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.
:: journal :: 2026
short-form posts, dated.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?
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 (?).