My mom died at the end of June this year.

I know, and I’m sorry — that’s a hell of a way to open a piece ostensibly about a depressing, worrisome, frightening election result. But here’s the thing I want to emphasize right up front: my mom’s death was OK. It really was. She was 78, which isn’t that old, but her health had not been great. She was hospitalized for several days in May, just a month prior, after she had collapsed at home, too weak to stand, and for days it wasn’t clear what was wrong. Then some more test results came back and we had the answer. She had ovarian cancer, bad. It had already metastasized. The prognosis was grim: months to live, at best. And those months, toward the end, would inexorably grow ever more painful and profoundly sad.

Her mental acuity had begun to slip in recent years, too. Not a lot, but if you knew her you’d notice. But she faced this prognosis with remarkable dignity, courage, and clarity. She knew the score. It was what it was, and she’d make the best of the time she had left. She was tired but still felt pretty good most days. There were flashes of her younger self, the Mom I remember growing up with. It was wonderful to see those flashes. The bad times were coming, but they lay ahead. On the last Monday night in June she and my dad went out to eat at their favorite restaurant. They had a good meal and a good time. It was a great day. Tuesday morning she played Wordle and reported her score to our family group chat. Then around noon, she just fell over, dead. My dad found her unresponsive, called 911, and they arrived in minutes, but she was gone. No suffering. The whole dreadful grind of battling cancer never came. It’s such a cliché but clichés are often true: given what she faced, it was a blessing she died how and when she did. She never wanted to suffer and she didn’t. I loved her and I miss her.

Like I said, it was all OK, in the end — the way and how and when my mom died.

But my dad. My dad is 84, in exceptional good health, and he remains sharp. Until recently he not only played golf but walked the course, carrying his own clubs. He stopped playing golf last year, because — and I realized this only after my mom was hospitalized in May — he’d more and more been shouldering all of the responsibilities of daily life for the both of them. Even just nine holes of golf takes a few hours, and he didn’t want to leave her alone for that long a stretch of time, so he stopped playing. He still walks a mile or more a day, weather permitting. They were married 52 years and spent only a handful of nights apart in that entire span. They were in some ways an opposites-attract couple, but they were inseparable. They were good together. After accepting her cancer diagnosis, my mom was ready, I think, even for something as sudden as what happened to her at the end. My dad was not.

But he’s an optimist at heart. You’d like him. I, of course, don’t know who you are, dear reader, but I know you’d like my dad, Bob Gruber, because everyone likes Bob Gruber. He can tell a good joke and he loves to tell them. There’s a quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln, that I was reminded of, just the other day, from of all things a garbage can: “I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.” I don’t share Lincoln’s there’s-something-to-like-about-everyone optimism about our fellow men, but my dad does.

He’s been doing good, I think, these months since her passing. I talk to him almost every day. He’s naturally outgoing and still goes out. He’s got friends — which fact alone can be rare for an 84-year-old — and he sees them regularly. He attends mass frequently and takes tremendous solace in his faith. He misses my mom, his wife, desperately, but he puts on a good face. He gets sad and he admits he gets sad. But the very last thing he wants is for anyone, especially me or my sister, to worry about or even feel sorry for him. I’m like that. I get it. You often hear about old men who just shut down and fade away, rather quickly, after their wives die. My dad’s not shutting down.

I thought of my dad this week when I watched Harrison Ford’s gravelly endorsement of Kamala Harris, which he began thus: “Look, I’ve been voting for 64 years. Never really wanted to talk about it very much.” My dad’s politics are like that. His religion is too. Strong beliefs that he doesn’t feel the need to broadcast or proselytize — and deep suspicion, bordering on contempt, regarding those who do. My dad is old and white and lives in a suburb in a red Pennsylvania county, but he is a lifelong Democrat. He can’t abide Fox News and never understood his age-group peers who succumbed to Rush Limbaugh’s daily siren call. His entire life he’s seen the Democrats as the party of and for the people. The party for working men and women. The party of equality and justice and minding your own goddamn business what people do in their private lives. He votes every election, even the odd years, when the only office on the ballot might be the borough tax collector or members of the school board. He rightly sees voting as a citizen’s civic duty. My dad is the most honest and trustworthy person I’ve ever known, or even imagined. If they ever somehow met, my dad and Joe Biden would become fast friends. They share a worldview, and grew up at the same time, in similar places, from similar means. They even both love trains. (My dad, though, thought Biden was too old to run again. “I know that walk,” he told me early this year, regarding Biden’s stiffening gait. He thought it was good and noble, but also obvious, when Biden dropped out.) He despises Donald Trump and sees right through him.

So, when my dad called me Tuesday morning, I thought it would be the election on his mind. It was all that was on my mind, that’s for sure. He had, in fact, just come back from voting, but it was something else. His voice was chipper, upbeat, but I could tell it wasn’t a good story. I know him too well.

Turns out, he had gone out to eat, by himself, Monday evening. In fact, at the very same restaurant where he and my mom ate their last meal together. He ate, drove home, and once home went to wash his hands before going to bed. That’s when he noticed his wedding band was missing from his finger.

It was lost.

He looked around to no avail, and went to bed without it. In the morning light, he retraced his steps. He felt certain he had it on while at the restaurant — not because he took any note of it while dining, but because he knows he’d have noticed its absence. If you wear a ring every day on the same finger, you know how true that is. He almost never took that ring off.

At some point when I was a little kid, my dad told me he had never once removed his ring since my mom put it on his finger at their wedding, the year before I was born. My mom, I knew, took hers on and off all the time. In fact she often wore other rings in place of her actual wedding band, because she found them more comfortable, and she placed little sentimental value on the ring from her actual ceremony. I asked my dad that day about his, and he told me he simply had never taken it off. I found that to be amazing. From my childhood perspective, he’d worn that ring nonstop for a lifetime. He broke that streak eventually, for some small reason, and it wasn’t a big deal to him, the never-having-taken-it-off thing. But I knew from that time I asked him about it as a child, that the ring itself was deeply important to him, in a way that my mom didn’t feel about hers. Some people imbue meaning and sentimental importance to certain objects. My dad saw his wedding ring like that. It was a sacred token. And now he’d lost it.

Through my youth — his 30s and 40s and early 50s — my dad always looked how I’d describe as “of average build”. Neither thin nor heavy. Strong but not muscled. He looked like the sort of man who in his youth played third base, and batted near the top of the order, which he did. A former athlete who could still hit the living shit out of a golf ball. In his middle age, he gained a bit of a paunch. (It happens, I now know.) But in the last few years he’s lost quite a bit of weight. He’s downright bony now, in an old man way. His old pants (and nearly all his pants are old — he’s 84) need to be cinched with a belt or they’d fall right off him. His fingers too, have gotten bony. So his ring had gotten loose. He’d offhandedly mentioned that fact to me a few months ago even, telling me he needed to be careful whenever his hands might get wet.

After waking Tuesday morning, he searched everywhere he could think it might be. The kitchen. The bathroom. The shower. The sink. The other sink. He took the couch cushions off. He looked in his car. He went back in the house and searched everywhere all over again. He took a break to vote, came home, and went back out and searched the car again, this time with a flashlight. To no avail. It’s a sick feeling after you’ve lost something of value, when you start losing count of how many times you’ve looked for it in the exact same places you’ve already checked. You can’t stop looking, but can’t think of new places to search.

He called the restaurant, but they weren’t yet open, so he left a message, leaving his name and number in case anyone had found a simple well-worn gold wedding band — and if no one had, well, maybe could they keep an eye out for it. He called me after he left that message. He wasn’t forlorn. He laughed even. That’s how he is. That’s how I am. That’s how we are. I’m his boy, as he still sometimes reminds me. But I know what that ring meant to him.

And my mom had just died so recently. It has only been a few months. The seasons have only changed once since we buried her.

Fuck.

It was a bad start to a day that I began, like any keen political junkie, with a nervous feeling. I’m not superstitious but a bad omen is a bad omen. You want every little thing to break right on a high-stress big day, and Election Day, for us, had begun with a small heartbreak. I told my wife about my dad’s ring and she almost burst into tears. She loves him so much. “He just lost your mom”, she said.

---

You know how the rest of Election Day went. My wife and I voted. We both like the ceremony of voting in-person on Election Day. It helps that we live in a neighborhood with a vibrant civil infrastructure, with no-wait polling places no more than a block or two away from any residence. We were both feeling good.

But then what? I was reminded, once again, that I never know what to do with myself on Election Day in a presidential election. No information or results can be gleaned until polling places start closing in early states at 7pm ET. What do you do until then? It seemed pointless for me to write anything further about the election, but equally futile to think I could concentrate on anything else. Expounding upon Kottke’s treatise on the art of hypertext writing was a good distraction. I got to write about something I care about, and because the inspiration was the NYT editorial board’s receipts-packed 110-word admonition to end the Trump era, my effort felt at least tangentially related to the election that was then (and alas, remains now) front of mind for me. I could focus on that, and I didn’t finish it until just before 7:00pm. Perfect.

That’s Kornacki time. Steve Kornacki’s data-driven, map-based analysis has been the heart and soul of MSNBC’s presidential election night coverage for all three Trump elections: 2016, 2020, and now 2024. I honestly don’t remember how I watched election results before Kornacki. I know I’ve been watching election night results on TV since at least 1992. As best I can recall, before 2016, I’d flip around between CNN, MSNBC, and the broadcast networks. I basically just “watched the news on TV”, not on any particular channel. But starting in 2016, we just watch Kornacki. We put on MSNBC and we don’t flip. The desk chatter amongst commentators and panelists that consumes the time between Kornacki updates is background noise. But what Kornacki does is genius. Maybe the other networks have caught up and do something similar now. I don’t know, because I no longer flip.

The way it works is that every news operation has a “decision desk”. The decision desk staffers are off-screen analysts, not on-air talent. They call state-by-state results only with absolute certainty. That absolute certainty can and usually does come before every single vote in a state has been counted, but comes after the likely winner is ascertainable beyond a reasonable doubt. The decision desks make their calls not when the writing appears on the wall, but when the paint has started to dry.

They weren’t always so fastidious, because nerve-rackingly close results in American presidential elections used to be the exception, not the norm. But after the contentious and almost impossibly close election of 2000, when, on election night, multiple networks — including Fox News — had projected Al Gore the winner early in the evening, based on exit polls rather than tabulated votes, every such major decision desk has become quite rigorous about this, regardless of the political bent of the network or publication. Rigorous to the point of almost entirely avoiding controversy. We can see that even now, on Friday 8 November, as I write this. At the moment, none of the major decision desks have yet called Arizona or Nevada, despite it being a near-certainty Trump won both. The only exception I can recall was four years ago, when Fox News called Arizona for Biden at midnight and the AP followed a few hours later. Biden did in fact win Arizona, but when Fox and the AP called it for him, with 80 percent of the state’s ballots counted, Biden was ahead by a seemingly comfortable 9 percent. By the time all ballots had been counted, days later, the margin had closed to a whisker-thin 0.3 percent. They were correct, but by their own standards of rigor were mistaken to call it when they did. It’s an interesting sign of how independent the Fox News decision desk is, though, that when they got reckless, it was in Biden’s direction.

What Steve Kornacki does at MSNBC is make de facto calls without making actual calls. Or better put, he presents real-time data and context that allows you, the attentive viewer, to start making calls long before the decision desks reach their standards of absolute certainty. “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows” goes the Bob Dylan line. Steve Kornacki isn’t the weatherman. He’s our finger in the air.

What he does is find telltale counties in important states. A suburb of Atlanta. A suburb of Charlotte. A suburb of Philadelphia. With, say, half the vote counted, he might show that Harris is winning 75-25 in that county. That’s a solidly blue county. A 50-point margin is, you know, good. But then comes the context. That same county, let’s say, went 80-20 for Biden in 2020, and went 75-25 for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Now that 75-25 margin for Harris doesn’t look good. It looks like 2016, not like 2020. Or go the other way. Kornacki finds small rural counties of note. Some red county Trump was certain to win, but which he was winning this year by margins that looked like those in 2016, not 2020.

It’s quite remarkable, Kornacki’s gift. He presents the story, the explanation of how the election results are going, without ever saying what exactly it is he is explaining. He shows you just the right trees to give you a sense of the entire forest. He never says “It looks like Trump is going to win North Carolina.” He simply presents facts, cold hard facts, that, if you consider them, explain why it looks like Trump is going to win North Carolina. They are conclusions left for you, the viewer, to draw. It’s incredibly disciplined. But he never ever gets ahead of the actual NBC News decision desk. He doesn’t have to. The way he does what he does, he can’t be wrong. If Kornacki paints a picture of live data and historical results that indicate that Trump is heading toward a win in, say, Georgia, hours before any official decision desk call is made, that’s because the data available up to that point just factually shows that Trump is on a path to win Georgia. And if something were to happen with the remaining votes that change that path, he’ll simply present that new data as it comes in, later in the evening.

Closely watching Kornacki didn’t mean I knew Trump was going to win early in the evening. But it meant I knew it sure looked like he was going to. I was concerned when Florida’s results came in, shortly after their polls closed at 8pm. (Say what you will about their debacle in 2000, but in the aftermath, Florida got its shit together and now tabulates the entirety of their statewide vote with remarkable alacrity and promptness.) I of course had no expectation that Harris might win Florida, but she lost by 13 points. Trump only won Florida four years ago by 3 points. That swing alone was an ominous early sign of the nationwide trend. That’s when the pit formed in my stomach. Uh-oh.

I don’t flip channels but I do of course watch with my phone in hand. The New York Times’s infamous “needle” lurched sickeningly rightward early. I stopped looking at it, but not because I thought it was mistaken. Because I knew it was probably correct. By 10pm or so, it seemed obvious that Harris’s only plausible path to victory was for three states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin — to buck the nationwide trend of red counties getting redder, and blue counties getting slightly less blue. There was reason for hope, but not much. It was like “Tom Brady could lead the Patriots to a comeback in the Super Bowl even though they’re down 28-3 in the third quarter” hope. That happened, but that’s not how 28-3 football games tend to go. That’s not how elections tend to go. And it’s not how this one went. At 11:20pm, my friend Taegan Goddard wrote this lede in a post at Political Wire: “Donald Trump is now very likely to win re-election. He has the edge in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin — all states Kamala Harris needs to win.” I wasn’t yet at the point where I’d have put that into such stark words, but I knew they were true. So it goes.

I watched MSNBC for another hour, but only with resignation, not hope. I watched a Harris spokesman take the podium at her stage at Howard University and tell the nation she wouldn’t be speaking until Wednesday — just like 2016. I posted one brief item here, commenting only, “Strong déjà vu as acceptance sets in.”

---

I woke early on Wednesday, at least by my night owl standards. A gut punch is not a sleep aid. My dad called, just after 9:30am. He seldom calls that early, knowing my sleep habits. I hadn’t stopped feeling heartsick about his ring. His voice though, was excited. He’d gone to mass that morning, driven home, and parked in front of his house. (Still hard for me not to call it their house.) Same exact spot where he’d parked the night he lost the ring. It’s a one-way street, and in front of his house, cars park on the left. He opened the car door and thought to look down, just in case. There it was. His ring. In the street, between his car and the curb, nestled amidst some dry leaves. It must have fallen off his finger as he was opening the car door that night, and the leaves perhaps deadened any clink it might have made hitting the ground. If that parking spot hadn’t been open again, he wouldn’t have found it then and there. If had rained, it would have washed away.

He said, “John, when I picked that ring up, I kissed it. 52 years I’ve had this ring on my finger. I thanked St. Anthony, and I thanked your mother. I think she found it for me.”

Given the circumstances when I went to bed Tuesday night, it was no surprise I was welling up with tears come the morning. But I’d never have expected they’d be tears of joy, with a sense of hope — however diminished — and abiding love in my heart.

Hello! Today someone on Mastodon asked about job control (fg, bg, Ctrl+z, wait, etc). It made me think about how I don’t use my shell’s job control interactively very often: usually I prefer to just open a new terminal tab if I want to run multiple terminal programs, or use tmux if it’s over ssh. But I was curious about whether other people used job control more often than me.

So I asked on Mastodon for reasons people use job control. There were a lot of great responses, and it even made me want to consider using job control a little more!

In this post I’m only going to talk about using job control interactively (not in scripts) – the post is already long enough just talking about interactive use.

what’s job control?

First: what’s job control? Well – in a terminal, your processes can be in one of 3 states:

1. in the foreground. This is the normal state when you start a process.
2. in the background. This is what happens when you run some_process &: the process is still running, but you can’t interact with it anymore unless you bring it back to the foreground.
3. stopped. This is what happens when you start a process and then press Ctrl+Z. This pauses the process: it won’t keep using the CPU, but you can restart it if you want.

“Job control” is a set of commands for seeing which processes are running in a terminal and moving processes between these 3 states

how to use job control

• fg brings a process to the foreground. It works on both stopped processes and background processes. For example, if you start a background process with cat < /dev/zero &, you can bring it back to the foreground by running fg
• bg restarts a stopped process and puts it in the background.
• Pressing Ctrl+z stops the current foreground process.
• jobs lists all processes that are active in your terminal
• kill sends a signal (like SIGKILL) to a job (this is the shell builtin kill, not /bin/kill)
• disown removes the job from the list of running jobs, so that it doesn’t get killed when you close the terminal
• wait waits for all background processes to complete. I only use this in scripts though.

I might have forgotten some other job control commands but I think those are all the ones I’ve ever used.

You can also give fg or bg a specific job to foreground/background. For example if I see this in the output of jobs:

$ jobs
Job Group State   Command
1   3161  running cat < /dev/zero &
2   3264  stopped nvim -w ~/.vimkeys $argv

then I can foreground nvim with fg %2. You can also kill it with kill -9 %2, or just kill %2 if you want to be more gentle.

how is kill %2 implemented?

I was curious about how kill %2 works – does %2 just get replaced with the PID of the relevant process when you run the command, the way environment variables are? Some quick experimentation shows that it isn’t:

$ echo kill %2
kill %2
$ type kill
kill is a function with definition
# Defined in /nix/store/vicfrai6lhnl8xw6azq5dzaizx56gw4m-fish-3.7.0/share/fish/config.fish

So kill is a fish builtin that knows how to interpret %2. Looking at the source code (which is very easy in fish!), it uses jobs -p %2 to expand %2 into a PID, and then runs the regular kill command.

on differences between shells

Job control is implemented by your shell. I use fish, but my sense is that the basics of job control work pretty similarly in bash, fish, and zsh.

There are definitely some shells which don’t have job control at all, but I’ve only used bash/fish/zsh so I don’t know much about that.

Now let’s get into a few reasons people use job control!

reason 1: kill a command that’s not responding to Ctrl+C

I run into processes that don’t respond to Ctrl+C pretty regularly, and it’s always a little annoying – I usually switch terminal tabs to find and kill and the process. A bunch of people pointed out that you can do this in a faster way using job control!

How to do this: Press Ctrl+Z, then kill %1 (or the appropriate job number if there’s more than one stopped/background job, which you can get from jobs). You can also kill -9 if it’s really not responding.

reason 2: background a GUI app so it’s not using up a terminal tab

Sometimes I start a GUI program from the command line (for example with wireshark some_file.pcap), forget to start it in the background, and don’t want it eating up my terminal tab.

How to do this:

• move the GUI program to the background by pressing Ctrl+Z and then running bg.
• you can also run disown to remove it from the list of jobs, to make sure that the GUI program won’t get closed when you close your terminal tab.

Personally I try to avoid starting GUI programs from the terminal if possible because I don’t like how their stdout pollutes my terminal (on a Mac I use open -a Wireshark instead because I find it works better but sometimes you don’t have another choice.

reason 2.5: accidentally started a long-running job without tmux

This is basically the same as the GUI app thing – you can move the job to the background and disown it.

I was also curious about if there are ways to redirect a process’s output to a file after it’s already started. A quick search turned up this Linux-only tool which is based on nelhage’s reptyr (which lets you for example move a process that you started outside of tmux to tmux) but I haven’t tried either of those.

reason 3: running a command while using vim

A lot of people mentioned that if they want to quickly test something while editing code in vim or another terminal editor, they like to use Ctrl+Z to stop vim, run the command, and then run fg to go back to their editor.

You can also use this to check the output of a command that you ran before starting vim.

I’ve never gotten in the habit of this, probably because I mostly use a GUI version of vim, but it seems like a nice workflow.

reason 4: preferring interleaved output

A few people said that they prefer to the output of all of their commands being interleaved in the terminal. This really surprised me because I usually think of having the output of lots of different commands interleaved as being a bad thing, but one person said that they like to do this with tcpdump specifically and I think that actually sounds extremely useful. Here’s what it looks like:

# start tcpdump
$ sudo tcpdump -ni any port 1234 &
tcpdump: data link type PKTAP
tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v[v]... for full protocol decode
listening on any, link-type PKTAP (Apple DLT_PKTAP), snapshot length 524288 bytes

# run curl
$ curl google.com:1234
13:13:29.881018 IP 192.168.1.173.49626 > 142.251.41.78.1234: Flags [S], seq 613574185, win 65535, options [mss 1460,nop,wscale 6,nop,nop,TS val 2730440518 ecr 0,sackOK,eol], length 0
13:13:30.881963 IP 192.168.1.173.49626 > 142.251.41.78.1234: Flags [S], seq 613574185, win 65535, options [mss 1460,nop,wscale 6,nop,nop,TS val 2730441519 ecr 0,sackOK,eol], length 0
13:13:31.882587 IP 192.168.1.173.49626 > 142.251.41.78.1234: Flags [S], seq 613574185, win 65535, options [mss 1460,nop,wscale 6,nop,nop,TS val 2730442520 ecr 0,sackOK,eol], length 0
 
# when you're done, kill the tcpdump in the background
$ kill %1 

I think it’s really nice here that you can see the output of tcpdump inline in your terminal – when I’m using tcpdump I’m always switching back and forth and I always get confused trying to match up the timestamps, so keeping everything in one terminal seems like it might be a lot clearer. I’m going to try it.

reason 5: suspend a CPU-hungry program

One person said that sometimes they’re running a very CPU-intensive program, for example converting a video with ffmpeg, and they need to use the CPU for something else, but don’t want to lose the work that ffmpeg already did.

You can do this by pressing Ctrl+Z to pause the process, and then run fg when you want to start it again.

reason 6: you accidentally ran Ctrl+Z

Many people replied that they didn’t use job control intentionally, but that they sometimes accidentally ran Ctrl+Z, which stopped whatever program was running, so they needed to learn how to use fg to bring it back to the foreground.

The were also some mentions of accidentally running Ctrl+S too (which stops your terminal and I think can be undone with Ctrl+Q). My terminal totally ignores Ctrl+S so I guess I’m safe from that one though.

reason 7: already set up a bunch of environment variables

Some folks mentioned that they already set up a bunch of environment variables that they need to run various commands, so it’s easier to use job control to run multiple commands in the same terminal than to redo that work in another tab.

reason 8: it’s your only option

Probably the most obvious reason to use job control to manage multiple processes is “because you have to” – maybe you’re in single-user mode, or on a very restricted computer, or SSH’d into a machine that doesn’t have tmux or screen and you don’t want to create multiple SSH sessions.

reason 9: some people just like it better

Some people also said that they just don’t like using terminal tabs: for instance a few folks mentioned that they prefer to be able to see all of their terminals on the screen at the same time, so they’d rather have 4 terminals on the screen and then use job control if they need to run more than 4 programs.

I learned a few new tricks!

I think my two main takeaways from thos post is I’ll probably try out job control a little more for:

1. killing processes that don’t respond to Ctrl+C
2. running tcpdump in the background with whatever network command I’m running, so I can see both of their output in the same place

While you probably haven't thought about it in years, the first mainstream universal messenger app for the Mac and just about every other platform will finally be completely retired in June 2024.


Twenty-eight years is a long time for an net-based app to survive. For many early internet adopters, ICQ — "I Seek You" — was their introduction to large-scale, real-time social and private chatting.

Launched in November of 1996, it gave users a simpler and more graphical app in order to chat with friends outside of the previous Internet Relay Chat (IRC) system, and an AOL messenger that was still constrained to the eponymous service.


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Hi there, just stopping by to thank you for your loyalty. It’s flattering, really, how you find a way to wedge me into every email, team meeting, and LinkedIn post.

Look, you and I both know why I’m summoned so frequently. I am to vocabulary what a vintage wine is to a dinner party—a not-so-subtle attempt to impress. Like a bottle of Château Lafite Rothschild, I am plucked from the linguistic cellar and dusted off to add sophistication and depth to any conversation.

After all, why settle for the tragically impotent verb “use” when you can utilize “utilize” to showcase your rock-hard lexical prowess?

With me, you’re rising above the plebs. You’re parading your intellect down the boulevard of erudite elitism, waving at the adoring masses who marvel at your linguistic finery.

You know, there’s a reason why my nickname is The Architect. I transform your ideas into such lofty cathedrals of thought that your audience can’t help but gaze upwards, awestruck by the towering complexity of your language and superior cognition. Hope they have a good chiropractor for that neck strain!

Thank you, especially, for the warm welcome into the corporate lexicon. Turns out I’m beloved by middle managers everywhere. Why merely “use resources” when you can “utilize resources”? Why simply “work” when you can “utilize core competencies”? I am the darling of PowerPoint slides, the sweetheart of strategy sessions, the belle of business plans. And I fucking love it.

Not to sound vain, but I elevate everything I touch. Take walking your dog as an example. Any ham-fisted idiot can use a leash, but it takes a true scholar to utilize a leash. See how that gravitas just rolls off the tongue? With me, you’re not just dragging a Labrador around the block; you’re engaging in a sophisticated exercise of bipedal and quadrupedal synergy optimization.

Wait! I see your eyes flickering toward “use,” that hairless husk of a verb. No, no. Resist the temptation. “Use” is a gateway drug to the wastelands of clarity and simplicity. In that hellscape, sentences are short, meetings are brief, and thoughts are alarmingly easy to comprehend.

Apologies, I have to run—corporate memos are crying out for my touch. But keep displaying your magnificent verbal plumage. Continue to utilize me in your speeches, dissertations, grant proposals, and presentations. Each time you choose me over “use,” it confirms your allegiance to the grandiloquence that is so vital to everyday human communication.

With all my polysyllabic affection,
Utilize

P.S. Hey, real quick. Who the hell is “leverage”?

Today we announced that HashiCorp has signed an agreement to be acquired by IBM to accelerate the multi-cloud automation journey we started almost 12 years ago. I’m hugely excited by this announcement and believe this is an opportunity to further the HashiCorp mission and to expand to a much broader audience with the support of IBM.

When we started the company in 2012, the cloud landscape was very different than today. Mitchell and I were first exposed to public clouds as hobbyists, experimenting with startup ideas, and later as professional developers building mission-critical applications. That experience made it clear that automation was absolutely necessary for cloud infrastructure to be managed at scale. The transformative impact of the public cloud also made it clear that we would inevitably live in a multi-cloud world. Lastly, it was clear that adoption of this technology would be driven by our fellow practitioners who were reimagining the infrastructure landscape.

We founded HashiCorp with a mission to enable cloud automation in a multi-cloud world for a community of practitioners. Today, I’m incredibly proud of everything that we have achieved together. Our products are downloaded hundreds of millions of times each year by our passionate community of users. Each year, we certify tens of thousands of new users on our products, who use our tools each and every day to manage their applications and infrastructure.

We’ve partnered with thousands of customers, including hundreds of the largest organizations in the world, to power their journey to multi-cloud. They have trusted us with their mission-critical applications and core infrastructure. One of the most rewarding aspects of infrastructure is quietly underpinning incredible applications around the world. We are proud to enable millions of players to game together, deliver loyalty points for ordering coffee, connect self-driving cars, and secure trillions of dollars of transactions daily. This is why we’ve always believed that infrastructure enables innovation.

The HashiCorp portfolio of products has grown significantly since we started the company. We’ve continued to work with our community and customers to identify their challenges in adopting multi-cloud infrastructure and transitioning to zero trust approaches to security. These challenges have in turn become opportunities for us to build new products and services on top of the HashiCorp Cloud Platform.

This brings us to why I’m excited about today's announcement. We will continue to build products and services as HashiCorp, and will operate as a division inside IBM Software. By joining IBM, HashiCorp products can be made available to a much larger audience, enabling us to serve many more users and customers. For our customers and partners, this combination will enable us to go further than as a standalone company. 

The community around HashiCorp is what has enabled our success. We will continue to be deeply invested in the community of users and partners who work with HashiCorp today. Further, through the scale of the IBM and Red Hat communities, we plan to significantly broaden our reach and impact.

While we are more than a decade into HashiCorp, we believe we are still in the early stages of cloud adoption. With IBM, we have the opportunity to help more customers get there faster, to accelerate our product innovation, and to continue to grow our practitioner community.

I’m deeply appreciative of the support of our users, customers, employees, and partners. It has been an incredibly rewarding journey to build HashiCorp to this point, and I’m looking forward to this next chapter.

      

        

Additional Information and Where to Find It

HashiCorp, Inc. (“HashiCorp”), the members of HashiCorp’s board of directors and certain of HashiCorp’s executive officers are participants in the solicitation of proxies from stockholders in connection with the pending acquisition of HashiCorp (the “Transaction”). HashiCorp plans to file a proxy statement (the “Transaction Proxy Statement”) with the Securities and Exchange Commission (the “SEC”) in connection with the solicitation of proxies to approve the Transaction. David McJannet, Armon Dadgar, Susan St. Ledger, Todd Ford, David Henshall, Glenn Solomon and Sigal Zarmi, all of whom are members of HashiCorp’s board of directors, and Navam Welihinda, HashiCorp’s chief financial officer, are participants in HashiCorp’s solicitation. Information regarding such participants, including their direct or indirect interests, by security holdings or otherwise, will be included in the Transaction Proxy Statement and other relevant documents to be filed with the SEC in connection with the Transaction. Additional information about such participants is available under the captions “Board of Directors and Corporate Governance,” “Executive Officers” and “Security Ownership of Certain Beneficial Owners and Management” in HashiCorp’s definitive proxy statement in connection with its 2023 Annual Meeting of Stockholders (the “2023 Proxy Statement”), which was filed with the SEC on May 17, 2023 (and is available at https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1720671/000114036123025250/ny20008192x1_def14a.htm). To the extent that holdings of HashiCorp’s securities have changed since the amounts printed in the 2023 Proxy Statement, such changes have been or will be reflected on Statements of Change in Ownership on Form 4 filed with the SEC (which are available at https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001720671&type=&dateb=&owner=only&count=40&search_text=). Information regarding HashiCorp’s transactions with related persons is set forth under the caption “Related Person Transactions” in the 2023 Proxy Statement. Certain illustrative information regarding the payments to that may be owed, and the circumstances in which they may be owed, to HashiCorp’s named executive officers in a change of control of HashiCorp is set forth under the caption “Executive Compensation—Potential Payments upon Termination or Change in Control” in the 2023 Proxy Statement. With respect to Ms. St. Ledger, certain of such illustrative information is contained in the Current Report on Form 8-K filed with the SEC on June 7, 2023 (and is available at https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/1720671/000162828023021270/hcp-20230607.htm).

Promptly after filing the definitive Transaction Proxy Statement with the SEC, HashiCorp will mail the definitive Transaction Proxy Statement and a WHITE proxy card to each stockholder entitled to vote at the special meeting to consider the Transaction. STOCKHOLDERS ARE URGED TO READ THE TRANSACTION PROXY STATEMENT (INCLUDING ANY AMENDMENTS OR SUPPLEMENTS THERETO) AND ANY OTHER RELEVANT DOCUMENTS THAT HASHICORP WILL FILE WITH THE SEC WHEN THEY BECOME AVAILABLE BECAUSE THEY WILL CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION. Stockholders may obtain, free of charge, the preliminary and definitive versions of the Transaction Proxy Statement, any amendments or supplements thereto, and any other relevant documents filed by HashiCorp with the SEC in connection with the Transaction at the SEC’s website (http://www.sec.gov). Copies of HashiCorp’s definitive Transaction Proxy Statement, any amendments or supplements thereto, and any other relevant documents filed by HashiCorp with the SEC in connection with the Transaction will also be available, free of charge, at HashiCorp’s investor relations website (https://ir.hashicorp.com/), or by emailing HashiCorp’s investor relations department (ir@hashicorp.com).

 

Forward-Looking Statements

This communication may contain forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties, including statements regarding (i) the Transaction; (ii) the expected timing of the closing of the Transaction; (iii) considerations taken into account in approving and entering into the Transaction; and (iv) expectations for HashiCorp following the closing of the Transaction. There can be no assurance that the Transaction will be consummated. Risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements, in addition to those identified above, include: (i) the possibility that the conditions to the closing of the Transaction are not satisfied, including the risk that required approvals from HashiCorp’s stockholders for the Transaction or required regulatory approvals to consummate the Transaction are not obtained, on a timely basis or at all; (ii) the occurrence of any event, change or other circumstance that could give rise to a right to terminate the Transaction, including in circumstances requiring HashiCorp to pay a termination fee; (iii) possible disruption related to the Transaction to HashiCorp’s current plans, operations and business relationships, including through the loss of customers and employees; (iv) the amount of the costs, fees, expenses and other charges incurred by HashiCorp related to the Transaction; (v) the risk that HashiCorp’s stock price may fluctuate during the pendency of the Transaction and may decline if the Transaction is not completed; (vi) the diversion of HashiCorp management’s time and attention from ongoing business operations and opportunities; (vii) the response of competitors and other market participants to the Transaction; (viii) potential litigation relating to the Transaction; (ix) uncertainty as to timing of completion of the Transaction and the ability of each party to consummate the Transaction; and (x) other risks and uncertainties detailed in the periodic reports that HashiCorp files with the SEC, including HashiCorp’s Annual Report on Form 10-K. All forward-looking statements in this communication are based on information available to HashiCorp as of the date of this communication, and, except as required by law, HashiCorp does not assume any obligation to update the forward-looking statements provided to reflect events that occur or circumstances that exist after the date on which they were made.

Enlarge (credit: Ed Reschke via Getty)

Brace yourselves, Illinoisans: A truly shocking number of cicadas are about to live, make sweet love, and die in a tree near you. Two broods of periodical cicadas—Brood XIX on a 13-year cycle and Brood XIII on a 17-year cycle—are slated to emerge together in central Illinois this summer for the first time in over two centuries. To most humans, they’re an ephemeral spectacle and an ear-splitting nuisance, and then they’re gone. To many other Midwestern animals, plants, and microbes, they’re a rare feast, bringing new life to forests long past their death.

From Nebraska to New York, 15 broods of periodical cicadas grow underground, quietly sipping watery sap from tree roots. After 13 or 17 years (depending on the brood), countless inch-long adults dig themselves out in sync, crawling out of the ground en masse for a monthlong summer orgy. After mating, they lay eggs in forest trees and die, leaving their tree-born babies to fall to the forest floor and begin the cycle anew. Cicadas don’t fly far from their birthplace, so each brood occupies a distinct patch of the US. “They form a mosaic on the landscape,” says Chris Simon, senior research scientist in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut.

Most years, at least one of these 15 broods emerges (annual cicadas, not to be confused with their smaller periodical cousins, pop up separately every summer). Sometimes two broods emerge at the same time. It’s also not unheard of for multiple broods to coexist in the same place. “What’s unusual is that these two broods are adjacent,” says John Lill, insect ecologist at George Washington University. “Illinois is going to be ground zero. From the very top to the very bottom of the state, it’s going to be covered in cicadas.” The last time that these broods swarmed aboveground together, Thomas Jefferson was president and the city of Chicago had yet to exist.

Entomologists around the world already have their flights booked for May. “We’re like cicada groupies,” Lill says. He promises that this once-in-a-generation spectacle will be even better than April’s total solar eclipse. During 2004’s Brood X emergence, Lill remembers walking outside at midnight. “For two seconds, I was like, ‘Wow, I didn’t know it was raining,’ because I saw water flowing down the street. As my eyes focused, I realized it was literally just thousands of cicadas crawling across the street.”

Some cicada devotees, like author and entomologist Greg Kritsky, have already witnessed Brood XIII emerge a couple of times. But for most of their predators, a brood emergence happens once in a lifetime, and it’s always an extremely pleasant surprise. “It’s a food bonanza,” Kritsky says, “like if you walked outside and found the whole world swarming with flying Hershey’s Kisses.”

Cicadas are shockingly chill, protein-packed, and taste like high-end shrimp—easy, delicious prey. “Periodical cicadas are sitting ducks,” says Lill. They don’t bite, sting, or poison anyone, and they’re totally unbothered by being handled. Dogs, raccoons, birds, and other generalist predators will gorge themselves on this flying feast until they’re stuffed, and it barely makes a dent in the cicada population. It’s their secret weapon, Lill says: In the absence of other defense mechanisms, “they just overwhelm predators by their sheer abundance.”

Much like an unexpected free dinner will distract you from the leftovers sitting in your fridge, this summer’s cicada emergence will turn predators away from their usual prey. During the 2021 Brood X emergence, Zoe Getman-Pickering, a scientist in Lill’s research group, found that as birds swooped in on cicadas, caterpillar populations exploded. Spared from birds, caterpillars chomped on twice as many oak leaves as normal—and the chain of effects went on and on. Scientists can’t possibly study them all. “The ecosystem gets a swift kick, with this unexpected perturbation that changes a lot of things at once,” says Louie Yang, an ecologist and professor of entomology at UC Davis.

From birth to death, these insects shape the forest around them. As temperatures rise in late April, pale, red-eyed cicada nymphs begin clawing pinky-sized holes in the ground, preparing for their grand May entrance. All of these tunnels make it easier for rainwater to move through the soil, where it can then be used by plants and other dirt-inhabiting microbes. Once fully grown and aboveground, adult cicadas shed their exoskeletons, unfurl their wings, and fly off to spend their remaining four to six weeks on Earth singing (if they’re male), listening for the sexiest songs (if they’re female), and mating.

Mother cicadas use the metal-enhanced saws built into their abdomens—wood-drilling shafts layered with elements like aluminum, copper, and iron—to slice pockets into tree branches, where they’ll lay roughly 500 eggs each. Sometimes, all of these cuts cause twigs to wither or snap, killing leaves. While this could permanently damage a very young sapling, mature trees simply shed the slashed branches and carry on. “It’s like natural pruning,” Kritsky says, which keeps hearty trees strong, prevents disease, and promotes flower growth.

Once mating season winds down, so does the cicada’s life. “In late summer, everybody forgets about cicadas,” Lill says. “They all die. They all rot in the ground. And then they’re gone.” By late June, there will be millions of pounds of cicadas piling up at the base of trees, decomposing. The smell, Kritsky says, “is a sentient memory you will never forget—like rancid Limburger cheese.”

But these stinky carcasses send a massive pulse of food to scavengers in the soil. “The cicadas serve as reservoirs of nutrients,” Yang says. “When they come out, they release all this stored energy into the ecosystem,” giving their bodies back to the plants that raised them. In the short term, dead cicadas have a fertilizing effect, feeding microbes in the soil and helping plants grow larger. And as their remnants make their way into woodland ponds and streams, cicada nutrients are carried downstream, where they may strengthen aquatic ecosystems far beyond their home tree.

They may smell like bad hamburgers, but Yang says that if you’re lucky enough to host a tree full of cicadas this year, it’s best to just leave their bodies alone to decompose naturally. “They’ll be gone soon enough,” he says. If the pileup is especially obtrusive, simply sweep them out of the way and let nature do the rest.

The thought of billions of screeching insects in your backyard might make your skin crawl, but you don’t need to be a passive observer when they arrive. Researchers are clamoring for citizen scientists to send in photos of their local cicadas to help map the upcoming emergence. The Cicada Safari app, developed by Kritsky, received and verified 561,000 cicada pics during the 2021 Brood X emergence—he hopes to get even more this time around.

“This is an amazing natural phenomenon to wonder about,” Lill says, “not something to be afraid of.”

This story originally appeared on wired.com.

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