Micro posting in March
Every few years a new company says you should use their special format. You have to pay them a monthly fee to use it — or keep all of your documents in their care. They offer some convenience or features, but at the cost of flexibility, portability, and independence. — Write plain text files
2022-03-02: I’ve long been ignorant of i3 scratchpad. Now that I use it, my music dispatcher looks much more comfortable.
See also I3 Scratchpad to access often used applications.
2022-03-02: BLAS-level CPU Performance in 100 Lines of C. #clang
2022-03-02: Debugging with GDB. See also GDB dashboard. #clang
2022-03-02: Symbols vs. Strings (via Irreal). #lisp
2022-03-03: Roswell: Hidden feature of “-s” option. #lisp
2022-03-04: Steve Cardenas, Language of Love.
2022-03-06: Yumi Zouma, Give It Hell.
2022-03-06:
When the software changes, people want to know why and how. — Keep a Changelog
2022-03-06: SymSpell: 1 million times faster spelling correction & fuzzy search through Symmetric Delete spelling correction algorithm.
2022-03-06: You’re using email wrong. My philosophy is much simpler: Inbox zero, block toxic people as well as spams and hoaxes.
2022-03-09: Practical Python Programming. #python
2022-03-09: [Unix] Maildir, mutt and vim.
2022-03-11:
By carefully examining every album you own, you get to become more familiar with your library, its extent, its variation, and its quirks. People used to spend hours lovingly sorting and resorting their shelves of LPs. In the iTunes age, many of us toss our music into a heap and forget about it. This is great for some people. But there’s value in intimate, complete familiarity with your collection. So instead of a chore, try thinking of correcting tags as quality time with your music collection. That’s what I do. — Using the Auto-Tagger
I love Emacs, but doing everything in it is the wrong move. Doing it with this site was proof of that for me. — Wherein org-mode was a pain
2022-03-11: Binary search with confidence.
2022-03-11: Python built-in functions to know. #python
2022-03-11: Software Design for Flexibility: a review. #scheme
2022-03-11: The Art of Assembly language programming.
2022-03-14: Happy Mondays, Step On.
2022-03-14:
The two most important ways to make your text easy to read are a short line-length and the copious use of paragraphs. Viewing a single large block of run-away text with no line breaks immediately puts stress on the reader, as absorbing the information provided therein requires a high degree of concentration and eye movement. — The art of plain text
2022-03-14: Amateur archiving activities, January 2022.
2022-03-14: Python Design Patterns. #python
2022-03-14: Why Dark and Light is Complicated in Photographs.
2022-03-15: John Cale, Chinese Envoy.
2022-03-15:
Many services have self-service account deletion tools, but often hide them so well that I failed to locate them without deferring to their customer support. On average, it took 24 interactions (menu clicks, password entries, etc.) after an initial login to request and confirm a deletion request. — Some discouraging anecdotes on how services handle account deletions
My initial reasons for giving up on OS X / macOS were due to my frustrations around developer tooling and package management, problems now largely solved by Homebrew. I got tired of being able to easily do certain kind of development on Linux and then struggle to get all the required pieces set up in the same way on OS X. Then, as soon as Homebrew began to resolve all that, Apple decided to ruin its laptops through the introduction of the awful and annoyingly-loud butterfly keyboard and touchbar. — Linux Developer Laptops: Dell’s Precision 5500 series reigns supreme
2022-03-15: An Introduction to Just Enough Cython to be Useful. #python
2022-03-17: The Cluttered Web: A Scrapbook of Sreenshots.
2022-03-21: Nicole Glover, Hive Queen.
2022-03-21: Foliate: A simple and modern eBook viewer for Linux desktops. I should note that Zathura handles Epub documents perfectly well.
2022-03-21: Rust’s Unsafe Pointer Types Need An Overhaul. #rust
2022-03-21: T>T: When Double Precision is Not Enough. #python
2022-03-21: XTerm: It’s Better Than You Thought. #unix
2022-03-22: 
First peony on the balcony.
2022-03-22: Structured Concurrency.
2022-03-23: Alice in Chains, Rooster.
2022-03-23:
Authors always say the best way to write better is to read more, which I can vouch for in blogging. Building up some RSS feeds in an aggregator like The Old Reader can be a great source of inspiration.
> But it’s also important to stress that this is only one approach. 8,000 posts sounds superficially impressive, but doesn’t speak to quality or detail. Writing a few posts a year is just as valid and worthwhile. If you’re having fun doing it, who cares. — 8,000 post feedback, and regular writing
Random effects/mixed effects models shine for multi-level data such as measurements within cities within counties within states. They can also deal with measurements clustered within subjects. There are at least two contexts for the latter: rapidly repeated measurements where elapsed time is not an issue, and serial measurements spaced out over time for which time trends are more likely to be important. An example of the first is a series of tests on a subject over minutes when the subject does not fatigue. An example of the second is a typical longitudinal clinical trial where patient responses are assessed weekly or monthly. For the first setup, random effects are likely to capture the important elements of within-subject correlation. Not so much for the second setup, where serial correlation dominates and time ordering is essential. — Longitudinal Data: Think Serial Correlation First, Random Effects Second
[I]n biology, when one research team publishes something useful, then other labs want to use it too. Important work in biology gets replicatedall the time—not because people want to prove it’s right, not because people want to shoot it down, not as part of a “replication study,” but just because they want to use the method. So if there’s somethingthat everybody’s talking about, and it doesn’t replicate, word will get out. — Biology as a cumulative science, and the relevance of this idea to replication
2022-03-23: Nice add-on to hide Firefox tab when there’s only one.
2022-03-23: Rust ownership, the hard way. #rust
2022-03-23: Two Logging Options Better than Print Statements. #python
2022-03-24: LaTeX2e unofficial reference manual.
2022-03-25: Mo-Dettes, White Mice.
2022-03-25:
Some developers won’t use an editor without a debugger, or linting, or Git built-in. For me, these aren’t hard requirements but are bonuses. Indeed, most good editors have these, or plugins that enable them. How useful they’re all depends on the language and platform you’re developing for. — Why Neovim is the best code editor / IDE for developers
2022-03-25: Hot off the kitchen.
