Ruth Suehle

@suehle.bsky.social

President, #Apache Software Foundation ( #ASF ) Makes lots of things & #highland dances GeekMom.com writer https://linktr.ee/suehle

There's a computer games museum in Berlin. (Always fun to see your childhood in a museum!) At one exhibit, you can play Zork. (You can play a lot of things.) In case you were wondering... nope, kids these days cannot play Zork.

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I've always been the kind of person who finishes slides right before the event... Maybe right before the talk. But dang, if you're doing talks about AI, you pretty much /have/ to be that person now.

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Bonus reading list for folks t my Women+ in Open Source talk (or anyone else wandering by who needs a new book!)" - The Computer Boys Take Over (Nathan Ensmenger) - Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England (Judith Bennett) - The Last Secret Agent (Pippa Latour) 🧵

Next on the list of AI-slop annoyances: When I travel or will need to say a name or a place in a language I don't speak, I try to find a video to hear a native speaker (or at least someone knowledgeable!) so I say it right. A sea of unexamined AI-generated videos is making this increasingly hard.

The best thing about the internet is (nearly) free access to endless quantities of information about anything I could possibly want to learn about. The worst thing about the internet is that I do not have enough lifetimes for every rabbit hole that catches my eye.

I learned yesterday that Ghostbusters in French is SOS Fantômes, which is funny enough, but Frozen Empire is La Menace de Glace, which is just what we call January/February in North Carolina.

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IMO it is embarrassing in 2026 for a tech story to put "open source" in scare quotes and equate it with free-of-cost. At least the tools actually are open source licensed. From the NYT:

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Can you imagine the amount of time that has collectively been wasted arguing about what platform to use based largely on personal preferences? Here's the new rule: The person who schedules the meeting gets to pick the platform. The person who starts the shared doc gets to pick the platform.

Pennsylvania is the state where the most objects are dropped for New Year's Eve, including a crayon, Pac-Man, a 100-pound stick of bologna, a pair of yellow pants,a rhombicuboctahedron, and a 400-pound Peep. If you can still say "rhombicuboctahedron" at 12:05, you can have another drink.

OK, KitchenAid. It's one thing to not have phone or chat support during the days/hours listed on your website. It's another to make me go through the whole phone tree of describing what I need only to end with "sorry, you've called outside of business hours" and hang up.