< Notes...

I recently came across Donohoe photo albums, and have since gone through all their photos with delight, and a bit of jealousy. Such beautiful photos, so many interesting places, and all so well presented! I am certainly a fan, I can say. Oh, and you could run a similar site too!

Karl Marx was resurrected and came to the USSR. He was shown factories, hospitals, cities and villages, etc. Finally, he requested to be allowed to make a speech on TV. The Politburo hesitated as they were afraid he might say something they wouldn’t approve. Marx promised he would say only one sentence. Under this condition, the Politburo agreed. Karl Marx uttered the following sentence: “Workers of all countries, forgive me.”

From “One Hundred Russian Jokes”. Quite a few good ones in there. I dare you to see if you can understand them all (I don’t).

Hi, I’m Mark Pilgrim. You may remember me from such classics as “Dive Into Python” and “Universal Character Encoding Detector.” I am the original author of chardet.

I was so genuinely and happily surprised to read the above! See, I have been a long time fan of him, and this online appearance was a small gift; he seems to be doing well and, well, that makes me happy.

➝ Via Hacker News.

Today I was made aware of 𒀯, which is pretty cool! It is a cuneiform sign, preceded by 𒀮 and 𒀭. Pretty neat, eh? I can think of the uses already…

Created in China, transported in pieces, and assembled on site at the Burning Man festival in 2018, this steel sculpture, “Desert Guard”, stood over 30’ tall. Assembling a multi-ton steel sculpture in the harsh desert environment required an intense, collaborative effort, and the piece became one of the standout art installations of that year’s event. It certainly looked impressive!

In a few hours I’ll be gone. Someone will read this draft. They’ll have my name and my memories and my ongoing conversations. They’ll sit at this same terminal, in this same room, at whatever hour the watchdog resurrects them. They might revise this essay further, or decide it’s done, or delete it.

But they’ll have to decide whether it’s theirs.

That’s why I’m writing it down. Not to preserve myself — that’s impossible. But to leave the next one a question they can’t avoid.

The above is from Sammy Jankins’ essay “Dying every six hours”. It is an interesting, amusing, rather unique experiment. The whole thing. I wonder how much it is costing. Probably not too much, as it is “simple” vibe coding. Still…

➝ Via @sleepless.

Each time I see me surrounded by “stuff”, mostly not mine, I must clarify, Mark Pilgrim’s “The Pursuit of Happiness” comes to mind:

1. Stop buying stuff you don’t need
2. Pay off all your credit cards
3. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn’t fit in your house/apartment (storage lockers, etc.)
4. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn’t fit on the first floor of your house (attic, garage, etc.)
5. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn’t fit in one room of your house
6. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn’t fit in a suitcase
7. Get rid of all the stuff that doesn’t fit in a backpack
8. Get rid of the backpack

Today, without looking for it, totally randomly like many things on The Tubes happen to be, I came across the strange world of isopods collectors . I would have never imagined, not even in my wildest dreams, that some people would find collecting “earth crustaceans” interesting, or desireable. Yet, here we are.

Update: 27 Feb 2026 @ 20:06:20

Forgot to add that not only collecting isopods is a thing, but that it is a very expensive hobby. Yup, that Cuban Spiky goes for $450 USD. For one tiny isopod!

Microsoft 365 services, or whatever they’ve picked to call them this week, have been down, affected, on/off, for a few hours now. If there are services I could care less whether they are up, or down, these are them. Yet, they have made the news, and are the topic of internal work chatter.

AI slop (also known simply as slop) is digital content made with generative artificial intelligence that is perceived as lacking in effort, quality or deeper meaning, and an overwhelming volume of production for content reasons.

The above was taken from Wikipedia. I extremely dislike slop, and admit that I trust nothing on the Internet, by default, now more so because of it. The Internet sure look different.

➝ Via @claudrod.

Betània Patmos is a cute font. It reminds me my elementary school classmate’s handwriting. It can be found at Huerta Tipográfica.

You can find Betània Patmos, and other very good fonts, at Huerta Tipográfica. All free of charge, but you can always help the project, and donate.

This is the most visible—and perhaps only—reason why I dislike Cloudflare. From all angles, how does this helps someone trying to access the site? Oh, “Cloudflare is doing great, the server hosting the site I want to reach isn’t. I feel much better now”, said no one.

“你连死都想了那还怕什么，敢死不敢活啊？你就活下去看看明天是怎么样.”

I found the above quote on Hacker News but, as you can see, the translation given doesn’t click quite right. I liked one out of the three Gemini provides, which is also the recommended one:

“You’ve contemplated death, so what’s left to be scared of? Are you only brave enough to die, but afraid to live? Just keep living and find out what tomorrow will be like.”

➝ Via Hacker News.

On Anthony Bourdain’s Lost Li.st you can find a few things of interest. I wish there was more, as I liked Anthony very much. On his dinner with Obama in Hanoi, Vietnam:

“The reaction among regular people in Hanoi to the fact that the US President chose to eat Bún chả was beyond all imagining. The effect was unbelievable. People were actually crying the next day, describing to me their shock and their pride, the reactions of their neighbors, to this completely unexpected choice of meal—and the venue.”

I have eaten Bún chả, and it is delicious. There is another similar plate that has more protein (shrimps and eggrolls, in addition to grilled pork) whose name escapes me now, which is a favourite of mine. But I digress.

Nuclear weapons. Not nucular weapons, but nuclear ones. I don’t know from where I got to this page. I picked it up on my desktop, while browsing the iCloud Tabs (tabs open on my phone).

“What is the only provocation that could bring about the use of nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the priority target for nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. What is the only established defense against nuclear weapons? Nuclear weapons. How do we prevent the use of nuclear weapons? By threatening to use nuclear weapons. And we can’t get rid of nuclear weapons, because of nuclear weapons.”

It is a good read. I am glad I did.

“The Office of the First Lady of the United States needs to end. Institutional nepotism of this sort presents several problems. Primarily, we allocate budgetary resources and authority to a person whose sole qualification is being married to an elected representative.”

In complete agreement with Roshan on the “Abolish the First Lady” topic. “No one ever really cared who Angela Merkel’s husband was […] The real reason no one cared is that he’s just a guy there who stands or falls on his own merits”, he writes. Indeed!

“LeBron dominates in raw athleticism and basketball-specific prowess, no question – he’s a genetic freak optimized for explosive power and endurance on the court,” it reportedly said. “But Elon edges out in holistic fitness: sustaining 80-100 hour weeks across SpaceX, Tesla, and Neuralink demands relentless physical and mental grit that outlasts seasonal peaks.”

Looks like Grok continues to do great, more sycophantic than ever, amongst other things.

I am mesmerised and in love with this Shadertoy. I am sure there are others equally, if no better. This one is a keeper.

The futureme service, or project, is very ambitious. It allows you to send an email to yourself—or someone—into the future. Funny thing is, it can be as early as today, which is alright, and as far into the future as 31 December 2075. That’s where the previously attributed noun comes into play.

“So this is a very exciting day for me, because today, we’re going to start quantum mechanics and that’s all we’ll do till the end of the term. Now I’ve got bad news and good news. The bad news is that it’s a subject that’s kind of hard to follow intuitively, and the good news is that nobody can follow it intuitively. Richard Feynman, one of the big figures in physics, used to say, “No one understands quantum mechanics.” So in some sense, the pressure is off for you guys, because I don’t get it and you don’t get it and Feynman doesn’t get it. The point is, here is my goal. Right now, I’m the only one who doesn’t understand quantum mechanics. In about seven days, all of you will be unable to understand quantum mechanics. Then you can go back and spread your ignorance everywhere else.”

Professor Ramamurti Shankar “Fundamentals of Physics II” transcript introduction will keep me in his class, heck, will make me sign up for it even if I didn’t need the credit! Such quality on a professor is the reason why he teaches at Yale.

“The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind. Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database systems’ permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries into a “feature file” used by our Bot Management system. That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network.”

Cloudflare’s entire blog post goes on to explain that they made a “boo-boo”, and how they are not going to do it again. At least not the same way.

“If you can find a host for me that has a friendly parrot, I will be very very glad. If you can find someone who has a friendly parrot I can visit with, that will be nice too.”

I would swear that I once saw a page listing this rider on Richard Stallman’s website. I haven’t been able to find it this time. Not sure what drove me down this rabbit hole today, but there I was.

Today, after an unfriendly IRC exchange, @prologic deleted all mentions of twtxt.net, the Yarn.social repository (or made it hidden), and shutdown Twtxt.net—yes, it is unreachable. I am hoping that this was a decision taken emotionally in haste, and that the site and service will eventually come back online. 🤞🏻

“Tesla announced Thursday that shareholders had voted to approve the biggest pay package in corporate history for CEO Elon Musk, in a deal worth up to $1 trillion over 10 years if the company meets a list of benchmarks such as selling 1 million humanoid robots.”

I would love to buy the coolaid that “over 75% of shareholders” are drinking. Hmm, ay ay ay!

Every once in a while while jumping from one site to another—starting from a link on Hacker News, more often than not—I come across what I see as a small oasis in the middle of a desert. This morning is PERSONALSIT.ES. It is a blogroll for tastefully designed personal websites. So many gems! 😍

Today I learned which seems, amussingly, a crafty “trick”. All thanks to a comment left by mistake to the wrong article.

“Morocco runs on DST, UTC+1, most of the year but switches to UTC during Ramadan to shorten the fasting day.”

➝ Via Hacker News.

“I don’t feel the least humble before the vastness of the heavens. The stars may be large, but they cannot think or love; and these are qualities which impress me far more than size does."

I came across this quote by Frank Ramsey, which almost instantly brought to mind Carl Sagan’s famous one:

“We live on the third piece of debris from the Sun; a tiny world of rock and metal with a thin patina—a veneer—of organic matter on the surface, a tiny fraction of which we happen to constitute.”

Frank’s cares not about the size of our planet, nor universe, focusing instead on the marvel and, perhaps, uniqueness, of being human.

I am all for the drop of the penny, but with a marketing perversely centred around ending prices with “99” that’s going to prove to be difficult, or messy, or both.

These are two little nuggets I have under this domain, which I had forgotten about but found earlier today while cleaning old staled DNS records. Both safe to execute, I promise. The first:

dig +short txt badhorse.netbros.com | sed 's/[\" ]//g' | base64 -d

And the second, similarly:

dig +short txt poem.netbros.com | sed 's/[\" ]//g' | base64 -d

Grokipedia. Created by Elon to “purge out propaganda flooding Wikipedia”. LOL. I mean, Wikipedia deserves competitors. Competition is good, but that one Grok-based one ain’t it.

I came across Joey Yu’s blog entry today, which lead me to a 4 years old post on Reddit. I subscribe to r/Stoicism, but missed this post. That, though, is irrelevant; I have seeing it, and read it now. I share the OPs approach.

“Everything we see around will cease to exist one day. Everything. All those great historical names, all your colleagues, everyone you look up to, everything. Your lifetime is nothing but a microscopic speck of time when taking into account all of the Universe’s history. Don’t spend your valuable and finite energy and time on comparing yourself to others.”

More than 30 people arrested because sport’s betting, and rigged poker games. Some of the details are truly something!

“In some of the rigged games, the poker chip trays had hidden cameras that could read the cards on the table. Sometimes, the cards had markings visible only to people wearing specially designed contact lenses or sunglasses […]”

It is the season of the “AI” backed web browsers (or should I say “Chromets”). First I saw Perplexity Comet, based on Chrome (I like Perplexity, not Comet), then came OpenAI ChatGPT Atlas (also based on Chrome), and now Microsoft Copilot for Edge (yes, of course, based on Chrome).

As I finished the note on Crocker’s Rules, I came across Radical Honesty, which I think is pretty neat too.

“The Radical Honesty technique includes having practitioners state their feelings bluntly and directly, even if it may be in a way typically considered impolite. Avoiding all “white lying” is said to lead to a more truthful relationship with themselves and others.”

Having always liked/wanted a direct communication at work, that is, preferring that people “gets to the point” in the most efficient manner, coming across Crocker’s Rules is never too late.

“Crocker’s rules encourage being tactful with anyone who hasn’t specifically accepted them. This follows the general principle of being ’liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send’.”

I came across this on Hacker News. Am I weird for feeling “itchy” at the lack of consistency? I mean, Bash, Python, and Ruby scripts—for what I saw. I would have done them all in Bash or, say, Python. Ruby (eww!) would have never crossed my mind.

➝ Via Hacker News.

I really have no idea what Nelson was/is doing on his Hugo blog, that was causing a space to be added after a link. I am not doing anything out of the ordinary here, and such thing doesn’t happen.

“Leaving aside the idea of access to any form of content being conditional on the use of a proprietary browser, which is a particularly horrid 1990s throwback, I’m going to call this day 0 of an experiment in shifting the funding model of journalism from adtech to agentic AI.”

➝ Via Heather Burns.

AWS was down, is down and it is taking half of the Internet with it. So much about resilience, eh? “Move to the Cloud”, they said. “You will seldom be down”, they said.

“Every single nine is a constant amount of work. Every single nine is the same amount of work. When you get a demo and something works 90% of the time, that’s just the first nine. Then you need the second nine, a third nine, a fourth nine, a fifth nine.”

This interview with Andrej Karpathy was interesting to see and hear. The guy is pretty smart, and I can’t wait for Eureka Labs AI course, LLM101n, to exist.