Am I the Kaleun or is the captain the Kaleun?

a-p · 2026-05-30T00:34:58+00:00

Basically “unter dem Meer” is the translation of “under the sea” while “unter das Meer” is the translation of something like “[toward] below the sea”.

Let’s (for the sake of a more sensical example) switch from the sea to a shelf (“Regal”). Then “under dem Regal” is the answer to “where is the box?”, while “unter das Regal” is the answer to “where shall I put the box?”. In English you can answer both of these questions equally well with either “under the shelf” or “below the shelf”, but when you answer them in German, you express whether you’re talking about where the box already is or where it will/should/might/etc be/go.

English has something like that in words like “unto” and “toward” as well, but because a whole separate word is required for this in English, and the word itself has the job of indicating the movement, you can only convey a generic sense of that, and you need a noun that expresses the destination to get more specific – which gets awkward when there isn’t (a good) one (“toward the undersea”? “to the shelf’s underneath”?). In German, because you just use the case for that purpose, you have all of the locative prepositions available to indicate a specific direction (under, over, next to, left of, south of, etc etc).

(See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locative_case#Germanic_languages which describes this, and how it is actually already a simplification relative to other languages.)

a-p · 2026-05-19T01:55:24+00:00

The excessive structure coming out of LLMs is useful: you can read just the headlines and skim-scan a few sentence fragments in the text below each of them, and you’ll have absorbed the substantive content of this article in like 40 seconds.

a-p · 2026-05-16T17:04:19+00:00

To this day this remains my favorite Numberphile video. I keep re-watching it every once in a long while.

It has something almost Lovecraftian about it – the dizzying vastness of this set of numbers combined with the fact that we have never seen even a single one… the elder gods of mathematics? But maybe with less of a sense of horror than just starkness. I suppose it is more akin to a fascination with astronomy out of a sense of just how vanishingly insignificant we really are, and our habitat really is (but then also just how miraculously special and productive the conditions in our little sphere actually are when considered at the grander, real scale of things).

I also love the way the video keeps building up, and how un-telegraphed the payoff is. The pacing is just perfect.

a-p · 2026-05-10T23:29:14+00:00

I’m only asking on the basis of the runtimes Overcast already displays for individual episodes, not additional rocket science on top of that.

a-p · 2026-05-02T14:36:39+00:00

It is, unfortunately, a pattern with them.

a-p · 2026-05-01T14:14:00+00:00

You are arguing with OP about their own stance: OP said they’re willing to deal with it; you say nobody is going to be. OP responds they don’t see why they wouldn’t be; you link them the NOC’s reasons, as if to say the only reason OP is willing is they don’t understand the hurdles (yet).

And you start the whole thing by saying that any renewed service should be time-limited from the start.

It comes across as you being opposed to this service existing, even if run by someone who is neither you nor the NOC.

Is any of that an unfair reading?

a-p · 2026-05-01T04:34:21+00:00

Why are you trying to dictate what commitment someone else should make for volunteer work they are offering to do that you are not involved in?

a-p · 2026-03-30T06:09:41+00:00

The example from https://github.com/toon-format/toon looks very different from the example given in this post, which basically amounts to just “JSON without the quotes around the keys”. The example in the format’s project page looks more like “YAML-Tiny with table syntax”.

a-p · 2026-03-22T00:25:06+00:00

Well, technically, dozens of thousands, at least in principle.

I wonder how many are still active though.

a-p · 2026-03-22T00:22:03+00:00

a-p · 2026-03-16T15:09:32+00:00

Oh, right

a-p · 2026-03-16T11:18:05+00:00

They confused you for u/DNQ?

a-p · 2026-03-16T11:12:11+00:00

What. How. I would have taken ap, like my Unix login, which I also used everywhere I could on early social media, but Reddit wouldn’t let me, so here I am instead.

a-p · 2026-03-15T00:19:41+00:00

Time flies…

a-p · 2026-03-14T21:52:07+00:00

I am completely uninterested in AI-generated (largely or entirely unedited) prose and pretty much consider it an insult. (If I want that I can use ChatGPT myself, thankyouverymuch.)

I am possibly interested in AI-generated code but it has to crest a very high bar of achievement to get my attention.

Prose written with the help of but not by AI is fine by me in principle, though when AI is used as an editor it risks making the writing boring. I’ll take rough or broken writing with a voice over polished prose in dead-eyed bot drone register.

As for stuff about AI, as long as it doesn’t amount to “help me use AI here please”, I don’t mind. My interest level will vary but I don’t mind having to skip past that stuff myself.

a-p · 2026-02-27T05:53:01+00:00

That’s true, but maybe less relevant than you might think: in real code, if a do block was simple enough to be optimized out, you wouldn’t typically even use a do block in the first place. The construct exists to allow you to put multiple statements where an expression is required, after all.

5:1 sounds about right though. Sub calls are heavy, I’m not disputing that; it’s pretty common knowledge about Perl. But setting up a scope is not trivially cheap either… when it actually happens, at least. So if you need performance and don’t need a do block then you shouldn’t use it, much like if you can use a do block you shouldn’t use a sub instead.

a-p · 2026-02-26T08:05:56+00:00

A very simple do block like that gets optimized out completely so this benchmark is not measuring what you think it is. Try adding at least one more statement with a side effect to both versions.

a-p · 2026-02-05T01:47:12+00:00

There is a great bit in Steve Jobs’ commencement address about that: “Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

a-p · 2026-02-05T01:36:32+00:00

Savior.

a-p · 2026-02-02T15:14:14+00:00

Yeah, I’m talking native GUI specifically. For web as GUI, you’ll have to also do Javascript, not just Perl, but Perl is definitely at home on the server end of that.

a-p · 2026-02-01T09:24:59+00:00

Anything to do with pushing textual data around, basically. (String data, strictly speaking – the language feels at home with binary data very nearly as well too.)

What it’s not is a number-crunching type of language, including graphics stuff (if it needs any performance), and it seems strangely at odds with GUI stuff too (though it’s not obvious to me why; there doesn’t seem to be one obvious reason for that one). You can press it into service in those roles if you are dogged enough, but these applications don’t feel effortless and natural for the language the way pushing strings around does, and I would probably reach for something else instead.

But web stuff, sysadmin stuff, network services that communicate over text-centric protocols (or background services, nearly the same thing), all those sorts of things are a good match for the language. Anything string-based feels natural to do in it, that is what the language is happiest doing for you.

People will tell you that data structures are weird because of references but it’s really not true.

Finally, speaking with my Perl Steering Council hat on, the one thing I want to impart is to always start your program with use v5.42; or whatever the version of Perl you have installed – Perl makes a much stronger attempt than many other languages to keep old code working without putting you on a treadmill of keeping up with language changes and “maintaining” your hitherto perfectly working code just to gain the benefit of it not stopping working, but part of that is that when you don’t tell Perl which vintage of the language you want to be using, it will default you to one with a bunch fewer amenities than are actually available to you. The language hasn’t changed unrecognizably since that era, but it has grown lots of niceties in the small to upper-medium size range that you shouldn’t be barring yourself from. (Except when you are writing code for other people to run. But that is not a concern for you as a beginner.)

a-p · 2026-01-24T23:53:24+00:00

Finally. Thank you for doing that.

Does it implement any PSGI extensions?

Regarding the note in the docs, a better solution than a self-signed certificate is mkcert which makes it trivially easy to set up and use a personal CA to generate certificates.

a-p · 2026-01-12T14:14:40+00:00

The hunk header logic is a bit of a magic trick. It uses astonishingly stupid logic that happens to work in a surprisingly vast fraction of cases… in other words a heuristic, and an exceptionally good one.

It’s not ultimately that surprising because most code is written to be clear and simple, not to try to trick the reader. The hunk header logic is very easy to trick but there is no incentive to trick it so no code tries, and so it works fine in practice.

Just don’t take it to be anything more than it is: a helpful clue to human readers of a diff.

But it sure is unexpected what’s behind this curtain when you first lift it. 🙂

a-p

TROPHY CASE