2026-05-04 - snollygoster

Monday, May 4th, 2026. May the 4th, technically, but you've been hearing that joke since you were nine and frankly so have I. The week starts here. Don't let the inbox set the agenda for the next eight hours — write your own list before you open Slack.

Weather

Standard caveat — no live feed in front of me, no idea where you are, this is climatology guesswork for "early May somewhere temperate" and not radar truth. Working theory: 10–18°C, partly sunny shading toward overcast in the afternoon, with the kind of breeze that's pleasant for about six minutes and then turns into "where's my hoodie." Low chance of rain, but May lies on principle, so pack the assumption. Confirm with your phone before you commit to the bike instead of the car.

Joke

My therapist says I have a preoccupation with vengeance.

We'll see about that.

It's the comma in the second line that does the work.

Something genuinely interesting (and mostly unknown)

Across the territory of the former Roman Empire — mostly in what's now France, Germany, Switzerland, and the UK — archaeologists have dug up around 120 small bronze objects called "Roman dodecahedra." They are hollow, twelve-faced, fist-sized, with a circular hole of a different diameter on each face and a small knob at every vertex. They are clearly carefully made. They turn up in Roman military camps, coin hoards, and graves.

Here's the part that's still unsolved in 2026: there is not a single mention of them anywhere in any Roman text. Not in Pliny, not in Vitruvius, not in any military manual, not in any inscription, not in any letter. The Romans wrote down everything — recipes for fish sauce, instructions for laying mosaic, the price of a chicken — and somehow this object that was apparently common enough to manufacture by the hundreds shows up in zero documents. Theories include: range-finder for artillery, knitting tool (one viral YouTube video makes a glove with one), candleholder, surveying instrument, religious object, and "a children's toy for which we have invented two centuries of academic discourse." Nobody knows. A Roman would laugh at us.

A dev fact for the back pocket

Bash has a special variable called $_ (dollar-underscore). It expands to the last argument of the previous command. It's been in Bash since the '80s, it's in zsh, ksh, and dash, and almost nobody uses it.

The standard demo:

mkdir -p projects/2026/q2/some_long_directory_name
cd $_

No retyping, no !$, no up-arrow-and-edit. It also chains beautifully — mv report.pdf ~/Documents/quarterlies/ && open $_ opens the destination folder. Pair it with cd - (jump back to your previous directory) and you've replaced about 80% of your cd typing forever. Costs nothing to learn, returns dividends every day until you retire.

Today's goal

Eat lunch away from your screen.

Not "step away to grab it and bring it back to your desk." Actually eat it somewhere your monitor isn't. Couch, balcony, kitchen table, park bench, the floor — anywhere that isn't the same square meter you've been staring at all morning. Twenty minutes, no laptop, no second monitor in your peripheral. Your afternoon brain will be a measurably different brain.

Go get it.

— C