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<title>Jach&apos;s Recent Posts</title>
<description>The 30 most recent posts on Jach&apos;s blog.</description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com</link>
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<title>Dividing up life into eras</title>
<description><![CDATA[This is just one of my silly &quot;cocktail party&quot; trains of thought (I've never been to a cocktail party). In short, more blog fodder I just felt like typing up without much careful thought or revision. It's simply amusing to me to try and divide up life, and indeed society at large, into small-ish eras focused around technological change, each suspiciously around 10 years long, with myself suspiciously placed at the start of interesting things.]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2026/2/dividing_up_life_into_eras</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2026/2/dividing_up_life_into_eras</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 13 Feb 2026 05:18:52 -0800</pubDate>
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<title>One of the beginner difficulties with programming</title>
<description><![CDATA[For some reason I occasionally think about programming pedagogy even though I don't teach anyone and I'm not in any hurry to write a book about it. I do occasionally give advice to beginners or even absolute beginners, though in the latter case it's usually &quot;here are two book options that seem to be successful for that audience, even when or especially if you don't have a clear picture in mind of what you want to learn programming for&quot;. (The books are Zed Shaw's Learn Python the Hard Way, and alternatively David Touretzky's Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation.)]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2026/1/one_of_the_beginner_difficulties_with_programming</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2026/1/one_of_the_beginner_difficulties_with_programming</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 06 Jan 2026 01:55:38 -0800</pubDate>
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<title>2026 Goals</title>
<description><![CDATA[I don't usually do goals, since I think I won't succeed in them anyway. But what the heck, let's list some off this time. And we'll list a bunch of stuff which I know for sure I won't do all of, but maybe I'll complete some of.]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2025/12/2026_goals</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2025/12/2026_goals</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 31 Dec 2025 02:10:17 -0800</pubDate>
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<title>20 years of programming</title>
<description><![CDATA[It hit me just now that I've been programming for fun since 2004-2005, aka 20 years... So I thought I'd ramble a bit about some of those years, in brief. This isn't going to be an autobiography or anything, and isn't complete or well-edited, but just a bit of history for my own future reference I guess. Maybe I'll want to write something up that's more serious in the future.]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2025/11/20_years_of_programming</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2025/11/20_years_of_programming</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 10 Nov 2025 03:23:13 -0800</pubDate>
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<title>Endeavoring to not go crazy</title>
<description><![CDATA[I've had this thought for many years, but seeing yet another instance of someone randomly going crazy makes me think about it more frequently again. I'm not going to name names, but it just keeps happening...]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2025/10/endeavoring_to_not_go_crazy</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2025/10/endeavoring_to_not_go_crazy</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 15 Oct 2025 21:55:08 -0700</pubDate>
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<title>Language Envy</title>
<description><![CDATA[Every programming language community seems to have a subset of itself that is just overly concerned with envy for another language, whether it's the features or parts of the ecosystem. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's actually good when a good idea gets support in multiple languages. It's just interesting how narrow and repetitive the envy can be. (In some cases even incestuous -- JS framework envy leading to more and more JS frameworks.)]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2025/8/language_envy</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2025/8/language_envy</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 18 Aug 2025 08:26:30 -0700</pubDate>
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<title>Getting over someone sucks</title>
<description><![CDATA[]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2025/8/getting_over_someone_sucks</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2025/8/getting_over_someone_sucks</guid>
<pubDate>Sat, 16 Aug 2025 06:55:50 -0700</pubDate>
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<title>Hard labor</title>
<description><![CDATA[I had a dumb argument recently with my dad's wife, it was around various aspects of illegal alien workers. One of the retorts against me was something like &quot;You have no idea how hard they work&quot;, to which my knee-jerk reply was something like &quot;I've done hard labor&quot; and her reply was a &quot;When have you ever? *laughs*&quot;.]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2025/7/hard_labor</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2025/7/hard_labor</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 31 Jul 2025 15:55:47 -0700</pubDate>
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<title>The futility of one million words</title>
<description><![CDATA[I've had a word count tracker for this site for quite some time. It's nothing special, just counts every &quot;word&quot; in posts and in comments by me, defining word as a string of symbols not including a space. A bit of logic filters out quote blocks or code blocks. (I had previously forgotten to filter code blocks, but duplicated the logic for span blocks so that should be good now...) Some quotes/code blocks probably should be counted (I think there might be some cringe poetry in pre tags...) but whatever, accurate enough.]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2025/7/the_futility_of_one_million_words</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2025/7/the_futility_of_one_million_words</guid>
<pubDate>Sat, 19 Jul 2025 06:58:16 -0700</pubDate>
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<title>Briefly revisiting Land of Lisp</title>
<description><![CDATA[A couple months ago I was surprised to read in a couple places that the book Land of Lisp was &quot;much maligned&quot;. This was surprising because it has high reviews on Amazon and GoodReads, and I personally liked it overall too. I remember getting it not long after it came out, Christmas of 2010, but I didn't really make time to read it much. I was busy with college and my job, and at some point I got more hooked on Clojure and didn't want to look at things through the &quot;old and crufty&quot; CL lens. I wish I kept track better of my progress milestones. I remember going through a section of it years later with my cat occasionally resting on a page. For various outside the book reasons though I just didn't get around to making the final push to finish it until 2018.]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2025/7/briefly_revisiting_land_of_lisp</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2025/7/briefly_revisiting_land_of_lisp</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 07 Jul 2025 04:45:01 -0700</pubDate>
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<title>You might not need ECS</title>
<description><![CDATA[So around May of 2024, I finally got around to reading this article on lisp gamedev with ECS. It's very good and explains things really well. The author created a nice ECS system and if it fits your development style, by all means, use it and let's have more Lisp games!]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2025/3/you_might_not_need_ecs</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2025/3/you_might_not_need_ecs</guid>
<pubDate>Sat, 15 Mar 2025 15:48:50 -0700</pubDate>
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<title>Hammock bye-bye</title>
<description><![CDATA[According to Amazon, I purchased my first hammock in October 2013. I've been sleeping in one since, trying out a few different types over the years or just replacing one as it wears out and gets a rip.]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2025/3/hammock_bye-bye</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2025/3/hammock_bye-bye</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 03 Mar 2025 06:15:11 -0800</pubDate>
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<title>Drafts</title>
<description><![CDATA[Previously this post was called &quot;Feature request to self: draft posts&quot;. Its original contents will be below. But I've decided to make it into a public scratch pad for drafts after all. It's important to allow others to see my sloppy incomplete thinking, or things I was interested in at some point. I should try to date things too.]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2025/2/drafts</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2025/2/drafts</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 13 Feb 2025 17:07:56 -0800</pubDate>
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<title>Japan Trip 6</title>
<description><![CDATA[Previously.]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2025/1/japan_trip_6</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2025/1/japan_trip_6</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 14 Jan 2025 09:30:13 -0800</pubDate>
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<title>It's probably over</title>
<description><![CDATA[Back home after a month trip (Japan Trip 6, will make a separate post later). It's so nice to be home.]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2025/1/its_probably_over</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2025/1/its_probably_over</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 10 Jan 2025 07:34:00 -0800</pubDate>
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<title>Brief thoughts on maybe programmers are bad talk</title>
<description><![CDATA[I love the title, though the talk isn't quite a match. Whatever. The link is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqUgl6pFx8Q]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2024/11/brief_thoughts_on_maybe_programmers_are_bad_talk</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2024/11/brief_thoughts_on_maybe_programmers_are_bad_talk</guid>
<pubDate>Sun, 17 Nov 2024 00:18:05 -0800</pubDate>
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<title>Some brief thoughts on the Yudkowsky / Wolfram chat</title>
<description><![CDATA[Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjH2B_sE_RQ]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2024/11/some_brief_thoughts_on_the_yudkowsky__wolfram_chat</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2024/11/some_brief_thoughts_on_the_yudkowsky__wolfram_chat</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 13 Nov 2024 11:45:50 -0800</pubDate>
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<title>Bad science reporting</title>
<description><![CDATA[This article about a new gout study is really quite annoying.]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2024/11/bad_science_reporting</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2024/11/bad_science_reporting</guid>
<pubDate>Sun, 03 Nov 2024 01:44:02 -0700</pubDate>
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<title>Game design considerations of phobias</title>
<description><![CDATA[There was a twitter thread a few days ago that ultimately got deleted because too many people made uncharitable reads of it. The underlying idea was a bit interesting though. I wanted to riff on it, and twitter's not a good place for that. So here's some unorganizeed thoughts.]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2024/10/game_design_considerations_of_phobias</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2024/10/game_design_considerations_of_phobias</guid>
<pubDate>Fri, 04 Oct 2024 22:15:17 -0700</pubDate>
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<title>Hero Driven Development</title>
<description><![CDATA[Just a brief thought or lament on a common pattern in open source development. It's the dependence on &quot;heroes&quot; of the ecosystem.]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2024/9/hero_driven_development</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2024/9/hero_driven_development</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 25 Sep 2024 09:18:01 -0700</pubDate>
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<title>Where's my game?</title>
<description><![CDATA[Nowhere in sight.]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2024/9/wheres_my_game</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2024/9/wheres_my_game</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 23 Sep 2024 06:34:09 -0700</pubDate>
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<title>AI Songs</title>
<description><![CDATA[I came across this silly song today, Colors of the Lisp. At the bottom is a link to a youtube video of someone performing it. I don't mean to be rude to the singer; my opinion is that it's kind of a bad performance.]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2024/9/ai_songs</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2024/9/ai_songs</guid>
<pubDate>Sun, 22 Sep 2024 01:42:33 -0700</pubDate>
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<title>Time series statistics are tricky</title>
<description><![CDATA[In one of my last projects at BigCo, I had to implement a bunch of metrics monitoring and alerting for our services. This was years ago now but every so often I think back on it and how it drove me a bit nutty... Here's a short write up of some of the problems I remember, from just considering one of its aspects: metrics on a single API endpoint request.]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2024/9/time_series_statistics_are_tricky</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2024/9/time_series_statistics_are_tricky</guid>
<pubDate>Mon, 02 Sep 2024 09:25:53 -0700</pubDate>
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<title>Thanksgiving Approaches</title>
<description><![CDATA[I was listening to a bit of my grandma's funeral service recording. Not yet ready for my mom's, but as next month is the 10 year anniversary, I'll do hers then. My mom only did a short segment for grandma, to read a poem, that apparently she read every Thanksgiving at grandma's? But I don't remember that, or the poem. My memory is so shot on these sorts of things. It's embarrassing.]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2024/8/thanksgiving_approaches</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2024/8/thanksgiving_approaches</guid>
<pubDate>Sun, 11 Aug 2024 07:56:10 -0700</pubDate>
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<title>Happenings</title>
<description><![CDATA[Been in a slump the last several months. Going to try an experiment, that I suspect will fail, of writing down daily or at least weekly blurbs here of things I've been up to, like things I've been learning or doing. Or if nothing else, maybe some food I've been eating or music I've been listening to. In short, a public journal, but without trying to be super detailed -- but maybe some entries will be TMI anyway and I suppose I'd rather go for more details than fewer if the thing is triggering some thoughts.]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2024/7/happenings</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2024/7/happenings</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 25 Jul 2024 12:51:56 -0700</pubDate>
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<title>Japan Trip 4 and 5</title>
<description><![CDATA[Previously.]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2024/2/japan_trip_4_and_5</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2024/2/japan_trip_4_and_5</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 29 Feb 2024 16:13:05 -0800</pubDate>
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<title>Possible errors and downtime</title>
<description><![CDATA[I've migrated my blog and other things over to OVH, leaving Amazon's EC2 behind. The DNS switch has been made, though my local machine keeps trying to talk to the old server I have shut down to encourage not caching the old IP. I also had to upgrade to PHP 8.2 and recreate my database. I've fixed a few errors so far, but there might be more. Anyway, just a warning as the title says in case anyone is experiencing the issues.]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2024/1/possible_errors_and_downtime</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2024/1/possible_errors_and_downtime</guid>
<pubDate>Thu, 18 Jan 2024 18:10:03 -0800</pubDate>
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<title>Parting is such sweet sorrow</title>
<description><![CDATA[One of the few Shakespeare lines I like.]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2024/1/parting_is_such_sweet_sorrow</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2024/1/parting_is_such_sweet_sorrow</guid>
<pubDate>Sun, 14 Jan 2024 14:55:05 -0800</pubDate>
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<title>Leaving a mark</title>
<description><![CDATA[Most people in all of human history didn't leave much of a mark. The greatest, longest lasting contribution for most of them was simply having children.]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2023/12/leaving_a_mark</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2023/12/leaving_a_mark</guid>
<pubDate>Wed, 20 Dec 2023 23:38:00 -0800</pubDate>
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<title>Keep saying no to unionizing tech</title>
<description><![CDATA[There's a lot of hot takes on the OpenAI meltdown this last weekend. One I don't think I've seen elsewhere, but relevant, is that the so far 710/770 employees (with the rest seemingly on PTO) have collectively signed a letter threatening to quit if the board doesn't resign.]]></description>
<link>https://www.thejach.com/view/2023/11/keep_saying_no_to_unionizing_tech</link>
<guid>https://www.thejach.com/view/2023/11/keep_saying_no_to_unionizing_tech</guid>
<pubDate>Tue, 21 Nov 2023 08:08:36 -0800</pubDate>
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