Tyblog

All the posts unfit for blogging
blog.tjll.net

systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success

  • 8 July, 2025
  • 1,782 words
  • 7 minute read time

The year is 2013 and I am hopping mad.

systemd is replacing my plaintext logs with a binary format and pumping steroids into init and it is laughing at me. The unix philosophy cries out: is this the end of Linux (or, as many are calling it, GNU plus Linux)?

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The Human Resources Alignment Problem

  • 18 June, 2025
  • 692 words
  • 2 minute read time

Today I realized that – distinct from the idea of AI misalignment – today's human resource departments have misaligned incentives for how employees will (or are?) using large language models.

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A Beginner's Guide to Extending Emacs

  • 4 February, 2025
  • 3,983 words
  • 17 minute read time

This post isn’t about the virtues of some editors versus others: that's already been written by somebody else (and it’s really good) – if you want to know why I use emacs, I suggest reading that instead.

This post will help you understand why "extensibility" and "introspectability" are such prominent emacs features even without an emacs lisp background. Bridging the gap from spacemacs or doom emacs to a bespoke configuration wasn't easy for me because I didn’t know how to learn emacs, so I'm going to stumble through one of my own use cases to demonstrate how this process goes if you're peeking in from outside the emacs ecosystem, horrified curious about how this all works.

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Blog Architecture Redux

  • 27 January, 2025
  • 808 words
  • 3 minute read time

There's a common joke out there that bloggers will write more about their blogging system than actual content.

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How to Preview System Updates on NixOS

  • 8 February, 2023
  • 1,182 words
  • 5 minute read time

If you’re a NixOS user, knowing what will change on your system when performing updates can be tricky. We can make the experience better!

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