Today I Learned

2026-09-12
The Internet Is Kind of a Predatory Cesspit Now

There's a bunch of absolutely banging quotes in this. I'm also apt to agree. The post itself claims to talk about the internet, but I don't see the line between internet and real life anymore. The mantra of the 2020s is, "If I conned you, that's because I'm smart." It's a pretty degenerate way to run a society. It's also a case of bad money driving out good. An economy run on deception doesn't seem stable in the long run, but it will produce enough jackpots to keep the illusion alive up until a few people own just about everything. At that point the poor masses no longer matter because markets only count ballots in your wallet.

You'd think you'd want something in your society to counter balance exponential runaways like this, but most people gave up on government and political power in the 70s and 80s, self-assured that individualism could solve all problems thanks to the boom in superhero narratives of the 40s.

2026-09-11
Lecture Friday: Solving the Right Problems for Engine Programmers

So many great takeaways in this. I spent a bunch of time "summarizing" for my post here but it piratically became a text transcript with different words. Just hit after hit.

2026-09-04
Lecture Friday: Fil-C: Garbage In, Memory Safety Out!

Yeah, this conference did not disappoint. This is huge! I run OpenBSD so I'm already totally fine to trade some performance for security. It's obviously not perfect (send patches), but this is one of the coolest projects I've seen in a long time. Like old school, you didn't think it was possible, well you're wrong because I did it.

It's not compiling the Linux kernel yet, but userland was covered for enough to do LibreOffice at least. Really exciting stuff for a spare time project. It'd be really cool if the Webkit, Firefox, or Chromium team took on the challenge of submitting patches to be able to compile those projects with Fil-C and have the first fully memory safe flagship browser (even if just as an optional build). OpenBSD might be easier than Linux given its smaller target, included userland, and still being just C for compilation.