I'm turning 30 so naturally I'm switching to OpenBSD

I’m kidding, I’m switching to OpenBSD because I like security or code quality or something. It’s totally not because the inexorable march of aging is starting to show its effects on my ability to down necessary-evil trivia like me and my friends used to down forties in the Ahhhnald after dark, and so I’d like to settle down with a software ecosystem I can study in real depth once without feeling like 20% of what I absorb in year X will be deprecated by year X+10....

May 4, 2024

Language learning treated as breadth-first search

I am, emphatically, not the language learning type. I’ve done enough of it over my life to know this. It’s certainly one of the better hobbies out there: You can do it for free (in principle), you can sink as many hours as you care to into it, and if you get good enough at it you get to reap some unique cultural and economic1 benefits. But there’s a reason I picked up Python when 14 year old me decided he wanted to get ahead in life instead of (say) German....

April 22, 2024