Another idiot with a trillion souls in his back pocket.

Ever since I started this blog, I’ve had in mind to devote a post to the relationship between the strong theory of vau-calculus and the no-go theorem of Mitchell Wand’s 1998 paper The Theory of Fexprs is Trivial.

Not super invested in use case, but this is a nice demonstration of circumventing a no-go theorem and operational semantics.

In computer science, Scott encoding is a way to represent (recursive) data types in the lambda calculus. Church encoding performs a similar function. The data and operators form a mathematical structure which is embedded in the lambda calculus.

because: https://fexpr.blogspot.com/2013/07/explicit-evaluation.html

Problem-solving isn’t always straight forward.

Lots of discussion on Lobsters on how both sides of the analogy are flawed, but I still think there’s a kernel of truth.

via: https://lobste.rs/s/bibyfi/why_developers_question_everything

Progressive disclosure is an interaction design pattern used to make applications easier to learn and less error-prone. It does so by deferring some advanced or rarely-used features to a secondary screen and designing workflows where information is revealed when it becomes relevant to the current task.

I feel like I use this philosophy a lot in my pedagogy and teaching: show only 2;#5 is necessary.

via: https://graic.net/p/left-to-right-programming

Programs should be valid as they are typed.

via: https://lobste.rs/s/ik0pjv/left_right_programming

Hardcoded credentials, pointless encryption, and generous APIs exposed details of every employee and made it possible to break into internal websites.

via: https://lobste.rs/s/6cls8e/intel_outside_hacking_every_intel

There are endless debates online about Rust vs. Zig, this post explores a side of the argument I don’t think is mentioned enough.

The whole point of Rust is to use the borrow checker, but when you frequently need to do something the borrow checker doesn’t like… should you really be using the language?

Nice image corrupter. Works best with low-to-medium resolution JPEGs and GIFs.

I wanted an integrated, minimal-faff PPE setup with ear protection, eye impact protection, and respiratory protection that I could use for woodworking while wearing my regular eyeglasses. So I paired a 3M Versaflo helmet ($225) with $50 worth of stuff from AliExpress and a bit of 3d-printing

In every team and organization important decisions need to be made related to goals, strategy, and allocation of resources. When decisions are announced people make evaluations of the fairness of the decision based on two aspects. First, the outcome of the decision (distributive justice) and second, the process by which the decision was made (procedural justice).

The framework of distributive and procedural justice, apparently due to Tom R. Tyler, seems to be quite useful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_R._Tyler

PDF version: https://bpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.mit.edu/dist/3/652/files/2020/06/Sharing-Difficult-Decisions-.pdf

AI isn’t just impacting how we write — it’s changing how we speak and interact with others. And there’s only more to come.

via: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/08/ai-mass-delusion-event/683909/

Scientific paradigms and religions reframed in the language of memetics.

TL;DR: I wrote a Neovim plugin in Lua that serves HTTP requests from open buffers. It has no external dependencies, it has first-class support for serving content in Djot, and it is faster than Nginx so it won’t be a performance bottleneck behind a reverse proxy. What’s not to like?

via: https://lobste.rs/s/l5qpv2/this_website_is_served_from_nine_neovim

Indeed, it seems that one of the many offerings of generative AI is a kind of psychosis-as-a-service. If you are genuinely AGI-pilled—a term for those who believe that machine-born superintelligence is coming, and soon—the rational response probably involves some combination of building a bunker, quitting your job, and joining the cause. […] It’s hard to care about tariffs or authoritarian encroachment or getting a degree if you believe that the world as we know it is about to change forever.

via: https://lobste.rs/s/y7gw78/ai_is_mass_delusion_event

mac devs on twitter be like “i made an app that makes your video files smaller without any quality loss”

and then its just a $20/mo ffmpeg wrapper with a promo video like this

So I gradually accumulate evidence, fodder for my intuition, and over years and even decades my intuition slowly learns to recognize rhymes, and starts answering me back with insights — into the rhyming structure of the various subjects of study, hence the blog title. And the insights more or less gather dust, in my files or even just in my head.