Posts

One of the cooler things about working in a firm founded and run by a lot of dyed-in-the-wool Linux hackers like my current place is that there is a lot of Bash lying around, accumulated over a good 25 years or so. For all their faults, pure shell solutions still set the silver standard for programs which appear almost entirely immune to bit rot. But you know what? So does vanilla PHP. That pink stuff that was made from the ground up to get you from zero to working dynamic web page as fast as possible. ...

I am, emphatically, not the language learning type. I’ve done enough of it over my life to know this. It’s certainly one of the better hobbies out there: You can do it for free (in principle), you can sink as many hours as you care to into it, and if you get good enough at it you get to reap some unique cultural and economic1 benefits. But there’s a reason I picked up Python when 14 year old me decided he wanted to get ahead in life instead of (say) German. ...

I Robert Anton Wilson was, is, and always will be a fascinating and hiliarious writer to me. I first read The Illuminatus! Trilogy when I was 13, and while it was coincident with a total and suffocating blackout of meaning, I no longer think reading it actually caused that to happen in any significant sense. Au contraire: Teen me found refuge in his absurdity - it felt bedrock nihilstic, sure, but a far more artfully and deeply buried nihilism than I was able to find elsewhere at the time. (My words, not his. RAW wouldn’t describe himself as anywhere close to a nihilist. I think the glove fits.) ...

Imagine you had the Most Complicated Program On Earth (MCPOE), with 1,000,000 dependencies. Every dependency must be build correctly exactly right or the MCPOE will fail to compile. MCPOE’s 10x dev team chose their packages so that each dependency has only a 1/1,000,000 chance of having something go wrong when you’re installing them - maybe a whitespace character snuck into the wrong build script, maybe solar wind hit the build computer. What are the chances that you will install MCPOE correctly? ...

The law of diminishing returns needs no introduction. Your second slice of pizza is less satisfying than your first. Your second million dollars is less valuable to you, personally. If you think econ 101 has any life wisdom to impart, it deserves being elevated to the status of “life heuristic” - especially because, unlike some other concepts in econ 101 (comparative advantage anyone?) it feels true in a boring way, not in an actively counterintuitive way. ...

In order to learn a word, we need to come across it several times. It seems that the minimum amount of times we need to meet a word is somehwere around 7 or 8 meetings, but it's very hard to put a figure on it. -- Paul Nation, [2020 Victorial University of Wellington](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlJj8vpJxfE) He’s right, but that never stopped me. I say 10 sentences in a specific practice: When you come across a word you don’t know enough times for it to bother you, ...

Here’s a secret. If you have Vagrant and VirtualBox installed, and your colleague does too, then you can both bring up an near-totally identical blank slate Debian 12 Linux VM by running 1 2 3 4 5 6 mkdir tutorial/ cd tutorial/ vagrant init debian/bookworm64 vagrant up vagrant ssh . This works regardless of whether you or they are on Linux, Mac1, BSD, or even Windows. (Through the magic of aliasing, mkdir and cd even work in PowerShell.) ...

I’ve been on vacation this week, and part of what I’ve been up to is fixing up the Selkouutiset Archive. Like most of my websites these days, SA is powered by Hugo, which means handling a lot of Markdown documents, which means I opted to use an intermediate Git repo as a submodule to actually store the custom-processed documents. After a few tweaks here and there, I found myself wanting to quickly flip through all of the Markdown documents I had generated for each news day. I wasn’t exactly sure what I was looking for, just that I would know it when I saw it. So: ...

1 wall "Hello, world!" will send a message that looks like 1 2 3 Broadcast message from root@localhost (pts/0) (Sat Feb 1 14:50:14 2024): Hello world! to every user currently logged in to the system. When might this be relevant? When you’re working in a small team, by remoting into custom hardware, and constantly reflashing the device, to give everyone a heads up, for instance: ...

Hyvää uuttaa vuottaa! As stated before, my TIL is up and running once more. Some things I’m going to be experimenting with this year: Self-hosted stuff, speficially on the Raspberry Pi. One of those fancy new split keyboards I keep hearing everyone talk about. Coding more, and thinking about coding less.