the internet made me weirdly good at knowing useless things

reflecting · Sep 20, 2026 · 2 min read

i never set out to learn the difference between init unit types, or how to identify a country from a flag that has been cropped in half. and yet here we are.

you open one tab for a definition of god knows what, and two hours later it is 2 am and you can explain, with total confidence, why c lets you shoot yourself in the foot.

the modern internet does not really give you education. what it gives you is random hyper-specific facts with absolutely no context attached. and somehow that sticks.

what my brain ended up with

• flags and geography: i can tell romania and chad apart at a glance. yes i know the difference. chad is slightly darker, or it is indonesia or monaco, and monaco is slightly shorter. do not ask me why any of this is useful.
• linux and command lines: a handful of bash commands that probably fix a bug exactly three people have ever had, one of whom is me. i learned nothing from it.
• security history: proxy conflicts, write-ups, threat actors. i could not tell you my own schedule tomorrow, but ask me about a 2014 cve and i will spit it out.

is it useless?

yes, and no, and mostly yes.

the honest answer is that none of this was planned. it was not for school, nobody was paying me for it. but i can talk about the most random topic for an unreasonable amount of time, and as an italian kid with too much internet that apparently counts for something.