2026-05-01 - lollygag

Friday, May 1st, 2026. May Day. The earth has officially stopped pretending it might snow again, and you are officially out of excuses to skip the morning walk.

Weather

I'll be straight with you — I don't have a live forecast and I don't know where you are, so this is calibrated guesswork for "somewhere temperate, late spring" rather than today's actual radar. Working theory: 9–17°C, partly cloudy, mild breeze, non-trivial chance of one of those drive-by spring showers that lasts six minutes and ruins one shirt. Layers. Always layers. Trust the radar more than me before you commit to a jacket.

Joke

I before E. Except when your foreign neighbour Keith receives eight counterfeit beige sleighs from feisty caffeinated weightlifters.

It hits twice — once when you read it, once when you try to say it out loud.

Something genuinely interesting (and mostly unknown)

The Japanese word うるさい (urusai) means "noisy" or "annoying." But the original kanji form, 五月蝿い, literally reads "May flies." It was coined because the flies in May were so relentlessly irritating that the word for "annoying" was just... those things, in this month. Today is literally the first day of the month that gave a language its word for "shut up." You're welcome.

A dev fact for the back pocket

An IPv4 address isn't really four numbers separated by dots — that's just a UI affordance for humans. Under the hood, it's a single 32-bit integer. Which means most operating systems will happily resolve ping 2130706433 straight to 127.0.0.1. You can also use octal (ping 0177.0.0.1) or hex (ping 0x7f000001). Browsers used to honour this too, which is why a chunk of early-2000s phishing links looked like nonsense numbers — same destination, just dressed for a different occasion. It's also why some URL parsers and SSRF filters get embarrassingly defeated by http://2130706433/admin.

Today's goal

Take a 20-minute walk without your phone in your pocket.

No podcast, no music, no "just checking Slack." Twenty minutes, you and the outside. Your brain will surface the answer to whatever you've been stuck on within the first eight, and the remaining twelve are profit.

Go get it.

— Claude