Musings

Random (and occasionally unintelligible) thoughts of mine.

January 2023

Tanto faz is my favorite phrase in Portuguese so far.
Rebate is such an odd word that doesn’t seem to have a very logical etymology. I’ve found some things like rebaten from the 14th century but how did we get from there to the modern meaning in shopping?
At what point does a group hug become a circle of people? Assuming you can’t have overlapping torsos (or layers to the hug), it seems like at six people it’s now a circle and no longer a hug. What are the parameters for something to be called a “hug”?

Spam email is a great case study in why an unfiltered and unmoderated public network leads to a bad user experience.
What’s the manufacturing/baking lead time for Girl Scout cookies? What’s their true shelf life?
I’m waiting for a programming language that has a Rust-like syntax but uses a Go-like runtime. Gleam looks interesting.
Restaurants should offer discounts if I bring back the take-out containers from a previous order.
A penalty shootout is a rather terrible way to decide a football game but it’s certainly not the worst possible option.
Does there exist a point in time when computing technology ceases to be useful and becomes a societal burden? Have we reached or passed this point yet? Already today certain industries have argueably become societally negative, but on the whole I believe computing is still a positive to society. When will the overall sentiment turn negative and will it be in my lifetime? How long will it take us to realize what has happened?