Best described by K. J. Parker.

Most people don’t seem all that fired up about mackerel, especially for things other than sushi (grilled or fried). To be fair, it does spoil awfully fast.

If they’re really not all that different from us, what are we slaughtering each other for?”

He sighed.

“Honour,” he said. “Moral imperatives, to defend our country and our way of life. Money, of course, and eternal glory, and to defend our trading interests. Because we’re right and they’re wrong. Because evil must be resisted, and sooner or later there comes a time when men of principle have to make a stand. Because war is good for business and it’s better to die on our feet than live on our knees. Because the fire god is on our side, and it’s our duty to Him. Because they started it.

But at this stage in the proceedings,” he added, with a slightly lopsided grin, “mostly from force of habit.”

Here’s a vaguely math-y analogy.

Unix is not beginner friendly. It was designed by some of the best computer scientists in the world when it was hard to tell if ordinary people would ever use a computer. So beginner-friendliness was not a priority.

More than any other meat, how good fish tastes depends on its freshness.

Using visual mode in vim is often like using cat in UNIX: unnecessary. If you’re uncharitable, it indicates a lack of understanding about the basic philosophy of each piece of software.

Vim’s creator, Bram Moolenaar, says his 2 favorite features of vim are macros and the “dot repeat” command.

Found in Hubbard and Hubbard’s vector calculus textbook.

I like to think of analysis as the laziest field of math, because in the end (the limit), it’s all the same.

In math, we often say the limit of a function. This is not precise. A better phase is “the limit of a function at a point” since limits are always defined with respect to a function and a point.

Use RSS instead of going to a news website. It’s better to not read news at all (trust me, you won’t miss much as long as you have at least one friend). But if you must, RSS frees you from the distracting cycle of checking news. Why should you have to check for the news when it can tell you when it’s available.

Hernan Cortes would’ve made a good behavioral economist if he hadn’t decided to be a conquistador.

If you’re using Emacs, then I’m sure you’ve heard of Magit. Go read something else, like Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai.

One of Vim’s lesser-known operators is !. If y, d, and v are the jocks, then c, <,and > are the theater kids, and ! is the kid who has to eat with the teachers because no one likes them.

There is rarely a distinction made between the following 2 terms, but I think it’s useful to separate the concepts of simple and easy.