I saw in the Haiku R1/beta6 release notes that Firefox now runs natively. Since Emacs added Haiku support in 29.1, that accounts for approximately 90% of my computing needs. So I installed Haiku bare-metal on my desktop.

So far—it works!

The following have recently crossed my desk.

• Josh Marshall writes in Talking Points Memo about “Colonel” Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s manager, and how he fooled everyone: “So how is it that Parker, a quite prominent public figure for decades, managed to maintain his false identity as well as the fact that he was in the country illegally and pull off his Southern good ole boy persona?” (h/t Mark Liberman at Language Log)
• Elizabeth Conner has written a piece on growing up Orthodox in the South.
• The Institute for Family Studies has put out a whitepaper titled “Toward Associational Data Rights: A Digital Economy for Families & the Common Good.”
• The photic sneeze reflex—where you sneeze due to sunlight or just bright light—has another name, which is (and I am not making this up) ACHOO: Autosomal-dominant Compelling Helio-Ophthalmic Outburst. That’s some Congress-level backronyming.
• I was more amused than surprised to discover that many of the default behaviors in Emacs that I thought “Oh, I should look at the documentation and figure out how to tweak that” are, in fact, tweaked in the “newcomers-presets” theme included with the recently-released Emacs 31. Which means I’ve been a newcomer longer than the millennium’s been around, since I think I started using Emacs in 1998.

The text [of the Akta dia Kalopodion] does not tell us how many partisans were present. We may perhaps take the figure of about 1500 formally enrolled Green stasiotai at the start of the seventh century as an upper bound. In this period, these partisans sat in the upper cavea directly opposite the kathisma, the imperial box, shaded slightly to the left from the emperor’s vantage point but prominent in his line of sight. Obviously a crowd of such a size required some coordination in their chants; in its lone stage direction, the text reveals that this was provided by an individual named Antlas.

It had never occurred to me that the Byzantine Greens and Blues would have or need cheerleaders, but it does seem obvious in retrospect.

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.