Technically, every spider is an octopus

Git is the ANSI C of version control. It is flexible and has low overhead but to get most things done, you need to manage raw pointers. CVS is BCPL. It works if everything you do fits neatly into a one-dimensional array. #jj-vcs is … I’m not sure?

Ways to prove you’re human: iNVERT THE CASE OF YOUR SENTENCES. Add em-dash in the wrong—places. {Use} {more} {curly} {braces.} Replace punctuation with smiley faces🙂

When writing prose, it makes sense to move around in the file character-by-character. But when reading, it is nice to move sentence-by-sentence. I wrote a little #Emacs minor mode to do that: github.com/gn0/sigh-mode

CLI tool to check if an executable uses your CPU's rare extension sets. Think AVX-512. Rough around the edges but it works, for now only on Linux: github.com/gn0/lsx86fea...

The first 10 prime numbers in R, calculated with a regular expression: > Filter(function(x) !grepl("^.?$|^(..+?)\\1+$", rep(".", x) |> paste(collapse = "")), 1:30) [1] 2 3 5 7 11 13 17 19 23 29 Totally straightforward.

🚨New paper alert!🚨 How do different disciplines use statistical software? We looked at 10,000 papers. We all know a lot of economists use Stata and a lot of statisticians use R. But...

The realization that rational numbers aren’t rational because “it’s only rational to model fractions as ratios of integers” but because they are ratios of integers Why they are called racionális számok in Hungarian when they could be arányos számok is a mystery

Sway is great but this is the time when I really wish that it was written in Rust or Go instead of C.

On why Go instead of C#: “… the TypeScript to Go move was far more automatable and more one-to-one in its mapping. Our existing codebase is all functions and data structures - no classes. Idiomatic Go looked just like our existing codebase …” github.com/microsoft/ty...

It seems that Guido developed Python 1.0 on an SGI workstation. Honorable mentions to Linux and, since it's Jan 1994, 386BSD, as desirable porting targets. Around this time, software developed on expensive workstations was becoming accessible to the broader public. ftp.ntua.gr/mirror/pytho...

When two dogs meet, do they say to each other, “I’ve smelled a lot about you?”

7,000+ people being forced into working at scam call centers is a huge number www.npr.org/2025/02/27/n...

And here’s Linus weighing in on the Rust/DMA kerfuffle too: lore.kernel.org/rust-for-lin...

Hello world in 12 bytes of tail code: $ cat a.tail #!/usr/bin/tail -1 hello world $ ./a.tail hello world $ But it’s wasteful because it uses an entire byte to represent just one letter.

Dwitter is like Twitter but your 140 character message is a JavaScript function body that draws an animation in your browser. Instead of likes, it has awesomes because of course it does: www.dwitter.net/top/month

Unusual life hack: making Vim emulate Emacs. Saving files in insert mode by pressing ^X^S and replaying macros by pressing F4 are creature comforts of the day.

This is only partially true any more blog.cloudflare.com/harnessing-o...

What you would see if Andromeda was brighter in the night sky