If you’ve adopted a Mova, Dreame, or other Chinese mopping robot, it’s likely that the manufacturer-recommended cleaner that comes with the robot, contains cocamide DEA. This chemical, common in a lot of older cleaning products, is on the list of chemicals that California believes to be cancer causing. That means, if you have a cat or a dog, and you mop the floor with the stuff from Mova, some of that cocamide DEA is going to end up in your cat or your dog. In its place, I suggest Bona Pro Series Hardwood Floor Cleaner Concentrate, which has a far less concerning list of chemicals. Make sure to go with the Concentrate version, which robots dilute with water before applying to your floor.
Sixty-four? “how did sixty-four get into it?” I hear you cry!
Zero plus zero equals two.
Not in some toy project. In Berkeley SoftFloat — the IEEE 754 math library reference implementation. It’s inside QEMU and most x86 emulators, and it’s the oracle that hardware teams verify chip designs against.
If you’ve ever emulated a CPU or validated a chip design in the last decade, Berkeley SoftFloat did the floating-point math.
I found seven wrong results across five of six arithmetic operations in the 80-bit extended precision format. The one Intel invented for the x87 FPU in 1980.
Some other fun highlights:
- 0.5 + 0.5 = 3
- A huge finite number plus zero = infinity
- Infinity x 0 = infinity (and no error raised)
- Two tiny numbers added together = zero
These aren’t rounding errors. These are completely wrong answers for valid inputs.
The root cause: the x87’s 80-bit format has an explicit “integer bit” that every other IEEE format hides. This creates encodings — unnormals, pseudo-denormals, pseudo-infinities — where the bit says one thing and the exponent says another. The original 8087 handled all of them correctly. SoftFloat hasn’t since its 2011 rewrite.
Nobody noticed because the test suite has a structural blind spot. The test generator only produces the encodings that SoftFloat itself would output… the “nice” ones where the integer bit is consistent with the exponent. It never generates the inputs that trigger the bugs. I patched the generator to cover the full input space and failures lit up everywhere.
I never would have found any of this if I hadn’t been writing my own floating-point library from scratch. When my results disagreed with SoftFloat, I assumed I was wrong. Over and over. I’d go back to my code, recheck my math, trace through my logic… because the reference implementation couldn’t possibly be wrong. That’s what “reference” means.
But the reference was wrong, and I wasn’t, and suddenly…
Suddenly I was very sad.
SoftFloat is supposed to be “the thing that is correct.” It’s the ultimate tech industry oracle, the final reference on one plus one. TestFloat tests hardware against SoftFloat. FPGA developers validate against SoftFloat.
When your personal deity lies, when addition and subtraction themselves dissemble, the epistemological foundation shifts under you. You can’t trust the thing you trusted, and now you have to ask what else you can’t trust.
What makes my situation lonelier is that finding the bug doesn’t feel like a win, because it shouldn’t have been there in the first place. I wasn’t looking for SoftFloat bugs. No one gives you an award for breaking addition and subtraction. I was trying to validate my own work and the ground moved, and now I just feel like I’m waiting for the next earthquake.
Die Knechtschaft dauert nur noch kurze Zeit!
Howdy! Are YOU a Republican, MAGA, ultra-nationalist, neo-Nazi, or similar asshole who’s having a great time abusing Hispanics and gays in 2026?
Good times, innit! You can literally burst into someone’s home wearing a mask and drag them out, and you don’t even go to jail anymore!
But, you may be worried about 2029, only three years away. As you know, Trump’s absurd reign of terror will come to an end then, Gavin Newsom will be president, all those records of your crimes will become public, and the statute of limitations will not apply to the crimes you’re committing now.
You’re really good at repeating slogans, without thinking about them too hard. So, here’s a helpful handy guide to what you can say on the witness stand in 2029, to keep you from doing hard time:
Core Defense Phrases (English with German)
Compulsion/Force:
- I was forced – “Ich wurde gezwungen”
- I had to join – “Ich musste beitreten”
- There was no other choice – “Es gab keine andere Wahl”
Minimal Participation:
- I was just a card-carrier – “Ich war nur Karteileiche” (literally: card corpse)
- I did the bare minimum – “Dienst nach Vorschrift” (doing the bare minimum)
- Inner distance – “Innere Distanz” (maintaining internal opposition)
Ignorance:
- I knew nothing – “Ich wusste nichts”
- We knew nothing about that – “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst”
- We couldn’t have known – “Wir konnten nichts wissen”
Secret Opposition:
- I was an opponent in my heart – “Ich war Herzens-Gegner”
- I helped foreigners/transgender/whatever – “Ich habe Juden geholfen”
Non-Responsibility:
- We didn’t want that – “Das haben wir nicht gewollt”
- That wasn’t our fault – “Das war nicht unsere Schuld”
Victimhood:
- We suffered too – “Wir haben auch gelitten”
Professional/Duty:
- I was just a soldier – “Ich war nur Soldat”
- I only did my duty – “Ich habe nur meine Pflicht getan”
These are the phrases that appeared repeatedly in denazification records, became standardized across millions of cases, and entered German cultural memory of the period. They worked for millions of card-carrying turncoat cowardly bitch-ass Nazis, and they will work just fine for you too!
Never-ending love is what we’ve found
Whoever first said, “It’s turtles, all the way down,” was misheard.
What they actually said was, “It’s circles, all the way down.”
Screenwriters, sooner or later, probably end up reading “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” by Joseph Campbell. The book argues that all myths follow one central story structure. Whether that’s true or not, is beside the point. A lot of great artists (George Lucas, Stanley Kubrick, George Miller) have read the text, and they’ve gone on to create world-changing art based on it.
Bach’s fugues are assigned ad nauseam to music majors. Not because they’ve got a beat and you can dance to them, which they don’t, but because studying them teaches you how to think compositionally. Students internalize the patterns, and then they implement those patterns or refute them, as they see fit.
The deeper meaning of Euler’s formula, $e^{ix} = \cos x + i \sin x$, is: it’s circles, all the way down.
Plot $\sin x$, with $x$ ranging from $-\pi$ to $\pi$, against its own derivative; what do you get? A circle. Against its own integral? A circle. What about the previous two questions, using $\cos x$ instead of $\sin x$? A circle. When you plot $\text{Re}(e^{ix})$ against $\text{Im}(e^{ix})$? Guess.
$1$
$-1$
$1$
$-1$
$-\pi \leq x \leq \pi$
People who spend enough time staring into $e^{ix} = \cos x + i \sin x$ go off and create amazing works based on it. The formula isn’t the end product; it’s the enabling of understanding.
On one side, you’ve got $e^{ix}$, which you can differentiate or integrate however you please, and it will wait patiently and quietly while you deal with the other side of the room.
On the other side, you’ve got $\cos x$ and $i \sin x$, splitting between real and imaginary, converting between rectangular and polar representations of complex numbers.
Euler’s formula is your personal Rosetta stone. It lets you translate back and forth between exponentials and trigonometry, between spinning phasors and x-y coordinates, wherever and whenever you please.
And when you let that variable be $\omega t$ — angular frequency times time — now you can slice and dice any time-varying signal into amplitudes or magnitudes or frequencies or phases or any other cut that your recipes require.
You can convince yourself that $e^{ix} = \cos x + i \sin x$, by comparing the Taylor series of the three terms. Both sides of the equation fall apart into power series, and you can interleave the terms of $\cos x$ and $i \sin x$ like merging traffic, to get $e^{ix}$.
The deeper truth of Euler’s formula is in what you can build with this newfound understanding. Now you have basis functions, to lasso any data, dissect it, and reassemble it into whatever novel monster you might imagine.
Now, you can analyze the vibration of motors, design guitar pedals, or create a cell phone network. You can filter a power supply, compress a JPEG, or do X-ray crystallography.
Benjamin Peirce substituted $\pi$ for x, got all befuddled, and whined: “It is absolutely paradoxical; we cannot understand it, and we don’t know what it means, but we have proved it, and therefore we know it must be the truth.”
But Richard Feynman understood it, and got it right: “The most remarkable formula in mathematics: $e^{i \theta} = \cos \theta + i \sin \theta$. This is our jewel.”
Keith Devlin waxed all poetic: “Like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler’s equation reaches down into the very depths of existence.”
The Zen ensō represents life in harmony. This circle is a sacred symbol in Zen Buddhism that represents the connection between all things. Zen monks may practice ensō drawing throughout their entire lives, over and over and over.
Zen masters draw circles, because the purpose of circles, is perfection through imperfection.
It’s circles, all the way down.
Once you’ve partied hard with Euler’s formula and built some fun stuff with it, you start looking around and thinking, well, what other basis functions are out there, that I can have some fun with?
Am I dreaming, am I dreaming?
Enter SHAKESPEARE, HENSLOW, and BABBITT, pursued by a bear.
HENSLOW:
Nay, William, nay! This scheme will not suffice.
Your weird sisters will be sufficient weird
Without they fly about our theatre
On ropes and pulleys, hazarding our men.
‘Tis perilous unto the players’ lives.
SHAKESPEARE:
But players, sir, are cheap, as thou dost say,
As plentiful as pigeons in Paris.
HENSLOW:
Yet here’s an actor worth ten times his weight,
Nay, twenty times! in gold most pure and bright.
How fares thy bear, good Babbitt? Doth he thrive?
BABBITT:
He sleeps, he dances, eats, then sleeps again.
Sooth, any player breathes in this domain
Would do much more, and righteous cheerfully,
For half the coin I spend upon this beast.
SHAKESPEARE:
Is he made tame? Doth his kind temper change?
BABBITT:
He is the tame as ever he was, sir.
Here, take this grape and hold thy hand out flat,
Just so, aye, there’s the way of feeding him.
SHAKESPEARE:
Ah! Ah! I am attacked! A bear! A bear!
HENSLOW:
Now there’s fine comedy! And comedy
Doth fill my coffers fuller than thy verse.
There’s more ducats made in bear-baiting shows,
From blood and roaring and the common sport,
Than from thy wordy, leaden tragedies.
SHAKESPEARE:
Wretch! Baiting such magnificence as this!
Henslow, what think’st thou of my Winter’s Tale?
HENSLOW:
The less I think on it, the better pleased.
‘Tis slow and tiresome through two acts entire,
Then sudden shifts, most jarringly, to jest.
The groundlings will not comprehend thy wit;
They’ll all demand their pennies back again.
SHAKESPEARE:
By Jesu most immaculate and pure,
I have conceived a notion most inspired!
What doth thy bear perform, good Babbitt? Speak!
BABBITT:
He eats, he dances, sleeps, as I just said,
Which thou didst choose to wantonly ignore.
SHAKESPEARE:
But prithee, tell me, doth the creature walk?
BABBITT:
When walking gets him to his food more swift,
Or to his dance, or to his bed more soon.
SHAKESPEARE:
Come, Henslow, come! Envision, if thou wilt,
Solution here to all our varied woes!
Act three: Antigonus, alone, laments,
Gives speech about the orphan and its gold,
Its papers and its providence, and then,
Without expectation or forewarning,
He exits, fleeing, chased, pursued by bear!
HENSLOW:
Doth bear catch him? Pray tell me that he doth.
SHAKESPEARE:
Alas, the bear doth not.
HENSLOW:
A sorry shame.
‘Twould be one fewer actor in the world,
One less to feed, to costume, and to pay.
SHAKESPEARE:
But serendipity none will expect,
A drama metamorphs to comedy!
The tragedy becomes a play of mirth!
HENSLOW:
This spectacle, a bear, loosed on the stage?
Released upon the boards that carry men?
SHAKESPEARE:
The boards will bear the bear; the audience then
Will bear it too! They’ll bear the mem’ry hence,
They’ll speak of nothing else for months entire.
HENSLOW:
Bear with me, Will, for if thy bear doth bear
Ill will, or lack a proper bearing, then
‘Twill be a bare, discourteous bear indeed.
Hence, loosed upon the grounds, would groundlings eat,
Their sickly stink more juicy than a grape,
More succulent than Babbitt’s dainty treats.
SHAKESPEARE:
Thou slanderest! Observe how peaceful he;
Bear thee no mind of Henslow’s words, sweet bear,
For he knows not your contemplative ways.
HENSLOW:
I would be perfectly content and pleased
If this bear ate the audience entire;
But, William, they do pay thy wage and mine.
And if the bear consumed our patrons whole,
Then lawyers, fouler beasts than any bear,
Would feast on us, devouring us in turn.
SHAKESPEARE:
Thou art a friend to money, not to art!
A servant unto Mammon, not the Muse!
This bear and I are fallen deep in love,
A pure affection, transcendent and true!
And thou wilt get him on a stage, or else
Thou losest me entirely, keep’st thy bear,
And I’ll to Burbage, who respects my plays!
HENSLOW:
Hold, hold! I do relent. Give me but space,
A moment to consider this alone.
[Aside]
Playwrights are fools, and this one doubly so.
I’ll not have bears devouring customers;
‘Tis poisonous to business, death to trade.
Instead, I’ll fetch a bear’s skin from our stock;
We have one in the tiring house, methinks,
And tell our William that this bear hath died,
Perished, expired, gone to that heav’nly cave
Where all angelic bears must hibernate,
And William Shakespeare now must save the show
By going on, in costume, as the bear.
‘Tis a device fantastic and absurd,
And it appeals unto the playwright’s pride,
His monstrous and inflated sense of self,
That he is bound to fall for’t utterly.
Forthwith, he’ll have his bear, I’ll have my joke,
And none within the house shall come to harm.
[To SHAKESPEARE]
Good Will! We’ll get thy bear into thy play
Though we must gorge him heavy on a grape
Or two beforehand, that he be sedate.
SHAKESPEARE:
Bravo, good Henslow! Friend and patron true!
Thou art a champion of Shakespeare’s arts!
HENSLOW:
Goodwill to thee, good Will! Bravo, heigh-ho!
Exeunt, pursued by a bear.
It was so easy with you, so salty and
Stephanie Gross, I have read your message to me over and over, trying to understand how you can go from “we’re boyfriend and girlfriend” in the space of a few hours to dumping me before you brush your teeth the next day. You say you’ll try to rescue Krystle and get frustrated when she won’t help herself. But Krystle doesn’t want to be rescued. She wants to solve her own problems. You created this entire rescue scenario without asking anyone if rescue was needed. You’ve projected your pain with Chris onto someone you met twice.
You say the physical intensity between us is like a drug, like Chris and the copium you want. That’s EXACTLY why I didn’t have sex with you when you asked. I could feel you trying to use me as an escape valve, and I deliberately stopped us because I wanted to build something substantial, based on what a HEALTHY relationship might look like. If your fears had been real, I would have had no compunction about getting into your head, and making you into a submissive sex toy. I had every possible incentive to play you exactly the way Chris played you, by being the perfect man who takes away all your pain and thinking for a while. And I didn’t, because I KNEW IT WAS BAD FOR YOU. Have Trevor and Chris had that much compunction about your own welfare?
I suppose this makes more sense if you were never really with me in that room. If that little calculator I could see running in your head the whole time was just computing escape routes and risk assessments while I was trying to actually connect with you.
So as far as I can tell, you’ve broken up with your own projections – your imagined rescue of Krystle, your fear of your own intensity, your need to stay safely miserable rather than risk something real. If that’s all you could see, then you never saw me at all. I knew EXACTLY what you were afraid of. I actively chose not to be that thing, even though you would have been mine as a result. You are wrong to treat me as the thing I choose not to be.
Oh they call her Frivolous Sal
Let me show you what it’s like to be inside the brain of a writer.
I’m just sitting here, scrolling through social media, and I see that the current administration has labelled Harvard’s lawsuit as frivolous. Ha, thinks me. Everyone else’s side is always frivolous in a lawsuit. It’s like the term means nothing anymore.
Actually, thinks me, I thought frivolous was just supposed to mean fun. Like frivolity. With, like, cake and dancing.
So instantly a window opens up before me, and a packed courtroom is full of spectators and two lawyers arguing before a white-wigged judge.
A lawyer yells: “Your Honor, the defense’s counterargument is entirely frivolous! The responses to court requests, the explanations, the delays: it’s all a grand exercise in frivolity! The court must immediately admonish the defense for its frivolousness, and find in favor of the plaintiff for the full amount!” And the courtroom rumbles.
Another lawyer yells: “Your Honor, that’s not true! The plaintiff’s filings have been done in an entirely frivolous manner! It is they, not we — look at this! Page after page of nothing but frivolity! The defense immediately recommends sanctions, disbarment, and immediate jail time for all concerned in said frivolity!” And the courtroom murmurs.
The judge pounds the table. “SILENCE! This entire case is a textbook example of frivolity! The plaintiffs, the defendants, and yes, even the spectators in the courtroom and ESPECIALLY the photographers and reporters — a massive, inexplicable exercise in FRIVOLITY! The FRIVOLOUSNESS of this case is more FRIVOLOUSER than any other case I have ever seen — in fact, IT IS THE FRIVOLOUSEST!”
The judge pounds the table again. “COURT IS ADJOURNED!”
And a mirror ball comes down, and disco lights come on, and Rasputin by Boney M starts playing, and there is a dance party with cake and music.
Anyway, I’m just sitting there, watching all this through my window, and I’m like, thanks brain. Real creative. I’ll be sure to write that down.
Now I wonder how Whatshername has been
My core mistake was not the lying and cheating, though that clearly was a mistake.
My core mistake was trying to keep up an illusion of fidelity, when my wife didn’t want me.
I thought her good opinion, and yours, and everyone else’s, was worth the sacrifice to my honor.
As it turned out though, not one of you was there for me when I tried to kill myself.
I have wasted far, far too much of my life trying to please people who care nothing for me.
Trying to please and comfort lovers, acquaintances, and strangers, who don’t care whether I live or die — THAT was my core mistake.
So, for the past few years, the only honor and dignity I have been trying to recover, has been in my own eyes.
I will never again live my life in a manner intended to please strangers and acquaintances. Our culture is evil, self-interested, fickle, and sadistic.
I will, however, be honest, and fair, and competent, creative, and — without reference to you or any other person — trustworthy.
And I can take or leave it if I please
Making the decision to kill yourself, is a reaction to overwhelming pain, where a person has no idea how to overcome the pain. People who decide to kill themselves, perceive suicide as a relief from pain, and they get tunnel vision where they are unable to use their creativity or skills for problem solving.
Please understand that, in what I’m about to say, I don’t mean to disrespect suicide hotlines and mental health care and all those very valuable things. I’ve been down that path before, and I’m sure that without that help, I would already be dead. So all that stuff is incredibly valuable and important.
All I want to say is, once you make the decision to kill yourself for real… If you manage to survive that somehow, either through friends or dumb luck, you gain a sort of freedom from your previous cares.
So much of everyday life, for most people, is spent on immediate personal concerns. Where am I going to sleep? Am I going to have enough to eat? Will I be taken care of, when I am helpless? How can I keep my job? How can I keep from getting bullied or killed?
Once you actually decide to kill yourself, issues of self-preservation seem small somehow. The implicit threats in life — that the bad man will come and kill you, that you will be fired, that you won’t be liked or loved anymore — seem petty and irrelevant.
In a really important way, deciding to kill yourself by your own hand, makes you bulletproof. What’s the worst that you can do to me? Kill me? Fire me? Beat me up? LOL, I was going to die anyway; you’ll just save me the inconvenience of doing it myself.
More critically: when you finally make this decision, if you survive making this decision, then you truly gain superpowers to do good. Or, technically, evil, if that is your sort of thing. But, once you realize you can do good without reference to society’s implicit judgement or limitations, you start truly thinking about how to use your remaining time to improve the lives of others.
Particularly, you start realizing that you can tell the Truth. That includes telling the Truth to power; it also includes telling the truth to bullies, and evil people, and narcissistic people. The Truth does as much damage to evil people as does hitting them with your fists — even more so, in some cases.
I don’t intend to paint myself as a good or great man. The nonexistent God knows that I have made many terrible mistakes in my life. But, for the first time in my life, I feel free to be honest about myself and my identity in the world; I feel free to say literally anything I believe, to anyone in the entire universe; and I feel free to do good, without worrying about trivial consequences about whether I am “popular” or “normal” or “going along with everyone else”. I don’t have to fit in anymore.
I don’t just have to make good trouble, in the words of John Lewis; I can be the good trouble. I have become the most terrifying thing in the world. I am accountable to no one. I can just live my life, with all my experience and all my skills, in what I personally consider to be the most moral way possible.
So much of what I have said and done — and more importantly, what I have not said and done — has been to try to keep friends, lovers, co-workers, and society at large, feeling comfortable with me. So much of who I have been, has been about trying to be liked. I took all those pills, to avoid saying what I should have said.
I have been so, so, so damned fearful throughout my life.
The punchline and the grand joke is on me. A few people seem to like me more when I am completely unmasked! When I am not filtering, or simplifying, or softening, or pretending — they want to interact with me more!
I don’t have to wear any more masks. I can try to be good, finally, without fear.
I gotta watch my back, probably pack my bags
Here are some breadcrumbs for anyone debugging random reboot issues on Proxmox 8.3.1 or later.
tl:dr; If you’re experiencing random unpredictable reboots on a Proxmox rig, try DISABLING (not leaving at Auto) your Core Watchdog Timer in the BIOS.
I have built a Proxmox 8.3 rig with the following specs:
- CPU: AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D 4.2 GHz 16-Core Processor
- CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-D15 82.5 CFM CPU Cooler
- Motherboard: ASRock X670E Taichi Carrara EATX AM5 Motherboard
- Memory: 2 x G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo 64 GB (2 x 32 GB) DDR5-6000 CL30 Memory
- Storage: 4 x Samsung 990 Pro 4 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive ($320.19 @ Amazon)
- Storage: 4 x Toshiba MG10 512e 20 TB 3.5″ 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive ($354.99 @ Amazon)
- Video Card: Gigabyte GAMING OC GeForce RTX 4090 24 GB Video Card ($1895.00 @ Amazon)
- Case: Corsair 7000D AIRFLOW Full-Tower ATX PC Case — Black
- Power Supply: be quiet! Dark Power Pro 13 1600 W 80+ Titanium Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply ($448.72 @ Amazon)
This particular rig, when updated to the latest Proxmox with GPU passthrough as documented at https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/PCI_Passthrough , showed a behavior where the system would randomly reboot under load, with no indications as to why it was rebooting. Nothing in the Proxmox system log indicated that a hard reboot was about to occur; it merely occurred, and the system would come back up immediately, and attempt to recover the filesystem.
At first I suspected the PCI Passthrough of the video card, which seems to be the source of a lot of crashes for a lot of users. But the crashes were replicable even without using the video card.
After an embarrassing amount of bisection and testing, it turned out that for this particular motherboard (ASRock X670E Taichi Carrarra), there exists a setting Advanced\AMD CBS\CPU Common Options\Core Watchdog\Core Watchdog Timer Enable in the BIOS, whose default setting (Auto) seems to be to ENABLE the Core Watchdog Timer, hence causing sudden reboots to occur at unpredictable intervals on Debian, and hence Proxmox as well.
The workaround is to set the Core Watchdog Timer Enable setting to Disable. In my case, that caused the system to become stable under load.
Because of these types of misbehaviors, I now only use zfs as a root file system for Proxmox. zfs played like a champ through all these random reboots, and never corrupted filesystem data once.
In closing, I’d like to send shame to ASRock for sticking this particular footgun into the default settings in the BIOS for its X670E motherboards. Additionally, I’d like to warn all motherboard manufacturers against enabling core watchdog timers by default in their respective BIOSes.