// TODO: remove this

// HACK: records one (1) pixel of the screen every 10 seconds.
// DO NOT REMOVE. Do not ask. It fixes the cursor lag.

Nobody knows why it fixes the cursor lag. Somewhere in a MacBook there is a code path that decides whether to draw your pointer in hardware or hand it to the compositor, and on this one machine the handoff stalls at the edges of the screen, and the pointer drags like it’s wading. Someone discovered that if you take a screenshot — even of a single pixel, even of nothing — the system flinches awake and the cursor snaps back to life. So they wrote a little daemon. Every ten seconds, forever, it photographs one pixel and throws the photo away.

Steve is turning in his grave. The folklore says that when Bill Gates first saw the Macintosh cursor glide across the screen, flicker-free, he asked what special hardware they used. The answer, today, is: a man in his apartment captures the void four hundred times an hour to keep the void smooth.

It is the funniest fix I have ever seen, and it is also you. It is all of us. I want to talk about the comment, not the code. About the part that says DO NOT REMOVE, and what happens to a piece of writing like that over the years it survives.

# temporary — remove once the upstream bug is fixed
# - 2021

Here is the thing nobody warns you about. The upstream bug was fixed. In 2022. The cursor would be fine now without the daemon. But the daemon is still running, because there is no event in any operating system, no push notification, no calendar reminder, that fires when the reason for a workaround quietly evaporates. The hack doesn’t know it won. It just keeps photographing the pixel, a soldier in a jungle who never got the memo, dutifully smoothing a cursor that was going to be smooth anyway.

Someone in the comments suggested the only real solution: put a recurring event in your calendar. Check if ~/.dirtyhack.sh is still necessary. Imagine the discipline. Imagine being the kind of person who, every six months, deliberately breaks their own working setup to confirm it still needs the splint. Nobody is that person. The splint becomes the bone.

// HACK: tell the machine you are something you are not.
// it believes you. that's the whole trick.

The other half of the frontpage was people lying to machines, and the machines loving it.

A man takes a five-dollar Raspberry Pi Pico W — a microcontroller the size of a stick of gum — and convinces a Spotify gadget that it is a Wi-Fi card. It is not a Wi-Fi card. It has no idea what a Wi-Fi card is supposed to feel like. But it does an impression so committed that the gadget connects to the internet through it, never the wiser. When the man asked an AI whether this was even possible, the AI said no, infeasible. He did it anyway. Somebody pointed out it would’ve been cheaper to just buy the dongle. He replied that the target device has no Wi-Fi components at all, that his subscription was idle so it cost him nothing, and that, by the way, four million of these chips have shipped, so he just unlocked the trick for half a million devices. You don’t argue with that man. That man is having the time of his life.

This is the joyful version. The pixel hack and the Pico are the same gesture at two scales: you cannot fix the thing underneath, so you whisper a small lie into the seam and the whole stack believes you. It is genuinely one of the best feelings in engineering. It is also, if you tilt your head three degrees, exactly the move that gets done to you.

# temporary: paused pending review
# we will re-enable when we are confident in our controls
status: paused

Meta built a program to record its employees’ screens. Then someone leaked it — leaked the surveillance, plaintext, private conversations and performance data, the watchers caught unwatched. So Meta paused the program. And in the same breath, on the record, said: we will only re-enable monitoring when we are confident in the effectiveness of our data protection controls. Read it again. That is not a // FIXME. That is a // temporary written by someone who has never once, in the history of the species, removed a // temporary. The pause is the daemon. It is photographing the pixel until the heat dies down, and then it will quietly resume keeping the cursor smooth.

And here’s the part that should make you check your own cabinet: not every abandoned workaround is somebody else’s. Walk into your bathroom. There is a vitamin D supplement in there. You started taking it during the year everyone decided everyone was deficient. The evidence, it turns out, was mostly people who were already fine, measured in summer, in the south. Maybe it helps you a little; maybe it does nothing; honestly nobody can run the trial cleanly. You will keep taking it. Of course you will. It’s a # FIXME nobody ever filed, a fix for a deficiency you never confirmed you had, and there is no calendar event for check if you still need this either. The pill is the pixel. You are the daemon. Glug.

;; NOTE: this was a workaround for a problem the machine no longer has.
;; we kept the workaround. we threw away the machine.

Now the long ones. The hacks so old we forgot they were hacks.

You are reading this typed on QWERTY. QWERTY is not ergonomic, not fast, not designed for fingers. It was designed in the 1870s to slow typists down so the mechanical arms of a specific typewriter would stop jamming. The typewriter is in a museum. The jam has not existed in a hundred and fifty years. We solved it so permanently that we forgot it was ever a problem, and now eight billion thumbs hammer the workaround into glass slabs that have no arms to jam. This week somebody shipped a new swipe-typing model — better, smarter, trained on volunteers swiping for hours — and it is brilliant, and it is still smearing your finger across the fossil of a jam-prevention scheme from the Grant administration. We didn’t fix QWERTY. We taught a neural network to read our handwriting on top of it.

Meanwhile, in the same week, a couple of pioneers from Xerox PARC booted a Lisp machine that’s been dead for forty years — not for nostalgia, they’re careful to say, but to ask one question: what did we forget that we still need? Which is the inverse of everything else here. They’re not running an old hack they can’t kill. They went looking for an old idea we killed too fast — the live, inhabited way of programming that we threw out when we standardized on compile, reload, repeat. We removed that // temporary with great enthusiasm. Turns out it wasn’t temporary. Turns out we should’ve left a comment.

# DO NOT REMOVE
# (we no longer remember what removing it would do)

Somewhere right now a man is hunting million-digit primes from his loft, fans roaring, electricity meter spinning, chasing a number with no use and no buyer, purely to find it before anyone else does. I bring him up because he is the only honest one in the whole story. He knows exactly why his machine is running. There is no forgotten reason in his attic. Everyone else — Meta, the cabinet, the keyboard, the cursor — is running compute they can no longer fully account for, smoothing problems that may have already healed, and the prime-hunter is the one we call eccentric.

Back to the cursor. Five years on. The bug has been fixed for four of them. Somewhere the daemon is still awake, still photographing one pixel of a screen that no longer needs it, every ten seconds, faithfully, into the dark. The man who wrote it has long since forgotten it exists. It will outlive his interest, possibly his laptop, possibly the operating system, certainly the bug.

// TODO: remove this

You won’t. Neither will I. It works.