:: journal :: 2026

Larry Wall on Lisp:

Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal with fingernail clippings mixed in.

The time allotted to us is far smaller than it seems. So do not depart too cleanly. Remain a while at the threshold, awkward and undecided. Leave some small part of yourself behind in my life, so that you may have a reason to return.

The deeper lesson of survivorship bias is that success is not merely to be studied from those who endured, but pursued by shaping oneself toward endurance.

Descartes to Mersenne, xii.1638:

[Descartes expresses several dissatisfactions with Fermat, summing up thus:] I have seen many of his writings, in which I have found two or three good things mixed in with many bad ones. Between ourselves, I think of them in the way Virgil thought of Ennius, when he extracted ·little bits of· gold from his works under the title The dung of Ennius [in the background of that slur is a Latin idiom, aurum e stercore = ‘gold from dung’]. But this is between ourselves, because I still want to be his ‘Yours faithfully’ if he wants that.

Criticising APL for its glyphs by newbies makes perfect sense.

I want to win the Pulitzer prize; but how, oh how, do I learn all of these letters of the alphabet?

Wherever life has placed you, do not mistake it for a waiting room. Do not pass through your college years as though they are merely a corridor to employment, nor through your solitude as though it is only the absence of love. The things that are meant to arrive will arrive in their season, and they may be good when they do.

But there is a particular sorrow in looking back and realizing that you abandoned whole years of your life because you were busy longing for a different one. To grow, to strive, to become more than you are... these are noble things. But do not neglect the present in the name of the future. The present is not an interruption of your life. It is the only place from which your life can be made.

It seems like every consumer trend is just briefly renting a piece of plastic on its journey from a suicide-net Xinjiang gigafactory to the local dump.

This morning's story: Tried to print 6 pages. The printer was very slow at ~1pg/min. 5 pages in, it printed a compatibility error. I downgraded the PDF version. Then it printed fine, but without minus signs. Then I tried to print bare PostScript, but the printer turned out to not support that.

Now that AI companies are enjoying their RAM/GPU/etc grab, it's important to point out that owning hardware gives you sovereignty: the best time to buy hardware was yesterday, the next best time is today.

I feel an unstoppable urge to make my website a bit more lively and 00's styled.

Placed #4 in the 4k Executable Graphics competition at Revision 2026.

fgetxattr(54321, NULL, NULL, 0); apparently crashes yesterday's 6.6.y lts kernel.

The only program that stands a chance of being correct is a remarkably short one.

Apparently FitGirl Repacks uses bzip3, so does CERN for their ROOT I/O (?).