Inspired by Jedda’s Postroll, here is an incomplete list of blog posts that I’ve read and enjoyed in the last 3 months. This list refreshes daily.
If you find any of these posts interesting, I suggest that you give them a follow!
Fundamentals of Lambda Calculus by
Matthias wrote a cool series explaining lambda calculus and showed how to construct some common programming constructs like if-then-else and recursion.
Part 1: Fundamentals of Lambda Calculus
Added: November 13, 2025
Robbery by
Honestly my feelings whenever daylight savings time ends. Peak sadness is at winter solstice when it gets dark around 4 PM in NY.
Added: November 11, 2025
When your brain lies to you by
I need to get better at identifying when my brain lies to me. There’s a great piece that Andrew Yockey wrote over at The Conversation which discusses the impacts of drugged driving. The conclusion is the same, our brain somehow tricks us into thinking that we’re in peak condition. Sometimes, we even believe that we’re somehow more alert than usual.
Added: November 11, 2025
Scripts I wrote that I use all the time by
Great list of personal scripts! It seems that Evan uses both macOS and Linux so most of these scripts work on both platforms as well.
Added: November 7, 2025
It’s awesome that Cory put the time in to make his website work without JavaScript. Another reason for progressive enhancement is that even with JavaScript enabled, it’s great until it crashes.
Unfortunately, I encounter a non-trivial amount of websites that have some sort of JavaScript error which causes me to find a workaround for whatever task I’m doing…
Added: November 6, 2025
Taking steps to end abusive traffic from cloud providers by
This is a great reminder that just because a person may be fine unleashing web scrapers on the Internet, it does not mean that their Internet Service Provider (ISP) is.
In this blog post, Xe shows how to craft an email to these ISPs in hopes that they crack down on their customers.
Imagine if everyone who owned a website kept careful logs and sent out abuse reports. I feel that the Internet would be a different place.
Added: November 6, 2025
A text-wall is a very cool take on the guestbook concept! Take a look if you haven’t seen it yourself yet.
Added: November 2, 2025
Formal or not formal? That is the question in AI for theorem proving. by
Most work in LLMs and Interactive Theorem Proving (ITP) have been focused on using large language models to help construct a proof of a given statement. There’s some success in this area, and even I use large language models at times to help speed up my Lean coding.
I agree with Kevin though, that an extreemly diffucult problem that these tools don’t help tackle is formally stating the theorem.
It reminds me of a common discussion I have on what it means to prove something “correct”. It’s a loaded term. In software, people often use it to mean that the software does not have any bugs and does not conflict with some mental model. This is difficult to formalize!
We’re making strides though, and I’m happy that there are plenty of people working on formalizing the building blocks of mathematics and program semantics into theorem provers.
Added: November 2, 2025
Hazardous States and Accidents by
In this article, the author discusses how an accident is a combination of a hazardous state and bad environmental conditions. They say that we don’t necessarily control the environment, but we can prevent hazardous states. An example they give is that a car’s wheel turning on its own is a hazardous state. By itself, it doesn’t cause an accident but it’s easy to see how an accident may occur.
I agree with the points of this article. As someone who has done research in decision making, I view this as a Markov decision process. There are a collection of states that we say an accident has occured. From there, we want to look at all the states prior to the accident states and label those as “hazardous”. It’s not beyond me to think that these hazardous states have a collection of properties that we have control over and some that we don’t. Let’s call the latter exogenous properties our environment.
What’s difficult about this formulation is that in most real world settings we almost never are able to construct the entire trasnition graph. This makes identifying ahead of time states that are hazardous difficult. Even so, we can develop some heuristics to identify some of these which in turn will reduce the likelihood of an accident.
Added: November 2, 2025
Most of my life, I’ve avoided branded T-shirts. Nowadays, I’ve opened up to the idea of conversation pieces. The Internet Phone Book, to me, falls in the latter category.
If I wanted to find new blogs to follow, I could easily visit a website like Ye Olde Blogroll and click on links as I scroll. However, there’s more to this book than discoverability.
Henrique had this book on his coffee table and that’s enabled him to share with others the coolness of the small web. That’s wicked cool.
Added: November 2, 2025
A theory on why contact forms get more spam than email addresses by
This theory checks out to me and is unfortunately a strong reason why I don’t have comments enabled currently on my own website.
Also, I like getting emails from people. For some reason it feels more intimate to me.
Added: October 9, 2025
Congratluations to the Immich team on their big stable release! I’ve been using them for a year now and love the improvements they’ve been making. Very happy to see so much love and support for this project. I’ve bought their retro CD to commemorate this milestone.
Added: October 3, 2025
Where's Eric? Tracking NY politicians' public schedules by
Where’s Eric? is such a cool project. Holding our leaders accountable is important and part of that is knowing what they’re roughly up to on a daily basis. This website focuses on a few New York politicians as collected by Politico’s New York Playbook. Some politicians like Bill de Blasio and Kathy Hochul take public disclosure seriously, while others like Eric Adams and Andrew Cuomo rather not.
Added: October 3, 2025
analyzing subscriptions and budgets by
I like the idea of coming up with a rule of thumb for price per hour of entertainment. However, I find this concept difficult to apply in practice. This is mainly since I personally track my cashflow on a monthly basis. Let’s run through a calculation.
For sake of example, let’s say that I’m willing to spend $50/month on video games. With just this piece of information, I can’t determine a price per hour of video gaming since I haven’t budgeted how much time I want to play video games per month. Though let’s humor the calculation, let’s say that my schedule and interest stays constant and I determined that I want to spend 10 hours/week playing video games.
To determine the price per hour we should take our total budget (b) and divide it by the number of hours we want to spend on that activity per month (f). For my example, this means that I should spend around 50 / (10 * 4) or $1.25 per hour of video gaming.
This process required budgeting both money and time. Another alternative that I don’t like is to look at your cashflow in an hourly perspective by taking your monthly income and dividing it by 672. However, all hours are definitely not the same.
Honestly the point of budgeting is to make sure you don’t spend more than you make in a given month and save on top of that. I find it easier to just set aside a set amount in savings every month and then treat the money left over after fixed costs as disposable income. This may mean that I spend extra money paying for a video game that I don’t play much of, but does that matter if the rest of the monthly budget is in check?
Added: October 2, 2025
Cat Bells by
I need to find a place around where I live that has sheep by a hiking trail.
Added: October 2, 2025
In the economy of user effort, be a bargain, not a scam by
A well crafted essay discussing why we should always put the user first. I love that she includes examples from many different products such as Google Calendar, Airbnb, and more.
Added: October 2, 2025
Notes from the trail 10.01 (Sun Never Sets Edition) by
The sun never sets on an Automattic 5k relay is a fun idea to show how globally distributed the Automattic organization is. Here’s the link to the direct website which shows all the participants.
Added: October 2, 2025
Currently the finalists are out for the 2024 Wikimedia Commons Picture of the Year. I haven’t contributed anything to Wikimedia Commons so unfortunately I cannot vote. However, I’m a huge sucker for landscape photos. Especially if it’s a different scene than what I’m used to :)
Added: October 2, 2025
A fun and silly little game on what it feels like to browse the internet nowadays. I’m a human, I swear!
Added: September 28, 2025
I don’t follow the developments of Bitcoin, but generally I find the protocols interesting from an academic perspective. The “Silent Payments” proposal, as summarized in the linked blog post is a great example of this.
The name is a little weird since the transactions are still recorded on the blockchain, but the idea is to minimize address reuse by allowing the recipient to share a technique for generating bitcoin addresses that they control. The sender would then send to one of these addresses. This is called a silent payment because the sender does not notify the recipient, but instead the recipient scans the blockchain for any updates.
For the mathematics behind how it works, check out the full proposal.
Added: September 26, 2025
Silly booby traps in FreeBSD and NetBSD by
It’s a fun (and scary!) idea to setup some honeypot VMs. I wonder if some of these automated bots write scripts in a “easier to ask for forgiveness than permission” (EAFP) style. That is to say, it’ll attempt to run a command like apt and if that fails, it’ll assume that it’s not a debian-based system and try something else.
Having a script like Rubenerd’s silly which aliases to common commands helps throw off that programming style.
Added: September 25, 2025
The Get Your Shit Together Day by
Picking a day every so often to tackle those low priority tasks is a great idea. It reminds me of software projects where you have some issues in the tracker dating multiple years because no one has deemed it “important enough” to work on over another task. But for your life!
Added: September 25, 2025
How FOSS Projects Handle Legal Takedown Requests by
The F-Droid project have recently been sharing blog posts on how to increase an open-source project’s legal resilience. It’s awesome that they are not only transparent in their process, but outline a procedure in which other projects can follow suit.
Added: September 16, 2025
How to Own Expensive Things for Little Money by
In this piece, Jose argues that instead of only looking at the cost of an item, we should consider its resale value as well.
I like how this gets me thinking about potentially selling some of my items instead of keeping it forever. Or as Jose puts it, we’re “renting” our items.
However, I don’t think we should use this to justify being something we can’t afford. The resale value of an item may change.
Added: September 16, 2025
Candle Flame Oscillations as a Clock by
Fun deep dive on the flicker of candles. It’s crazy for me to think that so much effort has gone into making candles flicker less, and how it’s not too difficult to disturb that balance.
Added: September 6, 2025
Charlottetown Boulder Park in the News by
This blog post is a great reminder that even though the Internet is full of knowledge, it is not a reflection of the real world. It’s cool that Peter took the time to document his surroundings and he encourages everyone to do the same.
Added: August 31, 2025
Misc parenting ideas for summer by
I’m not a parent, but this post has a recipe for making giant bubbles that is super cool! If you try it out, make sure that the cotton string you use is thick enough. It needs to absorb enough of the bubble liquid to make the giant bubbles.
Added: August 31, 2025
I’ve always felt weird about status pages shown on major services like Overleaf and Discord. I’m glad James took the time to investigate why they don’t exactly match the reality we face when using these services.
I won’t spoil the findings, so go check it out :)
Added: August 31, 2025
The vulnerability might be in the proof-of-concept by
I’m not a security expert, however, I do have a formal methods background. To me, I would say that a piece of code has a vulnerability if we’re able to perform more capabilities than otherwise specified/intended.
Seth argues in this piece that while a user-submitted report may contain a vulnerability, this vulnerability may not lie with the standard library itself but with the report.
I agree with this take. Just because each individual component is secure, does not mean that their combinations are. That is what makes security hard to get right.
This is why it’s important to establish clear contracts with the code. If a user calls a function with these constraints, then they’re guarenteed to get these outcomes. It’s then up to the developer/toolchain to ensure these contracts are met and their code adheres to their specificiation.
Library and tool builders can help their users by documenting how to securely implement common patterns. This is something the Python documentation already does quite well.
Added: August 31, 2025