because adulthood is lonely

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#286 — Jun 20, 2026 by Evan Chen

Happy (and mortified) to report that the "Claude proofreads the 18.02 book" campaign uncovered an embarrassingly large number of typos:

42 files changed, 165 insertions(+), 163 deletions(-)

I'm a bit scared but maybe should release Claude on the Napkin as well.


#285 — Jun 19, 2026 by Evan Chen

Excited for Keychain 3 to be out of beta so I can be less confused about what my ssh-agent and gpg-agent are doing.


#284 — Jun 19, 2026 by Evan Chen

i'm so happy that Arch Linux obs-studio finally includes the browser plugin as of 2 months ago

i always hated building OBS from the AUR


#283 — Jun 19, 2026 by Evan Chen

I'm sure I'm just incompetent, but I feel like I spend so much time fighting Procreate. Like… how do I draw a straight line or circle? How do I delete a lasso-selected region? How do I fill a region with a gradient or texture?

I wonder if there's something that's not clicking yet.


#282 — Jun 17, 2026 by Evan Chen

why do people apply the label "powered by AI" to their websites as if that's supposed to entice me


#281 — Jun 16, 2026 by Evan Chen

The speed at which rumdl fixes my bug reports is so impressive to me (e.g. rumdl#669 went from issue report to release in 65 minutes).


#280 — Jun 16, 2026 by Evan Chen

the netflix k-drama 기리고 is about a supernatural phone app that grants a wish then kills you, so of course the show producers made an actual decorative app. which i thought was cute, so i downloaded it a few weeks ago, though i hadn't actually tried it.

then today i accidentally opened the app with my thumb and it was the best jumpscare of all time.


#279 — Jun 15, 2026 by Evan Chen

I still think it would be really funny if we actually renamed the TSTST to "Team Selection Process Math Olympiad".


#278 — Jun 14, 2026 by Evan Chen

can I just say how great the Parasocial posts have been this is actually so good

excited for paradox puzzle hunt 2! but first my team has to pick a faction…


#277 — Jun 14, 2026 by Evan Chen

It took 15 years but I finally got an edition of ELMO named after me 🎉


#276 — Jun 12, 2026 by Evan Chen

on the phone listening to a friend install arch linux for the first time 🥰

WELCOME TO THE DARK SIDE 🎉


#275 — Jun 11, 2026 by Evan Chen

A story in amateur form design.

It used to be that on the OTIS financial aid form, people didn't know the difference between annual vs monthly income. (No matter which one I asked for, some students would put the other.)

Solution: ask for both annual vs monthly income, and have JavaScript validate that monthly ≈ annual ÷ 12.


#274 — Jun 10, 2026 by Evan Chen

Now 2 for 2 for getting onto standby flights.


#273 — Jun 9, 2026 by Evan Chen

lastlint is on PyPI now!

uv tool install lastlint

#272 — Jun 7, 2026 by Evan Chen

It's slowly dawning on me the "I'll do this over the summer once I have time again" to-do list has more items on it than I can do in one summer.


#271 — Jun 7, 2026 by Evan Chen

many months later i finally have no overdue cards in anki it's a freaking miracle


#270 — Jun 4, 2026 by Evan Chen

Despite turning 30, I apparently still have nightmares that I have to go back to Irvington High School to finish some graduation requirement that I never completed.


#269 — Jun 3, 2026 by Evan Chen

it took me five years but i think i finally found the right way to do cd-supported Asymptote in latexmkrc:

use File::Basename;
sub run_asy {
    my ($base, $dir) = fileparse($_[0]);
    return system("cd '$dir' && asy -tex pdflatex '$base'");
}

i'd been misusing asy -o all this time (not supposed to be for directories!) and nobody told me. sheesh.


#268 — Jun 3, 2026 by Evan Chen

I definitely never got more mature as I aged. But in my mid-20's I at least got faster at getting things done over time. I'm not sure I still have that going for me either.


#267 — May 30, 2026 by Evan Chen

Sometimes when I get busy enough, I feel like I enter this "survival mode" where I drop executive planning and instead just do:

import random

while not too_tired_to_work:
    next_task = random.choice(remaining_tasks)
    next_task.work_until_finished()

I don't like being in this state. It feels like I'm just running as fast as I can without stopping to breathe. Even the sleep between consecutive days doesn't feel like a break.