GeezerVison

Emacs for Goodness' Sake

Hypermedia and the early internet before the web flattened both. Xanadu, HyperCard, NLS, Gopher, Usenet, Plan 9 — what they were, why they lost, what their loss cost us, and what's being recovered.

What We Lost When Unix Won examines the design decisions that became invisible once they became universal. Lisp Machines, Smalltalk, Plan 9, Oberon, BeOS — serious proposals for what computing could be. This book makes those alternatives visible again and asks what's recoverable in 2026.

A history of version control as a 50-year conversation about how humans coordinate work. SCCS, RCS, CVS, Subversion, Perforce, BitKeeper, Mercurial, Darcs, Fossil, Pijul, Sapling, Jujutsu, and the rest. Git won the market but didn't settle the questions — it made some of them invisible. This book recovers what got buried.

A working engineer's guide to the binary serialization landscape. Covers Protobuf, Thrift, Avro, CBOR, MessagePack, FlatBuffers, Cap'n Proto, SBE, Arrow, Parquet, ASN.1, Borsh, and more. Organized by the tradeoffs each format makes, not popularity. Every chapter ends with a hex wire tour of the same record.

A 2026 survey of mesh networking that doesn't expect you to have read every academic paper. Tradeoffs between Reticulum, Meshtastic, MeshCore, Yggdrasil, cjdns, Scuttlebutt, Briar, and the mesh VPNs — what each is good for, what it gets wrong, and which are worth your weekend right now.

The Mythos moment showed AI can find and chain real vulnerabilities at scale. You don't have Mythos — you have Claude, GPT-5, and a Tuesday afternoon. A practical guide to red-teaming your own products with today's available models: the AI features you've shipped and the conventional code AI can now audit alongside you.

Companion vulnerable harness for AI Red Teaming (cloudstreet-dev). A deliberately under-defended AI support bot to attack.

Async, lifetimes, Pin, higher-rank trait bounds, variance — the parts of Rust where the type system stops feeling helpful and starts feeling like an antagonist. This book is for engineers who've cleared the borrow checker and hit the next wall. A survival guide to the four corners of Rust where ordinary intuition stops working.

Exceptions are invisible GOTOs to unguessable destinations, and exception safety is one of the most under-taught problems in software. Most engineers can't tell the no-throw, basic, and strong guarantees apart. This book changes that — and shows why the same problem keeps reappearing in places that don't look like try/catch.