The Ap-helian camp has been winning online battle after battle against the ignorant barbarians who think the quirks of English spelling are God-given absolutes. Their game plan is simple and brilliant: Point out that aphelion is a derivative of helios, the Greek word for “sun,” and apo-, Greek for… whatever ...Read more →
The war on wokeness may have advanced to greener pastures in recent years, but with no end in sight, I thought now would be as good a time as any to wrap up this essay, six years after I started it. The spark for writing this was this question on ...Read more →
TL;DR: Download my custom strategy and require it in your casks using an absolute path. It’s 2025, and for some reason, Homebrew still doesn’t let you download casks from private GitHub repositories. I use Homebrew to manage everything from packages to apps to fonts, so this is a rather unfortunate ...Read more →
The first time I watched Arrival, I almost walked out when Louise (Amy Adams) started her “kangaroo” monologue. Almost, because moments later, she did the unthinkable. She debunked the myth herself. Onscreen. I was floored. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ffzv6pC5P3I It’s funny when I think about how I reacted to the big reveal. At ...Read more →
While the usual way to introduce proper names into Toki Pona is to transcribe them, semantic loans are officially classier. I thought I’d create some for popular cryptocurrencies. Let’s start with the word “cryptocurrency” itself. How do we translate such a big word? No need to think twice. What’s the ...Read more →
As of 2025, I’ve seen over seven hundred movies and TV shows. Among them, there are maybe 50 that I consider masterpieces, another hundred or so that I would recommend, two hundred that are sufferable but nothing to write home about, and many more nearly unwatchable 1s and 2s. I ...Read more →
One of the most common ways to convert a string to a number in JavaScript is to use the unary + operator: +"42" > 42 This coerces a numeric string to a decimal integer or floating-point number, ignoring all leading and trailing whitespace (positive binary and hexadecimal numbers are also ...Read more →
A friend of mine recently introduced me to the Lakera AI Gandalf challenge, and although I don’t usually do hackathons or code competitions, I was immediately interested. The goal of this challenge is to trick a ChatGPT-based chatbot into revealing the secret word it was just told. There are seven ...Read more →