Ben Ramsey

Coder, author, & speaker. PHP 8.1 & 8.2 release manager. ramsey/uuid maintainer. Open source developer. Senior Staff Engineer. Pronouns: he/him/his

“This guy seems to fundamentally misunderstand open source” — some rando on Hacker News

“Who is this guy?” — another rando on Hacker News

Co-admin of the https://phpc.social Mastodon server.

All original content in public posts © me & licensed CC BY-SA 4.0, unless otherwise specified. :cc: :ccby: :ccsa:

Last Notes

2026-08-30 16:00:18 GMT

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That second screenshot looks like a Cloudflare block page.

2026-08-15 18:29:35 GMT

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I remember seeing some polling from years and years ago that showed most people didn’t think Congress (in the US) was doing a good job, but most people also said they would continue to vote for their incumbent representatives because they were good enough at their jobs. 🤯

2026-07-30 01:02:54 GMT

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That’s what I’m trying to understand, too. In PGP, the concept of vetting often involves meeting and looking at IDs or equivalent to check identities, and you sign their key with yours and set a trust level.
These levels can mean different things to different people, and how you vet also differs, but ultimately, you’re trying to say, “I trust (to some low/med/hi degree) this is Alice.”
Is the goal with this proposal to establish a trust system?

2026-01-05 05:25:45 GMT

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I’d like to interject for a moment. What you are referring to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux.
(Sorry. I was obliged to respond with this, since no one else has. 😉)

2025-12-25 01:29:41 GMT

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There’s the art that comes about through remixing culture, and there’s the art that comes about from stretching oneself to innovate and create something completely new. I don’t think AI can do the latter—even when prompted by a human. It can only produce art that bears similarities to the data it was trained on. One could argue this is also what humans do, and maybe that’s so, but I still think this is an important distinction.

2025-10-27 19:06:30 GMT

IMO, the PSF has always been the ideal any software foundation should aspire to be. I’m so happy to see them make this decision.
https://pyfound.blogspot.com/2025/10/NSF-funding-statement.html
#Python #PSF

2025-10-20 22:35:44 GMT

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I can say with certainty (from friends who used to work there) that many of their services are running on AI-generated code that was prompted by product managers and not engineers.

2025-09-20 23:28:07 GMT

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“Broken pottery shards were also used for anal hygiene. Scholars have suggested that shards (pessoi) from a vote may have been re-used for this purpose, to curse the exiled individual by soiling their name.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostracon

2025-09-14 18:22:25 GMT

HR 3860 allows the Secretary of State to revoke the US passport of anyone “whom the Secretary determines has knowingly aided, assisted, abetted, or otherwise provided material support to an organization the Secretary has designated as a foreign terrorist organization.”
There’s no due process, and the only way to overturn it is to “request a hearing to appeal such denial or revocation not later than 60 days after receiving notice of such denial or revocation.”
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/3860/text

2025-08-21 15:22:11 GMT

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Lots of sites and services block Tor nodes.

2025-05-01 03:40:51 GMT

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I once stumbled on this bathroom when I no-clipped into the backrooms.