iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 14/08/2026

I have family down in Corpus (Navy). How would that be categorized?

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 04/08/2026

I’m not attending either. Couldn’t get my act together when abstracts were due.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 04/08/2026

Does AIS count as big? Certainly MESA (which blows) does.

Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 27/07/2026

Adult one, too. Never had easier US passport renewals than during the years we lived in Germany.

Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 30/06/2026

I've been there. One year I was on a last-day 8:30 a.m. panel, and maybe ten people showed up, but several of them had their suitcases and left before it was my turn to speak.

Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 26/06/2026

Our piano has been going out of tune so quickly in our current house that I keep thinking about learning how to do some basic maintenance myself. But have been too afraid so far.

Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 09/06/2026

I was "from" there between spring 2019 and summer 2024 😞

Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 04/06/2026

Large swaths of Munich are indeed dumpy, though the city still has beautiful areas, nice old architecture. It’s sad how much has decayed and how people seem to be in denial about it.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 31/05/2026

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

Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 29/05/2026

Not sure why, but whenever I see "uncial," I spend a moment thinking it's a typo for some other word, until I remember it's legit. I once almost flagged it as a typo when peer-reviewing an article, which would have been embarrassing.

Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 22/05/2026

Common/idiomatic in Go codebases, and yes, sometimes frustrating…

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In a sad reflection of the times, the first word I thought of was بمباران

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The next thing I would look for is words with مب as a consonant cluster that are also written that way.

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Yes, I'm confident that your explanation of this would be more accurate than mine! When it comes to linguistics, to paraphrase Walter Sobchak, I'm like a child who wanders into the middle of a movie.

Improved digitized version of Francis Joseph Steingass’ “Comprehensive Persian-English Dictionary”

Nasal assimilation afaik. The first word I learned in Persian that displays this is تنبان for “trousers,” pronounced “tumbān.”

steingass.theobeers.com

Steingass – Entry 16495

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 13/05/2026

My friends and colleagues who spend a lot of time here insist otherwise. I think they just enjoy the platform, which is fine, but apparently it's easy to mistake that enjoyment for a sense that what gets discussed here has any broader relevance.

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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.)

Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 09/04/2026

Manuscript photo as a standalone

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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 · 04/03/2026

Wait, what is the current theory on that helicopter crash?

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 01/03/2026

I’m told this is what the arrival of freedom looks like…

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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.

Not sure what you’re trying to accomplish here (or who you are or what involvement you have in the software industry if any), but have a nice weekend!

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You might be surprised. This category includes e.g. people I only ever followed on functional programming, who turned out to have collected enough grievances over the years that they were willing to greet this admin with an open mind (which stunned and revolted me).

NB, here I’m excluding those who were always complete hacks, grifters, fraudsters, etc. What I mean is people in software whose views I might have respected a few years ago, who made the poor choice to support this admin initially. They’re basically all gone by now.

My sense of which way the wind is blowing on this is based 100% on what I see on Twitter. True that it would be a mistake to look here or elsewhere in the Fediverse. The few people on tech Twitter/tpot who haven’t turned yet, like eigen, are being disgraced before their own following.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 23/02/2026

I'm surprised a16z is holding firm like this, with the tech right – or the red-grey coalition; whatever we want to call it – in full collapse. It's past time for them to be preparing their next pivot.

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That’s a good idea. Optimize when you hit a performance problem. Switching from JSON to a DB is not a huge deal. Cloudflare has a kind of hosted SQLite product, called D1, that I like. It has a decent free tier. I’m on the (cheap) paid plan; I use it for my Steingass dictionary site.

Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 23/02/2026

It’s not brave to set aside everything you know about everything – Trump, Netanyahu, the US military, the history of regime change wars and occupations, etc. etc. – because it’s the IR that is about to get bombed. This is lazy, and laziness is also cowardice.

Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 22/02/2026

The number of innocent Iranian civilians who were slaughtered by the IR, one of the most profoundly evil regimes anywhere on earth in modern history, has *nothing* to do with the question of whether to support this war. Are you stupid enough to conflate the issues?

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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.

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.

Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 14/01/2026

I’m as anti-IR as the next guy. The world we live in is what it is, though. All villainous actors in power almost everywhere.

Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 14/01/2026

So why wouldn’t they shoot ten thousand protesters? I’m no longer convinced that our government wouldn’t do the same.

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.

Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 13/12/2025

There were things they could have done that would have been a meaningful token of appreciation to me at zero cost to them. You live and learn.

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.

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”).

Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 30/11/2025

Sad that Universally Preferable Behaviour never took off

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 28/11/2025

The DHS Twitter account has repeatedly come extremely close to doing that.

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Theo Beers @t6e.dev · 28/11/2025

I was sorry to read of John Walker's passing last year. He did us all a great service, founding Autodesk, writing tons of FOSS tools, publishing fascinating articles on his website Fourmilab, etc. An OG programmer. It's still largely his code. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Wa...

en.wikipedia.org

John Walker (programmer) - Wikipedia