my personal blog for less-serious stuff

 How do you convince someone of something that is true?
If we had the answer to this question, world peace and many other good things should be inevitable.
Unfortunately, you cannot. 
 Let's start by talking about what I don't mean by this.
I do not mean that you cannot know what is true.
I do not mean that you're just bad at rthethoric.
I do not mean that people are…

 Have you ever wondered how companies pick what they use? No?
Too bad I’m telling you anyway, because it has implications for people wanting to make money in b2b off of open source.
Spoiler: it’s very hard but not for the reasons you might think. 
 Common Case # 
 Let’s start with the most common case.
This is why, for example, seemingly every company under the sun uses…

 First, some context. 
 One of the things I (recently) currently do in my absolute rollercoaster of a career is headhunting. Well, kind of.
The way that it works is I get hired as a consultant to run the entire end-to-end recruiting pipeline for a company,
integrating with them for the duration, and paid by the day.
I look for people for as long as they pay for, and they get…

 It means nothing.
Yeah that's it feel free to close the tab, the rest is just elaborating on this. 
 First off, let's get this out first: there is no singular unix philosophy. 
 There is how Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson designed Unix,
but these design considerations are not what people talk about. 
 There is McIlroy's 'characteristic style' of Unix…

 So I make a variant of this blog post every 2 to 4 years now, it's kind of
become a tradition. The reason is actually fairly simple: shell is by far the
language I use the most, but we'll get into that. As a result of using it that
damn much, and in the kinds of contexts that I use it in, I have very peculiar
preferences. In this early 2026 edition of this post, I'll talk…

 It's no secret I'm a fan of lisps.
I'm writing this in emacs right now! 
 Back in 2008, this blog post came out. 
 Now, almost 20 years later, we have more hindsight.
Typical responses to it are to say that the squint test makes no sense for a programming language.
Now a rejection of the premise is all fine and good, but I want to do more.
This is because I think that…

 I live. 
 Yeah so not much has happened since my last blog post.
I had an operation, and ended up having complications from it.
As of today I am managing to sit down (without horrible pain) and use a computer, albeit in a very time-limited manner.
Regardless, I'm getting better day to day.
Should be able to get back to work soon.
And in the meanwhile... I should…

 Do you feel valued? Needed? Like things actually depend on you?
If not, do you want to? 
 I'm going to talk about how I got to a place where I feel universally
valued at every place I start working for in a matter of a month or
two. This isn't per se about salary or any other metric, purely about
how you (or rather, in this case, I) feel. You might not have the
same…

 It's not a secret, I've been a vim , then
 neovim user. Actually for longer than a decade, but it
sounds better this way. This is a story about my recent (3 months) excursion
into emacs. 
 How did I get to vim? # 
 I got there through the classic pipeline: nethack to vi to vim. While I've tried
several other editors, I've also kept coming back to it. Generally…

 We are alone in this world.
I don't mean that we (together) are alone, but that you as a person are the only entity you will ever interact with directly.
Every other interaction will go through several layers of abstraction, concretization, misdirection, and more. 
 To talk about this, we'll need to define what 'you' even are, so let's start with my obviously subjective…