PolyD_ 🥪 | 10 years in the desert

CTV. Creator of Enigma. Vires in Numeris. Remnant. GameMaster. Archiver. Namer. The 10th Man.
#npub1775tuvua6h9mkmlqm3ragxpv3z3eegahhshydj36u2xq72vve9lsq29jcw

[PolyD_ 🥪 | 10 years in the desert @Polyd_]

Read about the future beyond Lightning with Enigma. I've updated the article with feedback from the community. The Enigma Network and how this impacts Lightning and makes us less reliant on it. A blurb about Sapio, a frontend for Core to make things fun

https://t.co/6q4a9QDl5L

[trish @TrisH0x2A]

i was reading the SQLite source

and found that DELETE does not actually shrink the database file

deleted pages are placed onto an internal freelist inside the file

new inserts reuse those free pages before growing the database again

the file itself only gets smaller when you run VACUUM

delete everything from a 1GB database and the file is still 1GB until you compact it

[Archaeo - Histories @archeohistories]

The world’s longest-running Dungeons & Dragons campaign, led by Robert A. Wardhaugh, has been ongoing since 1982....

In 1982, Canadian historian Robert A. Wardhaugh sat down to begin a Dungeons & Dragons campaign with friends. What started as a hobby soon became a lifelong commitment. Over four decades later, that same campaign is still running, making it the longest continuous D&D game in the world.

Wardhaugh has built an expansive fantasy universe that stretches far beyond the typical tabletop experience. His basement is now filled with massive hand-built landscapes, intricate miniatures, and elaborate storylines that his players navigate. The game has evolved into a living history, with characters and families spanning generations, and events that ripple across decades of storytelling.

Unlike a traditional campaign that might last weeks or months, Wardhaugh’s game has no end in sight. Players come and go, but the world continues, shaped by decisions made decades ago as well as those made today. For Wardhaugh, it’s more than just a pastime—it’s an art form, combining history, creativity, and friendship into a shared experience that has lasted longer than many real-world nations.

His campaign shows the enduring power of imagination, and how storytelling, when nurtured, can create a legacy as rich as any written epic.

© History Pictures

#archaeohistories

[Zojka 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇵🇱 @_Zojka]

They refused to arrest the attacker, and only used the police report to identify me and arrest me for 'racism'. Britain's police forces are so insanely evil and anti-White it literally sounds like some dystopian speculative fiction story

[alex harper ♃ @balefulrays]

If you want to be good at magic, practice holding multiple unrelated or contradictory threads of thought in your mind at once

My first magic teacher would have me have four conversations with him at once, across varied topics.

Ex:
1) abortion morality
2) merits of evolution vs creationism
3) metaphysical backdrop of the novels of Charles dickens
4) what ingredients make the best chicken noodle soup.

If he made an argument for 1, I could only respond to threads 2, 3, or 4. Then let’s say I said something about topic 2. He could only respond to threads 1, 3 or 4. The exercise continued until I gave up or got confused.

Be grateful I’m teaching you guys magic while you’re asleep.

[Joseph Miscimarra 🇺🇸 @jmisci]

This week I came across the obituary of a photographer named David Plowden. I was unfamiliar with his work, but decided to browse his website after reading that he specialized in photos of trains and industry.

I’m not much of an art guy, but these photos are astonishing. (1/4)

[J. Whitebread @JWhitebread1]

Pitch for a future scifi dystopia. The world is seemingly very advanced, rich, prosperous and happy. Technology is woven into every facet of their lives and everyone has AI agents to help them with even the smallest tasks. Life is good, but almost no one, even the smartest, knows exactly how it all works.

Every once in a while however, a catastrophic systems failure happens, threatening everything. Disaster is always narrowly averted though by a mysterious group of engineers that operate mostly out of site but sweep in during times of great need.

The engineers have an almost mythical status in society and operate more like wizards and demigods, and their methods are nearly inscrutable to the general population. Our hero aspires to be one of them. After years of hard work, he is accepted to their school. On day one, they strip him of his phone, his ai agents, all his technology. He is taken to a remote monastery with no wifi, no ai, no agents, no technology more sophisticated than a chalk slate. The first class has nothing more complicated than a sand pit where they write equations in the sand using a stick. Only after years of working only with pure abstract math do they allow him to use an abacus or a slide rule, which are limited to upper classmen.

This is the way it has been for generations. This is the only way to ensure that people are actually learning and not just being guided by their technology.

[exQUIZitely 🕹️ @exQUIZitely]

Studies have shown that older games with simpler graphics had a much more stimulating effect on a gamer's brain - actively "training" creative skills and imagination, with positive impact on memory building and abstraction skills.

If that sounded to scientific, have a look at the 4 images. The older ones among you will recognize those classic games.

In the first one your brain would turn that into a "Rambo" style scenario, dropped in the jungle fighting against hordes of enemies. Have a closer look at the main character - that's 3 colors and a pile of pixels. Your mind does the rest.

In the second image your brain converts the image into an epic space battle against aliens, with you sitting in a spaceship, fighting wave after wave. Again, have a closer look at the aliens. One (!) color, 2 animation phases. Now look at your "spaceship".

In the third image you are teleported by your creative mind into a fantastic world with heroes, battles, an open world, portals and so on. A magic world, that was created aong the way, by your mind.

The fourth picture turns you into Bruce Lee despite the fact that he is a little blob of pixels in black and yellow.

The common thing in all of those examples is your brain "filling in the blanks" - and that's EXACTLY the part that's positively stimulating it.

Now think of hyper-realistic modern games with graphics so good that your brain doesn't need to do any "imagining" anymore... instead it turns into pure consumption mode. Brain waves look entirely different then. No creative areas will fire up.

The reason why many retro gamers have fond memories of old games is not just nostalgia. It is connected to what those games have done to our brains and imaginative minds at the time. They didn't oversaturate us - they merely hinted at the right direction and our brains did the rest.

Old games were similar to books - the world was created by the reader/player. And those worlds looked different for each and everyone of us.

[Architecture Hub @archpng]

The Eiffel Tower you know is not exactly the Eiffel Tower that opened in 1889.

Its first platform was once wrapped with ornate decorative arcades — part of the architectural embellishments added by Stephen Sauvestre to soften the tower’s industrial iron structure. But for the 1937 Paris International Exposition, the first level was modernized under André Granet: the old decorative arcades were removed and replaced with cleaner, straighter galleries.

The change was so seamless that most people today have never seen the original version. What we recognize now is a simplified Eiffel Tower — less Victorian, more modern, and shaped partly by a renovation nearly 50 years after it was built.

Did you know this detail was missing?

[Tom Kratman @TKratman]

So who gets the joke?

The best swordsman in the world doesn't need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person for him to be afraid of is some ignorant antagonist who has never had a sword in his hand before; he doesn't do the thing he ought to do, and so the expert isn't prepared for him; he does the thing he ought not to do; and often it catches the expert out and ends him on the spot.

--Marcus Binarius Clementius

[avrl ☘ @avrldotdev]

[NASA almost lost a $280M Mars mission coz of a bug every dev studies about in college.]

The 1997 Mars Pathfinder mission had a computer glitch on the Sojourner rover which triggered repeated total system reboots.

It was a Priority Inversion bug.
A low-priority task held a mutex, but a high-priority task needed it and a medium-priority task kept preempting the low-priority task.

This led the watchdog timer (failsafe) to reboot the system wiping all data again & again.

[Max Shen @maxkshen]

every winter the ground squirrel basically dissolves 60% of its synapses, and its heartbeat slows to around 2 beats per minute.

somehow it is able to recover ~all its connection within 2 hours of waking, and recalls all its alliances

[Justin Skycak @justinskycak]

You cannot be creative at a high level unless you are robotic at a low level.

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

USA. A potluck. Everyone brings one dish. I have never been so out of my depth in my life.

I was invited to a gathering. "Just bring a dish to share," they said. Simple words. I did not sleep for three days.

Because I understood instantly what this was. A summit. Every guest, a lord of their own house, arriving bearing tribute. And tribute is judged. Tribute is ranked. To bring the wrong dish to the wrong table is to fall in standing before your peers, possibly forever.

So I prepared. I made my finest dish. I carried it to the door with two hands and a straight back, braced for the weighing of my worth.

The first lord arrived with a bowl of orange powder noodles. Macaroni and cheese. The crowd roared. He set it down at the center of the table. The CENTER. I noted this. The center is the seat of power.

The second lord brought a tower of small brown meat orbs in red sauce. "Meatballs," he announced, like a man laying down a sword. They were placed beside the macaroni. A strong showing. An alliance, perhaps.

I studied the table like a battlefield map. Potato salad: defensive, reliable, old money. A vegetable tray, untouched, clearly a hostage offering no one expected to win. And then a woman walked in, raised a flat box overhead, and the entire room turned and CHEERED.

Pizza. She had brought pizza. Store-bought. Still in the box.

I was stunned. She had not even cooked it. And yet the people rejoiced as if a king had entered. I revised my entire understanding of the hierarchy on the spot. Effort means nothing here. Only the roar of the crowd decides rank.

I placed my dish down, humbly, near the napkins. A peasant's position. I accepted it.

And then a man tapped my shoulder, pointed at my dish, and said the words that changed everything.

"Whoa, did you make this? This is amazing. Everybody, you GOTTA try this guy's thing."

The room turned. The room came. The room ATE. My dish vanished in ninety seconds. The pizza woman herself took a second helping and looked at me with respect.

I had won the summit. By accident. With a dish I placed by the napkins.

I understand nothing about this country. I have never been happier. I am hosting the next one.

So tell me, America.

Is there a system to the potluck? A secret rank? A hidden law?

I have decided there is not.

You just bring the thing you love, and everyone eats it, and somehow everybody wins.

It is the most insane way to hold a war.

I will fight in every single one.

[Tyler O'Neil @Tyler2ONeil]

🚨READ IT

The Justice Department just secured a superseding indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center, and it reveals some new bombshells

🧵1/20

https://t.co/uRCbnWaBzr

[ℜ𝔞𝔢 @dystopiangf]

You need to get into the habit of quite literally rebuking certain words. Language is the most weakly defended entry point to the mind/soul; it isn’t grounded in reality like our senses. There are phrases that were designed to have power over you upon hearing them; rebuke them!

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A journalist in 1987 rewrote the 2,500-year-old Tao Te Ching as a series of short parables about programmers, and the book became required reading inside Silicon Valley because every line of the joke turned out to be deadly serious.

His name was Geoffrey James.

He was not a famous engineer. He was a technology journalist who had spent years inside the offices of early software companies watching the same disasters play out over and over again.

Managers piling more programmers onto failing projects. Codebases collapsing under their own weight. Corporate hierarchies producing endless documents that nobody read. Geniuses being interrupted by meetings until they quit and went home.

He could have written a serious management book. Plenty of serious management books already existed and almost nobody in software was reading them. He decided to do something stranger.

He picked up a copy of the Tao Te Ching, the foundational text of Taoist philosophy written in China around 500 BC, and he rewrote it line by line as if Lao Tzu had been a master programmer.

The result was published in 1987 as The Tao of Programming. 151 pages. Nine books. Roughly 50 short parables. A comedy book on the surface and a philosophy book underneath, written in deliberately ornate language that made you smile while you were absorbing arguments that have aged better than almost anything else published about software in the last 40 years.

The opening line of the book is the giveaway. Thus spake the master programmer. When you have learned to snatch the error code from the trap frame, it will be time for you to leave. The joke is that he is parodying the kung fu master from the old Kung Fu TV show. The argument underneath the joke is that real mastery in software is not measured by what you can build. It is measured by how cleanly you can recover when the system fails.

The book has been passed around hacker communities continuously since the late 1980s. It sits alongside Fred Brooks's Mythical Man-Month on the required reading list of serious software teams. People who have never heard of Geoffrey James still quote his lines without knowing where they came from. The reason it has refused to die for 40 years is that every line of the parody was always disguising a piece of real wisdom that nobody else was willing to say plainly.

Here are some of the lines, and what each one is actually saying.

"Even a perfect program still has bugs."

The line is funny because it sounds like a contradiction. The truth underneath is that there is no such thing as a finished program. Every system you ship is alive. It is going to encounter inputs you did not anticipate, hardware you did not test on, and edge cases your imagination could not produce.

Treating any piece of software as finished is the single most common reason production systems fail. The masters in the book are calm about bugs because they have stopped pretending bugs are exceptions. Bugs are the default state. The programmer's job is to keep them from compounding.

"Let the programmers be many and the managers few. Then all will be productive."

The line is funny because every software company in the world does the opposite. The truth underneath is that programming is a kind of work that runs almost entirely on uninterrupted thought, and the more layers of management you stack on top of it, the more interruptions you create, the more meetings the programmers have to attend, the fewer actual hours of deep work get done.

Every manager you add to a software team subtracts more productive hours from the engineers than the manager could possibly add through coordination. Brooks proved this formally in 1975. James said it in nine words in 1987.

"After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless."

The line is funny because it sounds like an addict talking. The truth underneath is that genuine craft work produces a kind of meaning that almost nothing else in modern life provides. The programmer who has not touched real code in three days is not just bored.

They are emotionally underfed. The masters in the book understand that the work itself is not a means to a paycheck. The work is the reward. The paycheck is a side effect. Everything that interferes with the actual work, no matter how prestigious or well-paid it looks, is making the programmer's life worse, not better.

"A manager went to the master programmer and showed him the requirements document for a new application. The manager asked the master, how long will it take to design this system if I assign five programmers to it? The master replied, it will take one year. The manager said, but we need this system immediately or even sooner. How long will it take if I assign ten programmers to it? The master programmer frowned. In that case it will take two years."

The line is the punchline of Brooks's Law disguised as a koan. Adding programmers to a late project makes it later, because every new person has to be brought up to speed by the existing team, which slows the existing team down, which extends the timeline. The book teaches this in 60 words. The same lesson takes most managers 20 years of failed projects to learn, if they ever learn it at all.

The deeper pattern is the one most readers miss the first time through.

James was not really writing about programming. He was using programming as a setting for a much older argument that Taoist philosophy has been making for 2,500 years.

The argument is that the world is governed by simple principles that get harder to see the more cleverness you stack on top of them. Force does not work. Pressure does not work. More resources do not work. The only thing that works is restraint, simplicity, and the patience to let the right shape emerge.

Lao Tzu was talking about how to govern a kingdom. James was talking about how to ship software. The wisdom is the same. The kingdom is the codebase. The emperor is the project manager. The advisors are the developers. And the entire collapse of every doomed software project in the last 40 years has had the same root cause that the collapse of every doomed dynasty has had for the previous 4,000.

People mistook complexity for competence.

The book has been sitting on the internet for free for almost 30 years. You can read all 151 pages in an afternoon. Most people who run it as a joke walk away quoting it for the rest of their careers.

What James understood in 1987 is even more true in 2026. AI can now generate millions of lines of code in seconds. The bottleneck has shifted entirely. The bottleneck is no longer typing speed. The bottleneck is judgment. The bottleneck is taste. The bottleneck is the ability to look at a generated codebase and feel, without quite knowing why, that something is wrong with it. That kind of feel is exactly what the book was teaching all along.

The Tao of Programming flows far away and returns on the wind of morning.

The masters in the book were never joking. The world just took 40 years to figure out they were not.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

The reason we think dandelions are weeds is because of a 1950s marketing campaign.

Dandelions, native to Europe and Asia, were brought to North America in the 1600s by European colonists who grew them deliberately.

Every part is edible. The leaves are a salad green, the flowers were made into wine, and the roots were roasted as a coffee substitute and used medicinally for liver and kidney conditions for thousands of years. They were a kitchen-garden staple well into the 1800s.

The shift happened after World War II, when 2,4-D (originally developed for chemical warfare research) was approved as a residential herbicide. Companies like Scotts built the modern lawn-care industry around the idea that a perfect green lawn meant zero broadleaf plants.

Dandelions, being bright yellow and resistant to mowing, became a visible enemy, and the campaign worked. By the 1970s, "dandelion-free" was synonymous with "well-kept."

They aren't native, but they aren't doing significant ecological harm either. The herbicides used to kill them, on the other hand, kill bees, contaminate groundwater, and have been linked to non-Hodgkin lymphoma in humans.

If you hate dandelions, it's most likely due to a marketing campaign that ran before you were born.

[Defund the USDA 2.0 @Dusty3080467325]

Maybe we can no longer afford to grow $4 corn in the west ??

In case you missed the biggest news that was lost to the circus that is our government, the USGS has released data showing that America's underground aquifer storing water is officially drying up.

Spanning approximately 174,000 square miles across eight states from South Dakota to Texas, the Ogallala Aquifer (High Plains Aquifer) is the lifeblood of American agriculture, providing roughly 30% of all groundwater used for U.S. irrigation.

However, the aquifer faces an existential crisis as massive agricultural extraction severely outpaces natural replenishment from rainfall. In some heavily farmed regions like the Texas High Plains, water levels have plunged by up to 80 meters (262 feet), leaving parts of the reservoir entirely depleted and threatening the long-term viability of the region's farming communities.

The consequences of this groundwater collapse extend far beyond localized dry wells.

The Ogallala sustains a massive $35+ billion agricultural economy, and as the water table drops, farmers are hit with skyrocketing extraction costs and dwindling crop yields.

This critical situation is not isolated; California’s Central Valley Aquifer, another vital agricultural engine, is suffering from similar severe, long-term depletion. Without aggressive water management and a shift toward sustainable farming practices, the depletion of these non-renewable resources risks destabilizing the nation's food supply and transforming once-fertile plains back into arid dust bowls.

source: USGS

[Gydda​ ᛏᚷ @TiwCultist]

When a slave was freed in Anglo-Saxon England, the legal ritual often involved placing a weapon, frequently a seax or a spear, into their hands.

By physically giving them the blade, they were being handed their status as a free person under the law.

Do you understand yet?

[LaurieWired @lauriewired]

RAM exists as a 1-dimensional space. For programming…that’s kind of irritating.

All the important math happens in 2D arrays.

It’s simple(ish) to compress a higher level space into a single dimension (most languages today are row-major), but there’s a funny quirk.

At the *physical* DRAM layer, the actual bits *are* stored in a 2D array, rows and columns. (…well, when you add up all the layers, it’s more like a hierarchy of 2D arrays, but you get my point).

If this information was directly exposed to you…gosh there are all sorts of neat tricks you can get away with!

Unfortunately, keeping memory addresses in a 1-D space makes things much simpler from the OS perspective for memory management, not to mention code portability. There are nasty security problems too...certainly some valid reasons for keeping physical structure hidden.

Yet, think of how much of performance engineering / memory locality work could be shortcutted if it were trivial to understand the exact physical layout of how your arrays were stored!