Around 2001, I needed to learn Perl. The primary means for doing so was Programming Perl by Wall, Orwant, and Christiansen — and indeed I did learn Perl, and spent an early part of my career using it as the glue language that made all sorts of impossible tasks possible (there are legacy posts recorded here that attest to this).

But the book had three surprising gifts that have stayed with me far longer than the syntax.

• A model for how to teach with a linguistics inflected, recursively absurd humor
• A preview of the wonder of watching a toddler learn to speak
• An absurdist hello-world I have carried into every language since: razzle

Some time in 1992, during my sophomore year of high school, Westwood released their landmark real-time simulator video game Dune II. After many hours in-game, I wanted to get into the lore of the universe.

I picked up a tattered copy of Frank Herbert’s Dune at the library.

It was the promotional paperback tied to the 1984 film complete with stills of Kyle MacLachlan and Sting and cocaine on the back.

A few hundred pages in, I was convinced: this was my favorite science-fiction book ever, and probably always would be.

Challengers came and went. Foundation fizzles quickly after the first book and Asimov never could write a believable woman or believable sex. And The Martian Chronicles are like poetry or epigrams, they’re too sad or too beautiful or too perfect for this world. They’re not meant to be your favorite sci-fi book. Recent entrants like The Southern Reach were too confused or undisciplined to be my favorite. It remained Dune — for thirty years, no challenger came close.

Hyperion is the first book that has made me genuinely wonder.

I might have resisted the narrative framing: a sci-fi Canterbury Tales with pilgrims trading stories on their way through ghastly circumstance. I might have bristled at the cover — a nightmare creature made entirely of blades, looming over a pastoral landscape. I might have discounted the possibility that a book with those strikes against it could be this good. But after reading it, those elements all contribute to Dan Simmons’s majestic storytelling.

Photo Credit: TechCrunch at https://www.flickr.com/photos/techcrunch/53202070940/

It’s a nightmare that wakes any developer in a cold sweat: I exposed internal code. This week, some poor developer at Anthropic unintentionally published the source code to Claude Code. The internet genies have copied it thousands of times and now all the king’s horses and all the king’s men will never get the code off the internet again.

But now what? I’d argue that Anthropic should open source Claude Code. Here’s the open letter I’d write to Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei if I thought there was any chance he’d pay the likes of me any attention.