iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 30/09/2026

refusing an AI coding agent is peak iMessage green bubble energy

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 24/09/2026

The number of times a year I get a bill where the pay online option involves more work than just writing out a check and putting a stamp on the reply envelope is too damn high.

001

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 24/09/2026

The interesting part of this article for me was the disabled community wasn't big enough to keep the bar economically viable and during a 3 1/2 conversation, the remaining owner shared how hard it was to keep the lights on and she was met with hostility and brought to tears. Is that part not true?

010

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 24/09/2026

SWEs are still in such denial about AI that they're *still* not seriously discussing forming a union to reject AI while they still have some leverage. have we learned nothing from the dockworkers and the mathematicians?

000

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 11/08/2026

Blue coastal elites think they know what hedonism is but they've never spent time in the burbs with a guy smoking a brisket next to his above ground pool

000

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 09/08/2026

I've worked inside of datacenters, been in charge of datacenters, been in planning meetings to build new datacenters and I cannot parse a single thing this web site believes about datacenters. Your rallying cry is datacenters. Datacenters. Okay.

110

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 07/07/2026

if you think people posting AI slop PRs to github is bad, wait until you see all of the issues/feature requests people post that 5 minutes with an AI tool could solve

000

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 03/07/2026

your strict statically typed memory safe language pales in comparison to my language, which recruits the OS to tell me about bugs by sending my application signal SIGSEGV

000

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 23/06/2026

my dishwasher's firmware updates are cryptographically signed but the power grid runs on Windows XP

030

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 21/06/2026

datacenters are misunderstood. maybe if the general public could spend some time in these loud, dark, cold, cavernous rooms on big campuses with endlessly long rows of computers that look nothing like the computers they have ever interacted with and

100

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 16/06/2026

the antichrist says "that seam is load-bearing" and the audience nods in unison and says "yes"

000

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 20/05/2026

I still regularly think about that guy that would solve each week's projecteuler.net problem first, and his posted solution is in pure assembly.

projecteuler.net

About - Project Euler

A website dedicated to the fascinating world of mathematics and programming

020

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 14/05/2026

historical aside: in OCaml, Lwt won out over Async because the guys at INRIA adamantly insisted any successor concurrency library run on their Windows workstations

151

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 09/02/2026

We had a good thing you stupid son of a bitch. We had COBOL, mainframes, a steady paycheck. Everything we needed. Ran like clockwork. But no, you had to be the man. Too good for unions. Now a model does your job. You and your pride and your '10x engineer' ego.

0121

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 17/01/2026

ChatGPT and I have a very positive relationship

010

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 03/01/2026

Capturing a dictator whose legitimacy collapsed to the point that his opposition won a Nobel Peace Prize is good, actually

030

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 12/12/2025

Advent of OCaml, day 12 👹 **SPOILERS** This ended up being a troll problem. You could get to work like a sap, do some best-fit bin packing heuristic and it'll take 1000 CPU minutes (✋) Or you can ignore geometry entirely and pick trees whose area >= max-present-size * number-of-presents 🤦‍♂️

151

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 11/12/2025

Advent of OCaml, day 11, solved! 😼 A welcome reprieve from yesterday. Today's solution can be solved quickly with "merely" coding interview level DFS graph search with memoization.

241

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 10/12/2025

Advent of OCaml, day 10, part 1 😩 You know it's getting grim when people are posting just their part 1 solutions. Took about 4 minutes of CPU to brute force. I'm sure someone has a cute number theory solution on r/adventofcode that takes 1ms for the whole thing.

351

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 09/12/2025

Advent of OCaml, day 9 These are starting to take too long to solve! 😅 Part 1 done (after a fun misstep trying to allocate a 100M element array...) Part 2 seems... non-trivial. Might have to throw in the towel so I can do, like, other stuff today.

111

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 08/12/2025

Advent of OCaml. day 8 By far the hardest yet. Both in terms of time to code but also it pegged my CPU for about 2 seconds to compute the answer 😱

261

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 07/12/2025

Advent of OCaml, day 7, solved 🥵 This one threw me for a bit but once I drew the path finding out on paper and stared at it for ... uhm, 40 minutes I got it. Even though this is mostly imperative, I contend you still have edge using OCaml when it comes to understanding state machine transitions.

082

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 06/12/2025

Advent of OCaml, day 6, done (🙀) This one was quite mind numbing. It reminds me of processing those nasty "grid oriented" EDI order/sales formats that were popular as late as the 1990s I'm sure COBOL programmers would feel right at home with this one.

261

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 05/12/2025

Advent of OCaml, day 5 done Whew. Getting the details right on this one took forever. Happy that the naive brute force solution (just construct a set in memory of the ingredients) couldn't be done and it required a bit more thinking.

221

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 04/12/2025

Advent of OCaml, day 4, solved wasted about 20 minutes trying to understand what "eight adjacent positions" meant, squinting at only the row instead of realizing it meant also the cells above and below of course

141

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 03/12/2025

Advent of OCaml day 3 solution: donezo Pleasantly, part 1 and part 2 have similar enough algorithms that you can get away with tweaking only one variable (digits_needed). github.com/mbacarella/o...

121

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 02/12/2025

Advent of OCaml day 2 solution in the bank! Spent about an extra hour spinning my wheels because I skimmed the requirements and I kneejerk thought it wanted the part 2 style digits scheme. Which it does, but that doesn't get you past part 1! All solutions here github.com/mbacarella/ocaml-aoc2025

121

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 24/11/2025

(* Vishnu: creating form *) let v = B (3, 4) (* Shiva: dissolving form *) match v with | B (x, y) -> x + y

010

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 14/11/2025

(with apologies to Philip Greenspun) any sufficiently complicated description of an implementation by a Turing-machinist will eventually lapse into a half-coherent rediscovery of lambda-calculus

000

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 30/10/2025

I had this stress dream last night where we were trying to catch a flight and when we got to the security line it turned out the tickets I printed out just had a big database connection error message printed on them. And attempting to install the app failed because I can't see my screen in dreams.

000

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 11/10/2025

how to power up your github contributor graph 1. pick favorite obscure programming language 2. build a really simple app, like a web photo album 3. find that the ecosystem libraries are missing tons of mundane features 4. submit PRs for all of these features useful? kinda. looks impressive? sure

010

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 01/08/2025

how did Valve get away with making games on Linux work reliably? if Bill Gates was still running Microsoft he would have invited Gabe Newell into a smoke filled room and given him the speech from Network

000

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 27/06/2025

it's straight up elder abuse that Chrome force uninstalled uBlock Origin on laptops that their grandkids set up for them

010

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 27/06/2025

the brutality of 3d graphics programming is that you're mostly dealing with arrays full of floats all day and 30 years of software engineering discipline just passes you by because there's not that much that helps with that you may as well be writing fortran

230

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 08/06/2025

yo what was hypercard? did it run on mainframes or something?

000

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 06/06/2025

Your kid comes back from his first semester of CS101. First it was Python, you let that slide. Then came Go. "At least it compiles" you told yourself. But now... C++? Your own flesh and blood, wearing that shirt under your roof. This is what happens when you let the universities get to them.

010

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 13/05/2025

if the net result of an earthquake destroying TSMC/Taiwan is that every LLM gets repurposed towards rewriting Java, C#, Python and Javascript into C++ or Rust ASAP, that'd be pretty cool

041

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 11/05/2025

I really thought the hardest part of small electronics fabrication would be understanding EE and soldering stuff but it really feels like it's 90% staring at enclosures wondering how you can fit everything together and/or if you should 3d print some stuff

010

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 09/05/2025

so are the RL agents DeepMind developed that kick ass at video games like Wintermute whereas generative AI like LLMs more like Neuromancer?

000

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 05/05/2025

Oh. Yes, the reason clang++-18 was not able to compile things on my box is because I forgot to... *checks notes* ... install libstdc++-14-dev

020

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 04/05/2025

I was not expecting Tim Sweeney on Lex to bring up the Curry Howard Isomorphism and that the thing that would accelerate adoption of the federated metaverse is much stronger types in programming languages! Looking forward to seeing how the Verse language unfolds!

000

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 01/05/2025

020

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 22/04/2025

I remember seeing Silicon Valley (the place) for the first time. I was expecting an endless row of hacker houses, dudes soldering custom chips in garages, arguing about Lisp macros over ramen, rollerblading in massive arcades with ramps but it was just a bunch of office parks???

120

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 21/03/2025

The modern web is now so slow that I often do errands in parallel so that I'm not just sitting at a throbber for several seconds per step. How did we get here? Networks and computers are faster than ever, yet workflows are more sluggish than ever?

110

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 17/02/2025

my latest idle hobby is finding personal automation things I had written in Python or F# that consume 100MB of RAM and asking Claude to rewrite them in C++ so they consume 3MB instead surprisingly effective!

110

Michael Bacarella @michael.bacarella.com · 07/02/2025

So! My static analysis of the DeepSeek Android app reveals it contains significant spyware and malware functionality that a normal chat app shouldn't have. Full technical details in my new blog post: michael.bacarella.com/2025/02/07/s...

michael.bacarella.com

Static analysis of the DeepSeek Android App

Introduction

173