🍠 “My 87-year-old neighbor just dropped potato wisdom that saved me $200 this year…”
She pulled out a plain cardboard box, sprinkled a handful of baking soda like it was gold dust, and whispered, “This is how we kept potatoes through the whole winter back home — no fridge, no chemicals, no sprouting.”
I thought she was joking… until I tried it.
Old-world potato preservation hack:
1. Place your potatoes in a cardboard box (breathable = key)
2. Generously dust them with baking soda
3. Tuck the box away in a cool, dark place (closet, pantry, under the bed)
4. Watch them stay firm and sprout-free for months
No more mushy potatoes. No more throwing away half the bag. Just simple, forgotten knowledge from a generation that didn’t waste a single thing.
Who else is bringing back grandma’s tricks in 2026? Drop a 🥔 if you’re trying this!
Save this before your next grocery run. Your wallet (and your potatoes) will thank you. ❤️
En 1978 mi viejo no nos dejó festejar el mundial. Nos sentó y nos explicó para qué lo usaba la dictadura. Yo tenía 4/5 años y entendí perfecto. Un señor nacido en 1930 en un conventillo, antes de la TV, los celulares, internet y sin siquiera teléfono, era más lúcido q ustedes hoy
“Tell people there's an invisible man in the sky who created the universe, and the vast majority will believe you. Tell them the paint is wet, and they have to touch it to be sure.”
— George Carlin
A self-taught Irish schoolteacher wrote a book in 1854 that almost nobody read for 80 years, until a 21-year-old MIT student picked it up and realized it could be used to design every computer in human history.
His name was George Boole. The book is called An Investigation of the Laws of Thought.
Boole was born in 1815 in Lincoln, England. His family was poor. He left school at 16 to support them. He taught himself Latin, Greek, French, German, and Italian.
Then he taught himself mathematics. By 19 he had opened his own school. By 24 he was publishing original papers in the Cambridge Mathematical Journal, competing with men who had spent decades inside the best universities in Britain.
He never had a degree. He never had a mentor. In 1849, Queen's College in Cork hired him as a professor anyway.
In 1854, he published his masterwork. What he built inside it was something nobody had attempted before at this scale. He turned logic into algebra.
Before Boole, logic was philosophy. You argued in sentences. You reasoned in paragraphs. It was powerful and completely impossible to automate, because there was no formal system underneath it, just language.
Boole stripped it down to arithmetic. He showed that every act of human reasoning could be reduced to operations on two values. True or false. One or zero. AND, OR, NOT. If both conditions are true, the result is true. If neither is, the result is false. Every judgment a human mind makes, every decision, every deduction, could be written as an equation following those rules.
Logicians read it. They found it interesting. Engineers building machines had never heard of it.
For 83 years, the book sat there.
Then in 1937, a 21-year-old MIT master's student named Claude Shannon was working on a thesis about electrical relay circuits. Switches that could be open or closed. Current that either flowed or didn't.
He read Boole and understood something nobody had connected before.
An open switch is a zero. A closed switch is a one. A circuit with two switches in series only carries current when both are closed. That is AND. A circuit with two switches in parallel carries current when either is closed. That is OR. Shannon proved that every possible logical relationship Boole had described could be physically built using wire and switches.
That single insight is the foundation of every computer ever made.
After Shannon, chip designers stopped thinking about electricity and started thinking about logic. Every transistor on every processor running right now is implementing a Boolean operation. Every if-statement in every codebase is Boolean logic. Every database query using AND or OR. Every neural network threshold that fires or doesn't fire. All of it is running the algebra of a self-taught schoolteacher from Lincoln who died 160 years ago.
The strangest part is what happened to Boole at the end.
He was walking to class in November 1864 when he got caught in a rainstorm. He lectured for hours in wet clothes. He went home sick. His wife, Mary, believed in homeopathic medicine and thought the cure should mirror the cause. She wrapped him in wet sheets and poured cold water over him repeatedly.
He died a few days later. He was 49.
He never saw a transistor. He never saw a circuit. He never saw a single physical machine run a single one of his rules.
His book is in the public domain. Free to download. Most engineers use the word Boolean dozens of times a week. Almost none of them know who they are saying.
The man whose logic runs inside every phone, every server, and every AI model on Earth died soaking wet in a small Irish town, 83 years before anyone figured out what he had actually built.
Dennis Ritchie invented C in 1972, co-built Unix in 1969, and his code is running inside every device you are reading this on right now and the colleague who announced his death had to do it through a Google+ post because no journalist thought to check.
He worked at Bell Labs in New Jersey for 44 years. He never gave a keynote. He never ran a company. He never appeared on a magazine cover. He just wrote code that became the invisible foundation everything else is built on.
Here is what he actually built, and why it matters more than almost anything that happened in tech.
In 1969, Bell Labs had just walked away from one of the most ambitious computing projects in history. The Multics project, a joint effort between MIT, Bell Labs, and General Electric, had collapsed under its own weight. Too complex. Too expensive. Too slow. Bell Labs pulled out.
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie refused to let the ideas die.
Working in a small office in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Thompson wrote the first version of Unix in three weeks during the summer of 1969. One week for the file system. One week for the process management. One week for the command shell. Ritchie was working alongside him, and when the system needed a language that could express what they were building, he built one.
In 1972 he completed C.
C was not just another programming language. It was a different philosophy about what a programming language should be. Before C, most systems code was written in assembly, which meant every program was tied to the specific hardware it ran on. You could not move code between machines. You rewrote it from scratch every time.
C changed that. It sat close enough to the hardware to be fast, but abstract enough to run on anything. When Thompson rewrote the Unix kernel in C in 1973, it became the first operating system that could be picked up and moved to a completely different machine without starting over. Portability was a new idea. Ritchie made it real.
The branching that followed is almost impossible to overstate.
Unix spread from Bell Labs to universities. At Berkeley, it became BSD. BSD became the foundation of macOS and iOS. Unix influenced Linus Torvalds, who built Linux in 1991. Linux now runs every Android phone, every major web server, every supercomputer on the Top500 list, and the overwhelming majority of cloud infrastructure at AWS, Google, and Microsoft.
C became the parent language of C++, Java, JavaScript, Python, and Objective-C. Rob Pike, who worked across the hall from Ritchie at Bell Labs for 20 years, said it plainly: "The browsers are written in C. The Unix kernel that the entire internet runs on is written in C. Web servers are written in C, and if they're not, they're written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C."
Ritchie won the Turing Award in 1983. He won the National Medal of Technology in 1998, presented by President Clinton. He was head of System Software Research at Bell Labs for decades.
He answered emails from strangers with technical questions until the end of his life. His home address stayed listed in the phone book. His colleague Brian Kernighan, who co-authored the definitive C textbook with him, said Ritchie was a private person who did no self-salesmanship. That was not false modesty. It was just who he was.
He died on October 12, 2011, at his home in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. He was 70. He had been ill for some time. The world did not notice until Rob Pike posted a quiet announcement on Google+, and the news spread through the programming community in hushed tones.
No front pages. No tributes from heads of state. No candlelight vigils outside corporate campuses.
The device you are reading this on runs code that traces directly back to what he built. So does the server that delivered it to you. So does the browser or app you opened to get here.
Most people will never know his name.
The ones who built everything you use every day do.
Only a few months after releasing their debut album, Rage Against The Machine arrived at Pinkpop in 1993 with a song that was already becoming impossible to ignore. “Killing in the Name” combined Tom Morello’s innovative guitar work with Zack de la Rocha’s uncompromising lyrics, turning political anger into one of the most explosive tracks of the decade.
Increíble que tanta gente marginal , sea fan de un pelado de mierda, burgués y careta que siempre lucró con los pobres, jajaja como vas a tener de Idolo a Sturzenegger