Since this is the first iteration of these links posts, it’ll be a bit more than just stuff from the last week.

Tech

• Fabien Sanglard writes about how the encryption on Quake shareware was cracked. I’ve never been much of a gamer (and definitely not for FPS games), but it’s an interesting view into what feels in 2026 like an ancient world. And it’s brief enough that you don’t get bogged down in all the technical details.
• Richard Hipp is the main developer of SQLite, which if you haven’t heard of it, is a database engine that is very likely the most widely deployed software on the planet. Earlier this year, he gave a talk on the reliability lessons he’s learned from developing it. The talk’s pretty technical, but approachable for those with an interest.
• Brett C. has a blog post about being done with AI: “Upon reflection, I’ve come to believe that quality software is not about how many features something has or how quickly it is built but rather how cared for it is by the designers, developers, and product people who work on it. There’s an ineffable aspect to my favorite pieces of software where I don’t think of it is as feature matrix but rather as an interface made by a human for humans that’s a joy to use. And when you build software with AI, it leads to worse software. Sure, it’s faster to build initially, but I think to the detriment of the quality of the code and the user interface and the user experience…. To put it simply: I do not like this world where people are using AI to generate art, music, writing, and software. So I will not use AI.”
• Somewhat relatedly, Nathan Sanders and Bruce Schneier published a piece on “Separating AI’s Technological Problems from Its Capitalism Problems.”
• As a kid in the 1980s and 1990s, we had an Apple //c (and its much cheaper—and arguably better—clone, the Laser 128). Like I said above, I’ve never been much of a gamer, and we didn’t have much software anyway; so I would “play” a lot with AppleWorks. Yes, the 1980s equivalent of Microsoft Office,¹ not to be confused with later Macintosh editions which bore the same name and purpose, but no code. So I was pleased to see Christopher Drum’s article revisiting and trying out AppleWorks.

Theology

Fr. Stephen Freeman is still blogging in his retirement and had two posts that caught my eye.

• Why Mary Has Always Been Honored: “The historical evidence for Mary’s veneration is so obvious that it is simply overlooked: her place in the gospel accounts…. Mary’s place within the gospels carries a message of veneration. Those who do not see this obvious feature of the New Testament generally get lost in the details, reading too much into sayings such as Jesus’ ‘Woman what have I to do with you?’ and the like…. [I]t is the seemingly ‘gratuitous’ material that points to veneration of Mary.”
• Learning to Read: “Orthodoxy, at present, is inundated with inquirers…. With inquiry comes the deep temptation to leap forward to the ‘deeper’ things, to look for a mastery that cannot be found on the internet or in a book. Self-appointed apologists, without training or accountability, offer a knowledge that they themselves do not possess. We are not saved by information—quite often, we are destroyed by it. What is so dangerous? The knowledge of God is personal and relational, not academic. God cannot be studied like a lab rat under a microscope, nor is theology a philosophical system, a simple matter of ideas.”

¹ If you’re now thinking “What kind of weird kid plays with office software?” you…would not be wrong.

Wikipedia is great. I love that it exists, though I’ve only occasionally contributed to it. But I’m hardly the first to notice that it sometimes fails for the general reader.

Here, for instance is a section from the entry for “Chebyshev polynomials”:

In 1952, Cornelius Lanczos showed that the Chebyshev polynomials are important in approximation theory for the solution of linear systems; the roots of T_n(x), which are also called Chebyshev nodes, are used as matching points for optimizing polynomial interpolation. The resulting interpolation polynomial minimizes the problem of Runge’s phenomenon and provides an approximation that is close to the best polynomial approximation to a continuous function under the maximum norm, also called the “minimax” criterion. This approximation leads directly to the method of Clenshaw–Curtis quadrature. (internal citations omitted)

I’m sure this makes sense if you know what Chebyshev polynomials are…in which case you probably wouldn’t look it up in an encyclopedia.

I’ve added a new section to the blog: “Links.” I’ve been using RSS¹ off and on since it was invented to keep up with stuff around the web.² I’ll be posting (theoretically weekly) a roundup of whatever I found interesting that crossed my path (via RSS or any other way), but which for whatever reason I don’t have much to say about beyond that. Note that the key word here is “interesting,” not “correct”—and definitely not “endorsed.” This will be its own section, but will still appear on the main page of the site and in the main feed.

¹ By which I mean “a feed” of whatever sort, whether technically RSS or something like Atom or the newfangled JSON. It’ll be “RSS” forever, I’m afraid, just like basically everybody still says “SSL” instead of “TLS.”

² The demise of Google Reader was a stumbling block, but not a fatal one. These days I use a self-hosted Miniflux instance; I’ve self-hosted FreshRSS in the past and also used Inoreader.

This is my first real post. I am almost too tired to write, but if I don’t start, I’ll never start. And I didn’t set up this blog in order to not start.

Wednesday of last week, I flew into MSP for the wedding of a friend’s son. That leg of the trip was uneventful—in the good way, meaning there were no problems. I flew in, found my Airbnb, went to Vigil that evening at St. Herman’s and Liturgy on Thursday morning, and the wedding that afternoon (at a different church) was beautiful. Unlike some people, I don’t actively miss the hymns from my Protestant upbringing,¹ but it was genuinely great to hear so many people singing together.

The return leg of the trip started off fine, from MSP to CLT, but thereupon things became uneventful in the bad way, meaning nothing happened. My flight home was delayed, then cancelled. Then I got rebooked with an additional stop through DFW (not ideal, but fine, whatever)…which then itself got delayed to the point that by the time I arrived there, my actual flight home to JAN would already have left. Then I was able to get rebooked again on a CLT to JAN direct flight, which was then cancelled about an hour before it was supposed to board. And on and on. Long story short, I finally crawled into bed about 1:30 AM Monday morning, just slightly over 48 hours after.

I’m tempted to badmouth American Airlines here out of sheer frustration; but I won’t, since they (as far as I know) can’t control the weather, and in any case I’ve had similar experiences with other carriers. I will say, throughout all this, every American employee I interacted with was unfailingly polite, personable, and as helpful as they could be under the circumstances. That didn’t make the experience good or fun, but at least I wasn’t also seething with rage.

Okay, that’s an entry. More soon.

¹ Probably because I still sing the ones I like to myself, even if they don’t get an airing in church.

OK. Textpattern is installed. Now to actually write things.