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 branches
• Cheering for Affirmative action being banned in the USA
• The 80s were so great cause they were not woke
• Andrew Tate is a martyr
• 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 are 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 Hyprland, 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.

News from Apple’s Podcasts for Creators site, regarding new features in the iOS 26.2 beta releases:

When you supply chapters in your episode description or in your RSS feed, they display in Apple Podcasts. If you submit chapters through your hosting provider, you can include images. For shows in English, when chapters aren’t provided, Apple Podcasts generates them for you and an “Automatically created“ label appears in the chapter list. If you prefer not to use automatically created chapters, you can disable this feature in Apple Podcasts Connect. Learn more about chapters.

It’s unclear to me whether this feature is actually exclusive to iOS/iPhone, or will be available across Apple’s 26.2 OS releases. This strikes me as a great use of AI, but I also think most multi-topic podcasts should include human-created chapters.

I'm worried that they put co-pilot in Excel because Excel is the beast that drives our entire economy and do you know who has tamed that beast?

Brenda.

Who is Brenda?

She is a mid-level employee in every finance department, in every business across this stupid nation and the Excel goddess herself descended from the heavens, kissed Brenda on her forehead and the sweat from Brenda's brow is what allows us to do capitalism. [...]

She's gonna birth that formula for a financial report and then she's gonna send that financial report to a higher up and he's gonna need to make a change to the report and normally he would have sent it back to Brenda but he's like oh I have AI and AI is probably like smarter than Brenda and then the AI is gonna fuck it up real bad and he won't be able to recognize it because he doesn't understand Excel because AI hallucinates.

You know who's not hallucinating?

Brenda.

— @belligerentbarbies, on TikTok

Tags: generative-ai, ai, excel, hallucinations, llms, tiktok, ai-ethics

Today we’re launching text-based intelligence classifiers, a powerful new way to train NewsBlur to show you exactly what you want to read. You’ve always been able to train NewsBlur’s intelligence using story titles, authors, tags, and publishers. Now you can train on any phrase that appears in the full text of a story. This feature is available exclusively to NewsBlur Premium Archive subscribers.

Text-based classifiers work just like the intelligence training you’re already familiar with. Find a phrase you care about, mark it as something you like or dislike, and NewsBlur will automatically highlight or hide future stories containing that phrase. Stories with phrases you like are marked with a green focus indicator, while stories with phrases you dislike are hidden unless you choose to view them.

How to use text-based classifiers

Reading a story and spot a phrase you want to see more of? Simply select the text with your mouse or trackpad, then click the “Train” button that appears.

This opens the intelligence trainer where you can mark the selected text as something you like (thumbs up) or dislike (thumbs down). The text classifier appears at the top of the trainer dialog, ready for you to train.

Once you’ve trained a text phrase, NewsBlur will automatically scan the full text of every story from that feed. Stories containing your phrase will be highlighted with a green focus indicator in your story list, making them easy to spot. You can also see the phrase highlighted throughout the story content itself.

Real-world examples

Text-based classifiers shine when you subscribe to broad-interest feeds but only care about specific topics. Here are some examples:

• Subscribe to a food blog that covers everything, but only want to read about vegan recipes? Train on “vegan” and similar terms.
• Reading a tech blog that writes about many frameworks, but you only want stories about your favorite language? Train on that language name.
• Following a news site with mixed content, but only interested in stories about a specific region or topic? Train on location names or topic keywords.

Since text classifiers work on the full article text and not just titles, they catch stories that might not mention your interest in the headline but discuss it in depth within the article.

Green always wins

Just like with other intelligence classifiers, green (focus) always wins. If a story matches both a phrase you like and a phrase you dislike, NewsBlur will mark it as focus and show it in your unread count. This ensures you never miss a story about something you care about, even if it also contains topics you’re less interested in.

You can view your focus stories by choosing between Unread and Focus at the bottom of the feed list. Set it to Focus to show only green stories and see everything NewsBlur knows you want to read.

Why Premium Archive only?

Text-based classifiers require scanning the full article content of every story, not just the RSS feed excerpt. The Premium Archive subscription ensures every story is fetched, archived, and available for full-text search and classification. This means your text classifiers work on every story from every feed you subscribe to, with no gaps in coverage.

The Premium Archive subscription also includes unlimited story archiving, the ability to mark any story as unread forever, full-text search across your entire archive, and the discover stories feature for finding related content across all your feeds.

Available now on the web

Text-based classifiers are available now to all Premium Archive subscribers on the web. Simply highlight any phrase in a story, click the “Train” button, and start training. iOS and Android support is coming soon.

If you’re not yet a Premium Archive subscriber and want to unlock text-based intelligence training along with unlimited archiving and advanced search, you can upgrade directly on the web.

As always, we’d love to hear your feedback on the NewsBlur forum. For every person who shares their thoughts, there are a dozen others thinking the same thing, so your input helps shape where NewsBlur goes next.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Think about what you did this morning. You woke up, brushed your teeth, made coffee, maybe scrolled your phone, maybe drove the same route to work that you do every day. How many of those things did you actually think about? According to new research, probably none. Scientists say nearly nine out of every ten daily actions happen on autopilot, with our brains running the show long before conscious thought gets involved.

The study, published in Psychology & Health, tracked 105 people for a week. Participants were pinged six times a day and had to report what they were doing, along with how deliberate or automatic it felt.

Across more than 3,700 reports, researchers found that 88 percent of behaviors were carried out automatically, while about two-thirds were triggered by habit rather than decision-making.

Lead researcher Amanda Rebar, an associate professor at the University of South Carolina, explained that this automation shows up in two ways.

“Habitual instigation occurs when environmental cues automatically trigger the decision to do something, like reaching for your phone when you hear a notification. Habitual execution happens when you perform an action smoothly without thinking about the mechanics, such as brushing your teeth or driving a familiar route,” she said in a statement.

Most people like to imagine themselves as rational actors, carefully weighing each choice they make. In practice, the study shows, life is closer to a string of well-worn loops. And those loops don’t vary much. Age, gender, and relationship status had no real effect on how habitual someone’s behavior looked.

One exception was exercise. People were more likely to start workouts based on cues, which could mean a reminder on their phone or a regular time of day, but still had to engage consciously once they got moving. Running, lifting, or cycling doesn’t complete itself, even if the decision to start feels automatic.

Habits, it turns out, often line up with what people want. Almost half of all reported behaviors were both intentional and automatic, while only a small fraction clashed with someone’s goals. That makes habits a surprisingly strong ally for anyone hoping to change.

Benjamin Gardner, a psychology professor at the University of Surrey and co-author of the study, said strategies for habit formation are more effective than willpower alone.

“For people who want to break their bad habits, simply telling them to ‘try harder’ isn’t enough,” he said. Building cues for healthier choices—or dismantling the ones tied to unhelpful patterns—might be the clearest path to change.

Most of what you do today will unfold without much thought. The trick, researchers suggest, is shaping those automatic moments to get you one step closer in the direction you actually want to go.

The post You’re Running on Autopilot Way More Often Than You Think appeared first on VICE.