:: journal :: 2026

I would like to dedicate today's journal note to Meta Platforms, Inc., that seems to have learned just last week how to implement rate limits in their shitty AI scrapers.

I bought a dot matrix printer.

Peer review basically means: Government by the scientists, of the scientists, for the scientists. [...]

My ThinkPad keyboard is broken again and I have to pay a ridiculous amount of money for a spare part.

I do not know which makes a man more conservative -- to know nothing but the present, or nothing but the past.

-- J. M. Keynes

The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.

-- A. MacKay

Happy Pride!

For my part I think that capitalism, wisely managed, can probably be made more efficient for attaining economic ends than any alternative system yet in sight, but that in itself it is in many ways extremely objectionable.

If farming were to be organised like the stock market, a farmer would sell his farm in the morning when it was raining, only to buy it back in the afternoon when the sun came out.

It is impossible to escape the impression that people commonly use false standards of measurement — that they seek power, success and wealth for themselves and admire them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life.

-- "Civilization and Its Discontents", Sigmund Freud

Thus we may have knowledge of the past but cannot control it; we may control the future but have no knowledge of it.

-- Claude E. Shannon

Wer sich aber zum Wurm macht, kann nachher nicht klagen, dass er mit Füßen getreten wird.

-- Die Metaphysik der Sitten (1797)

"I proclaim that justice is nothing else than the interest of the stronger. [...] And the different forms of government make laws democratical, aristocratical, tyrannical, with a view to their several interests; and these laws, which are made by them for their own interests, are the justice which they deliver to their subjects, and him who transgresses them they punish as a breaker of the law, and unjust. And that is what I mean when I say that in all states there is the same principle of justice, which is the interest of the government; and as the government must be supposed to have power, the only reasonable conclusion is, that everywhere there is one principle of justice, which is the interest of the stronger."

-- Plato, The Republic

I want to see my dad again, but I will not have a chance for a two week holiday anytime soon. We will start playing online chess together.

Failure possesses a strange beauty: despite its ontological negativity, it compels us toward growth and knowledge. I fail many times, but each failure leaves me altered; I do not return to the same mistake as the same person.

Daniel Bernstein:

I thank God for not making me a computer scientist.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable.

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?

A trick question is designed to trick, not test your knowledge.

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 (?).