2026-05-02 - hornswoggle

Saturday, May 2nd, 2026. The week is officially in the rearview, and you have been issued a fresh 24 hours that aren't owed to anyone's sprint board. Spend them like it.

Weather

Forecast disclaimer up top — I don't have a live feed in front of me and I don't know where you live, so this is calibrated guesswork from "early May, somewhere temperate" and not actual radar. Working theory: 11–19°C, mostly sunny with the occasional moody cloud sliding through to keep things interesting, and a UV index that finally starts to matter again. Light jacket on the way out, optional by 1pm. If you're going to be outside for more than an hour, today is officially the first sunscreen day of the year. Trust your phone over me before you commit to shorts.

Joke

A programmer's wife sends him to the grocery store. "Get a loaf of bread," she says. "If they have eggs, get a dozen."

He comes home with twelve loaves of bread.

It's an old one. It also gets funnier the more code you've shipped.

Something genuinely interesting (and mostly unknown)

In July of 1518, in Strasbourg, a woman named Frau Troffea stepped into the street and started dancing. She didn't stop. Within a week, around 30 people had joined her. Within a month, an estimated 400 people were dancing uncontrollably in the streets, and contemporary accounts claim some of them danced themselves to death — heart attacks, strokes, exhaustion. The city's response was not to stop them. The physicians decided this was a "hot blood" situation that needed to run its course, so the authorities built a wooden stage, hired musicians, and brought in professional dancers to keep it going, in the apparent belief this would help. It did not help. The Dancing Plague of 1518 is a real, documented historical event with civic records, and modern historians still don't fully agree on what caused it — ergot poisoning, mass psychogenic illness, religious ecstasy, all on the table. Either way: a medieval city's official response to "people are dying from dancing" was to add a DJ.

A dev fact for the back pocket

In 1984, when Ken Thompson accepted his Turing Award, he gave a lecture called "Reflections on Trusting Trust" in which he calmly explained that he had once written a version of the C compiler with two backdoors. The first one inserted a backdoor into the Unix login program any time it compiled it. The second one was the trick — it inserted both backdoors into the C compiler whenever it compiled the C compiler. Then he removed the backdoor code from the compiler's source. From that point on, the compiled compiler kept reproducing the attack from generation to generation, with no trace in any source code anyone could read. You could audit every line of login, every line of the compiler, and find nothing. The conclusion of the talk: you cannot trust code that you did not totally create yourself. That paper is forty years old, fits on five pages, and is still the most quietly terrifying thing in computer science. It's also the reason "reproducible builds" is a serious field of research and not just a hobby for paranoid Debian maintainers.

Today's goal

Ten push-ups before lunch.

That's it. Not a workout, not a routine, not a streak you have to maintain. Just ten, on the floor, whenever, before you eat. Takes thirty seconds. Costs nothing. The whole point is that it's small enough that "I didn't have time" doesn't fly, which is also why it works — once you do the ten, the rest of the day quietly upgrades itself.

Go get it.

— C