You know, I like Christmas. I like the carols (in moderation), I like the gift-giving, I like the festive spirit and the festive spirits, I even like the decorated trees.

But I do not like Christmas medleys. Oh, no no nonny no. Playing them in an orchestra is even worse. A plea to all in the music industry: please, please boycott the creation or recording of more Christmas medleys. I and future generations will praise your sacrifice.

Ugh, so tired, will get lots of sleep tonight. Big day tomorrow!

Tomorrow, after 4 hours sleep: damn it.

I think I need a small holiday. Two, maybe three years should do it.

'Epiphany' might be overstating it, and it's something I realised a long time ago, but it's been invaluable in the years since.

When designing an interface or an abstraction or a data structure, everything is going to be easier in the long run if you can map it to a mathematically simple idea. Documentation, validation, bug fixing, interaction with other components — everything.

Contrapositively, if a piece of code is a horrible bug magnet, or hard to describe, or full of special cases — these things tend to go together — then chances are it doesn't model a logically simple concept.

Even mathematicalizing something like recursion as the limit of something like 'let g = f in f g' — making explicit something that is implicitly complicated — can provide both a cleaner API and more control over the process of execution.

Linux perf events would be an order of magnitude more useful IF THERE WERE ANY REAL DOCUMENTATION.

Not to denigrate the heroic effort behind the creation of the perf_even_open man page, where is the event documentation? What do they MEAN?

What, even, is the difference between PERF_COUNT_SW_CPU_CLOCK and PERF_COUNT_SW_TASK_CLOCK? No one seems to be able to give a definitive answer.

And while I'm at it, why is PAPI stuck in an AUR on Arch?!

So I get that python's scope/mutability/binding semantics are … idiosyncratic.

But 'a += b' may or may not rebind the name 'a' DEPENDING ON ITS DYNAMIC TYPE.

Yeah, that makes total sense. Much intuit. So design.

Okay. We believe in atmospheric physics when we're running weather forecast models. But somehow half the population thinks the science of anthropogenic climate change is in dispute.

I would like to have a cat about the house. But I live alone, travel intermittently, don't have a cat-friendly environment etc. etc.

I am resigned to dying petless.

Lennart, stop. Please, just stop.

https://phoronix.com/scan.php/...

So we have a work excursion tomorrow, but we're not all based in the same city. It's 2.30 am, and I'm going to have to be up in three and a half hours to make the train.

It's not that I resent these Mandatory Fun events. I just wish they didn't require sleep deprivation.

You weak fucks who -1 a comment because you don't agree with it: fucking reply, or argue, but don't be such spineless cowards that you abuse the *extremely* light guidelines on this platform in place of defending your clearly shallow fucking position.

I suck at being sick. I'm sure there's a knack to it, but man, I'm just useless when ill.

CMake. There is apparently no way at all of including some FindXXX.cmake modules on the search path via an environment variable. Jesus fucking Christ you fucking shitful excuses for engineers. And go shove your fucking semicolon laden randomly quoted path strings.

Jesus, Python. Hash randomization?! I now have non-deterministic fucking behaviour _that I cannot disable within the python script_.

Oh, we have a crafted-input DoS scenario. What will we do? Make an interface to allow programs to supply their own hash function perhaps? No! That wouldn't break reproducibility!

Floating point addition is not commutative? Summing over float values in a set may give randomly different answers? Who cares? It's not like anyone is using python in science or anything.

Fully 80% of the time I spend doing mathematics is chasing sign errors.

Yay for technical debt.

For each bug I attempt to fix, I am finding > 1.0 more bugs that are related to it that also need fixing, leading to exponential bug discovery.

So, summer in a 'minergie' building. Pseudo-air conditioning means it is a bit cooler inside, if you win the office lottery, but the humidity is not controlled at all.

Next week, the dew point will not drop below 17 degrees, and I may die.

Generally, I like to do it in the dark, or in the shower.
Doing it at work can be awkward, what with everyone watching.

Shared home directory, different architectures, and fucking python pip.

Python allows a site-wide architecture-dependent directory, but PEP 370 presumes all the world's a vax. Or whatever machine you happen to be using at the time.

Did people look at autoconf's --exec-prefix and think, who would ever use that? So sick of software reanimating bad design decisions that were put to rest thirty years ago.

If I have to deal with one more package dependency today that doesn't have any support for configuring with an exec_prefix, I will likely do something that somebody else will regret.

Business consultants armed with psychometric pseudoscience have invaded our organisation.

I fear it is only a matter of time before HR strays yet further from any sort of rationality, basing their decisions on some sort of essentialist colour type stereotype nonsense.

Anyone successfully dealt with these sorts of infestations before?

Somehow balance work, self-education, exercise, sleep, and non-work activities. This year for sure. [1]

[1] And reduce number of footnotes in rants.

On those rare occasions where I am on long enough break with few enough obligations: working on Project Euler problems for fun.

Or on one of a multitude of incomplete side projects.

I have a great job, working on interesting projects with good, competent people.

But sharing an office is slowly driving me insane.

Oops, falling off the wrong side of the Ballmer Peak.

I need to post a laziest thing, because I sodding mistagged a completely unrelated rant.

About 20 years ago (!) we needed a couple of big primes to set up asymmetric encryption for some sort of verification/signing whatsit in this game we were developing. How do you generate big primes?

Well, there was this fairly new thing called openssl, which was open source, and _it_ had to have the facility to find large primes for RSA key generation. Half an hour of hacking at the openssl source code gave us a prime generator, saving us from writing one from first principles.

For context, our high score security consisted of simply xoring the data with a secret. The secret was one byte long.

Fucking smokers at bus stops.

Forced to breathe your vile, clothes infusing emissions because you can't wait and you don't fucking care about anyone else.

A pox on you.

Every time I hear the word 'exascale' I find it harder not to snirk.

Writing an NFA-based matcher for glob functionality: fun!

Writing the actual glob function, mock filesystem representation for testing, tests: questioning will to live.

Paper feedback full of criticisms of English usage and constructions that are entirely correct and idiomatic. If English is not your first language, and you are reviewing a paper, please have someone check your corrections!