Weeknotes 2026 W12: Unpopular demand

Hello, London! Well, I’m not exactly in London just yet. Flirting with it from just beyond its borders, more like! For now, I’m in secret town where I’m visiting mystery friends.

I’ll be in London for a team event, finally meeting my team in person. I expect good work and productive conversations, and good drinks and food — employer-covered, ideally.

Expect these week­notes to be more incoherent than usual, and coming week’s to be sparser!

Quick bits

• My ad blocker (uBlock Origin) has been so effective that when I happen to see an ad on the internet — on another device, usually — I am mildly confused, and also deeply horrified at how people can put up with all this junk.

• Hot tip: create a reminder (in Things 3, for example) for renewal of ID cards and passports. I have one for many years in the future.

• Some of the Berlin U-Bahn cars still have that terrible pattern on the window. You know, the one with the Brandenburger Tor depiction all misaligned. When will it ever be fully resolved?

• I’ve been giving away stuff. I’ve got so much of it!¹¹1 I don’t really think I have a lot. But I sure have more than I need, and that’s what makes it feel like a lot.  If I’m moving to London, then I want to do a move that’s as light as possible.

• I went to the bathroom, had no idea what for, and ended up giving myself a haircut instead. I am not sure whether the haircut helped, but I did end up remembering that I left my wallet there.

  That haircut needed some serious corrections, I realized the day after.

• Random bit of life advice: after finishing a load of laundry, open the detergent compartment and let it air out to avoid mould buildup.

Travel bits:

• So many escalators are out of service in Berlin. The majority in the main station (Hauptbahnhof) have been taken out of service. Südkreuz is affected, too, and so is the airport, clearly.

• What is the fucking point of online check-in and “fast bag drop-off” if you still have to stand in the damned check-in queue for an hour to drop off a bag?!

• This time at the airport where I heard some arguing with the staff, saying “but ChatGPT said — ” repeatedly, to great annoyance of the staff. LLMs are fucking up people’s brains.

Gremlins

Gremlins are back — by unpopular demand.

• My Colemak keyboard layout suddenly became greyed out. A restart fixed it, but I had to resort to Tarmak-4 until I managed to correct it. What went wrong? I have no idea.

• Touch ID mostly stopped working. It works maybe 20% of the time. I’m probably mutating! I’m already preparing my application to join the X-Men.

• Sometimes, my keyboard will stop working. Or my trackball. Or both! Hours later, I might get a notification that there is too much power drawn by the external devices. For a keyboard and trackball? That sure seems odd.

Shower thoughts

• Why can someone be unhinged, but not hinged? Why can one be disgruntled, but not gruntled? If you’re neither overwhelmed nor underwhelmed, are you just whelmed?

• Pro tip: You can abbreviate k8s to k3s!

Five rules of programming

I stumbled on Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming and I thought it’d be neat to go through them.

Rule 1. You can't tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don't try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is.

I mostly agree! I’m a big fan of rbspy combined with speedscope; it has been instrumental in all of Nanoc’s recent performance improvements. But on the other hand, I have quite a few years (decades?) as a software engineer under my belt, and I’ve become rather good at identifying bottlenecks before measuring anything. But those are perhaps just the obvious bottlenecks.

Rule 2. Measure. Don't tune for speed until you've measured, and even then don't unless one part of the code overwhelms the rest.

Agreed. There are parts of Nanoc that I know are inefficient, but there’s not much point in optimizing those parts because they barely show up in execution profiles.

Rule 3. Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small. Fancy algorithms have big constants. Until you know that n is frequently going to be big, don't get fancy. (Even if n does get big, use Rule 2 first.)

It’s remarkable how fast a $O(n)$ linear array scan can be. It can be much faster than a $O(1)$ set membership check.

Rule 4. Fancy algorithms are buggier than simple ones, and they're much harder to implement. Use simple algorithms as well as simple data structures.

I’ve made Nanoc faster by removing fancy algorithms. Not directly, of course: switching to simpler algorithms slowed things down, but it created opportunity for increased understanding and therefore better improvements.

Rule 5. Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming.

Data structures definitely trump algorithms in my experience, but I don’t think I agree with “algorithms will almost always be self-evident.” I also wonder: is there a trap of selecting data structures because you know the algorithms for it?

Overall, though, distilling programming into five rules is a bit silly. These five rules are quite specific, too; they don’t even get close to covering programming as a whole.

And also: calling them rules is rather strong. “Guidelines” would be more appropriate.

Entertainment

• The Fall²²2 The Fall, directed by Tarsem Singh, written by Dan Gilroy, Nico Soultanakis and Tarsem Singh (Googly Films, Absolute Entertainment (II), Deep Films, 2008).  is a beautiful little tale.

• This is my first time watching Being John Malkovitch.³³3 Being John Malkovich, directed by Spike Jonze, written by Charlie Kaufman (Astralwerks, Gramercy Pictures (I), Propaganda Films, 1999).  Delightfully weird, and not nearly as dated as I had feared it would be.

• I picked up Nobody Wants to Die⁴⁴4 Nobody Wants To Die (Critical Hit Games, 2023), published by PLAION, Deep Silver.  and am an hour into the game or so. I’m enjoying it: it’s certainly got a clear and well-executed vibe. The story comes across as a bit muddled, but I’m not very far into it yet.

• Sirât⁵⁵5 Sirât, directed by Oliver Laxe, written by Santiago Fillol and Oliver Laxe (Filmes da Ermida, El Deseo, Uri Films, 2025).  sticks in my head still. I still believe the first thirty minutes are amazing, but I’m becoming more positive about the rest of the film. There’s something borderline spiritual here. Perhaps the film has something of the form of a parable. There’s more to it than meets the eye. (Or ear.)

• I saw Swan Song Of The Skunk Ape⁶⁶6 Swan Song of the Skunk Ape, directed by Brad Abrahams (2015).  again after about ten years after it came out. It’s still wonderful! And only just over ten minutes long.

  What fascinates me is that even though I’m by far not a believer in Bigfoot or the Skunk Ape or literally any other cryptid, the documentary makes me think: wouldn’t it be amazing if the skunk ape actually existed? The documentary respects the material it covers, and doesn’t provide an opinion. Just the wild and the weird, and I love that.

  I also need to mention its amazing soundtrack by Legowelt, which is how I stumbled on the documentary in the first place.

Links

• Peter Thiel’s Antichrist Circus Smacked Down in Rome (Gil Duran)

Tech links:

• Related UI elements should not appear unrelated (Rakhim)

• Every layer of review makes you 10x slower (Avery Pennarun): This is more about the impact of approval gates rather than reviews. Reviews themselves don’t make you slower. Maybe a pedantic difference?

• Writing Consistent Tools (Jan Schaumann): nothing groundbreaking here, except for password handling, which is surprisingly elaborate. See also: Common command-line options.

• Philosophy of object-orientation

• Unix philosophy is dead! Long live... something else? (domi)

• I'm OK being left behind, thanks! (Terence Eden): Yep.