PDF/A is a specific version of PDF designed for long term archival of electronic data. The idea being that PDF/A files are both self contained and fully specified, so they can be opened in the future without any loss of fidelity.

Implementing PDF/A export is complicated by the fact that the specification is an ISO standard, which is not publicly available. Fortunately, there are PDF/A validators that will tell you if (and sometimes how) your generated PDF/A is invalid. So, given sufficient patience, you can keep throwing PDF files at the validator, fixing the issues reported and repeating this loop over and over until validation passes. Like this:

This will be available in the next release of CapyPDF.

Ptyxis

• Handle some incoming issue reports which basically amounts to copying their question into google, searching, and copying the first result back. A reminder that we really need dedicated support channels that are not the issue tracker.

  But more importantly, how you move people there is still problematic. I could of course just tell them to go over “there”, but when the questions are so simple you end up taking the gentler approach and just answering it begrudgingly rather than coming off abrupt.

• Issue reported about an async spin loop from GMainLoop after closing a window which has a really long paste actively feeding it. Looks like it needs to be addressed in VTE (more on that below), but also decided to raise priority of our fallback SIGKILL handler if SIGHUP failed.

• Code review for incoming community feature to swap profiles on an active tab.

VTE

• MR sent upstream to hopefully address the corner case of disposing a terminal widget while paste is ongoing.

• Noticed that ibus-daemon is taking considerable CPU when running the ucs-decode test tool on Ptyxis/VTE. Probably something related to tracking input cursor positions w/ the text protocol or similar. Reached out to @garncho for any tricks we might be able to pull off from the VTE side of things.

Libdex

• Looking into some strange behaviors with dex_thread_wait_for() when implementing the cross-thread semantics for libgit2 wrapping. As a result I changed where we control life-cycle for the waited upon future so that it is guaranteed longer than the DexWaiter.

• Spend some time thinking about how we might approach a more generalized wrapper for existing GIO-like async functions. I was never satisfied with DexAsyncPair and perhaps now that we will gain a gdbus-codegen for Libdex we could gain a *.gir future wrapping codegen too.

• Add a new DexFutureListModel which is a GListModel which is populated by a DexFuture resolving to a GListModel . Very handy when you have a future and want a GListModel immediately.

Foundry

• Add FoundryFileRow so we have easy mechanics for the whole typing a file/directory path and browsing to it. Re-use the existing path collapse/expand stuff in Foundry to allow for niceties like ~/Directory . Fix a bunch of obnoxiousness that was in the Builder implementation of this previously.

• Add foundry_operation_is_cancelled() to simplify integrating with external blocking/threaded code such as libgit2. This allows breaking out of a clone operation by checking for cancellation in the progress callbacks from the server but works for any sort of blocking API that itself has callback functions in its state machine.

• Add new CLI formatter for GFlags to use value_nick instead of the whole enumeration value in UP_CASE .

• Add FoundryBuildPipeline:build-system with discover from the FoundryBuildAddin before full addin loading occurs. This replicates the IdeBuildSystemDiscovery from Builder without having to use a secondary addin object.

• Add priorities to FoundryBuildAddin so that we can pre-sort by priority before build-system discovery. That fixes loading the WebKit project out of the box so that CMakeLists.txt will be matched before Makefile if you configured in tree.

• Implement write-back for FoundrySdkManager:sdk to the active configuration after checking of the config supports the SDK.

• Implement write-back for buildconfig files.

• Implement mechanics for write-back PluginFlatpakConfig . Also start on implementation for all the FlatpakSerializable types. This is made much more complicated by needing to keep track of the different subtle ways lists can be deserialized as well as referenced files which can be included. It will mean write-back may have a bucket of files to update. Though right now we only will do this for a few select fields so we can probably punt a bit.

• Meson cleanup to all our tools that test various aspects of Foundry outside the confines of an entire IDE.

• Non-destructive editing of flatpak manifests works for the core feature-set we need. It requires storing a lot of state while parsing manifests (and recursively their includes) but it seems to work well enough.

• Setup needs-attention tracking for panels and pages.

• Write a new foundry.1 manpage for inclusion in distributions that really want that provided.

• Add :author property to FoundryForgeIssue and FoundryForgeMergeRequest so we can start presenting peer information in the Builder UI. Implement this for gitlab plugin.

• Improve handling to changes in implicit-trailing-newline from file settings getting loaded/applied. That way we don’t run into weird behavior with file-change monitoring with ligbit2 getting something different than we’d expect.

• Support for keyword search when listing issues/merge-requests through the forge interfaces.

• Add FoundryDocumentationIntent for intent to read documentation.

• Very basic support for Justfile using just to build. Currently it is sort of a cop-out because it uses build and clean instead of trying to track down [default] and what not. Contributions welcome.

Builder

• Iteration on the new clone dialog based on Foundry including wiring up all the PTY usage, page navigation, etc.

• Update builder-dark GtkSourceView style to fit in better with updated Adwaita palette. Even though it’s not using Tango palette for all the colors, we still want it to fit in.

• Iteration on forge listings

• Wire up needs attention for panels/pages

• Setup forge splitbutton so we can jump to gitlab (or other forge) quickly or alternatively list issues/etc in app as we gain more forge support.

• Implement manuals panel and page on top of the Foundry service FoundryDocumentationManager .

• Implement browser page and port over old urlbar implementation. Still slogging through all the intricacies of navigation policy which I didn’t handle so well in Builder originally.

• Work on bringing over path bar from Manuals so we can use it more generically for things like symbol paths and what not.

• A lot of little things here and there that just need plumbing now that we’re in a world of futures and listmodels.

• Lots of work on the updated greeter using Foundry. It looks mostly the same, just less madness in implementation.

Flathub

• Investigate why older Builder is what is shown as published.

• Merge PR to update Ptyxis to 49.2

• Update Manuals to 49.1 since I missed the .0. Had a lot of libfoundry things to bring over as well. Needs an exceptions update to flathub linter.

Text Editor

• Update builder style scheme

Libpanel

• Update needs-attention style for the panel switcher buttons

Manuals

• Make ctrl+k select all the existing text in the search entry as part of the focus-search action.

It’s been four months since my last Digital Wellbeing update . In that previous post I talked about the goals of the Digital Wellbeing project. I also described our progress improving and extending the functionality of the GNOME Parental Controls application, as well as redesigning the application to meet the current design guidelines.

Introducing Screen Time Limits

Following our work on the Parental Controls app, the next major work item was to implement screen time limits functionality, offering the parents ability to check the child’s screen time usage, set the time limits, and lock the child account outside of a specified curfew. This feature actually spanned across *three* different GNOME projects:

• Parental Controls: Screen Time page was added to the Parental Controls app, so that parents can view child screen usage an set the time limits, it also includes a detailed bar chart
• Settings: Wellbeing panel needed to make its own time limits settings impossible to change when the child has parental controls session limits enabled, since they are not in effect in such situation. There’s now also a banner with an explanation that guides to the Parental Controls app
• Shell: Child session needed to actually lock when the limit was reached

Out of all of the three above, the Parental Controls and Shell changes have been already merged, while the Settings integration has been through unwritten review during the bi-weekly Settings meeting and adjusted to the feedback, so it’s only a matter of time now before it reaches the main branch as well. You can find the screenshots of the added functionalities below, and the reference designs can be find in the app-mockups and os-mockups tickets.

Child screen usage

When viewing a managed account, a summary of screen time is shown with actions for changing further settings, as well as actions to access additional settings for restrictions and filtering.

Child account view with added screen time overview and action for more options

The Screen Time view shows an overview of the child’s account’s screen time as well as controls which mirror those of the Settings panel to control screen limits and downtime for the child.

Screen Time page with detailed screen time records and time limit controls

Settings integration

On the Settings side, a child account will see a banner in the Wellbeing panel that lets them know some settings cannot be changed, with a link to the Parental Controls app.

Wellbeing panel with a banner informing that limits can only be changed in Parental Controls

Screen limits in GNOME Shell

We have implemented the locking mechanism in GNOME Shell. When a Screen Time limit is reached, the session locks, so that the child can’t use the computer for the rest of the day.

Following is a screen cast of the Shell functionality:

Preventing children from unlocking has not been implemented yet. However, fortunately, the hardest part was implementing the framework for the rest of the code, so hopefully the easier graphical change will take less to implement and the next update will be much sooner than this one.

GNOME OS images

You don’t have to take my word for it, especially since one can notice I’ve had to cut the recording at one point (forgot that one can’t switch users in the lock screen :P) – you can check out all of these features in the very same GNOME OS live image I’ve used in the recording, that you can either run in GNOME Boxes , or try on your hardware if you know what you’re doing

Malcontent changes

While all of these user facing changes look cool, none of them would be actually possible without the malcontent backend, which Philip Withnall has been working on. While the daily schedule had already been implemented, the daily limit session limit had to be added, as well as malcontent timer daemon API for Shell to use. There has been many other improvements, web filtering daemon has been added, which I’ll use in the future for implementing Web Filtering page in Parental Controls app.

Conclusion

Our work for the GNOME Foundation is funded by Endless and Dalio Philanthropies, so kudos to them! I want to thank Florian Müllner for his patience too, during the very educative for me merge request review, and answering to all of my Shell development wonderings. I also want to thank Matthijs Velsink and Felipe Borges for finding time to review the Settings integration.

Now that this foundation has been made, we’ll be focusing on finishing the last remaining bit of the session limits support in Shell, which is tweaking the appearance of lock screen when the limit is reached, and implementing the ignore button for extending screen limit, as well as notifications, followed by Web Filtering support in Parental Controls. Until next update!

Some notes on my first serious coding projects in something like 20 years, possibly longer. If you’re curious what these projects mean , more thoughts over on the OpenML.fyi newsletter.

TLDR

A GitHub contribution graph, showing a lot of activity in the past three weeks after virtually none the rest of the year.

News, Fixed

The “ Fix The News ” newsletter is a pillar of my mental health these days, bringing me news that the world is not entirely going to hell in a handbasket. And my 9yo has repeatedly noted that our family news diet is “broken” in exactly the way Fix The News is supposed to fix—hugely negative, hugely US-centric. So I asked Claude to create a “newspaper” version of FTN — a two page pdf of some highlights. It was a hit.

So I’ve now been working with Claude Code to create and gradually improve a four-days-a-week “News, Fixed” newspaper. This has been super-fun for the whole family—my wife has made various suggestions over my shoulder, my son devours it every morning, and it’s the first serious coding project I’ve tackled in ages. It is almost entirely strictly personal (it still has hard-coded Duke Basketball schedules) but nevertheless is public and FOSS . (It is even my first usage of reuse.software —and also of SonarQube Server !)

Example newspaper here .

No matter how far removed you are from practical coding experience, I cannot recommend enough finding a simple, fun project like this that scratches a human itch in your life, and using the project to experiment with the new code tools.

Getting Things Done assistant

While working on News, Fixed a friend pointed out Steve Yegge’s “ beads ”, which reimagines software issue tracking as an LLM-centric activity — json-centric, tracked in git, etc. At around the same time, I was also pointed at Superpowers —essentially, canned “skills” like “teach the LLM, temporarily, how to brainstorm”.

The two of these together in my mind screamed “do this for your overwhelmed todo list”. I’ve long practiced various bastardized versions of Getting Things Done, but one of the hangups has been that I’m inconsistent about doing the daily/weekly/nth-ly reviews that good GTD really relies on. I might skip a step, or not look through all my huge “someday-maybe” list, or… any of many reasons one can be tired and human when faced with a wall of text. Also, while there are many tools out there to do GTD, in my experience they either make some of the hardest parts (like the reviews) your problem, or they don’t quite fit with how I want to do GTD, or both. Hacking on my own prompts to manage the reviews seems to fit these needs to a T.

I currently use Amazing Marvin as my main GTD tool. It is funky and weird and I’ve stuck with it much longer than any other task tracker I’ve ever used. So what I’ve done so far:

• wrapped the Marvin API to extract json
• discovered the Marvin API is very flaky, so done some caching and validation
• written a lot of prompts for the various phases/tasks in GTD. These work to varying degrees and I really want to figure out how to collaborate with others on them, because I suspect that as more tools offer LLM-ish APIs ( whoa, todoist! ) these prompts are where the real fun and action will be.

This is all read-only right now because of limitations in the Marvin API but for various reasons I’m not yet ready to embark on building my own entire UI. So this will do for now. But this code, therefore, is very limited to me. The prompts on the other hand…

Note that my emphasis is not on “do tasks”, it is on helping me stay on priority. Less “chief of staff”, more “executive assistant”—both incredibly valuable when done well, but different roles. This is different from some of the use examples for Yegge’s Beads, which really are around agents.

Also note: the results have been outstanding. I’m getting more easily into my doing zone, I think largely because I have less anxiety about staring at the Giant Wall of Tasks that defines the life of any high-level IC. And my projects are better organized and todos feel more accurate than they have been in a long time, possibly ever.

a note on LLMs and issue/TODO tracking

It is worth noting that while LLMs are probabilistic/lossy, so they can’t find the “perfect” next TODO to work on, that’s OK. Personal TODO and software issue tracking are inherently subjective, probabilistic activities—there is no objectively perfect “next best thing to work on”, “most important thing to work on”, etc. So the fact that an LLM is only probabilistic in identifying the next task to work on is fine—no human can do substantially better. In fact I’m pretty sure that once an issue list is past a certain point, the LLM is likely to be able to do better— if (and like many things LLM, this is a big if) you can provide it with documented standards explaining how you want to do prioritization. (Literally one of the first things I did at my first job was write standards on how to prioritize bugs—the forerunner of this doc —so I have strong opinions, and experience, here.)

Skills for license “concluded”

While at a recent Linux Foundation event, I was shocked to realize how many very smart people haven’t internalized the skills/prompts/context stuff. It’s either “you chat with it” or “you train a model”. This is not their fault; it is hard to keep up!

Of course this came up most keenly in the context of the age-old problem of “how do I tell what license an open source project is under”. In other words, what is the difference between “I have scanned this” and “I have reached the zen state of SPDX’s ‘ concluded ’ field”.

So … yes, I’ve started playing with scripts and prompts on this. It’s much less further along than the other two projects above, but I think it could be very fruitful if structured correctly. Some potentially big benefits above and beyond the traditional scanning and/or throw a lawyer at it approaches:

• reporting: my very strong intuition, admittedly not yet tested, is that plain-English reports on factors below, plus links into repos, will be much easier for lawyers to use as a starting point than the UIs of traditional license-scanner tools. And I suspect ultimately more powerful as well, since they’ll be able to draw on some of the things below.
• context sensitivity: unlike a regexp, an LLM can likely fairly reliably understand from context some of the big failures of traditional pattern matching like “this code mentions license X but doesn’t actually include it”.
• issue analysis and change analysis: unlike traditional approaches, LLMs can look at the change history of key files like README and LICENSE and draw useful context from them. “oh hey README mentioned a license change on Nov. 9, 2025, here’s what the change was and let’s see if there are any corresponding issues and commit logs that explain this change” is something that an LLM really can do. (Also it can do that with much more patience than any human.)

ClearlyDefined offers test data on this, by the way — I’m really looking forward to seeing if this can be made actually reliable or not. (And then we can hook up reuse.software on the backend to actually improve the upstream metadata…)

But even then, I may not ever release this. There’s a lot of real risks here and I still haven’t thought them through enough to be comfortable with them. That’s true even though I think the industry has persistently overstated its ability to reach useful conclusions about licensing, since it so persistently insists on doing licensing analysis without ever talking to maintainers.

More to come?

I’m sure there will be more of these. That said, one of the interesting temptations of this is that it is very hard to say “something is done” because it is so easy to add more. (eg, once my personal homebrew News Fixed is done… why not turn it into a webapp? once my GTD scripts are done… why not port the backend? etc. etc.) So we’ll see how that goes.

• Slept badly, up late, catch up with Dave. Prepared TTT slides on making patches easy to review with Szymon & gave that.
• Lunch, synched with Andras to unwind some horror service authentication issue. Collected car from MOT/service in Bury with J.
• Interview, dinner, interview prep with M.
• Unclear whether to be encouraged or disappointed to have a new SpaceX association from a bogus profile on Linked-In, apparently we're the obvious choice of COOL-kid to associate with:
  
  I'd never considered to check the staff for bogus employees before, I wonder how many companies do that; kudos to Darshan for the catch.

It’s Friday, so it’s time to provide an update on what’s been happening at the GNOME Foundation over the past week. Here’s my summary of the main activities and events, covering what both Board and staff members have been up to.

GNOME.Asia

I mentioned GNOME.Asia 2025 in my last post, but I’ll mention it again since it’s only a month until the event in Tokyo, which is being co-hosted with LibreOffice Asia .

As you’d expect, there is a lot of activity happening as GNOME.Asia 2025 approaches. Kristi has been busy with a plethora of organisational tasks, including scheduling, printing, planning for the day trip, and more.

Travel has also been a focus this week. The Travel Committee has approved sponsorship for a number of attendees, and we have moved on to providing assistance to those who need documentation for visas.

Finally, registration is now open! There are two registration sites: one for in-person attendees , and one for remote attendees . If you plan on attending, please do take the time to register!

Transitions

This week was a big week for us, with the announcement of Rosanna’s departure from the organisation. Internally transition arrangements have been in progress for a little while, with responsibilities being redistributed, accounts being handed over, and infrastucture that was physically managed by Rosanna being replaced (such as our mailing address and phone number). This work continued this week.

I’d like to thank Rosanna for her extremely helpful assistance during this transition. I’d also like to thank everyone who was pitched in this week, particularly around travel (thank you Kristi, Julian, Maria, Asmit!), as well as Cassidy and Arun for picking up tasks as they have arisen.

The Foundation is running smoothly despite our recent staffing change. Payments are being processed quickly and reliably, events and sysadmin work are happening as normal, and accounting tasks are being taken care of. I’m also confident that we’ll continue to work reliably and effectively as we move forward. There are improvements that we have planned which help with this, such as the streamlining of our financial systems and processes.

Ongoing tasks

It has become a common refrain in my updates that there is lots going on behind the scenes that doesn’t make it into these posts. This week I thought that I’d call some of those more routine activities out, so readers can get a sense of what those background tasks are.

It turns out that there is indeed quite a lot of them, so I’ve broken them down into sections.

Finances and accounting

It’s the beginning of the month, which is when most invoices tend to get submitted to us, so this week has involved a fair amount of payments processing. We use a mix of platforms for payments, and have a shared tracker for payments tasks. At the time of writing all invoices received since the beginning of the month have been paid, except for a couple of items where we needed additional information.

As mentioned in previous posts, we are in the process of deploying a set of improvements to our banking arrangements, and this continued this week. The changes are coming in bit by bit, and there are tasks for us to do at each step. It will be a number of weeks before the changes are completed.

Dawn who joined us last week has been doing research as part of her work to improve our finance systems. This has involved doing calls with team members and stakeholders, and is nearly complete.

Meetings!

Kristi booked the room for our regular pre-FOSDEM Advisory Board meeting, and I’ve invited representatives. Thanks to everyone who has sent an RSVP so far!

Next week we have another regular Board meeting scheduled, so there has been the routine work of preparing the agenda and sending out invitations.

Sysadmin work

Bart has been busy as usual, and it’s hard to capture everything he does. Recent activity includes improvements to donate.gnome.org, improvements to Flathub build pipelines, and working through a troublesome issue with the geolocation data used by GNOME apps.

That’s it for this week! Thanks for reading, and see you next week.

Couple weeks ago Cloudflare announced it would be sponsoring some Open Source projects. Throwing money at pet projects of random techbros would hardly be news, but there was a certain vibe behind them and the people leading them.

In an unexpected turn of events, the millionaire receiving money from the billion-dollar company, thought it would be important to devote a whole blog post to random brokeboy from Athens that had an opinion on the Internet .

I was astonished to find the blog post. Now that I moved from normal stalkers to millionaire stalkers, is it a sign that I made it? Have I become such a menace? But more importantly: Who the hell even is this guy?

D-H-Who?

When I was painting with crayons in a deteriorating kindergarten somewhere in Greece, DHH, David Heinemeier Hansson , was busy with dumping Ruby on Rails in the world and becoming a niche tech celebrity. His street cred for releasing Ruby on Rails would later be replaced by his writing on remote work. Famously authoring “Remote: Office Not Required”, a book based on his own company, 37signals.

That cultural cache would go out the window in 2022 when he got in hot water with his own employees after an internal review process concluded that 37signals had been less than stellar when it came to handling race and diversity. Said review process culminated in a clash, where the employees were interested in further exploration of the topic, which DHH responded to them with “You are the person you are complaining about” (meaning: you, pointing out a problem, is the problem).

No politics at work

This incident lead the two founders of 37signals to the executive decision to forbid any kind of “ societal and political discussions ” inside the company, which, predictably, lead to a third of the company resigning in protest. This was a massive blow to 37signals. The company was famous for being extremely selective when hiring, as well as affording employees great benefits. Suddenly having a third of the workforce resign over disagreement with management sent a far more powerful message than anything they could have imagined.

It would become the starting point for the downwards and radicalizing spiral along with the extended and very public crashout DHH will be going through in the coming years.

Starting your own conference so you can never be banned from it

Subsequently, DHH was uninvited from keynoting at RailsConf on the account of everyone being grossed out about the handling of the matter and in solidarity with the community members along the employees that quit in protest.

That, in turn, would lead to the Rails Foundation starting Rails World. A new conference about Rails that 100%-swear-to-god was not just about DHH having his own conference where he can keynote and would never be banned.

In the following years DHH would go to explore and express all the spectrum of “down the alt-right pipeline” opinions, like:

• Woke is so bad that it made me a racist
• People call me racist, but I found a book telling me how nice I am
• Fat people are bad and should feel bad
• DEI is bad
• DEI is bad part 2: trigger the libs with git branchoveres
• Cheering for Affirmative action being banned in the USA
• The 80s were so great cause they were not woke
• Andrew Tate is awesome
• Therapy is so bad, that I shall platform transphobes
• Therapy is so annoying that I’d rather make an Arch distro instead
• Leave your work problems at therapy, instead of making it the problem of your boss (me)
• People not wanting kids are bad and Jordan Peterson nailed it
• Elon Musk and DOGE is awesome
• This private school is making my kids GAY
• London is full of “non-native Brits” and I am going to praise a race purity rally
• Words are not violence
• Words ARE violence, when they are against me

Omarchy

You either log off a hero, or you see yourself create another linux distribution, and having failed the first part, DHH has been pouring his energy into creating a new project. While letting everyone know how he much prefers that than going to therapy . Thus, Omarchy was born, a set of copy pasted Window Manager and Vim configs turned distro. One of the two projects that Cloudflare will be proudly funding shortly. The only possible option for the compositor would be Hyperland , and even though it’s Wayland (bad!), it’s one of the good-non-woke ones. In a similar tone, the project website would be featuring the tight integration of Omarchy with SuperGrok .

Rubygems

On a parallel track, the entire Ruby community more or less collapsed in the last two months. Long story short, is that one of the major Ruby Central sponsors, Sidekiq, pulled out the funding after DHH was invited to speak at RailsConf 2025. Shopify, where DHH sits in the boards of directors, was quick to save the day and match the lost funding. Coincidentally an (allegedly) takeover of key parts of the Ruby Infrastructure was carried out by Ruby Central and placed under the control of Shopify in the following weeks.

This story is ridiculous, and the entire ruby community is imploding following this. There’s an excellent write-up of the story so far here .

In a similar note, and at the same time, we also find DHH drooling over Off-brand Peter Thiel and calling for an Anduril takeover of the Nix community in order to purge all the wokes.

On Framework

At the same time, Framework had been promoting Omarchy in their social media accounts for a good while. And DHH in turn has been posting about how great Framework hardware is and how the Framework CEO is contributing to his Arch Linux reskin. On October 8th, Framework announced its sponsorhip of the Hyprland project, following 37signal doing the same thing couple weeks earlier . On the same day they made another post promoting Omarchy yet again. This caused a huge backlash and overall PR nightmare, with the apex being a forum thread with over 1700 comments so far.

The first reply in forum post, comes from Nirav, Framework’s CEO, with a very questionable choice of words:

We support open source software (and hardware), and partner with developers and maintainers across the ecosystem. We deliberately create a big tent, because we want open source software to win. We don’t partner based on individual’s or organization’s beliefs, values, or political stances outside of their alignment with us on increasing the adoption of open source software.

I definitely understand that not everyone will agree with taking a big tent approach, but we want to be transparent that bringing in and enabling every organization and community that we can across the Linux ecosystem is a deliberate choice.

Mentioning twice a “big tent” as the official policy and response to complains about supporting Fascist and Racist shitheads, is nothing sort of digging a hole for yourself so deep it that it reemerges in another continent.

Later on, Nirav would mention that they were finalizing sponsorship of the GNOME Foundation (12k/year) and KDE e.V. (10k/year). In the linked page you can also find a listing of Rails World (DHH’s personal conference) for a one time payment of 24k dollars.

There has not been an update since, and at no point have they addressed their support and collaboration with DHH. Can’t lose the money cow and free twitter clout I guess.

While I would personally would like to see the donation be rejected, I am not involved with the ongoing discussion on the GNOME Foundation side nor the Foundation itself. What I can say is that myself and others from the GNOME OS team, were involved in initial discussions with Framework, about future collaborations and hardware support. GNOME OS, much like the GNOME Flatpak runtime, is very useful as a reference point in order to identify if a bug, in hardware or software, is distro-specific or not.

It’s been a month since the initial debacle with Framework. Regardless of what the GNOME Foundation plans on doing, the GNOME OS team certainly does not feel comfortable in further collaboration given how they have handled the situation so far. It’s sad because the people working there understand the issue, but this does not seem to be a trait shared by the management.

A software midlife crisis

During all this, DHH decided that his attention must be devoted to get into a mouth-off with a greek kid that called him a Nazi. Since this is not violence (see “ Words are not violence ” essay), he decided to respond in kind, by calling for violence against me (see “ Words are violence ” essay).

To anyone who knows a nerd or two over the age of 35, all of the above is unsurprising. This is not some grand heel turn, or some brainwashing that DHH suffered. This is straight up a midlife crisis turned fash speedrun.

Here’s a dude who barely had any time to confront the world before failing into an infinite money glitch in the form of Ruby on Rails, Jeff Bezos throwing him crazy money, Apple bundling his software as a highlighted feature, becoming a “new work” celebrity and Silicon Valley “Guru”. Is it any surprise that such a person later would find the most minuscule kind of opposition as an all-out attack on his self-image?

DHH has never had the “best” opinions on a range of things, and they have been dutifully documented by others, but neither have many other developers that are also ignorant of topics outside of software. Being insecure about your hairline and masculine aesthetic to the point of adopting the Charles Manson haircut to cover your balding is one thing. However, it is entirely different to become a drop-shipped version of Elon, tweeting all day and stopping only to write opinion pieces that come off as proving others wrong rather than original thoughts.

Case in point: DHH recently wrote about how “men who’d prefer to feel useful over being listened to”. The piece is unironically titled “ Building competency is better than therapy ”. It is an insane read, and I’ll speculate that it feels as if someone, who DHH can’t outright dismiss, suggested he goes to therapy. It’s a very “I’ll show you off in front of my audience” kind of text.

Add to that a three year speedrun decrying the “theocracy of DEI” and the seemingly authoritarian powers of “the wokes”, all coincidentally starting after he could not get over his employees disagreeing with him on racial sensitivities.

How can someone suggest his workers read Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me” and Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow” in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing and the BLM protests. While a couple of months later writing salivating blogposts after the EDL eugenics rally in England and giving the highest possible praise to Tommy Robinson ?

Can these people be redeemed?

It is certainly not going to help that niche celebrities, like DHH, still hold clout and financial power and are able to spout the worst possible takes without any backlash because of their position.

A bunch of Ruby developers recently started a petition to get DHH distanced from the community, and it didn’t go far before getting brigaded by the worst people you didn’t need to know existed. This of course was amplified to oblivion by DHH and a bunch of sycophants chasing the clout provided by being retweeted by DHH. It would shortly be followed by yet another “ I’m never wrong ” piece.

Is there any chance for these people, who are shielded by their well-paying jobs, their exclusively occupational media diet, and stimuli all happen to reinforce the default world view?

I think there is hope, but it demands more voices in tech spaces to speak up about how having empathy for others, or valuing diversity is not some grand conspiracy but rather enrichment to our lives and spaces. This comes hand in hand with firmly shutting down concern trolling and ridiculous “extreme centrist” takes where someone is expected to find common ground with others advocating for their extermination.

One could argue that the true spirit of FLOSS, which attracted much of the current midlife crisis developers in the first place, is about diversity and empathy for the varied circumstances and opinions that enriched our space.

Conclusion

I do not know if his heart is filled with hate or if he is incredibly lost, but it makes little difference since this is his output in the world.

David, when you read this I hope it will be a wake-up call. It’s not too late, you only need to go offline and let people help you. Stop the pathetic TemuElon speedrun and go take care of your kids. Drop the anti-woke culture wars and pick up a Ta-Nehisi Coates book again.

To everyone else: Push back against their vile and misanthropic rhetoric at every turn. Don’t let their poisonous roots fester into the ground. There is no place for their hate here. Don’t let them find comfort and spew their vomit in any public space.

Crush Fascism . Free Palestine.

• Sync with Dave, catch up with Tracie & Julie. Interview alongside Chris, catch up with an old friend, Lunch.
• Published the next strip around an project paying the complete maintenance bill:
  
• Sales team call, sync with Phlippe, discovered lots of older mail I'd somehow missed, processed it, more admin.