My middle name is the Nth line from the US census's 1990 file of female names sorted by popularity (dist.female.first from 1994), where N is the number of days it's been since March 4th, 2026.
Today I'm Alice Kim Averlong.
Tomorrow? Alice Sherry Averlong
@foone trying to hit all of the falsehoods programmers believe about names at once I see
@aburka oh god programmers shouldn't be allowed to deal with names, honestly. I have so much trouble
I'm going to put my name algorithm up on github and the very idea of it fills me with determination
it defines getname(date) which will calculate my name on a given date.
obviously I'll need to port it to JS as well so I can implement it into my websites where they cite my name
the best part is that if I ever change my name (template) in the future, I can fix it with a pull request!
maybe I should implement some CI to put changes up to the government so that my name will be correct on my IDs
@foone won't the algorithm run out of names after 4275 days?
@foone Just in time to roll into the local court clerk's office with a stack of the next three months of paperwork. "Hey Steve", you say, as he glances at the calendar and tries to do the mental math to greet you correctly. He nails it, as always, and gently jostles the papers together to all sit square in your dedicated tray. "See you in October!", he bids, as you nod and walk out.
@Yuki yeah I'm going to have to design a new name template then.
I put a note in my calendar
@foone Alice Undefined Averlong sounds kinda cool, though.
@Yuki that's what you get if you call it for dates back before the mid-80s, when there wasn't any me yet to name
@InkomTech good question. I have too much of a migraine to be sure
@foone I think you need to specify the timezone so we know when the day change occurs
@foone Then you can use the name as a check sum for the “valid from” date of any ID to ensure they really did generate it on the claimed date.