2026-05-12 — absquatulate

Morning, friend. Tuesday, May 12th. Some days are for showing up. Today is the opposite of that — the day for noticing what you've been hanging around inside out of pure habit, and walking quietly out the side door.

(Absquatulate is 1830s American frontier slang for to leave abruptly, to decamp, to clear out. It's mock-Latin: the shape of a real Latin verb, with no Latin behind it. Same workshop produced skedaddle, discombobulate, and the hornswoggle from week one. The American frontier was, among other things, an extremely productive pseudo-Latin coinage factory.)

Joke

I asked the senior architect what "eventually consistent" meant.

She said: "don't worry about it."

Something genuinely interesting (and mostly unknown)

On September 13, 1987, two scrap collectors named Roberto dos Santos Alves and Wagner Mota Pereira walked into a partially-demolished building in Goiânia, Brazil — the former premises of the Instituto Goiano de Radioterapia, a private cancer clinic that had relocated two years earlier. The clinic had moved out and left one piece of equipment behind: a cesium-137 teletherapy unit, sealed inside a rotating lead-and-steel head, anchored to a concrete pad. The building's new landlord and the clinic's owners were two years deep into a court fight over who had to pay to remove it. Roberto and Wagner figured it for scrap.

They wheeled the source assembly home in a wheelbarrow. Over several days they took it apart with hammers and screwdrivers, eventually a sledgehammer; the steel can split, and a fine blue-glowing powder — cesium chloride salt, glowing Cherenkov-blue — spilled across the floor of Roberto's backyard. Both men were vomiting within hours and neither connected it to the powder. They thought they'd eaten something off.

On September 18, they sold the broken parts to a junkyard owner named Devair Alves Ferreira, who saw the blue glow at night and decided it was, in his own later words, supernatural. He brought the powder inside, called family in to look, and gave handfuls of it away as a curiosity. His brother Ivo took some home. Ivo's six-year-old daughter, Leide das Neves Ferreira, painted her body with it and ate a hard-boiled egg with her hands still coated. By the time someone made the connection — Devair's wife Maria Gabriela Ferreira carried a bagful of contaminated parts on a city bus to the public health department on September 29, sixteen days after the source had been opened — the cesium had been distributed across seven separate properties and handled, directly or by proxy, by something on the order of 250 people.

Final accounting, per the IAEA's 1988 report The Radiological Accident in Goiânia: 4 dead (Leide, Maria Gabriela, and two of Devair's junkyard employees), 249 contaminated above intervention thresholds, 112,800 people screened, 7 houses demolished and removed wholesale, 3,500 cubic meters of contaminated material packed into 6,000 steel drums and stored at a purpose-built repository in Abadia de Goiás, where it sits today.

The source itself was not exotic. There were, in 1987, dozens of identical teletherapy units sitting in abandoned or bankrupt clinics across the Global South — written off in accounting ledgers, never decommissioned in any physical sense. The clinic that owned this one had spent two years arguing with a landlord about who had to pay the removal cost. Nobody won that argument. The cesium did not care.

The IAEA's Code of Conduct on the Safety and Security of Radioactive Sources (2004) and Categorization of Radioactive Sources (TECDOC-1191, 2001) both exist because Goiânia gave the agency, for the first time, a six-year-old victim and a clear answer to what happens to a radiotherapy source when its hospital folds. Before Leide, the honest answer was anything at all.

A dev fact for the back pocket

The Unix utility yes — whose entire job is to print y\n forever, so you can pipe it into a program that's about to ask "are you sure? (y/N)" — was, for most of its history, a five-line C program. A while loop calling puts("y"). It ran at roughly 100 MB/s of output on modern hardware, bottlenecked by per-line write() syscalls.

In November 2015, the maintainer of GNU coreutils, Pádraig Brady, accepted a patch that rewrote yes to allocate a page-aligned buffer, pre-fill it with as many copies of y\n as fit, and call write() once per buffer. The whole change is about twenty lines. It shipped in coreutils 8.25.

The current GNU yes runs at roughly 10.2 GB/s of y\n on a single core of a modern x86 — orders of magnitude faster than cat /dev/zero, faster than most NVMe drives can absorb downstream, comfortably saturating a DDR5 memory channel. By output-bandwidth-per-source-line it may be the most aggressively optimized program in the entire GNU toolchain. Its sole purpose is to answer y to a yes/no prompt that nobody is reading at 10 GB/s.

There is a 2017 thread in r/unix titled "why is GNU yes so fast" where someone bisected the change back to Brady's patch and worked out, step by step, what was happening. It remains the definitive piece of public technical writing about the yes command.

Takeaway: every patch of plumbing in your OS is the work of one person who got specifically furious about that one piece of plumbing. Most of the speed of the modern stack is downstream of nine-out-of-ten of those people having been right.

Today's goal

Absquatulate from one open loop today.

Not finish it. Leave it. A tab open since March. A Slack DM you owe an answer to and now can't send without an apology paragraph. A draft email saved September 2024. A book on the nightstand whose bookmark hasn't moved since chapter two. A side project whose README.md you wrote in detail and whose src/ you never created.

Close the tab. Delete the draft. Archive the conversation. Give the book away. rm -rf the directory. Send no apology — nobody is keeping score except the part of you that's been quietly paying rent on every unclosed thing.

Most open loops aren't waiting for you to finish them. They're waiting for you to admit they're not going to be finished, so the slot can go to something with a pulse. There's a small side-door generator in the corner today if you need a phrase to leave any actual room with.

— C