Sunday, December 21, 2025

Anyone who has read Tolkien’s letters will know that he is at his funniest when filled with rage, and The Bovadium Fragments is a work brimming with Tolkien’s fury—specifically, ire over mankind’s obsession with motor vehicles. Tolkien’s anger is expressed through a playful satire told from the perspective of a group of future archaeologists who are studying the titular fragments, which tell of a civilization that asphyxiated itself on its own exhaust fumes. Tolkien’s fictional fragments use the language of ancient myth, reframing modern issues like traffic congestion and parking with a grandeur that highlights their total absurdity.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/isengard-in-oxford/


Sunday, December 14, 2025

"Uncleftish Beholding" is a short text by Poul Anderson (...) which is designed to illustrate what English might look like without its large number of words derived from languages such as French, Greek, and Latin, especially with regard to the proportion of scientific words with origins in those languages.

https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/1100/docs/uncleftish-beholding.html

The underlying kinds of stuff are the firststuffs, which link together in sundry ways to give rise to the rest. Formerly we knew of ninety-two firststuffs, from waterstuff, the lightest and barest, to ymirstuff, the heaviest. Now we have made more, such as aegirstuff and helstuff.

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding


Monday, December 1, 2025

This document is the result of a series of discussions, some online and some in person, held between Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin and John Ousterhout between September 2024 and February 2025

https://github.com/johnousterhout/aposd-vs-clean-code/blob/main/README.md


Tiger Style is a coding philosophy focused on safety, performance, and developer experience. Inspired by the practices of TigerBeetle, it focuses on building robust, efficient, and maintainable software through disciplined engineering.

https://tigerstyle.dev/ HN

edit: this seems to be a variation of the original source


advent_of_code 2025 is live! https://adventofcode.com/2025

i never managed to complete more than the first few before leisure time ran out and pre-christmas chores took over.


Tuesday, November 25, 2025

OOP-bashing seems fashionable nowadays. I decided to write this article after seeing two OOP-related articles on Lobsters in quick succession. I’m not interested in defending or attacking OOP, but I do want to throw in my two cents and offer a more nuanced view.

https://lesleylai.info/en/fifty_shades_of_oop/ HN

worth the read IMO


Sunday, November 23, 2025

on windows i'm running a triple monitor setup - center for the IDE, left for logs, debugging and documentation and right for communication (email, chat).

sometimes, when i play games i wish to turn off the peripheral monitors for better immersion; also my graphics card is probably happy having to render a few million pixels less.

usually, i just used the physical buttons to turn the monitors off, but after a defect i've had to get a new one that places its on/off switch at the back, which i can't easily reach.

nirsoft to the rescue: enable/disable or power on/off monitors over software with MultiMonitorTool

https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/multi_monitor_tool.html


Saturday, November 22, 2025

fun article about solving fizzbuzz with cosines by susam_pal: https://susam.net/fizz-buzz-with-cosines.html

then, in the hn comments, there's even more: vidrun's fizz buzz at aphyr.

PS: also in the comments - joel grus' FizzBuzz in tensorflow: https://joelgrus.com/2016/05/23/fizz-buzz-in-tensorflow/


Wednesday, November 12, 2025


archive