misc on nikthink.net

Misc log

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 20:22:00 -0500

unimportant miscellaneous log entries.

Fri, 25 Apr 2025 19:37:35 -0400

a log of small interesting-ish things i have learned.

2026-04-04: bartitsu
2026-03-19: uranium was formed in supernovae
2026-02-11: busybox contains commands to decrypt xz, ip link, wget.
2026-01-08: acrylic paint is mostly made of plastic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylic_paint
2025-10-26: whale fall
2025-10-24: scammers now distribute malware hidden inside interview code projects: https://blog.daviddodda.com/how-i-almost-got-hacked-by-a-job-interview
2025-09-22: learned about how llms sometimes interacts with people to propagate memes and delusions: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ZnznCaTcbGYsCmqu/the-rise-of-parasitic-ai
2025-05-27: early (before plastic) movie film base were made from (or in part with) cellulose: nitrocellulose.
- researched this since i noticed i was confused: i thought there was no common transparent and flexible material before plastics, but also thought that movies existed on film before plastics; and the latter would seem to require flexible transparent material.
2025-04-25: a rfc about the new protocol gnap which is designed to be a replacement for oauth and openid connect: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc9635
2025-04-24: Black Magic Woman was originally a Fleetwood Mac song (famously known from Santana): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Magic_Woman

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 21:44:00 -0400

a log of things i felt particularly grateful for.

2025-08-20: matt offering to let me have a interview video call at his place. since i dont have internet at home right now.
2025-06-18: marion offered to pay me a drink, and paid me a lemonade.
2025-05-15: orpheus paid me a meal at chai-yo
2025-04-15: julie gave me a fidget spinner that i like very much.

Fri, 28 Mar 2025 14:49:00 -0400

misc thoughts that are not important enough to put somewhere else.

2026-04-04 : “I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working […]” — Reid Wiseman aboard Integrity / artemis 2
2026-03-18 : i hate it when i mount the same directory twice by mistake. (so i now have to double check if the dir is already mounted every single time im mounting something).
2026-03-04 : maybe from now on all humans must register under the .bio tld and all machines under .bot tld
2026-02-12 : since linux 2.6.28 we’ve unlocked a 4th level of meta: “Since Linux 2.6.28, the kernel permits the interpreter of a script to itself be a script. This permission is recursive, up to a limit of four recursions, so that the interpreter may be a script which is interpreted by a script, and so on.”
2025-12-04 : if we were in a simulation, factorio would be the honeypot
2025-11-29 : sleep is when the gradient descent happens
2025-06-11 : chips flavored chips
2025-06-09 : a 6h flight doesn’t make me write a blog post, but a forced 5h layover does
2025-06-09 : told robin hanson that he was just signaling for status. ahah. in reply to something he said in a conversation with me and others at manifest 2025.
2025-06-08 : they should make chips with caffeine
2025-06-04 : constellations arent real.
2025-03-28 : short git stonks: people wont need vcs with peak vibe coding.