iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 31/05/2026

Arrived today. Will keep me busy for a year and a half.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 30/04/2026

Reading a ghazal of Sanā’i, translated by Frank Lewis (excerpt from a somewhat longer video)

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 29/04/2026

Finally took the time to edit this blog post that I drafted last summer, on the nuts and bolts of the Unicode Collation Algorithm. Code examples are in Zig.

theobeers.com

How Unicode Collation Works

Learn how the Unicode Collation Algorithm solves the problem of sorting text beyond the basic Latin alphabet. A detailed overview with code examples in Zig.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 12/04/2026

~30 seconds of Monty Alexander playing "Amazing Grace" with a nice harmony. (From the intro to a duet on "I wish I knew how it would feel to be free," with Billy Taylor, who can be seen in the background.)

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 08/04/2026

Reading a quatrain I know I've shared before, and recently, but only in text. Recorded on the morning of the maybe-ceasefire.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 28/02/2026

I wish we had Frank Lewis’ voice in these days. Everyone knew that when humans hurt anywhere in the world, he hurt – a true child of Adam. Given his leadership in the Baha’i community, no one could level at him cheap accusations of regime-friendliness. He would have opposed this war unequivocally.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 22/02/2026

Supporting a regime change war (or whatever tf this is going to be) instigated by an illegitimate American government is not just obviously wrong, it’s lazy. It disgusts me. I’ll remember everyone I know who lines up behind this.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 09/02/2026

A friend of mine with a corporate job in the entertainment industry told me that he and all of his coworkers are now "required to use AI tools" for their jobs. What does that even mean? It seems like a positively insane placement of means above ends.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 27/01/2026

There's this whole new level of public outcry and outpouring when the martyr is an actual hero.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 14/01/2026

Israel and the US have given the Iranian regime: a) no reason to play by any set of rules other than sheer self-preservation (they’ll get attacked regardless); and b) examples of the effectiveness of unrestrained brutality and completely amoral conduct.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 13/12/2025

I volunteered for some years as webmaster for a small learned society. Was it a big commitment, no. Did I do the best job at it, probably not. But I left things in a *much* better situation than I found them in. I was surprised by how unceremoniously I was cut loose.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 07/12/2025

Until further notice I’m a single-issue voter (at the national level), and that issue is gambling. I’ll vote for whichever candidate is more anti-gambling regardless of party or anything else they believe.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 01/12/2025

The realest line in any holiday song is “Mom and dad can barely wait for school to start again” (from “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas”).

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 28/11/2025

The date conversion library underlying Muqawwim has always been open-source, but now it's also published in the NPM package registry. I'll put links below. I'm interested in adding more test cases to document the correctness of the code.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 27/11/2025

Of these two men, neither was stirred by love. Wisdom was far off, the face of love not seen. From fishes in the sea to wild horses on The plain, all beasts can recognize their young. But man who's blinded by his wretched pride, Cannot distinguish son from foe. (tr. Clinton)

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 25/11/2025

Our son had a classmate/friend over yesterday, a boy whose mom lost her life in a freak accident last month. I made a pumpkin pie for the kids. My wife explained that I like baking, and the boy said, “So did my mom.” It was almost the saddest I ever felt, to hear that from a nine-year-old.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 22/11/2025

The value of an XML sitemap in anno domini 2025 is dubious at best. That being said, we were using an old abandoned NPM package for sitemap generation at work, and I took a bit of time to modernize it and publish a new version. Maybe it will be of use. www.npmjs.com/package/@t6e...

npmjs.com

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 21/11/2025

My son is one of the best pistachio eaters in the world, but he won’t touch them if they’re already shelled. Somehow the experience of cracking the nut is essential for him to know it’s legit.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 14/11/2025

The work goes on. I already post about these Shāhnāma projects as I make progress on them; a talk is a good way to force myself to keep moving forward.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 12/11/2025

Looks like something went horribly wrong over at Twitter/X with the YubiKey re-enrollment process. Like many others, I'm locked out of my account. Maybe this is how I finally permanently stop using it? A blessing in disguise?

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 30/10/2025

*Every* software dev I know agrees that GitHub has absolutely butchered their web front end in the last year or so. It's gotten unbelievably bad! How is it possible for a product used by the whole world, operated by a corporation with bottomless pockets, to just shit the bed like this?

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 30/10/2025

Xunzi on serving as minister to a ruler: “Treat him like riding an unbroken horse, like caring for a newborn, like feeding a starving person.” I have often been reminded of Ghaznavid court literature while reading Xunzi.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 19/08/2025

I finally wrote a blog post to share some of what I learned from implementing the Unicode Collation Algorithm in two languages. Maybe there are people out there nerdy enough to be interested in stuff like this!

theobeers.com

Unicode Collation for Dummies

Learn how the Unicode Collation Algorithm solves the problem of sorting text beyond the basic Latin alphabet. A detailed overview with code examples in Zig.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 15/08/2025

If I’d known I would be employed again at the end of the summer, I would have enjoyed it a lot more.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 03/08/2025

The one context in which I've ever used bubble sort for real. Does anyone recognize this function? I asked a few LLMs, and they all identified it at once. Bonus question: how much better can this be done?

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 31/07/2025

For those who use Claude Desktop or similar MCP clients (a niche group, I know): I just wrote an MCP server to facilitate use of my API for Steingass' Persian-English dictionary. It works! A link to the GitHub repo with installation instructions: github.com/theodore-s-b...

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 29/07/2025

I recently trained an ML model, fine-tuning XLM-RoBERTa and using data from Ganjoor, to predict the meter of a hemistich of classical Persian poetry. Still early days, but results are promising. Perhaps colleagues will find this interesting. Model on Hugging Face: huggingface.co/katomyomachi...

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 25/05/2025

Identitarian progressives bear significant responsibility for the destruction of American institutions that we are now living through. I will neither forget nor forgive how they drove the country toward this nightmarish situation.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 20/05/2025

Some of you may have noticed that Etymonline's website has been redesigned this year—multiple times, I think. I try to keep up with changes to their markup so that my `gloss` CLI util still works (link in reply).

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 13/05/2025

I recently published basic (really preliminary) Python bindings for my Rust implementation of the Unicode Collation Algorithm. My first PyPI package, at least for a project of my own. pypi.org/project/feru...

pypi.org

feruca

Python bindings for feruca, a Rust implementation of the Unicode Collation Algorithm

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Reposted by Theo Beers

Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 08/05/2025

I have a little web app that gives examples of how Arabic numbers and their counted nouns work from 1 through 100, masculine and feminine, all three cases. This is of course only part of the story! www.theobeers.com/arabic-numbe...

theobeers.com

Arabic number expander

Enter a number to see how it should properly be written in Arabic

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 25/04/2025

Depressing how DJT supporters are legit too ignorant to realize that what they’re doing, e.g. demanding the arrest of “activist judges,” is exactly what people descending into fascism have always done. Naïvely playing their role in a remake of an old movie they somehow haven’t seen.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 11/03/2025

I remember when I was a finalist for what would have been a life-changing professorship, I would think, Ok, it may or may not be me, but someone is going to be made very happy. It’s cool that someone gets to experience that. And in any case, I can find my own way. It helped me deal with it.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 23/02/2025

Möge Deutschland das tun, was Amerika ablehnt.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 16/02/2025

MAGA has ruined my family. We all still talk and get together, but it’s not like it used to be. We tiptoe around each other. I wonder if we’ll ever be able to put it behind us and feel normal again.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 14/02/2025

Ich bin zutiefst beschämt über das, was Vance heute in München getan hat, und möchte hiermit meinen kleinen Widerspruch und meine Entschuldigung gegenüber meinen europäischen Freunden, insbesondere in Deutschland, ausdrücken.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 06/02/2025

I don't blame Trump for $7 eggs any more than I blamed Biden for $5 eggs, but like… seriously? It could not be more on the nose.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 06/02/2025

Publicly speaking out against what he and his cronies and zealots are doing to this country will be remembered as better than nothing. I hope we can actually fight back, but just publicly refusing to legitimate any of this is meaningful.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 04/02/2025

You have to go back. The other place is still where the action is, and it’s been completely ceded to fascists, in a way that might shock you if you haven’t been there in a while

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 02/02/2025

I have a very simple paper in this issue on occasional literature that recently came out (with a backdated publication date). There are some fascinating studies in this collection; just please don't read too much into mine if you happen to look at it. riviste.unimi.it/index.php/in...

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 24/01/2025

Sometimes I like to sketch an idea in a conference paper abstract that is probably not tenable. It might pan out, and I have many months to see about that. If not, a) who cares? and b) I can still do something useful with the paper.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 24/12/2024

I named her Samak when I adopted her in the fall of 2011 because I was taking Frank Lewis’ Samak-e ‘Ayyār seminar. She lives with my parents now (never moved to Germany) but is doing well, finding warm spots in a big house.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 22/12/2024

Did not have “return of asinine taqiyya discourse” on my 2024 bingo card

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 20/12/2024

The place around the corner from our apartment makes a pretty good cheesesteak, and they’re almost never crowded. I can walk in by myself for lunch, sit where I please, order, get my sandwich, and eat at a leisurely pace—all within 20–25 minutes. Hard to beat that.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 19/12/2024

I lost most of a work day to learn that I had to add these lines to a config file

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 15/12/2024

I’ve been sent the most fascinating paper for peer review. What a privilege

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 14/12/2024

A couple years ago I bought one of these old Bell telephones, and this week I finally got an ATA and a number from a VoIP provider. The ringtone is quite nostalgia-inducing.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 10/12/2024

Classical music provides the best reference points for prodigy. Mendelssohn wrote this string octet at age sixteen, as a birthday present for a friend. One of my favorite passages in the first movement (starts quiet)… I listen to a lot of Mendelssohn in the cold season and will post more.

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