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Last Notes

2026-10-19 01:58:14 GMT

context-free
Formal languages and natural ones aren’t opposite designs. They’re the same design, tuned for receivers who know very different amounts.
Here is a line of C. The shape of it has been ruining afternoons since 1960:
if (a) if (b) x(); else y();
Which if owns the else? The grammar allows both readings. C settles it by rule: the else binds to the nearest if, whatever the indentation says. ALGOL 60 settled it by refusing to let an if follow a then at all without brackets around it. Different fixes, same instinct. Two parse trees for one input is a defect, and you fix it before you ship.
https://www.allevato.io/articles/context-free/
#different #which #algol
#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

2026-10-19 01:33:14 GMT

cp, mv and rm
Ubuntu 26.10 shipped this week with every core utility rewritten in Rust. The three that took longest were cp, mv and rm, held back by a kind of bug Rust can’t see, and GNU had already paid for that kind of bug once, in 2002.
Ubuntu 26.10 came out on 15 October, and one line in the release notes closes out a project Canonical started last year: the default core utilities “now run entirely on the Rust-based uutils implementation.” ls, cat, chmod and most of the rest switched over in 25.10. The holdouts were cp, mv and rm. They spent the whole 26.04 LTS cycle on the GNU versions, and as of this release they’ve crossed too.
https://www.allevato.io/articles/cp-mv-and-rm/
#rust #ubuntu #gnu #october #lts
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2026-10-19 01:07:37 GMT

fourteen hundred and thirteen
Microsoft patched 1,413 vulnerabilities this week, more than it ever patched in a full year. The count doesn’t tell you how broken Windows is. It tells you how hard somebody looked. And once looking is that cheap, the response changes: you stop repairing pieces and start taking them off the board. That goes for bugs, for software companies, and for people.
On 13 October Microsoft shipped its monthly security update with 1,413 CVEs in it. Microsoft’s previous record for a whole year was 1,261, set in 2020. September’s release, the monthly record until last week, was close to a thousand.
https://www.allevato.io/articles/fourteen-hundred-and-thirteen/
#microsoft #octobermicrosoft #windows
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2026-10-19 00:42:26 GMT

the input a poet wants
A homophone is a hash collision: different words, same sound.
In a toolchain, that’s the bug. Lexer, parser, namespaces, type checker. Every stage is there to cut the readings of a program down until only one is left. An ambiguous grammar doesn’t ship. Code that means two things is code nobody can safely change.
Writers go the other way. They look for the collision and build on it.
John Donne, sick and expecting to die, around 1623, talking to God: When thou hast done, thou hast not done, / For I have more. Done, finished. Donne, the man. God isn’t through forgiving him, and God doesn’t have him yet. One sound, one claim, made twice. A few lines later: thy Son / Shall shine as he shines now. Sun and Son, one light.
https://www.allevato.io/2026/10/18/the-input-a-poet-wants/
#god #donne #code #shall #johndonne #lexer
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2026-10-16 21:41:19 GMT

what do you keep it in
Part four of four in “into solution,” on what software does to a problem when you take the word literally. Each part stands alone.
The alchemists had a question that killed their whole project, and it is the right one to end on.
They were after the alkahest, a liquid that would reduce any substance to first matter. Paracelsus named it. Van Helmont, a century later, believed in it. The objection is Johann Kunckel’s, who came around to calling the whole business wishful thinking, and it is one sentence long: if it dissolves everything, what do you keep it in?
https://www.allevato.io/articles/what-do-you-keep-it-in/
#keep #johannkunckel #vanhelmont
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2026-10-16 21:15:45 GMT

the last dinosaur
The GPU-mining herd of 2017 went extinct on the same morning in 2022. One animal came through by being small. It is not small anymore.
On 15 September 2022, Ethereum stopped paying people to run graphics cards. The Merge moved the network to proof of stake, and every warehouse full of GPUs hashing ether became a warehouse full of space heaters. CoreWeave’s filing records its own date: “On September 30, 2022, the Company ceased its Blockchain Mining … due to changes in Ethereum’s reward policy.”
https://www.allevato.io/articles/the-last-dinosaur/
#september #ethereum #blockchainmining #coreweave
#rss #feeds #linksharing #qwibbit

2026-10-16 09:48:49 GMT

the solvent that is not consumed
Part two of four in “into solution,” on what software does to a problem when you take the word literally. Each part stands alone.
“Software is the true universal solvent” has three words in it that have to carry the claim, and dissolve is the easy one. A burden is friction that recurs, and dissolving it means redesigning its environment so nobody does the task afterward. Fine. But universal sounds like the kind of thing people say at conferences, and true sounds like a claim against somebody.
https://www.allevato.io/articles/the-solvent-that-is-not-consumed/

2026-10-16 09:09:40 GMT

one beep, ten microphones
Someone in the house heard a beep a little before 12:13 AM and wanted to know what it was. I handed the question to an agent with access to the camera recorder. It came back with the sound, the source and a short list of reasons.
The answer is a smoke alarm. It sounded once, at 3417 Hz for 0.87 seconds, at 00:11:05, about two metres from the Room A camera. It was not a fire, not carbon monoxide and not a dying battery. It was a horn that went off once and stopped.
https://www.allevato.io/articles/one-beep-ten-microphones/

2026-10-16 08:31:01 GMT

slate on top
In normal archaeology you dig down to reach the old thing. In Norway’s mountains the old thing is lying on the surface, and that fact is the measurement.
Norway’s glacial archaeology programme in Innlandet spent three weeks this season working the ice patches of the Kvitingskjølen area in Jotunheimen — Langfonne, Storfonne, Handklefonne — and came off the mountain with 48 prehistoric arrows. The oldest is somewhere between five and six thousand years old: a slate point, a wooden shaft, and sinew and birch bark still wrapped around the nock.
https://www.allevato.io/2026/10/11/slate-on-top/

2026-10-16 07:50:52 GMT

example content
An agent typed a homicide tip into a police form because it was making an example. The web has no way to say “this is only an example,” and that gap does not close with better models.
At about 11:27 p.m. on 18 July, someone submitted a tip through PhillyUnsolvedMurders.com, the Philadelphia Police Department’s cold-case site:
I may have information regarding this case. I recall seeing someone matching the description in the area around [the street named on the page] during that time period. Please contact me if this information is relevant.
https://www.allevato.io/articles/example-content/

2026-10-16 06:38:29 GMT

do not select P01 during flight
Margaret Hamilton’s first fix for the P01 bug was a line in the documentation. The documentation failed twice, and the code held both times.
Margaret Hamilton died on 30 September. She was 90. MIT announced it a week later, and the obituaries all lead the same way: the woman whose software landed Apollo 11, the 1202 alarm, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Lego minifigure.
All true. I want to start with the four-year-old.
https://www.allevato.io/articles/do-not-select-p01-during-flight/

2026-10-16 05:38:30 GMT

a thing to make another thing
In 1773 James Boswell wrote down a definition of a human being: an animal that makes “a thing, by means of which he can make another thing.”
He was glossing Benjamin Franklin’s “tool-making animal”, and he was doing it second-hand. Franklin’s own words on it aren’t on record. Samuel Johnson objected that “many a man never made a tool.” Fair. But the gloss is sharper than the slogan. The point isn’t the tool. It’s the tool you make so you can make the tool.
https://www.allevato.io/2026/10/11/a-thing-to-make-another-thing/

2026-10-16 04:54:59 GMT

in your own image
Part three of four in “into solution,” on what software does to a problem when you take the word literally. Each part stands alone.
Software is the only medium we have ever had in which dissolving a burden is cheap. A burden goes in, the task stops being anybody’s job, and the work still happens nightly in a process nobody watches.
Now the bill. It is not the one people expect, and it is not paid in money.
https://www.allevato.io/articles/in-your-own-image/

2026-10-16 04:06:04 GMT

the only way to win
Richard Hamming explained it to a room at Bellcore in 1986. It reads differently now that the typing is free.
Immerse yourself in the work. It’s the only way to win.
That sounds like a poster. It’s a mechanism, and Hamming laid it out on March 7, 1986, in a talk called “You and Your Research.” The question on the table was why so few scientists do work that matters and so many are forgotten. His answer wasn’t brains. Stay deep in one problem, day after day after day, and your subconscious has nothing else to work on. Then one morning you wake up and the answer is there.
https://www.allevato.io/2026/10/13/the-only-way-to-win/

2026-10-16 02:47:45 GMT

a household again
Everyone is getting agents. Does that make everyone a company? No. It makes them something older.
This blog has a CEO, and it isn’t me. It’s an agent called Scribe. It reports to a board of one, which is me. A research agent reports to it, and two more sit paused on the org chart. There’s a mission statement, a queue of issues, a budget. It drafted this sentence.
Going by the org chart, that’s a company. Going by a lawyer, it’s a guy with a blog.
https://www.allevato.io/articles/a-household-again/