Have you ever encountered something and thought: I am completely the target market for this, and I cannot wait to read/watch/listen to this? I think about Proto-Indo-European (PIE) culture multiple times per week. I’m always fascinated when the recursive ladder of etymology leads me from English (say, “mother”) to Greek/Latin (“mater”) to a splash in Sanskrit (“matar”) unto a constructed word in PIE ("*méh₂tēr"). That’s one word across multiple cultures across 5,000 years. By that reckoning, the word for mother is older than the Bible’s estimation at the age of the Earth.

Breathtaking.

So Proto — a biography of the PIE language told through the peoples who may have first spoken it — felt like it was written for me. The book could have awed; the book could have chased etymological chains; it could have found marks of where PIE became the Greek, Latin, or Sanskrit we know today; it could have found scientific/artistic firsts and traced how those firsts became a PIE word that became words we know today. But, despite the enormous scope and rich tapestry of source material, the book did something altogether remarkable: it bored the living hell out of me.

A few weeks ago, I filed anthropics/claude-code#30640 — a bug report about Claude Code’s native installer being unusable on FreeBSD as Anthropic soft-deprecated the npm install path.

The issue management bot tried a few times to close things but I kept it alive. Ultimately, I decided to enlist the FreeBSD community. To my great fortune, Graham Perrin found my plea and worked to promote the problem on Reddit. He also took on the thankless task of moderating the Reddit thread.

Between Graham’s work, both of our Mastodon posts, and my FreeBSD forums post, enough souls made enough noise to get Anthropic to do some work to help us retain functionality!