iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

I’m almost certainly going to get the Amiibo so I went with the deluxe edition. Walmart doesn’t discount that, do they?

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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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

I should note it took me a while to find a good pattern. It was actively harmful when I first started trying to get help with ZJIT. Opus 4.8 was a turning point and really helped with the ZJIT inliner. The biggest gain was giving it a crashing benchmark and letting it figure out the root cause.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

I’ve had pretty good luck working on ZJIT and TruffleRuby, but I really need to give it guidance and ~20% of the time it’s very confidently wrong. You still need subject matter expertise to catch stuff and even then I’ve had an embarrassing issue or two leak into PRs. Reviewers fortunately help out.

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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 · 01/07/2026

I’m glad PC gaming has started to deliver a console-like experience. If I’m going to have to go all digital, I’d rather go back to PC. GOG is DRM-free and Steam Family is the best implementation of DRM licensing. I feel like I’m one incontestable bad AI decision from losing my PS library.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 19/06/2026

I loathe Conventional Commits, including their presumptuous name, as well. I'm of the mind that commit messages should be for humans, not tools, first and foremost. If we need to attach metadata to commits, the SCM should be updated to handle that. If you still need git, use a 2nd message, IMHO.

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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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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

I don’t know what it is about a particular segment of gamers, but please know that others do truly appreciate your posts.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

They jumped the gun on the last price increase so I didn’t order in time and I was kind of annoyed and didn’t order. At $549 I’m out for good. The used market is ridiculous, too. I wonder who’s buying at $549. Anyone that interested probably bought in an earlier wave.

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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 · 02/04/2026

Are you having to do that manually? Or is there a way to automate that?

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 16/03/2026

Any insights on how this compares to the Switch 2 version? I see there are improvements, but don’t know how noticeable they are. I’m inclined to get the one with the game on cart.

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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 · 28/01/2026

The problem is the people that pay salaries aren’t going to be put off by that. 60% quality for -100% fully loaded employee cost? Have vendor lock-in? Carpe diem, baby. See: MS, Oracle, and Amazon’s recent lay-offs. It’s happening industry-wide and across disciplines.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

I’d add that there’s a potential lack of nuance here, too. I picked up the Star Wars game during the BFCM sale, so I suppose I’m technically willing to buy a GKC. But, I’ve also declined to purchase far more games or I’ll buy them for other platforms. Especially if I can get a Switch 1 -> 2 upgrade.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

There may not be a better source, but that doesn’t mean 1,000 users that opted to share their collection data is representative of “most users”. Or, if you really only mean Deku Deals users, you should rephrase to qualify it better. For broader claims you need to seek out a diverse sample.

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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 · 03/12/2025

Thanks for the suggestion. I had never heard of this company or any of these items. It’s awesome that they make STL files available for many of the clips so you can 3D print them or integrate them into a new design.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

I ended up shelling out for the 512GB. I had been holding out for larger capacities, but $170+ is 1/3 the cost of the console. I don’t know how reliable the microSD Express cards are, but I’ve had regular microSD cards die on me (Lexar was the worst). I’ll just continue to avoid GKCs where I can

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

I don’t understand why you’re arguing this. Do you think one of us is lying about our experiences? Yeah, there are techniques and sometimes they work. Those obviously aren’t the cases being talked about. It’s a gigantic waste of human effort to expect every contribution to start in a vacuum.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 21/11/2025

It’s more than convenient. It’s collaborative and it’s considerate. Expecting everyone to do everything from first principles is a gross waste of human effort. In terms of sports analogies, I believe OSS works better if we play the zone rather than man-to-man.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 20/11/2025

There was one project I used that wouldn’t allow you to file a bug without supplying a PR. I spent a weekend fixing a gnarly issue only for the maintainer to delete the tests and regress in the next major release. That was my cue to find an alternative solution.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 20/11/2025

It’s a game you can’t win. Others will chide you for opening a PR for a new feature or behavioral change without discussing first.

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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 · 29/09/2025

Saying he’s arguing is bad faith is not the same thing as saying he’s wrong or misinformed. It’s a bold value judgment you’re making about him, publicly, without any evidence. The time to seek clarification is before you declare someone is arguing in bad faith.

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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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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 17/09/2025

Running native extensions in parallel is a huge performance boost. Running a large internal Rails application, we saw performance roughly double. Very workload dependent, of course, but all of the major DB adapters are implemented as native extensions. We also added support for the blake3-rb gem.

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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 · 03/08/2025

Is there any game that benefits from having two sets of Joy-Con 2? I have Switch 1 Joy-Cons and Pro controllers. I’ll get the Joy-Con 2 now if beneficial, otherwise I’ll probably wait for models with a different design.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

What are the margins on the Switch, Switch Lite, and Switch OLED? Price increases aside, it’s never been a better time to buy used. Lots of people that upgraded to Switch 2 don’t have much use for an original Switch. I’m seeing OLED models, including special editions, going for $105 around me.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 31/07/2025

This is a team effort. Third parties could produce full game cards but are choosing not to. Maybe that shouldn’t be a choice they can make. I’m a bit surprised retailers went along with this. It seems to be a deliberate attempt to push digital purchases.

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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 · 04/06/2025

This is going to sound nitpicky, but I’m legitimately curious: is this an editor approved usage of “agnostic”? I’ve been trying to figure out if “agnostic” should’ve been “indifferent” in most software contexts but someone mixed them up and it’s snowballed (like HTML shivs).

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

I have LLMs using two hyphens and it’s driving me nuts.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

Please let me know how you like the machine. I’ve been looking at getting a Minisforum machine for a little arcade and/or pinball project.

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Kevin Menard @nirvdrum.bsky.social · 03/06/2025

I’m already in the Unifi system and am generally happy with it, so I don’t want to have hybrid equipment. And, yeah, I have a TrueNAS SCALE server. But, what’s driving it is my new workstation motherboard has integrated 5 Gbps. It’d be great if I could use it without having a 10 Gbps copper LAN.

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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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