iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 24/09/2026

It's just a bad math pun. To pick the maximal element of a set, you don't need a score per element, you just need the answer of which is better between any pair of elements, aka a a "total order", which puns against your restaurant "order". (I wrote partial order above but I was wrong.)

Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 24/09/2026

Feels like there is a pun in there about how you only need a partial order, not even a total order, to have a supremum.

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Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 23/09/2026

If I implemented comments I would make a form that looks like a comment form that converts to a private email, and then I’d have a mechanism to promote good emails back into the page. Like a letters to the editor section. But the default would be comments do not show unless I marked them.

At one extreme, either function "works" if you pass them any garbage, so it's correct to model both as accepting unknown. At the other, it doesn't make sense to pass non-numbers, so it's correct to disallow the other cases by making both accept only number. It feels weird to pick the middle...?

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A social media researcher was once talking to me about LiveJournal, and they pointed out that LJ's clunky user interface effectively served as a screen for the kind of person who would sign up for it. For me at least, that made it a utopia of curious alternative nerd types.

(Stuff like nushell is already along these lines, but I'm thinking about how for the new software I create I now have this new framing of how the subcommand interface ought to work.)

But also maybe it doesn't matter because agents are happy to parse text formats? Not sure. I think for heavily structured data (including perhaps Tailscale ACLs) there's value in being able to perfectly serialize complex data in and out.

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There's some upcoming abstraction of CLI software where each subcommand can be invoked in user mode or tool-calling mode, where the latter it takes structured input and returns structured output. Like imagine "git status" returning a JSON array of file status objects.

Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 21/08/2026

Reposted by Evan Martin

Like we thought we'd get a terminator apocalypse, but instead we get a sort of Internet Kessler Syndrome.

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Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 20/08/2026

The "three questions" bit is duplicated in adjacent paragraphs, some sort of editing mixup?

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Reposted by Evan Martin

Brad Fitzpatrick @bradfitz.com · 13/08/2026

On 2024-02-22 I reached out to @antithesis.com fanboying and wanting to use it for @tailscale.com. They were expensive & I couldn’t get people on board w/ buying their service. Instead, more time + money went to: tailscale.com/blog/sqlite-... Nerd sniped them and: antithesis.com/blog/2026/wa... 😅

antithesis.com

Breaking the WAL | Antithesis

I did this from a lawn chair on the Sunshine Coast.

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Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 14/08/2026

New blog post: Computing graph dominators Diving into an algorithm. neugierig.org/software/blo...

Tech Notes: Computing graph dominators

Diving into an algorithm.

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Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 22/07/2026

New blog post: Jujutsu tutorial I wrote the tutorial I wish I had. neugierig.org/software/blo...

Tech Notes: Jujutsu tutorial

I wrote the tutorial I wish I had.

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Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 04/07/2026

Feedback: the README is missing a "what this actually is" section. It jumps from "What if you had [...]" and then goes right how to run it. I think I can read between the lines but I would appreciate a bit more. Also I'm curious for your take on how this relates to zfs/btrfs/etc snapshots.

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Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 03/07/2026

On this post in the bsky UI it shows a count of 1 comment but no comments below. I wonder if it's related 😅

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Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 28/06/2026

I've been writing a Jujutsu tutorial that also starts with a sales pitch about why I think it's worth your time to learn: evmar.github.io/jjtut/ It's not quite complete but I have gotten positive feedback so far, so take a look!

evmar.github.io

Evan's Jujutsu Tutorial

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Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 27/06/2026

I have sometimes wondered if they were overtrained on LinkedIn posts.

Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 25/05/2026

New blog post: Theseus: translating win32 to wasm Notes on targeting Theseus to the web. neugierig.org/software/blo... Check out Minesweeper on the web: evmar.github.io/theseus/

Tech Notes: Theseus: translating win32 to wasm

Notes on targeting Theseus to the web.

Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 05/05/2026

Ninja uses a "database" that is effectively this in binary! Append-only, last write wins for multiple entries for the same key. It reads the whole file at startup, and somes writes out the loaded state as a new file to garbage collect old entries.

Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 24/04/2026

New blog post: Theseus unpacking Revisiting unpacking executables. neugierig.org/software/blo...

Tech Notes: Theseus unpacking

Revisiting unpacking executables.

Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 20/04/2026

New blog post: Theseus, a static Windows emulator An new old approach to emulation. neugierig.org/software/blo...

Tech Notes: Theseus, a static Windows emulator

An new old approach to emulation.

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Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 19/04/2026

Because it's pseudocode, you can use your judgement to include types where they improve exposition and leave them out when they hurt it. To my eyes, your "for floats" comment on lerp is better without types, as is "N" as an integer, while some of the other types do help.

Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 05/03/2026

On the other hand, over the same time interval the asm dialect to know changed from x86 to ARM, so you're kind of set up to dive back in again.

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Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 02/03/2026

Also the history of the history of the history of ideas, en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...

en.wikipedia.org

Intellectual history: Revision history - Wikipedia

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Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 24/02/2026

As I read this I thought of dutch baby. I guess it's already on your chart, but I looked up a random recipe online and it was 3 eggs, 3/4 cup milk, 3/4 flour, almost perfectly within your forbidden region.

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Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 09/02/2026

A small note for anyone else republishing their blog on here: you can add a <meta name="description" content="..."> to your pages to make the bsky/mastodon post summary widget include your description. Witness it on a random old post of mine here: neugierig.org/software/blo...

Tech Notes: Rethinking errors, warnings, and lints

Lessons from working on programming language tooling.

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Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 03/02/2026

New blog post: The smallest build system Replacing "./build.sh" with a miniature build system. neugierig.org/software/blo...

Tech Notes: The smallest build system

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Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 19/01/2026

Aw man it's so cool you remember this! Someone just mentioned it to me recently and I had forgotten it! What a fun tradition.

Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 08/12/2025

A recent post about ad blocking techniques observed that if you route your browser traffic through aws etc then ad networks think you are bot traffic and suppress their ads.

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Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 01/12/2025

pacman (the packaging tool used by Arch Linux) is like this too.

Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 20/11/2025

Mostly it appears to just correlate with money, e.g. a school in east Portland/Gresham with a 7% pass rate also has a 60%"kid living in poverty" rate. There are some surprising random high-scoring schools scattered about, mostly magnets or other nontraditional settings.

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Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 20/11/2025

My state of Oregon ranked 50th among states on 4th grade reading: www.wweek.com/news/state/2... I was curious how regional it was so plotted the data for a (different) state-level test on a map: evmar.github.io/schools/ Values (zoom in) are the % of kids meeting the state proficiency level.

evmar.github.io

Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 15/11/2025

Nice work! I did some similar work at Google 5 years ago and wrote a post about it: neugierig.org/software/blo... Most of it is the same things you covered (cool to see isolatedDeclarations exists now!) but maybe the discussion of globals will be interesting to you.

Tech Notes: Scaling TypeScript compilation

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Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 18/10/2025

I expect it probably wouldn't ever help these situations, but I tried to write the canonical "why adding a flag is a bad solution" answer: neugierig.org/software/blo...

Tech Notes: Why not add an option for that?

Rado Kirov @radokirov.bsky.social · 24/09/2025

Reposted by Evan Martin

Calling Bay Area math enthusiasts interested in weekly sessions doing rigorous foundational mathematics the modern way - with computer-verified proofs in Lean. (An experiment in rigorous math education outside traditional academia)

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Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 21/09/2025

I have tried a few, Kiki's Delivery Service worked the best. For a slightly older kid (like age 4) I think all of them have themes that can be hard. Even in Totoro, the gentlest one, there is a decent amount of plot around the mom being sick.

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Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 17/09/2025

New blog post: Access logging in 2025 Looking for humans in the age of bots. neugierig.org/software/blo...

Tech Notes: Access logging in 2025

Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 13/09/2025

New blog post: Account disasters Logging in is impossible. neugierig.org/software/blo...

Tech Notes: Account disasters

Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 29/08/2025

I could have recognized it contextually, but the post doesn't give any context that would have suggested it. In a post about authorization I was expecting acronyms from the auth soup, e.g. SAML/IdP/JWT and so on.

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Blog post defines DCR on first use, but uses "MCP" without ever defining it.

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Dunno if anyone from Figma sees my posts, but Figma started (maybe some months ago, not sure) doing a thing where when you make a new document the UI lets you switch tools, but then a second later it switches back to the selection tool. Repro: create new document, hit 'f', watch it switch back.

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I think the solution is to provide an opt-out for new strictness checks, e.g. something like --allowImplicitAny. This allows the new TS release upgrade instructions to say "keep --strict, but also temporarily --allowWhatever to keep your build working, then remove that once you get a chance".

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Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 21/08/2025

I wonder what the impact of this is across TS versions. For example, imagine a new project with --strict on that passes all checks. Next, you want to introduce some new check in the next TS version. If the project tries to upgrade, their build now breaks.

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New blog post: Understanding Jujutsu bookmarks neugierig.org/software/blo...

Tech Notes: Understanding Jujutsu bookmarks

Evan Martin @neugierig.org · 09/08/2025

New blog post: diff --stat for binary files Contributing a minor feature to Jujutsu. neugierig.org/software/blo...

Tech Notes: diff --stat for binary files