A handful of things that caught my attention this week.

1. Translations

When I was growing up, I read Asterix comics – in English – as I’m sure many of you did too. It was not lost on me that these were translated from the original French, and that those translations were pretty incredible. Not only did the stories come through, they were funny, and humour is not something that is easy to translate. I did a bit of research and discovered that these translations were originally done by the late Anthea Bell. I also learned that the Asterix comics have been translated to 127 languages and dialects.

So what made me think about that? Well, these two threads about Machine Translations and Large Language Models. At first glance it would seem obvious that LLMs should be great at translations. After all, it’s in the name. The reality seems to be that they are not, and the longer the text being translated, the worse the result. Depending on the import of what you are translating, you might not want to rely on these translations. A quick chat message to someone who speaks a language you don’t? Sure. Your Terms of Service or a contract with a client? Maybe make sure you QA those.

2. Docscribe

Docscribe is a tool to “Generate inline, YARD-style documentation comments for Ruby methods by analyzing your code’s AST”. If you’re writing a library or a Rubygem, this will give you a start on the documentation. It won’t write the docs for you, but it will generate the comments with method names, parameters, and types (when they can be inferred). Pretty neat.

3. Postgres Cleanup

This short thread in the r/rails shows a number of queries you can run on your Postgres database to find things like unused indexes and table bloat. Postgres maintains a bunch of metadata about its internal state that can be queried and used to perform maintenance operations on your database. Also mentioned in the thread is PgHero, which can be installed in your Rails app as an engine to give you these insights in a neat dashboard.

4. Slug Algorithm - Font Rendering on the GPU

Eric Lengyel developed the Slug Algorithm for rendering fonts directly from Bézier curves on the GPU in 2016, nearly a decade ago. Eric received a patent for the algorithm in 2019 and many major companies, including Blizzard, id Software and Adobe, license it. That patent would be valid until the year 2038 if it weren’t for the fact that he decided to “permanently and irrevocably dedicat[e]ing the Slug patent to the public domain” (March 17, 2026).

Well it didn’t take long for @xenobrain to announce on Discord that he had implemented the algorithm in DragonRuby. It’s an experiment, a curio. In his own words, the “real greatness will come later when we can implement this in shader code. Imagine a label primitive that is perfect at every size, infinitely rescalable in realtime.”

5. Phoenix Desert Dragons

The Phoenix Desert Dragons are a dragon boat racing team based here in Arizona. After placing first in their division at the recent AZDBA Festival on Tempe Town Lake, they qualified for the International Breast Cancer Paddling Commission festival in France in August 2026. And FASCINATION.works is now officially a sponsor for that trip. If you’d also like to sponsor this amazing group, use this link or reach out to me and I can put you in touch with someone.