A non-gamer’s view on games

[For folk literature,] you need folk allusions — if cowardly, say Vuu Dhahlang; if brave, say old Huang Dyung.
— Lǎo Shě, The Agony of Creating Popular Literature

I am the kind of person who emphasizes at the beginning of each smalltalk that I am a non-gamer. Unfortunately, this statement requires clarification. I open Tetris from time to time, and occasionally linger on neal.fun and Lichess, but Doom is beyond choice. I always make the claim abruptly, regardless of how others would interpret it, maybe contrary to my intention. I envy gamers, in fact. I envy them like the hypothetical narrator in a clichéd advertisement envies those who read. Their focus on games and the clear separation between games and work are beyond my imagination.

I am a ruin aborigine

The open space outside the parking area fuses into the mainroad, with no clear boundary other than a vest-sized road sign. I did not see the parking area itself, which is roughly beyond a crossbar at a corner. However, should any major event occur, the open space would doubtlessly be filled with cars at all.

The spreadsheet-makers

In a note, Shemol breezily asked whether there was ever a time when people are paid to create Excel and PowerPoint, reached a positive conclusion with Claude, and compared supposed decline of these employees to the current AI hype threatening developers. This is a good question catering my bouquiniste soul. I left a letter in response, which inspired the post you are reading.

I did not experience the time of spreadsheet-makers. I was, at that time, a fake geek boy lingering about office suites and online services. I habitually help Muqliongists and teachers with paperwork, with no idea of work or even college entrance. I swaggered through the provincial capital, staring at my first smartphone, replacing lorem ipsum in Calibri with ‘observation’ notes I was told to take, and feeling the ‘generousity’ and device switch promoted by cloud services. I almost forgot the carefree age, when I also picked up You Gotta Play with Excel Like This, a book published in 2011 by Quu Hao.

领有和非领有的 C++ range

这是讨论 C++ range 及其 range adaptor 等底层性质系列文章之第一篇。同时，我介绍了意在解决本文所述一些问题的实验性库之设计。

Do not get gentle into your CS major

I used to believe I was the one on the planet who loved this field the most. Now I suspect I care the least. I cannot see the future, sprinting toward a horizon that keeps receding into darkness. Part of this text was written one year ago, originally meant to be the script for a video. I found it too clumsy and in constant need of revision, so I reformed it into an essay.

Before I begin, let me summarize a remark of one brilliant peer, that variance is enormous, and joining the frontier requires a otherworldy stainless résumé. It is never too much to repeat this. However, since anyone actually aiming for that perfection is unlikely to read a post like this, I only deal with the question how large the the gap/residual will be if you fall short.

ཡིའུ་ཀང་ལག་

高田时雄在 Multilingualism in Tun-huang^(PDF) 所引 Pelliot tibétain 1259 写在帋边的《斿江乐（泛龙舟）》。

Buku-name de Mini kon Sina-litera

Mini a linga de-i make de S.C. Gruget en ano 2020. Note-metodo de Mini kon Sina-litera e de-i make de Onerio an amigo en junta de Mini, i kan ade a man ke savi a Sina-litera go-i etudi a Mini. Onerio i de pubili a video de di ota note-metodo. Di note i efeto sama mi note de Kokanu.

„My Path“ after twenty years

Goliath was pelted with ten million stones every June. It must be painful.
— Me, commenting elsewhere

After the faith fades, the ritual remains.
We still carry stones — not for victory,
but to remember our past goals.
— ChatGPT, mimicking a contemporary

Twenty-two years ago, a college fresher penned an essay titled My Path. She began with a modest line: ‹I don’t consider myself a winner. I am just an ordinary person who keeps growing and thinking.›

My linguistic history

Before the FSF40 gathering, William Goodspeed checked my blog when receiving my inquiry email. When I opened the same website in person, he asked: ‹Are you into linguistics?› I was not sure what expectations an English major might have by ‹into linguistics›, so I awkwardly avoided answering.

The other day, I read a reflection on their linguistic journey from a linguistics guru. This guru’s encounter with language began with academic competitions and has since woven a marvelous double helix of career and language, an achievement I can hardly imagine. Their article, however, debunked my single-origin hypothesis of the linguistics community, as I had assumed the entire language circle stemmed from discussions on a BBS forum in the early 2000s. This prompted me to reflect on the role language and linguistics have played in my life.

A slice of Bash programmable completion

During the process of migrating a Conda environment and mitigating confliction, I noticed Bash programmable completion was experiencing an issue when the environment was not yet incomplete. I seemingly showed no curiousity, proceeding to enter the command despite STDERR for the rest of migration. This post was created after that since there are no Marginalia search engine-style sources on Bash programmable completion.…