For a glimpse into public toilets in Japan, do yourself a favour and watch ‘Perfect Days’.

Great film with great acting and great music. If you feel you lost the connection to your own life, it might be worth a watch.

And right here (U.S.): https://youtu.be/aRwug4G8JjI

Thanks! I was scrolling for this helpful comment with the link!

Correct order is:

1. Watch Perfect Days 2. Go to Japan 3. Do the The Tokyo Toilet [1] _tour_

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tokyo_Toilet

My favorite movie of all time. First thing I thought of when I saw this.

Perfect Days is in my top 10 movies of all times - a must watch for everyone.

ps - I learned the beautiful word / concept komorebi from the film: "dappled, shimmering light and shadow created when sunlight filters through the leaves of trees"

Some of the most beautiful English-language writing I've read is describing the interplay of light and shadow under a canopy. This is an area where I think having a single word description is a linguistic loss.

I find having the word "komorebi" to be a conceptual gain. I can more-readily notice this beautiful occurrence because I have this easy-to-grasp concept in my mind.

ps - the existence of this word does not prevent authors from using more words to describe the situation ;)

I dunno, it could be evocative like something like "petrichor" is in English.

Petrichor isn't very evocative though? It sounds more like it should be a description of a scab or something than a smell, and I guess maybe it rains too much where I live but the smell of rain isn't something I have a strong feeling about, it's just a warning to get inside.

> We have made something simple unnecessarily complicated.

Oh, but Markdown isn’t simple. Easy it is, certainly, but simple it isn’t because of one feature: being able to embed HTML. So the semantics of Markdown subsumes the semantics of HTML, which has a _huge_ spec.

What one’d like in many cases would be a Markdown-without-HTML-embedding. But that’s no longer Markdown.

How Perl was created:

‘Larry, throw the cat at the keyboard!’

MEEEOW!

‘What did it type?’

‘&}Ak'>v=4%Qe}9;’

‘OK, so let’s make this a syntax for hello world.’

There was a hilarious video in The early days of YouTube when someone tried to write Perl using vistas voice recognition.

I haven't seen it in many many years, but at the time it struck my giggle button every time.

this feels like a direct descendent of this work of art:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyBEUyEtxQo

the gpt-6 astra video referenced this!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QNsdr-Qx_I

Oh wow it’s an actual video of hell!

OCR works too https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/

There's always this amazing paper:

https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/2019.pdf

I was very disappoint to learn that '&}Ak'>v=4%Qe}9;' is not actually hello world in perl :(

here's an actual one: print'(%,,/@(/),$!'^'`@@@@`_@[@@+'

another one

    $/=~s##'&}(/%]?`~=.&~(@^,_!$/"'^'+.{|}!_{.|=.^_/,@;'^'}!:=,^(~<-|$'#ee

I also often blame it on my cat, but unfortunately, the truth is simpler ... Larry was inspired by awk. So this is why perl is snoopy swearing.

I did genuinely try to run this since, well, it could be true, I don't know Perl.

Bareword found where operator expected (Missing operator before "Ak"?) at -e line 1, near "&}Ak" Bad name after Ak' at -e line 1.

How to trick nerds into installing your spyware 101.

Doesn’t feel LLM-y to me. If it is LLM-generated, the LLM must have been explicitly instructed to ignore sentence capitalization and invent a persona (‘i chose...’).

I love this. This is a fun hack, but the article also hearkens back to pre-LLM days when people were still interested in _code_.

I wonder if there was a period in the 90s where the chess community was more interested in talking about IBM’s stock price than in actually playing chess.

"Delivering chess solutions" was never the job though.

I'm definitely gonna use that for April 1st though, just adding this as instruction in Claude.md

That will also serves as a litmus test to check how many of my coworkers are reading the code they push.

Programmers are still interested in code

Weekend hobby!

Now there is Monday again, no more coding, back to babysitting agents.

It feels like it's from back when we unironically thought memorizing quirks like this makes us better programmers, or is somehow important for making computers more secure, aka middle of the 2010s tech bubble.

Dunno about the original C64 (which is what this attempts to recreate), but the C64C used ITC Avant Garde Gothic Pro Book according to https://github.com/FeralChild64/MechBoard64-keycaps

And it has to weigh in under 1 MB and have sub-second compilation times.

Since there is MicroHS Haskell compiler in 0.5 MB space nothing is stopping people to wire it together with TurboVision/ncurses. Apart from that the name is taken now.

Compile times are ... not quite there yet.

In Heroes of Might & Magic 3, “several” means 5–9. 10–19 is “pack”, 20–49 is “lots”, 50–99 is “horde”, 100–249 is “throng”, 250–499 is “swarm”, 500–999 is “zounds…” and 1000+ is “legion”.

I suggest this post be renamed “A legion of vulnerabilities has been discovered…”

Hah! I remember playing that game as a young non-English-speaker and having no idea what these qualifiers meant. They never give the scale, it's just assumed you know that several < pack < lots < horde < throng etc. Which.. even as bilingual as I am today I'd struggle to put on a scale.

I remember playing DOS games as a kid and having read that "several" of something was needed. So I built 7. Later I learned how wasteful I was being.

Maybe we should use legion as a collective noun for vulnerabilities. Like murder of crows or school of fish. Would signal the urgency no matter the actual number or impact...

Reminds me of a C64C that, as of 2016, was used in production in a car workshop in Poland:

https://www.neoteo.com/en/a-commodore-64-stands-the-test-of-...

POKE 1,0 would mess up the bank switching of addresses above $A000 and switch on the Datasette motor. Probably not what you wanted. I guess you meant POKE 646,1 (white text on black screen).

I memory serves me the sequence turns the screen black and POKE 1,0 hangs it. At least that is what I intended, maybe it was POKE 0,1?

Ah, yeah, POKE 1,0 might plausibly have caused a hang. Sorry!