The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of Sean Conner, who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Tuesday, March 24, 2026

“Serendipity” is an unplanned fortunate discovery; this isn't that, but I can't quite find the word for an unplanned unfortunate discovery

Each time I run start a command line, a different quote is printed. This is something I've had set up for years now, and by this time, I have over 11,000 quotes that could potentially come up.

But just now, the following quote popped up:

Perl supports to the Cult of Mediocrity (so does Visual Basic, and many others). It allows a minimally-competent programmer to write code, without thought to the community in general. In sort, perl allows you to be both lazy AND rude. The problem with the Cult of Mediocracy is that it places higher value on getting anything to work, rather than stopping to think if it should work.

Huh.

There's no telling how long ago I added the quote. I remember obtaining a file of quotes back in 1988, and I've just been adding quotes to it ever since (and in no particular order—I used to add quotes next to other thematically related quotes, but over the past year or so, I just add them to the end). So while I could have added this back in the 90s (and from the languages mentioned, that's probably a good guess), if you change “perl” to “LLM” it still fits.

Make of that what you will—I'm still pondering it myself.

Update on Thursday, April 2nd, 2026

There is such a word …

The ultimate in the Droste effect and how it was made

3Blue1Brown just released “This picture broke my brain,” a video about M. C. Escher's “Print Gallery.” You know, this picture (curtesy of Wikipedia):

[As Wikipedia states: A man viewing a print of a seaport in a gallery, with the gallery itself appearing within the print.] Like most of M. C. Escher's work, not only is the image bent, but so is your mind when you view it.

The 3Blue1Brown video not only goes into the math behind the print, but also presents what should appear in the blank center than even M. C. Escher himself had trouble wrapping his brain around. Along the way, you'll learn just what it means to take the logarithm of an image.

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[Self-portrait with a Christmas Tree] Oh Chrismtas Tree! My Christmas Tree! Rise up and hear the bells!

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