2025-10-09 12:32:00
I’ve been trying to slowly ease into using LLMs for coding help again lately (after quitting cold turkey), but something always feels off -- like we’re not quite on the same wavelength. Call it vibe coding or vibe engineering, but I think I’ve finally pinned down two big reasons why their approach to code feels so awkward.
delete tool on the old file, and then a write tool to spit out the extracted code from memory. There are no real cut or paste tools. Every tweak is just them emitting write commands from memory. This feels weird because, as humans, we lean on copy-paste all the time. It’s how we know the code we moved is exactly the same as where we copied it from. I've only seen Codex go against the grain here, sometimes I'd see it issue sed and awk to try and replicate that copy-paste interaction, but it doesn't always work.These quirks are why I contest the idea that LLMs are replacing human devs -- they’re still more like weird, overconfident interns. I can’t fully vibe with them yet.
2025-10-09 05:15:00
Seven or eight years ago, when I was working as a localization writer on the English version of Pathologic 2, I was faced with the question of how to localize that game's Tragedians.
The Tragedians in Pathologic act as ushers, as 'shadows' of other characters, as deliverers of tutorial dialogue. They're very explicitly drawn from the tradition of stage hands dressed in all black – same one that gives us the literary image of the ninja and the style of performance in which a puppet is manipulated by several performers wearing black morph suits.
They are, in a word, theatrical. The tone of their dialogue was meant to reflect that they live in this heightened space, inherently brushing up against the fourth wall. I don't know what possessed me to say "what if in English they spoke entirely in iambic pentameter," but once I had I was basically on the hook to do it. So I did it.
This makes me one of very few living people who've written a large volume of iambic pentameter verse drama for money, on a deadline. Honestly I'm not sure anyone else is there who can say they did this, other than Cat Manning who picked up doing a substantial volume of Tragedian dialogue when I got sick during the production of Pathologic 2.
This is an extremely rarefied skill that I am now going to share with you. How, exactly, do you write verse poetry at a reasonable pace, without losing your mind or generating text that is truly incomprehensible to the target reader? Here's how.
I was not writing these directly off the dome. I was working off a first-pass translation. If I was writing this kind of verse as original writing, I would also write a first draft mostly in straight prose.
People with a lot of experience doing this kind of thing – freestyle rappers, eg – can just write narrative verse right off the cuff. But until you have a ton of experience, separating out the steps of figuring out what you're going to say from how you're going to say it is critical.
There's this persistent idea in discussions of iambic pentameter that the English language is "naturally iambic." This isn't really true at all – it's kind of a meaningless statement. What is true, however, is that English does feature a lot of two-syllable words, and a lot of recurring pairs of one-syllable words that tend to be stressed as iambs; pairs like "up to", "go in", "if I," and so on.
These are the basic building blocks of iambic verse, and most texts written this way will favor shorter words. A very common sentence structure privileges one longer word surrounded by short little words; in the line "now is the winter of our discontent," the only long word is "discontent", which almost acts as a cornerstone for the whole line.
What really eases doing this is, of course, the general wealth of synonyms in English. You can often reach for a shorter word to help you rephrase; the thesaurus is your friend. When that isn't an option – which happened frequent on Pathologic 2, since lines often had to fit in names or specific setting terms – I would usually construct the line around that cornerstone, starting from the position of the harder-to-fit word and then figuring out how to phrase the words around it.
I've done this enough that I can work it out in my head – I still need to count syllables and say things aloud – but when starting out, pen and paper and / * notation are your friends.
Finally: you always have the dirty trick of inserting somewhat contentless words to make the meter work. Now, I don't think Shakespeare or Milton stooped to doing this all that often. But Marlowe? All those other workaday guys who were also writing reams of iambic verse drama, that nobody bothered to save? I suspect they did this all the time.
A particularly frequent example is 'on' and 'upon', which are basically interchangeable but one is an extra syllable. "To sit on a throne of human skulls" can become "to sit upon a throne of human skulls" and suddenly it's a fragment that fits iambic meter.
The most important thing about iambic pentameter is how much of it isn't actually made out of iambs. Which is to say: there are a number of metrical variations that are extremely common, and which a skilled writer uses both to add rhythmic interest to verse and to conform phrasing. If you actually stuck completely rigidly to the meter, you would not write something that sounds like Shakespeare or Milton at all, because those guys absolutely varied rhythm a lot, and sharp rhythmic variation really is what makes all those texts breathe the way they do.
Trochaic inversion: It's very common for the start of a line of iambic pentameter to be a trochee, not an iamb. Again, this is the case in the classic "now is the winter of our discontent" example, which starts on that very emphatic, stressed 'NOW'.
In truth, any iamb can theoretically be a trochee, but there are degrees of how dissonant of a rhythmic break this creates. A trochee at the very start of a verse is generally going to read fine, while one in the middle of a sentence is going to break the rhythm noticeably.
As a rule of thumb, the second syllable pair of a line – the second 'foot' – should definitely be an iamb; but the other four feet in a line have more flexibility, especially the first and last one.
Weak or 'feminine' ending: This is an extra unstressed syllable tacked on at the end of the last line of a verse; famously seen on "to be or not to be; that is the question." This is sometimes almost unavoidable.
Historically, this has particular associations; in practice it tends to come off as hesitancy or trailing off rather than definitively ending a sentence, but it's not really so heavily marked that you can't just do it to make a line work.
Clipped lines: Not at all a common thing in actual Shakespeare or Milton, but something I did relatively often: final lines of a verse that are shorter than a full pentameter, sometimes as short as just two feet. For this to work properly you need a pause or structural break that implies that line break (so it 'feels' like a separate final line, and not like the previous line is just abnormally long). Often, I would pair this with lines that themselves imply uncertainty, incompleteness, or interruption – kind of like a song pausing after the word 'stop'.
You can use these kinds of variations to build a rhythmic language specific to your piece. As in music, repetition legitimizes; if you deviate from the formula in consistent and meaningful ways, those deviations will become an integral part of the iambic pentameter that you are writing. Where I end up drawing the line of what is "iambic enough" to still convey the rhythm and feel of iambic pentamter is that:
Enjambment in poetry is when sentence boundaries don't line up with line boundaries. Verse drama does this basically all the time; it's almost required. Sentences, by nature of needing to say specific things, will be most of the time either too long or too short to make up a line of pentameter; so they'll have to either end or start mid-line.
Sentence boundaries also act as additional pauses mid-line, which can anchor rhythmic variation. The real goal of becoming an effective verse writer is to be able to knit together all this disparate rhythmic and semantic information and make it all agree.
Finally: Verse drama almost always drops out of the verse meter at least some of the time. The most common example are short lines that don't make up a full line of verse; if someone just needs to say "ack!" because a bear is chasing them, then that's that. In the Pathologic 2 script there are definitely moments where some critical mechanical or quest information needs to be conveyed and the only way to effectively do it is in prose.
Sometimes you have to use a word that simply will not fit into the meter in any sensical way.
I count these as spots where the delivered text is above the required quality bar, but below the desired quality bar. Ultimately in high-volume commercial fiction writing – ie, much of video games writing – you're going to run into those spots, and the art is as much in knowing what is and isn't acceptable to fudge, as in being able to consistently hit the bar on the places where you really need to.
I emphasize, of course, that this is what it's like doing it on a deadline within the context of a broader project with greater needs than the stylistic perfection of your writing – you have to be conscious of how much time you're spending on individual assets, and of the broader context of what you're writing. Pathologic 2 contains tutorializing conversations written in iambic pentameter! That's a fancy trick, but it's one where I was only able to do it because I was thinking very carefully about how to achieve clarity (well, clarity by Pathologic standards).
I have truly no idea if this knowledge is helpful to anyone else. If you have a cool project you're working on that benefited from it, feel free to let me know.
2025-10-09 03:23:00
Like every Toronto Blue Jays fan, I am down in the dumps today because I watched my team snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory last night. I am, however, still tethered to reality. The Jays have to win one more game to eliminate the Yankees and advance; the Yankees have to win two.
We still have the advantage, we just don't have the momentum.
Momentum is important in, like, everything. When you have it, you only barely have to have control or a plan. When the wind is at your back you are suffused with the general idea that you're going to figure it out as you go —— and you often do. When your sails are empty, it often feels like the wind has forsaken you and you will never again experience its power —— but you will.
⚠️⚠️ TANGENT ALERT!!
⚠️⚠️ TANGENT ALERT!!
⚠️⚠️ TANGENT ALERT!!
Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot is inarguably one of the most important and enigmatic plays of the 20th century because no one except for Beckett knows what it's actually about. "Because the play is so stripped down, so elemental, it invites all kinds of social and political and religious interpretation," wrote Norman Berlin in the Massachusetts Review in 1999.
Over the years, I've read various postulations about what Waiting For Godot is about.
It's about God! It's about religion! No it's not, it's about war! Yes, the Cold War! No, the French Resistance during WW2! Uh, can't you see that it's about Ireland? Pozzo and Lucky are Britain! No, no, it's about the emptiness and desolation at the core of existence! Yes, kind of, but have you examined the play's inner workings through a Freudian lens! Actually I think Jung is more applicable here!
I did a literature degree at McGill. The people in those classes really can be the gasbags you hope they're not and boy howdy do they enjoy getting high on their own fumes.
I talk a lot (shout out to AW and the other talkers who keep you informed and your lives interesting without asking for anything more than your attention, sorry not sorry) but as an undergrad I largely avoided offering my viewpoints on things we were reading because I didn't want to be wrong (duh) or sound dumb (duh) but also because I didn't want to sacrifice clarity on the altar of immediacy. I liked to arrive at my perspectives after considering other perspectives and, in some cases, figuring out why they didn't hold water. I still do.
I'm not saying I was a good student. I wasn't. It took me three separate tries to get my B.A. In my defence, though, I didn't think the point of university was to be a good student. I thought the point of university was to learn things. And I did.
⚠️⚠️ TANGENT COMING IN FOR A LANDING!!
⚠️⚠️ TANGENT COMING IN FOR A LANDING!!
⚠️⚠️ TANGENT COMING IN FOR A LANDING!!
I mention all this in the same context I talk about the Blue Jays, baseball, and everything else, because this post isn't actually about about baseball or Beckett or Battlestar Galactica and you probably already figured that out.
Waiting For Godot is really just about inertia. This reading lends itself to all the other readings but I never yelled this at the folks I went to school with because I was unsure about almost every one of my opinions until about five minutes ago.
In the play, Vladimir (!) and Estragon can leave anytime. It's not that they can't, it's that they don't. Leaving before Godot arrives is tantamount to admitting that the wait was meaningless.
Fans can stop watching their teams anytime they want but they don't, because stopping means admitting that their devotion was meaningless.
We do not remain inert because we can't move. We stay inert because moving requires accepting that we've been tragically wrong. The momentum swings? The big ones that make us feel that our time, suffering, and sacrifice was worth it? That's what we're chasing. That's what fandom is about because that's what faith is about.
Per Newton:
Every object perseveres in its state of rest, or of uniform motion in a right line, except insofar as it is compelled to change that state by forces impressed thereon.
If inertia can be reduced to something as simple as nothing moves until something moves it, then we Blue Jays fans —— the day after choking away a 6-1 lead and losing 9-6 —— are no different from the Yankees fans who watched their team get drubbed in Toronto and indeed in the first three innings of last night's game. They weren't moved until they were moved. We weren't stopped until we were stopped.
We don't watch the games for the result. Yes, we want our team to win but we don't watch the games to witness the wins, nor do we watch the games to experience the wins.
We watch the games to be moved. We watch the games to prove that all the time we've spent watching the games was worth it, to prove that the time we spent watching the games wasn't wasted.
The momentum is what moves us.
This post is not about baseball. It's about how you fit into everything —— including baseball.
That said, still gonna win.
⚠️⚠️ TANGENT OVER!!
⚠️⚠️ TANGENT OVER!!
⚠️⚠️ TANGENT OVER!!
==On y va!==
💻📖 In Formation Magazine is back, apparently. I saw the image above when I opened a browser tab in Brave and got unreasonably excited. "After a 25-year coffee break, they’re back in print—and sharper than ever," says Magazeum. "Launched during the dot-com delirium of the late ‘90s, this cult publication returns not to gloat (okay, maybe just a little), but to stare directly into the cold, blinking LED eye of our current tech moment—and blink louder." With shipping, etc, I'll have to pay like $60 to get it delivered and yet I may still do it if I don't end up buying that Lakers jacket for myself. (informationmagazine.com)
💻📘 Cory Doctorow's Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It was just released and there was a big New York Times writeup about it and here's a gift link to that piece. (NYT)
🎵🎵 Tired? Coffee not doing the job? Skip those energy bars filled with apple cores and Chinese newspapers and try out my favourite Titus Andronicus song. (Spotify)
🎵🎵 Too much news got you down? I talked to the doctor and the doctor said, let Ty Segall into your head. (Spotify)
🎵🎵 The other track on my mind is this version of Nirvana's most famous track. (YouTube/@Dr.Slowburn)
⚾⚾ I'm a Blue Jays fan but Aaron Judge's home run last night literally shouldn't have happened, statistically speaking. It was a brilliant, brilliant piece of hitting by one of the best in the game. (Twitter/MLBONFOX)
🍎🍎 Hundreds of years later there are still arguments re: what Newton meant, by the way, including this one from 2023. (Scientific American)
🌲 gonna
🌼 go
🌱 touch
🌳 grass
🌷 now
Be good to yourself.
==If you enjoyed this post, click the little up arrow chevron thinger below the tags to help it rank in Bear's Discovery feed and maybe consider sharing it with a friend or on your socials.==
2025-10-08 08:21:00
After a year, I still struggle with blogging consistently.
Trying to post daily, quickly become a pressure I didn't enjoy. But when I try to post freely, I struggle with another mental barrier.
I want to write about a topic, but I also had another topic in mind that will go nicely with it. So I should write that other topic first. Never did.
I should just write about things that really matters to me, so that it will be useful to those who read it. Never did.
I forgot my purpose is not to write for others.
One day after another. I didn't create. I just consume.
Robert's post got me thinking. One sentence that struck me:
Perfect compared to what?
Reading Robert's post also remind me of Jack's video, "Finished, Not Perfect".
The fact is, I'm writing for myself. This is just a place for me to record my thoughts (other than my digital journal). There will be typos, wrong grammar, bad structure, and many other imperfections.
Just write.
2025-10-08 06:22:00
Heya!
So, as it turns out, grepping the Linux kernel for random stuff is way more fun than it has any right to be.
Here are some highlights I've found:
net/ipv4/ip_gre.c
/* All the routers (except for Linux) return only
8 bytes of packet payload. It means, that precise relaying of
ICMP in the real Internet is absolutely infeasible.
Moreover, Cisco "wise men" put GRE key to the third word
in GRE header. It makes impossible maintaining even soft
state for keyed GRE tunnels with enabled checksum. Tell
them "thank you".
Well, I wonder, rfc1812 was written by Cisco employee,
what the hell these idiots break standards established
by themselves???
*/
drivers/net/ethernet/sun/sunhme.c
/* Only Sun can take such nice parts and fuck up the programming interface
* like this. Good job guys...
*/
/drivers/char/agp/amd64-agp.c
/*
* This hack alters the order element according
* to the size of a long. It sucks. I totally disown this, even
* though it does appear to work for the most part.
*/
kernel/locking/lockdep.c
/*
* More smoking hash instead of calculating it, damn see these
* numbers float.. I bet that a pink elephant stepped on my memory.
*/
(Because for some reason theres a list of these in (Documentation/kernel-hacking/hacking.rst)
Documentation/kernel-hacking/hacking.rst
/* Sun, you just can't beat me, you just can't. Stop trying,
* give up. I'm serious, I am going to kick the living shit
* out of you, game over, lights out.
*/
Documentation/kernel-hacking/hacking.rst
/*
* Sun people can't spell worth damn. "compatability" indeed.
* At least we *know* we can't spell, and use a spell-checker.
*/
/* Uh, actually Linus it is I who cannot spell. Too much murky
* Sparc assembly will do this to ya.
*/
I might do another one of these if I find more stuff, but for now thats it.
Hope you had fun reading these :3
2025-10-08 03:38:00
Article written by absurdpirate
Oh boy, this one may be a doozy and maybe a bit controversial, but I saw Herman's blog post and felt compelled to write about it, because well, look at my username.
This may seem like a "biting the hand that feeds" scenario, but I want to make clear I have the utmost respect for Herman, and his philosophy is what attracted me to signing up with Bear Blog in the first place. I may not agree with everything he does (the licensing change being one of them), but I still respect the work he has done. Herman, if you're reading this, keep up the great work, and thanks for supporting the Gazette.
Anyway, the gist of Herman's post was that people were pirating his software JustSketchMe and is a:
3D modelling tool for artists to conceptualize their artwork before putting pencil to paper.
Which honestly sounds pretty neat, I'm not much of an artist, but I could see this being a pretty useful tool.
So, Herman found through a google search that people were pirating his software (which I feel like is in the same no-no realm as an author looking up criticisms of his book), but I think he did probably the best possible solution. Giving out a discount code through a fake piracy page he created and trying to poke a bit of fun.
If Herman was an American corporate executive, he probably woulda slapped some proprietary anti-piracy software which would have just lead to a never ending arms race between him and the pirates. An arms race that the pirates will always win. Or he would have thrown around A GRIPLOAD of money to try and shut down these sites. But he didn't. Instead he managed to turn the piracy issue into a chance to gain some good PR and it worked. According to Herman, this fake page/discount code was REALLY effective. Which to me should be no surprise.
It kinda reminded me of how Serious Sam 3 had a pirated copy planted by the devs that spawned this unkillable creature that would run at you at mach-5 and kill you. Which also garnered something of a cult following. Or that one indie dev who outright put up a pirated version of their full game for free on their social media with the only stipulation being that the game will not receive updates.
I do find the "PIRACYKILLS" discount code itself and the "beings of pure light" bit on the webpage to be more on the goofy side. Kinda reads like that "You wouldn't download a car" PSA. Maybe that was the intention all along and it just kinda flew over my head.
This whole thing got me thinking into the rationale of piracy and why it is so prevalent, and in many cases, necessary.
Generally, I think Gabe Newell (the CEO of Valve which owns Steam) said it best:
"Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem"
I think in Herman's case, it WAS a pricing problem. Seeing as how adding that discount code relatively seemed to lead to positive sales results. $100 USD is a BIG ask, especially in this economy that not everyone is willing to fork over and without some free trial which usually comes with the higher-ticket software. With the discount code, it offers 2 things: lowering the barrier to entry and making potential purchasers feel like they're getting a deal. This is what makes a lot of these markdown sales that companies will do so successful. It was also just a really effective marketing campaign.
The reasons people will pirate are generally the same reasons why I pirate (which I'll get to in a second). One of which generally is the price. It lowers that barrier to entry because, wouldn't you know it, the countries with the most piracy are generally poorer third-world countries. Brazil seems to be one I see pop up a lot in pirating forums/message boards.
Piracy also isn't theft, it's copyright infringement. Unless you're stealing the physical data (i.e. the USB the code is housed on), you're not committing theft. That's why if you get caught pirating you get a Cease & Desist letter mailed to you not felony theft charges.
I mean think about it, go on any news source like this one and you'll likely find people who get arrested for hosting pirated sites get slapped with charges such as high-tech crimes, money laundering, and you guessed it copyright infringement.
Absurd Pirate engages in piracy!? Say it ain't so! Jokes aside, I do have reasons and a sort of code-of-ethics (a pirate's code if you will).
If purchasing isn't owning: If purchasing the product can be revoked at any time, movies, music, shows, etc. then I have no qualms finding out how to functionally take back what was bought. Take your "license" and shove it strait up your tailored-suit ass.
If the original creator isn't going to be supported by a 3rd party purchase: I'm not always going to buy new, so naturally I will go through a 3rd party reseller. Which nobody besides greedy corporate execs really have a problem with, which is why they want you to go download only. So, at that point it becomes a matter of "get thing for free, but have it only in software form" or "buy physical". I see the point of supporting local small businesses, but they're really only getting my business if I'm buying physical anyway (which I may not want a physical copy of everything), so what's the difference?
If I bought the product already: If I already bought the damn thing on one platform, I'm not gonna buy it 5 fucking times. ESPECIALLY if you're gonna charge full price for a next-gen addition like a certain gaming company... get. bent.
To Demo: I will generally pirate to demo a product before forking over the money if a demo/free trial isn't offered already. I don't want to buy software that doesn't have a return policy if it sucks shit through a crazy straw.
If the product is REALLY old: I'm talking 7+ years. If the game is still receiving updates, that's one thing, but c'mon who's getting hurt because you're not buying a game that is old enough to learn about times tables?
Anti-consumer practices: Audiobooks are the worst in this regard imo. Because the file is locked behind a proprietary system that can further be locked down to a specific platform. If I can't get the DRM-free version piracy is a great way to remove that. Often the pirated version ends up performing BETTER because it's not bogged down by anti-piracy software (which also serves as a point to Newell's quote). This also falls in line if a company updates a game that fundamentally ruins the experience as was the case with Ready or Not.
If the media is generally unobtainable: If a game costs upwards of $100 to own physically, unless it's an absolute favorite I WILL NOT fork over the funds for that. Same goes for if there isn't a way to play it on modern platforms.
Generally I try to avoid pirating from small artists/studios. If I can afford to throw a couple bucks their way, I will. I might pirate temporarily to demo the product, but if I plan on playing the full version, I will throw money their way when I get the chance to.
If it's something I want the gaming industry to make repeat, I will throw some money as a sort of "vote with your dollar" way. Example being, a franchise going back to its roots after floundering for the better part of a decade.
Piracy is a multi-faceted undertaking and peoples' reasons for partaking in it will vary from ethical to financial.
I think Herman's response was generally in the right direction. I would just like to urge him to stop worrying about piracy and just keep working on making a good product.
Moist Cr1tikal has talked about piracy in his video "Piracy" with his manga series GodSlap getting huge amounts of piracy because people just wanna check it out before forking over the money. In spite of that, he said he isn't planning on doing anything about it and even owes the success of the comic series to the piracy efforts.
With that all being said, remember the pirate's creed:
Yar har fiddly dee, being a pirate is alright with me! Do what you want because a pirate is free! You are a pirate!