Curated river of news
Latest posts from blogs I follow
Introduction If you’ve ever tried to write your own calculator, you’ve probably needed a way to convert mathematical expressions written in the usual infix notation into Reverse Polish Notation (RPN). This post walks through that conversion using the classic shunting-yard ...
Update (2026): This was the first 'real article' I ever wrote. It actually dates back to before 2010, though I didn't publish it until later. I’ve made a few tweaks here and there, but the original 'old code' remains. Please ...
My first blog post, in which I am writing Hello World!. #include int main() { long long h = 0x0A646C726F57206FLL; long long e = 0x6C6C6548; printf("%.4s%s", (char*)&e, (char*)&h); return 0; }
A lot of the SVG filter primitive content out there is some really rad, deep-dive type content (I’ll link some of these at the end!), so I reckoned it might be nice to do a quick write-up on some effects ...
I have this weird relationship with Incredible Amounts Of Grief where, like, I’ve literally been there — I know there’s nothing to say, and nothing will heal but time. When The Bad Thing™ happened, I felt angry so often with ...
Let me present my credentials. I am sick as fuck. Disabled, in fact. I have schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type, with a side of PTSD. I have watched an angel descend from the sky and land in front of a neighbor's ...
I have been writing "the algorithm eats X" for the better part of a year now. It ate virtue. It ate language, love, democracy, reality, and time. Eventually it ate itself. The whole series is a catalog of appetite, and ...
This is the second essay in what is apparently becoming a series. In Mental Health (for Humans) I presented my credentials: sick as fuck, disabled in fact, ten-plus years inside the system. That essay argued that the system's core abstractions ...
In October 2018 I released a web framework called Responder, and to understand why it exists you have to remember what the Python web felt like that year, because the web it was born into no longer exists. It was ...
The first DSM shipped in 1952. It was a spiral-bound thing of about 130 pages describing roughly a hundred disorders. The current release runs just under a thousand pages and describes around three hundred. Between those two artifacts sit five ...
Sometimes there is handwriting on the floor. Sometimes there are printed pages on the walls, set like scripture, type where no type is. This has been true for years. It comes in waves, usually when stress is high or the ...
Some of my own essays this year have made me cry. That's not remarkable; writers cry at their own work all the time, usually at how bad it is. What's remarkable is when it happens. Not while typing a sentence. ...
This week I did something I'd been putting off for a long time. I reread MentalHealthError: an exception occurred, the essay where I told the internet I had bipolar disorder. A hundred and fifty thousand people read it the first ...
Rhyme is a fact about sound, not spelling. Blue rhymes with shoe and through and you, and not one of them is spelled like the others. Comb, bomb, and tomb all end in the same three letters and not one ...
There's an entry in my Obsidian daily notes from this April that I didn't think anyone would ever read, including me. It says: > Working on the vault today. Got a fancy new theme going, pretty good. Refactored the style ...
There's a genre now. You've seen it. A face fills the frame, the captions bounce along the bottom, and the voice says something like: five signs you might have ADHD. Or: things I didn't know were autism. Or the compound ...
There is a folder in my notes called System 777. It contains around two hundred files and a hundred and thirty thousand words: maps, dream logs, a glossary, a quest log, channeled writings preserved verbatim, and profiles of some forty-seven ...
Earlier this spring I wrote a few essays about PyTheory, the music theory library I was stuck on for five years and finally unstuck. The short version: it models tones, scales, chords, and fretboards in Python the way a musician ...
A changelog for a personal website is a strange genre. Nobody asked for release notes. There is no userbase waiting on a fix, unless you count me, and I already know what shipped. But this site is the closest thing ...
I almost didn't write this down, because the sentence sounds like a brag and it isn't one. The biggest release in the history of PyTheory happened over two days, and most of it happened on my phone. On vacation. With ...
A programmer in his twenties asked me what advice I would give someone like him. I said: focus on family more than code. I think it is the best advice I have. I also think I am close to the ...
There is a silent asterisk after the words music theory. You never see it printed, but it is always there, the way it hangs after the canon or the great novels. When someone says music theory they mean one specific ...
Some mornings I wake with the clear sense that I was just with someone, and I sit down to write it before it fades, and the words come out thinner than the thing. Not wrong, exactly. Just smaller. A pencil ...
Everyone has lost a dream to language. It is whole and certain for the first second after waking, and the moment you reach for a word to keep it, it begins to thin and shrink, until what you have on ...
For about fifteen years, my answer to a music theory question had the same shape: open another window. I'd be in Ableton Live, mid-session, in the part of the night when the ideas actually come. A clip would be sitting ...
yesterday: [[2026-02-25-notes]] [[the-wrath-to-come]] started [[the-wrath-to-come-pt-2]]
yesterday: [[2026-02-26-notes]] note on [[my-thoughts-on-beads]] Nexus post/page coming eventually [[for-my-own-sake-i-do-it]]
yesterday: [[2026-03-03-notes]] Happy Saturday, we're at the GWL and I figured I'd take a few minutes this morning to reflect on the last few weeks Wo
yesterday: [[2026-03-07-notes]] Back to normal life We're back from vacation, Florida was nice but a few thorns on the rose of vacation include: several da
yesterday: [[2026-03-22-notes]] Might've had a breakthrough with a data modeling issue at work today... If you want it make it so strikes again. I can'
yesterday: [[2026-03-27-notes]] tried to make a little progress on [[spring-cleaning-2026-homelab-edition]] Also having M.2 MiniMax do something about a consist
yesterday: [[2026-03-31-notes]] Reflection It's the middle of holy week and my note from yesterday feels like it was months ago... The days are getting lon
yesterday: [[2026-04-01-notes]] Good Friday It's Good Friday for the Christians in the world, a day named not for what happened but for a person. Jesus wen
yesterday: [[2026-04-03-notes]] [[easter-2026]] [[data-loading-is-a-huge-deal]] I have several competing streams of thought about Easter this year, I want to fo
yesterday: [[2026-04-05-notes]] PC Crash Desktop crashed days ago, apparently my primary drive has been going bad for a while and eventually it just died. live-
yesterday: [[ 2026-04-18-notes ]] [[work-compensation-note]]