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Quoth “How to Become a Hacker”: 2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice. Creative brains are a valuable, limited resource. They shouldn't be wasted on re-inventing the wheel when there are so many fascinating new problems waiting out there. Much more at the original post, including preemptive rebuttals to what I’m about to describe. This post is entirely about cataloguing my own error. I took this maxim, perhaps, a little too close to heart when I was starting out as a software guy, 15-odd years ago. This is my apology to past me. Past me, I apologize. ...

Did you know Vim has a client-server model baked in? Of course it does. If you run 1 vim --servername LOVE , then in another terminal something like 1 vim --servername LOVE --remote-send "<Cmd>colorscheme peachpuff<CR>" , you’ll find your Vim terminal switch to the creamy default theme all true gangsters love - without you actually having to do anything. I frequently flip between a US- and Finnish-based keyboard while doing my language studies. I already had a tiny shell script in place which plays a seventh major chord every time they switch, courtesy of Sway WM: ...

It would have to be finstem, a simple command-line program I wrote to reduce Finnish words down to their root form. Finnish is a lot like Latin or Russian in that its words often become lumbering behemoths of rewritten consonants, suffixes upon suffixes, and this makes it hard to look up in a dictionary – that is, until you factor in its very regular orthography and the phenomenal efforts of the Finnish programming industry: finstem is basically a very specialized UI for the OpenOffice spell checker, and I have no shame in admitting that. ...

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.) ...