Garrett Wollman

I fix networks and other stuff with computers inside for MIT CSAIL. Bi cyclist, cis male. More frequency = better mobility. Formerly @garrett_wollman on Twitter, still @gwollman.bsky.social on the other site.

Home: https://bimajority.org/~wollman/
Blog: https://blog.bimajority.org/
Photos: https://photos.bimajority.org/
Pronouns: I use he/him (or il/lui when I try to write French) but they (or iel) is fine too.

Last Notes

2026-05-30 03:16:13 GMT

I have a very simple solution to the "data broker problem": simply outlaw them. There is no reason a free society should tolerate their existence.

2026-05-21 03:48:00 GMT

Thursday is the 80th anniversary of Louis Slotin's screwdriver slipping.

2025-11-04 02:57:10 GMT

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I always thought the original Athena explanation-in-dialogue paper was quite clear, even when I was 16. Of course it was about v4 which is now long obsolete, and v5 adds a bunch of complications for Microsoft's benefit (some of which other implementations also use). Wish I could remember either the titles or the authors.

2025-08-01 21:57:05 GMT

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No, it's much worse than that. Firing the person responsible for reporting jobs numbers just ensures that nobody trusts the jobs numbers going forward.

2025-07-17 02:26:39 GMT

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I was bored today and went looking for reviews of a book that I know well, that has been important to me for more than 30 years.
This book has a child rape scene, told from the PoV of the victim. It's important to the resolution of the central issue in the story.
Many of the amateur reviewers said, to paraphrase, "sigh, yet another rape scene, why do fantasy authors have to resort to sexual abuse as a source of trauma for their characters?"

2025-07-17 02:23:57 GMT

I've written a few times before about my philosophy with regard to literature, which can be roughly summarized as "let the text speak for itself", avoiding extratextual sources of information about the writer's motivations, intent, or career path. I've found one case, though, where this is clearly inadequate, the text can't speak for itself, but the author can. (cont'd)

2025-05-16 20:49:56 GMT

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You could argue that I was cheating because those buffers were all empty. We can fix that:
(defun make-buffer-recursive (i limit)
(if (< i limit)
(progn
(with-current-buffer (generate-new-buffer " test " t)
(insert "foo"))
(make-buffer-recursive (+ i 1) limit))))
Adding another 400 buffers each containing the word "foo" changes the virtual size not a whit, but resident set increases to 74808, so that's about 5,150 bytes per buffer.

2025-05-16 20:47:10 GMT

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It's a Lisp, I could just do it recursively (although I don't think Emacs Lisp has tail-recursion optimization) but ugh.
ok fine.
(defun make-buffer-recursive (i limit)
(if (< i limit)
(progn
(generate-new-buffer " test " t)
(make-buffer-recursive (+ i 1) limit))))
After running (make-buffer-recursive 0 400), virtual size increases from 114076 to 114332, and resident set size increases from 72496 to 72796. (Positively svelte!)

2025-05-16 20:27:50 GMT

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I was thinking I could just code it up and measure the memory usage when I realized I forgot how to write a for loop in Emacs Lisp.

2025-05-16 20:25:00 GMT

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Don't see why not, a buffer's not that big a data structure even in Emacs.

2025-04-27 03:28:50 GMT

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LLMs are approximate information retrieval systems. Asking them to generate something that isn't well represented in the training corpus is going to get you a linear combination of stuff that is. Sometimes by coincidence that happens to be right but the model isn't capable of knowing.

2025-03-04 14:58:23 GMT

Back before the pandemic, the EU was working on revoking the Summer Time Directive and eliminating semiannual time changes. Come the emergency that didn't seem so important, but has this effort been completely dropped or is it still out there lurking in Brussels?

2025-03-02 23:41:59 GMT

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When I was a lad, that was the whole excitement of computers! Here was this thing, it sat on your desk and you could make it do stuff!

2025-02-07 06:05:35 GMT

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I would really confuse that student given that I have Emacs open all the time (one frame for mail and one for other stuff) but then constantly run vi (not vim) from the shell because it's faster than opening the same file in Emacs (assuming it's even on the same machine).
Remember when Emacs was said to be an acronym for "eight megabytes and constantly swapping"? Those were the days. I'm guessing VS Code is closer to eight GIGAbytes, amirite?

2024-12-24 20:09:49 GMT

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Comment dit-on "meh"?

2024-11-14 02:13:22 GMT

Asked on Bluesky and got no responses, so I'm going to ask here where there are more techies and fewer poasters: is there an actual specification for the RFC 1035 "master file format" representation of TXT records? #DNS

2024-10-10 02:59:14 GMT

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I hope you're right. (My ballot is already at the clerk's office but I'll still be very anxious on Election Day proper and hitting refresh constantly.)

2024-09-08 21:19:31 GMT

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What we need is some bollards (and Newbury permanently closed to non-emergency vehicles, except perhaps for deliveries 5a-10a).