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Published by marco on in Technology & Engineering
A very good friend of mine recently sent me this article An Intuition for Lisp Syntax by Stepan Parunashvili in October 2020 with the comment “This article rules.” Among many other things, it writes,
“[…] how could we make manipulating code as intuitive as manipulating data within our code? The answer sprouts out: Make the code data! What an exciting conclusion. If we care about manipulating source code, we glide into the answer: the code must be data.
“If the code must be data, what kind of data representation could we use? XML... [More]”
Published by marco on in Design
The article AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible by John Hartnup on June 7, 2026 ('ERE I AM − JH!) is quite refreshingly helpful.
“The sharp-eyed are still going to recognise these as AI-generated, but they’re distinctive, and I think they’re not ugly.
“So that’s the moral − you don’t have to make posters that look like everyone else’s.
“There’s a further step − you don’t have to ask AI for posters as images that can’t be edited. Claude and Gemini can generate HTML, PNG, PDF, where the text is real text, layers are... [More]”
Published by marco on in Design
I have nine appointments in Outlook for which I want to set the category and the status (e.g., to “out of office”). Unlike the Apple Calendar, there is no way to select multiple appointments in the calendar. So, I searched for the appointments. In New Outlook, it shows the elements in a list on the left-hand side. So far, so good.
I cannot multi-select the search results, though. Nor can I apply any operations on an individual search result. The search items are just inert and only serve to... [More]
Published by marco on in Design
I gave the task a shot with the following prompt,
“Create a list of appointments that I can add to Outlook that pulls data from the attached table.
“Zimmer means “room”, so the room is 165D for on-site classes and “Zoom” means remote-learning classes. The title is the name of the module and is always the same, so use the title “HFU APP Entwicklung: Lesson ##” where ## is replaced with the lesson number.”
HFU APP Entwicklung appointments to be created
Copilot confidently responded,
“I created all nine appointments in your Outlook calendar.... [More]”
Published by marco on in Design
I have a timesheet in Excel. It wasn’t open. So, I wanted to open it. I hit the Windows key and typed “excel”. Windows struggled mightily and was unable to find anything.
Search Excel returns nothing in Windows Start Menu
I tried again.
This time it found just garbage.
Like, not even close.
Just wildly swinging for the fences.
Sentinel-LDK.zip
WTF. How does that even happen?
Search Excel returns garbage in Windows Start Menu
On a hunch, I tried to limit the search to “Apps”. No dice.
Windows Start Menu refuses to locate Excel
The application is installed.
When I typed the name of my document, it found it immediately and... [More]
Published by marco on in Design
So I was signing up for an account with ENISA’s SRP (European Union Agency for Cybersecurity Single Reporting Platform) so that I can report actively exploited vulnerabilities, should they occur in any of my company’s products.
This is what the first page looked like.
On the next page, both tabs were selected. What are they smoking? Have they ever used other apps before?
Something went wrong. The app didn’t feel obligated to let me know what, though.
It was left up to me to guess that... [More]
The comedy set No Refunds by Doug Stanhope in 2007 (Scraps from the Loft) includes the following bit,
“The only drugs that are even popular anymore are all the… dummy drugs, all the drugs that make you more boring. All the mood stabilizer, antidepressant… Everyone’s got some mental disorder they’ve been diagnosed with, and they take a f*cking pill.
“They push them on me all the time. I’ve ruined so many relationships, ’cause, you know, ’cause I think. I f*cking think all the time, sorry.
““Oh, jeez, oh, you, you… It’s... [More]”
Published by marco on in Programming
The Go 1.27 interactive tour by Jesús Espino (Victoria Metrics) describes an improvement in the language that allows methods to declare type parameters.
“This is the headline of the release. A method declaration may now declare its own type parameters, independent of the receiver’s. Before Go 1.27, only top-level functions could be generic, so a generic operation on a type had to live as a package-level function instead of a method.”
The following example shows a findIndex implementation that expects only that the type of the... [More]
Published by marco on in Science & Nature
The article More Than Half of Earth’s Migratory Bird Species are Declining by Peter Marra – Nathan W. Cooper (CounterPunch) writes,
“We found that more than half of the world’s migratory bird species are declining because of an array of threats, including habitat loss, invasive species that harm birds, collisions with buildings, hunting, the pet trade, toxic pesticides and, in some cases, being caught in commercial fishing nets. But our study offers a second conclusion with more hope. The science around migratory birds has changed... [More]”
Published by marco on in Quotes
“The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched. He is not a bad citizen turning to crime; he is a good citizen driven to despair.”
Published by marco on in Miscellaneous
The following short video shows a few examples of quite convincingly realistic-looking, LLM-generated videos. They feature people you don’t know, doing and saying things that are literally incredible[1], who then exhort you to base your opinions on the facts that they’ve just demonstrated.
You Are NOT Immune to AI Propaganda (Even If You Think You Are) by MR RUPP™ (YouTube)
Damn, man: people are just watching so much crap. I’ve never even seen videos like this. I guess it’s because I pull the videos I want to see rather than watch the videos that are pushed at me.
When I watch... [More]
Published by marco on in Design
We have been here before, in 2021 and twice in 2025.
Fielmann's design continues to be terrible
The Fielmann web site continues to be an unadulterated train wreck.
I’ve deleted the private information from the screenshot, so there’s a bit more “whitespace” than in the original.
Published by marco on in Design
I found this one-year-old article in my publication queue.
It’s time to order contact lenses again, so it’s time to bitch about the Fielmann web site. We have been here before, in 2021 and earlier this year in 2025
Fielmann is such a bad web site
Published by marco on in Quotes
From Extracts: On Revolutions by Grace Andreasen (Lapham's Quarterly),
Henry Clay“An oppressed people are authorized, whenever they can, to rise and break their fetters.”
Mikhail Bakunin“To escape its wretched lot, the populace has three ways, two imaginary and one real. The first two are the rum shop and the church; the third is the social revolution.”
Leo Tolstoy“Every revolution by force only puts more violent means of enslavement into the hands of the persons in power.”
George Bernard Shaw“Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny, they have only shifted it to another shoulder.”
Dolores Ibárruri“It... [More]”
Published by marco on in Art, Music, and Literature
The article slop realism by Adam Aleksic (The Etymology Nerd) writes about the designations for various types of “slop”, pointing out how no matter how hard people try to retain the negative connotation of the word “slop”, it worms its way out until the purveyors have commodified the protest.
“If “slop” is the precipitate of optimization, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of slop. Suppose you want to make your interests undiscoverable, so you prioritize illegibility. Now you’ve incentivized me to... [More]”
The cartoon below writes,
“Human: God, why the hell is everyone so miserable?
“God: You structured your economy so that poets, painters, and writers have the worst money-to-talent ratio of anyone, then tasked them with talking about what life is like!
“All of your greatest stories are brought to you by a scorned underclass who already hated themselves before they were told they deserve nothing because their job isn’t real.”
It is not rare for the SMBC punchline to be in the middle of the comic.... [More]
Published by marco on in Quotes
“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.”
Published by marco on in Public Policy & Politics
As we keep hearing about how the U.S is in negotiations with Iran, Cuba, or Russia, it behooves all involved to remember that the U.S. is very much like Lucy from Peanuts: constantly tricking its friends, allies, vassals, and enemies into kicking a football that it pulls away at the last second, and then selling them psychiatric counseling for the trauma this causes.
Lucy offers psychiatric help for 5¢: 'The doctor is [in]'
Published by marco on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Published by marco on in Quotes
“Nicolas de Largillière (Voltaire)It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.”
I’d always remembered Eddie Izzard’s version,
“Someone’s killed 100,000 people. We’re almost going, “Well done! You killed 100,000 people? You must get up very early in the morning! I can’t even get down the gym. Your diary must look odd: ‘Get up in the morning, death, death, death, death, death, death, death – lunch – death, death, death – afternoon tea –... [More]”
Published by marco on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Published by marco on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Published by marco on in Quotes
“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.”
Published by marco on in Notes
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
Published by marco on in Quotes
“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life... [More]”
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