Nick Salvatore

Good Morning

2026-05-25T07:09:10-07:00

I don't do well with options. I have said that without the convenience of desperation, I am forced to consider, which is the source of my anxiety. And though it feels an accurate reflection of my experience, the framing doesn't actually offer me a way out. To live in desperation would be its own hell. So as a person of good fortune, I'm left with freedom and calm and options. So many options. Even to reduce them to a select few—my most beloved—doesn't ease my wandering mind. As long as there is another, outside of my current selection, I will, without question, consider it. My only escape seems to come with a sort of recreational desperation—in activities that demand inconsideration. But again, I can't live there. Even to immerse myself momentarily in such activities makes me feel like a madman. I thrive in that place because it makes me a madman. I become fixated and once my attention is fixed, I become absent in every other activity.

I have said that I can't enjoy things that I enjoy because I become a slave to them. They turn me into an addict and I can't experience calm as an addict, not even in the satisfaction of my addictions. So I reach for middle options, those things between dread and desire. I try to keep myself at a distance at all times in order to not tempt my destruction. Fated to mediocrity by my own rules.

I have a propensity for drama, obviously. All of this is fine. 🐕🔥

I find satisfaction and calm in the middle, not in ends. That's the lesson here. It's ends that taunt me—images of satisfaction. The simple act of imagining turns everything into an end. So is it in imagination that my mind betrays me? Perhaps. And again, the framing offers me little. But it's something to pay attention to nevertheless.

This is good. We're really setting the tone for the chaos that will become of this blog.

A Year of Zig ⚡

2026-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

I've decided to commit to learning Zig for the next year or so. The rationale is pretty simple: I want to work in a language that allows me to build real software without unnecessary headaches but also forces me to learn how computers really work and what high-level languages abstract away.
I just got started yesterday, reading Chapter 1 of Introduction to Zig ↗</a> and tackling the Hello World ↗</a> exercise on Exercism. Hello World exercises usually feel like a joke, especially on Exercism. They hand you a function that says "Goodbye, Mars!" and you modify the text to say "Hello, World!" Run the tests. Pass. Done. And to be clear, that's exactly what the Zig exercise was, but there was enough unfamiliarity in the function signature for me to pause and dig into it more.
The point of this post isn't to educate, but to illustrate my point briefly—and it's a dumb point—here's the hello()</code> function:
pub fn hello() []const u8 { return "Hello, World!"; } </code></pre> Coming from Python and Go, if I return a string in a function, my return type is something like str</code> or string</code>, not []const u8</code>. I looked up what a u8</code> type is: unsigned 8-bit integer. So the return type is a slice of const</code> (?) of unsigned 8-bit integers. Why would a slice of integers be the return type for a string? Why const</code>? I wrote the questions I had down, then researched until I could answer each one. As I said, the point of this isn't to explain all of this. The point is that this is the first Hello World exercise I've encountered where I wasn't just learning about language-specific syntax to make a program do what I want it to do. Obviously, Zig is not alone in this, but it nevertheless excited me to have a simple exercise push me deeper into the computer. So yeah, I'm looking forward to this next year.