It’s Friday the 13th and I’ve just been lorem ipsum’d in the face. I’ve always preferred the textual rickroll while researching (quick & painless gotcha). Since 2023, I’ve mostly stopped reading articles.

The time saving trick now is to look at title dissimilarities and speed-read lightly. The new lorem ipsum is a thick labyrinth of maze like semantics that looks amazing, says nothing and something, and may violate simple laws of physics.

There are mistakes in places where they shouldn’t be and unfortunately I can’t play industrial scale spot the difference.

I’ve been slowly trying to fix one of my aggregators. I ended up discovering (quite happily) that Saint Lucia eventually caught up, and that there’s a neat book written about that scheme.

Now I’m tempted to compare notes with the hyperreality (for science). Anytime I mistakenly read into stuff, the situations are even more absurd than I remember. Getting scammed enough times is a viable short cut to Kant’s enlightenment (or something).

I actually peeked at that social media data. And it’s surprisingly good. I’m still questioning if it’s worth tracking the election this time round (no guarantees). The 2026 election doesn’t feel like it’ll be as interesting as 2021 and the hard part is researching candidates.

It turns out that I actually saved my copy of 2021 polling data, but of course the incumbents redrew the boundaries to make it extra fun.

Bonus: I didn’t notice before, but there’s also data on generative AI use worldwide and locally.

I came across some violently classical programming humor. Is HTML still even a pen knife in the hand?

OWASP’s cheat sheets are really good for quickly learning about web security gotchas. The load averages here appear nominal, so perhaps my servers haven’t been disembodied just yet.

I saw this riddle in a local newspaper the other day:

‘The visitors had missed their turn, doubled back, but “forgot” to stay on the right side of the road.’

Anyone speaking in writing has my ultimate props.

The happy new year is here. I was conversing offline with individuals about courses a little ways back in time. And, if it’s any solace to anyone online deathly afraid of the future, keep reading?

Fun fact: Many seemingly think that I’ve used generative models to build this inert static site (hoho). How would you know the difference? And can you fully trust it?

The end of the year is around the corner. There are varied spins on “speak of the devil”. I was shown a really neat one some time ago;

“Talk of an angel and you hear his wings.”

There’s a fun and purposively perplexing novel called “His Master’s Voice”. Inside, it invents the term circular irony.

Fuzzy search is spooktastic. I’m sometimes asked, but I know nothing of AI generally. I don’t read much tech news these days, but I do speed-read headlines and peek in occasionally.

If anyone’s getting into nginx look into nginxinc/crossplane. That parser is particularly good if you’re trying to analyze or do sophisticated stuff with a huge nginx.conf. I have this one installed in my playground, here’s a quick and dirty demo:

There are a collection of poems called The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. I saw references to one of its four liners in a random video clip of a show. That’s unexpected.

Oh, threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise!
One thing at least is certain–This Life flies;
One thing is certain and the rest is Lies;
The Flower that once has blown for ever dies.

The translation on the third line is especially spiffy, and the fourth, sufficiently crafty (at least in my opinion).