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Cake day: April 8th, 2026

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  • 1940: “These mechanical monstrosities lack the intuitive check of a human mind. A mathematician can spot a stray digit through reason; a machine will blindly process an error to its conclusion. We are trading the elegance of thought for a noisy, fallible crate of glass and wire.”

    1950: “Direct control is the only honest way to command a machine. If you cannot visualize the specific vacuum tube you are firing, you aren’t truly programming. To delegate this to any intermediary is to invite a loss of precision that the hardware simply cannot afford.”

    1955: “These ‘mnemonics’ are a crutch for the lazy. By using words instead of addresses, the programmer loses the vital ‘feel’ for memory layout. We are seeing a five-fold decrease in efficiency; no automated assembler can ever match the tight, hand-calculated loops of a master of bits.”

    1965: “Compilers are the death of performance. These languages allow ‘programmers’ who don’t even understand the CPU architecture to bloat memory with generic subroutines. Software is becoming a black box—impenetrable, unoptimized, and dangerously detached from the reality of the silicon.”









  • LAN tester.

    I thought of it as fancy electrician / network equipment. Not anymore. Now it’s basic troubleshooting / procedure.

    On a particularly frustrating switch installation, I picked one up for like $20 on Amazon, and it’s made me much less annoyed by network changes.

    For context, I’m one of those people who hoards any electronic bits that might prove useful on a hobby project later, so lots of old patch cables and cable reels with unknown breaks, so maybe a LAN tester is really only worth it for others like that, but I’d recommend it to any level of tech enthusiast at least.