FYI The word "setup" is not a verb. Neither is "login", or "backup", or "signin" or "checkout".

Hoping you enjoy my artisanal long division. All handcrafted, no calculators, computers or adding machines (apart from the 200,000,000,000 operations it took to render it on my iPad and the countless millions more to whiz it round the world to you.)

The US is unqualifiedly a shithole country of barbarians.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/08/hegseth-fort-hood-shooter-public-execution

It's cool that Amazon keep you updated as your stuff approaches but I live in an Internet black hole several miles across and I feel like I know what it's like to be a NASA engineer during reentry.

Is your repo a cassette tape where every edit requires a decision to wait minutes or risk losing your code? Did you actually put in the work to edit your code or just let algorithms like search and replace do your work for you? Was every fact you know about the system you use the product of hard won scavenging across the physical world or just the result of a subsecond Google? If not, don't you feel guilty about calling your project "retro"?

You have to check from time to time: is this the means or is this the end? And if it's someone else's end, know whose. And the answer may vary between people and over time and be a blend. And almost by definition you needn't all agree and that's OK.

Reading news stories over the last decade or so, from all over the political spectrum, there is one overwhelmingly consistent message about the US that really stands out:

The US is a desperately poor country and the only way to survive is for everyone to work harder, expect less, increase efficiency, direct everything towards producing the goods without which civilization will collapse, and make sure nobody undeserving ever takes advantage because in such a weak economy there is no excess and nothing to spare.

"Mark III: Can Man Build a Superman?"

(Aside: reading a lot of old articles about computing recently I find the use of the term "man" really grating. Not just because of the sexism (different time, yada yada), but also the grandiosity. It's also in the Xerox ad I recently posted.)

it's sad how humanity has lost the ability to write code to search for things. Whether it's Google, or Apple Music, or eBay, typing in exact substrings of the title of something is no longer guaranteed, or even likely, to find matching entries.

The thing that makes modern dimmers for lighting complicated is basically what Einstein got his Nobel prize for.

A propos of nothing: I often think of this work of art although I don't think it was on display last time I visited the Tate. It's a map of the US showing only the place names containing the word "Lost".

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/prendergast-lost-p78411

I regret not publishing more papers. I spotted my trick for computing Laplacians appearing in ML papers recently.

https://blog.sigfpe.com/2011/08/computing-errors-with-square-roots-of.html

This is actually how it is used - simulating stochastic processes such as diffusion where the infinitesimals are too large to discard.