little security is a concern for an MVP. It’s rarely addressed while a startup seeks product market fit. The engineers slinging code have no security background. And LLMs aren’t going to fix it.

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Reposted by Kevin Menard

JetBrains @jetbrains.com · 02/09/2025

Exciting news for Ruby and Rails developers! RubyMine is now FREE for non-commercial use! It joins the list alongside WebStorm, Rider, CLion, and RustRover, allowing you to learn, develop your open-source and hobby projects, and create content for FREE. Learn more: jb.gg/tqov3b

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 22/08/2025

Ticketmaster is killing it with these recommendations.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

I shut Mogoterra down in 2009 and at that time the company was better known as Mogotest. I very much doubt there were 35 searches for it on LinkedIn this week.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 14/06/2025

It’s really quite sad how quickly we went from fretting over 50 - 100ms in front-end code to letting React and Cloudflare add seconds to page load. And then for the hell of it we decided to trash privacy because Cloudflare made blocking any VPN other than theirs a one-click process.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

I hope LLMs can one day automate the generation of useful changelogs and allow us to destroy the scourge of Conventional Commits.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

It's rather annoying that Ubiquiti skips right over 5 Gbps. I appreciate 10 Gbps over copper is doable now, but it's not power efficient and I'm somewhat concerned it'll burn down my house. Running fibre throughout and replacing all my switches for SFP+ will be ungodly expensive.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 25/05/2025

Issues like this are why I loathe "stale" issues: github.com/linuxserver/... It's not resolved, despite messaging to that effect. Community members were trying to help each other out, but that conversation is now shut down. And for what? So a project can juice its issue close rate?

github.com

Support for physically connected USB devices · Issue #58 · linuxserver/docker-calibre

Desired Behavior Allow a user to plug-in their Kindle or e-reader device via USB Allow a user to upload files directly to connected device Steps Start docker with: --privileged -v /dev/bus/usb:/dev...

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

It’s a little sad to me that I haven’t written anything with ExtJS in a decade and no UI component framework has come out since that’s competitive. I’ve seen 17,000 different ways to render tabs but hardly any toolkits include a Tree component. And nothing comes close to ExtJS’s Grid component.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 25/04/2025

@stuffwithstuff.com I’m going through “Crafting Interpreters” again with a book club at work. One thing I’ve noticed is the Java code would be a lot easier to manage with newer Java functionality like pattern matching switches and records for data classes, should you ever do a 2nd edition.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

It’s time to part with some more computer books. A couple of these I’ve had since high school. I have digital copies of the Manning books, which is nice, but outside of using them for reference I vastly prefer the tactile experience of a real book. They’re much easier on my eyes, too.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

I’d love to get an updated copy of this time. It was a great way to learn x86 assembly and functioned as an amazing reference. If anyone knows of a book that fills that void, please let me know.

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Reposted by Kevin Menard

Rob Sheridan Art @robsheridan.bsky.social · 31/03/2025

Nine Inch Nails “The Hand That Feeds” single, March 2005 …20 years ago. Art direction / design by me. Created with damaged scanner glitching techniques, and hand-drawn digital pixel linework. More info in alt text.

Photo of the exterior of Nine Inch Nails “The Hand That Feeds” CD single package, released March 2005. Cover/interior artwork created by Rob Sheridan with damaged scanner glitching techniques and hand-drawn digital pixel linework. The digital lines that ran throughout the NIN “With Teeth” aesthetic were inspired by (and sometimes taken directly from) low-res scientific graphs and data imagery. In this case I drew them tracing the topography of the textural element, attempting to quantify it, seeking meaning in its form: at once a strange landscape, distant mountains, a seismogram, an electrocardiogram, a cloud nebula… And of course I had Joy Division’s iconic “Unknown Pleasures” album cover in mind as I was making this.

Photo of the interior of Nine Inch Nails “The Hand That Feeds” CD single package, released March 2005. Cover/interior artwork created by Rob Sheridan with damaged scanner glitching techniques and hand-drawn digital pixel linework. The digital lines that ran throughout the NIN “With Teeth” aesthetic were inspired by (and sometimes taken directly from) low-res scientific graphs and data imagery. In this case I drew them tracing the topography of the textural element, attempting to quantify it, seeking meaning in its form: at once a strange landscape, distant mountains, a seismogram, an electrocardiogram, a cloud nebula… And of course I had Joy Division’s iconic “Unknown Pleasures” album cover in mind as I was making this.

Photo of Nine Inch Nails’ “The Hand That Feeds” CD single, 2005. Art direction and design by Rob Sheridan.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 01/04/2025

It's really hard to get excited about a UI component library that doesn't supply a Tree component. I don't need the 275th unique iteration on what tabs should look like. I need to fill the gap the browser isn't handling.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 25/03/2025

Claude Code could cost up to $10 an hour and needs your source cod; companies are paying up. But, if you need a tool that costs $100/year and saves you hours per week, that goes into purchase review Hell. They’ll tell you to spend hours setting up an unaudited, slower OSS “alternative.” Fun stuff.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

@backblaze.bsky.social I received an email saying my password isn't secure enough. It's a 32 character randomly generated password with a mixture of case, digits, and special characters. And it's only used with a service-specific email address for Backblaze. What's not secure? Was there a breach?

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

I appreciate the ways Slack/Discord are better than IRC. But, c'mon, it's been over a decade. Why do I need to swap workspaces all day long just to read a message from the one or two channels I care about? Switching channels across servers in IRC is instantaneous. It's massively more productive.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 21/02/2025

I can't believe we still don't have a standard tree widget for web apps. Every native GUI toolkit provides one, but web browsers insist on every dev inventing it and doing so poorly. It's weird that SenchaJS still has the best components even if they appear a bit dated.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 12/02/2025

I let my YouTube Premium subscription lapse and now I’m conflicted on reactivating it. I like not having any ads when watching educational content, but the ads have been unexpectedly beneficial: I’ve found I spend way less time in the YouTube app because the ads are unbearable.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 19/01/2025

It’s kinda sad, but also rather predictable, what’s happening with Bambu Labs’s 3D printers. I appreciate they made 3D printing more accessible to the masses and forced other manufacturers to up their game. But if you chose a convenient appliance over an open platform, this is the risk you took.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 30/12/2024

@fox0x01.bsky.social Is there any store that sells a DRM-free PDF copy of your book? I purchased on Wiley before realizing I would be stuck in their walled garden. I bought a paperback copy to read, but like having an indexable digital copy for quick reference.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 19/12/2024

We got a follow-up email saying there wasn’t a credible threat, but man getting emails like this is exhausting. Since it was devoid of any details, you get to pick which tragedy you think they’re referring to. Shootings aren’t something we constantly think about, but it’s always in the background.

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Reposted by Kevin Menard

Matthew Green @matthewdgreen.bsky.social · 13/12/2024

Ok I know nobody cares about this but me, but GOD I care: 1. I have just downloaded your app. 2. You want me to make an account. I don’t want to make an account! 3. When I enter my email, you inform me that I already have an account! This seems like a good thing, but I know it means only pain. 1/2

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

It was kinda surreal to somehow stumble across a thread on HN where Chris was commenting, almost two years to the day after his passing. It was linked from a post today so I didn’t notice the date. I started reading the comment without the name and thought: “wow this sounds like Chris”. And it was.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 03/12/2024

I completed my Ryzen 3700X -> 9800X3D upgrade and build and test tasks on TruffleRuby have nearly doubled. It trimmed 12 minutes off the demanding MRI test suite. I kinda wish I did this earlier, but I had been holding out for the 9000 X3D. I wanted to go 12/16 core, but no set release dates yet.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

I don’t understand how people can watch TV with motion blur on. I suppose you get conditioned to it, but I find it can make me nauseous. Alas, most hotels won’t allow you to change this setting.

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Reposted by Kevin Menard

Mike Dalessio @flavorjon.es · 24/11/2024

Rubyists, have you ever wanted more features from SQLite? I'm excited to announce the `sqlean` ruby gem! github.com/flavorjones/... packaging precompiled extensions from antonz.org/sqlean/ for things like unicode, hashing, regexps, time, fuzzy strings, math, and even CSV support! #ruby #sqlite

github.com

GitHub - flavorjones/sqlean-ruby: Precompiled SQLean extensions for SQLite, packaged for the Ruby ecosystem.

Precompiled SQLean extensions for SQLite, packaged for the Ruby ecosystem. - flavorjones/sqlean-ruby

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

I really dislike stalebot. I go to great lengths to debug issues & create simple reproductions. I've blown entire weekends this way. I don't have any real expectations other than my issue won't be dismissed out of hand, which is what stalebot does. And to what end? To juice some meaningless stats?

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

I’ve been running a Ryzen AM4 system for several years. I love being able to upgrade the CPU without needing a new motherboard and RAM. But, I’m going to make the switch to AM5 and hope for similar longevity. This is a workstation build. Does anyone have an ATX 3.1 PSU they like? Should I go 3.0?

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

FreeCAD 1.0.0 is now available. I’ve been testing dev builds and reporting issues. The core developers have been incredibly responsive and fixed all issues I’ve encountered. 1.0.0 is a massive improvement over the last stable release. You should give it a shot: blog.freecad.org/2024/11/19/f...

blog.freecad.org

FreeCAD Version 1.0 Released

After more than twenty years of intense and sustained development, the FreeCAD community is proud to announce the release of version 1.0. FreeCAD 1.0 is now available for download on all platforms.…

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 11/11/2024

While there’s a stigma about giving cash as a gift, gift cards need to go. It sucks teaching a kid to save up their money for something only to discover when they met the goal that the gift card funds have been stolen. Stores don’t particularly care to prevent the problem or provide restitution.

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Reposted by Kevin Menard

Rob Sheridan @rob-sheridan.com · 06/11/2024

Apropos of everything, here's NIN playing Bowie's "I'm Afraid of Americans" in Toronto 15 years ago, filmed by me from on stage in a single shot. www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-d2...

youtube.com

NIN: "I'm Afraid of Americans" live from on stage in Toronto, 6.02.09 [HD 1080p]

YouTube video by Nine Inch Nails

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Reposted by Kevin Menard

Ufuk Kayserilioglu @ufuk.dev · 05/11/2024

PSA to all Rubyists about the great `all-ruby` tool that allows one to run Ruby code against all Ruby versions since the beginning. If you see something that doesn’t make sense, or think is a regression, just run it against this tool to see how it behaves on different Ruby versions.

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Reposted by Kevin Menard

Charles Oliver Nutter @headius.bsky.social · 04/11/2024

We're still committed to regular JRuby releases despite some *ahem* complications with employment. You can still sponsor my work at github.com/sponsors/hea... or sign up for reasonably-priced expert JRuby support at headius.com today!

github.com

Sponsor @headius on GitHub Sponsors

Charles has worked for 20 years to make JRuby the best possible Ruby on the JVM. He loves contributing to the Ruby community and bringing the power and beauty of the Ruby language to large enterpri...

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