May 5, 2026
SNAFU
I always thought “snafu” was just a fun made up word. It’s actually an acronym: Situation Normal: All Fucked Up. The term originated from the US Army during World War II to describe bureaucratic inefficiency.
I always thought “snafu” was just a fun made up word. It’s actually an acronym: Situation Normal: All Fucked Up. The term originated from the US Army during World War II to describe bureaucratic inefficiency.
in human–computer interaction, WIMP stands for “windows, icons, menus, pointer,” describing the classic desktop style of user interface. It was first developed at Xerox PARC and later popularized by the Apple Macintosh, which added things like the menu bar and more advanced window management. WIMP interfaces standardize how programs receive input, making it easier for users to transfer skills between applications. Learn more
The Pygmalion effect is the idea that people perform better when others expect more of them, and worse when expectations are low, because expectations subtly change how they are treated and how they see themselves.
A TOCTOU (Time-of-Check to Time-of-Use) race condition is a software vulnerability occurring when a program checks a resource's state (e.g., file existence) but the resource changes before it is used. Attackers exploit this tiny timing gap to manipulate the resource, causing unauthorized actions or privilege escalation.
A Veblen good is a type of luxury good where demand increases as the price increases, contradicting the law of supply and demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. Higher prices make them desirable as a status symbol, like expensive watches and cars.
Not all luxury goods are Veblen goods. Some luxury items do in fact provide a premium experience or feature. Veblen goods typically are purchased as a sign that someone can afford to purchase it.
Veblen goods are named after American economist Thorstein Veblen who first wrote about the phenomenon.
The phrase was coined by Western observers in the 1940s to describe religious movements in Melanesia that formed after contact with Allied forces in World War II. Indigenous people saw large amounts of manufactured goods (“cargo”) arrive via military logistics, and after the troops left they built symbolic airstrips, mock planes, and other rituals in hopes of attracting similar cargo again.
The label was applied by outsiders, not by the communities themselves, and later broadened metaphorically (e.g., Feynman’s “cargo cult science”) to describe imitating form without understanding substance.
Everyone knows ⌘⇧3 for taking screenshots on a Mac, or ⌘⇧4 for screenshotting a region. But I never thought to ask: what happened to ⌘⇧1 or ⌘⇧2? Turns out: they were originally designed for ejecting floppy disks. I guess people did a lot of ejecting back in the day.
I’ve since remapped ⌘⇧1 with Cleanshot to take OCR screenshots (copy and text in the image directly to my keyboard, rather than saving the image directly).
I learned this computer fun fact, and many others, from Marcin Wichary’s delightful website and article that everyone should subscribe to.
cd - takes you back to your previous directory, like a navigation undo in the terminal.
~/projects $ cd /etc
/etc $ cd -
~/projects $No more spamming cd .. or retyping full paths.
Same pattern works with git checkout -—switches to your previous branch.
SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) lets a CPU do the same math on multiple numbers at once. If you have a list of 1,000 numbers and need to double each one, a normal CPU does it one at a time. SIMD does 4 or 8 at a time in a single step.
Where it matters: video codecs, game engines, ML inference, image processing—bulk numeric work on uniform data. Libraries like numpy and ffmpeg use SIMD under the hood.
Why not use it everywhere?
if statementsYou benefit from SIMD without touching it. It's plumbing—good to know it exists, rarely something you write yourself.
Sumo oranges (dekopon) are a Japanese cultivar from 1972—a cross between kiyomi tangor and ponkan mandarin. The distinctive bump was initially considered ugly and they flopped commercially for two decades. In the late 90s, a growers' cooperative figured out a curing process that ensured consistent sweetness.
The easy peel trait is genetic. The albedo (white pith) naturally separates from the flesh, so the rind practically falls off. The segment membranes are also thinner than most mandarins—less fiber, more juice release.
Sumo oranges arrived in the US in 2011, marketed as "Sumo Citrus" by a California grower who licensed the cultivar. They have a short season (January–April), are usually hand-harvested, individually wrapped, fragile, and don’t ship well—hence, $3-4 per fruit.