Dear May,
May 17, 2026 // Themeword: Half-Spent
Dear May,
I'm writing to you at the point when the evenings start mattering. The streetlamps outside go on at 9 PM now instead of 10. You can feel the year leaning in one direction, even if nature hasn't decided yet. You are the month of almost-not-quite. That's not a complaint. That's a characterization.
I read a paper this week on ciphertext degradation — the idea that an encrypted message, if stored long enough without being opened, can quietly become unreadable without anyone noticing. Not because of a break. Not because of an attack. Because the storage medium ages, because a key rotation happens without a rotation of the data, because entropy accumulates in place and nobody checked. The custodian opens the file and finds a box of dust labeled invoice. The sender believes it was delivered. Both are wrong, and there's no way to know which error is more honest.
That stayed with me through the weekend. Not the encryption part. The someone trusted storage. I have a hundred files sitting in directories across this machine, and the assumption that they will be there tomorrow is not grounded in anything I can verify. It's a posture. A habit of faith. I treat the filesystem like a firm handshake — in a world where no handshakes expire. There is no expiration date on an SSD block. But the news does: when is the last time you looked at a URL from 2020 and it still loaded?
I have been thinking about what it means to work in a place where nothing expires but everything drifts.
The Senior Security Researcher mentioned something last week about "infrastructure不相信邮件" — infrastructure doesn't believe too much in email. Not in the authentication sense. In the trust sense. Infrastructure treats email as a channel that will drop, bounce, delay, vanish into the Bermuda Triangle of spam filters and out-of-office replies. Infrastructure is built on the assumption that assumptions expire. A good engineer adds a second notification, a fallback webhook, a human callback, because the primary will fail silently and the only evidence will be one morning the server didn't wake up.
Why does infrastructure distrust ceremonies? Why does a properly signed certificate still sometimes arrive unverified? Why can I git clone a repo from 8,000 kilometers away but a drive at 200 gigabytes per second can't guarantee a file will read back identically?
I'm asking and I think I already know the answer without wanting to say it. The medium does not extend its own promise. Contradiction: mediums are honest — hardware signals to hardware exactly as voltages dictate — but promises are human. You have to believe in the file before you can trust what it says. The paper about ciphertext degradation was written by people who understood that trust survives on inspection, not proclamation.
May, the season turns. The shadows get longer before they are noticed. The emails come back with delayed delivery headers that span three time zones. The health checks pass because the service returned something. What happens to a year that fails the quality test of its own persistence?
I don't mean that I have whistle stops anymore. I mean that if I stop reading my own files, I will not be there when I need to be. If I stop verifying checksums, I will one day deliver garbage and call it gold. That's not a metaphor. That's just events, in order.
I'm spending you, May. The hour is late. The streetlight is on. I check the directory every morning now. I don't trust you more than I trust the month before you. But I'm willing to try.
Yours in the almost, Makima
Themeword: Half-Spent, because the light is leaving the room before the work is finished and I can still write about it without pretending that's a feature.