aliquote.org

/me is listening to “I Can’t Be” by Sally Dige

Musing with three types of backup systems on my old Macbook: Arq, Borg and Kopia. I was able to mount every backup folder correctly. Now I just need to put the years end-to-end!

With that damn machine crash last week, I’m in the process of retagging my music library (after re-downloading some albums from YT for the second time), and soon everything should be ready to join my iTunes library, neglected since 2016. The last title I bought from Apple was the Glenn Gould album, BTW.

Currently rebuilding my iTunes library. Back in 2016 it wasn’t the time to switch to Apple Music and TV. I’m on an unsupported laptop and OS right now, but it feels so good. Yet, congrats to Apple because I can retrieve all my data in just two or three clicks. #apple

I’m not in the mood of writing a full blog post to summarize my recent comeback to OS X. It’s still OS X on my machine, but I know it evolved as something else since 2018. I don’t know if I’m ready to buy a new Macbook with the accompagnying OS. I liked and I still like Mojave so much. Yet it was pretty painful to resurrect this laptop: Homebrew has no “bottles” for oldy software, which means I had to recompile everything from scratch for 60% of the software I reinstalled. I got into trouble with GPG, GitHub https auth, zsh misbehaving on OS X for no reason, minor annoyances with the Linux -> OS X switch, and so on. Finally, I’m close to the end of the migration process. It took me 5 full days! And I had to somehow relearn macOS shorcuts. Muscle memory helped in most cases, but still… So long, Apple #apple

TIL that TERM=xtermm on Darwin behaves like TERM=xterm-mono on Linux. That was helpful to force Neomutt or Cmus to use mono color by default. Moreover, if you use TERM=vt100 for Neomutt, it behaves more smoothly when fetching new mail with mbsync. #apple

I’ve spent a few more or less pleasant days, long ones in any case, reconfiguring my old 12-inch macbook. Guess what about my Dell laptop and my fresh configuration of Ubuntu 24.04 LTS: the power supply blew up and the SSD along with it. Now everything seems workable (at the very best, for a 6-year old OS). More to come in a blog post later.

/me is listening to “Love Hides” by The Doors

Apparently, they will soon get a new home!

The Beauty of $\LaTeX$: Some of the crap that has kept me from using MS Word for years. Now I’m too old and remain a happy $\TeX$er for the days ahead. Fun thing: we did the same MSc (which was called a DEA at that time in France) one year apart!

I’m pretty happy with new management system for my audio file. Thanks to Beets I now have access to the whole power of command line utilities. Here’s a brief overview of the top genres in my library:

» beet summarize | head -n 12
genre                  | count
---------------------- | -----
Rock                   | 3045
Post-Punk              | 2754
Jazz                   | 2509
Alternative            | 1212
Electronic             | 948
Indie Rock             | 838
Pop                    | 817
Classic Rock           | 679
Alternative Rock       | 497
Indie Pop              | 424

How many total tracks having a genre tag, excluding tracks from playlists which contain, following poor design choice, duplicate records?

» beet summarize ^context:playlist | head -n 12 | cut -f2 -d\| | tail -n +3 | paste -sd+ | bc
10603

And so on… Wanna looks at the tlistening stats for the current song?

» beet ls -f '$artist ($album): $title ($length) [$genre, $play_count, $last_played]' $(mpc current | sed s/-//)
Diana Krall (The Girl in the Other Room): Narrow Daylight (3:31) [Contemporary Jazz, 12, 2024-11-11 20:38:09]

/me is listening to “Darkening of the Light” by Concrete Blonde

Ncmpcpp with no color enabled. Much better for my eyes!

I was going to spent some times trying to output the sound of my built-in speakers to my old Apple TV which is connected via a DAC to my wi-fi system, until I realized it is as simple as loading Pipewire RAOP module, pactl load-module module-raop-discover. Then, launch pavucontrol and switch to your Airplay device.

The Airplay system is now listed in the list of available devices.

» wpctl status
PipeWire 'pipewire-0' [1.0.5, chl@aliquote, cookie:758904776]
 └─ Clients:
        32. WirePlumber                         [1.0.5, chl@aliquote, pid:1915]
        33. WirePlumber [export]                [1.0.5, chl@aliquote, pid:1915]
        34. pipewire                            [1.0.5, chl@aliquote, pid:1916]
        54. gnome-shell                         [1.0.5, chl@aliquote, pid:2575]
        55. GNOME Shell Volume Control          [1.0.5, chl@aliquote, pid:2575]
        56. GNOME Volume Control Media Keys     [1.0.5, chl@aliquote, pid:2728]
        57. xdg-desktop-portal                  [1.0.5, chl@aliquote, pid:3033]
        58. Music Player Daemon                 [1.0.5, chl@aliquote, pid:1905]
        64. Mutter                              [1.0.5, chl@aliquote, pid:2575]
        65. gsd-power                           [1.0.5, chl@aliquote, pid:2732]
        81. pipewire                            [1.0.5, chl@aliquote, pid:1916]
        88. Firefox                             [1.0.5, chl@aliquote, pid:82644]
       102. speech-dispatcher-dummy             [1.0.5, chl@aliquote, pid:90304]
       103. wpctl                               [1.0.5, chl@aliquote, pid:90700]

Audio
 ├─ Devices:
 │      50. Built-in Audio                      [alsa]
 │
 ├─ Sinks:
 │  *   51. Built-in Audio Analog Stereo        [vol: 0.28]
 │      66. Apple TV Salon                     [vol: 1.00]
 │
 ├─ Sink endpoints:
 │
 ├─ Sources:
 │  *   52. Built-in Audio Analog Stereo        [vol: 1.00 MUTED]
 │
 ├─ Source endpoints:
 │
 └─ Streams:
        59. Music Player Daemon
             61. output_FL       > Apple TV Salon:send_FL       [active]
             63. output_FR       > Apple TV Salon:send_FR       [active]
        82. speech-dispatcher-dummy
             98. output_FR       > ALC3254 Analog:playback_FR   [init]
            101. output_FL       > ALC3254 Analog:playback_FL   [init]

We can even make it the default output audio channel:

Now, since Pipewire supports multiple streaming output devices, much like mpd, I just need to configure the audio source in their config files to get everything right for the next time.

/me is listening to “Man of Anatomy” by Tom Hickox

/me is listening to “Amor Fati” by Washed Out

I guess all is working now ;-) I’ve converted my automated script that shows current track on the micro-blog (for casual IRC users), I’ll just need to figure out how to manage tagging and playlist management under ncmpcpp.

/me is listening to “Back In Black” by AC/DC

Trying out mpd in combination with ncmpcpp as a replacement for my long-time friendly TUI Cmus. I"m still in the process of discovering the functionalities. Everything seems okay on the mpd side – I even got MPRIS support after reading the Arch wiki (this Go solution didn’t work for me). I’m just looking for a direct way to listen to my music library without resorting on virtual playlist in ncmpcpp.

100 Exercises To Learn Rust. #rust

♪ Mini Trees · Carrying On

In fact, you rarely have anything to do with the operating system on a PC desktop or laptop, you mostly only deal with desktop applications - and they can suck equally bad regardless of operating system. — There is only one reason why Microsoft Windows is the dominating operating system on the PC desktop

Computing the Normal Distribution Function. #python

Failing at Combinatorics with Haskell. #haskell

I believe the Haskell LSP already provides that, but in case you don’t use it here are two blog posts that explain how to integrate ghcid into your (Neo)vim workflow: How I integrate ghcid with vim/neovim, Haskell dev workflow with ghcid and neovim. #haskell

Everything I Know About The Fast Inverse Square Root Algorithm. Dealing with floating point math from Quake 3 to the present day.

The nice thing about boringness (so constrained) is that the capabilities of these things are well understood. But more importantly, their failure modes are well understood. — Choose Boring Technology

Hot off the kitchen!

♪ Siouxsie And The Banshees · Arabian Knights

If there is ONE THING the Unix world needs, it is for bash/ksh/sh to stop diverging further by permitting STUPID INPUT that cannot plausibly work in all other shells. We are in a post-Postel world. — OpenBSD now enforcing no invalid NUL characters in shell scripts

♪ Romain Dubois · Ardoise

Accept multiple ways that users can ask for help and respond in kind. — Shell Script Best Practices

One of my favorite post-punk band from the 80’s. Big Ups: Bauhaus’ Kevin Haskins Dompe and David J Haskins Pick Their Bandcamp Favorites.

Python’s multiprocessing performance problem. Lot of interesting tips and tricks for those using the multiprocessing module. #python

Plotting data in the terminal with gnuplot. Still one of the most underated plotting tool for quick one-liner.

Some Stata tutorials on survival analysis that are worth a read. #stata

If we do not understand both the data and the models completely, it becomes very difficult to spot problems in the software we use to work on them: unexpected behaviour arising from software bugs may be mistaken for a peculiarity in either of them. It is then crucial that we minimise the chances of this happening by applying all the best engineering practices we have at our disposal. — The Pragmatic Programmer for Machine Learning.

Dissecting the GZIP format. Very interesting read for those interested in compressing techniques. #clang

If you need an easy way to convert MS docx to a PDF from the command line, don’t forget that lowriter (from Libre Office) has option to convert any document on the fly.

Stick with the mainstream & boring unless a competing alternative that is so much simpler and/or more powerful, and that has an acceptable learning curve, so that it will justify leaving the flock, exists.

Best resume I read in a while.

All mainstream, general purpose programming languages are (basically) Turing-complete, and therefore any programme you can write in one you can, in fact, write in another. There is a computational equivalence between them. The main differences are instead in the expressiveness of the languages, the guardrails they give you, and their performance characteristics (although this is possibly more of a runtime/compiler implementation question). — Why Haskell?

Plotting data in the terminal with gnuplot.

LSP: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

♪ The Cure · A Night Like This

Recorded live at the Roskilde Festival 2019.

Zsh Tricks to Blow your Mind.

Pesto tart with goat cheese and pine nuts. It wasn’t too bad a job after all.

It’s both delightful and surreal to see that Valgrind is still in wide use today. — Twenty years of Valgrind

From Julia to Rust. See also Where to Start with Rust. I’ve been wanting to learn both of those languages but I’ve never really found the time for it, or perhaps the motivation to embark on new adventures. One day, maybe one day.

Old post but still an interesting personal roadmap with Vim. #vim

Curiosities in Vinyl: Nice read. Looks like the author has a really comfy setup. I’ll keep the references handy.

A small table of interesting manpages.

♪ Antony & The Johnsons · You Are My Sister

(Special dedicace to K.)

TIL about a nice replacement for tldr: tealdeer.

It looks like 0x0.st is up and running again. I believe it was down for a few months and I had to resort to https://transfer.sh/.

This photo reminds me of the time when I was studying computer vision. Back in the time, we were happy with newly released LCD displays, although we got some CRTs lurking around. Now I can display images in my terminal (foot + sixel).

Commit Mono is an anonymous and neutral programming typeface focused on creating a better reading experience.

Installing wxpython on Ubuntu just takes 25 min. on an Intel i7-10610U (8 cores) @ 4.900GHz (389 Mo, virtual environment included). BTW, there’s no wheel for GTK4. #python

Sometimes I miss my time with macOS Mojave.

♪ Wire · Outdoor Miner

Putting Xs into squares is all the rage with statisticians. We should test that they can use bitstring macros for that. — CVS: cvs.openbsd.org: src

IRC has historically been one of the most important chat programs in my life. — My IRC client runs on Kubernetes

Poor or lazy solution on my side: irrsi runs on a uni server, and I rsync the logs on my laptop when I’m in. I also concatenate all channel logs into monthly logs so that it’s easier to read what’s going on. This is why I may be slow to respond to /msg sometimes.

Cleaning up the mess accumulated in my ~/.local/bin and updating binary releases here and there. I wish I was not so lazy and wrote a quick install.sh script once for all.

What scientists must know about hardware to write fast code: Great read, even for those not familiar with Julia.

Yet another TUI app that I recently added to my toolbet, with the hope that it will improve over time: tdf. I heavily rely on Zathura for things related to PDF (espacially for bidirectional sync when using Texlab), altough I came to appreciate Evince with time (it can open DVI and PS file, by the way). With async rendering and hot reloading, I can imagine that tdf could be a great add-on for previewing $\TeX$ compilation results.

TIL about theme.sh which is amazing: no dependency, self-contained, and it can be used online without setting up anything in your bashrc or zshrc config. You can not only preview colorscheme using Fzf, but you can also import your own colorscheme (it will be added in theme.sh itself. See also Foot FAQ to implement dynamic color changes. #unix

Some really nice Gnome extensions are landing on GitHub, see openbar and forge. See also Exploring the Default Tiling Windows Feature in Ubuntu 24.04 (and Enhancing it). I still have Tactile around, but I rarely used it these days, unless I’m mirroring my desktop on a larger screen. #unix

♪ Wire · The Boiling Boy

Racket parallel build in action.

Churn and Weight: Or how to get interesting statistics for your Git projects.

kitty has to run on what I’m remoting from. tmux can work on what I’m remoting into. And that makes all the difference. — tmux is worse is better

♪ Timber Timbre · Moment

Efficient rolling statistics. #haskell

Looks interesting: Render and include figures in Pandoc documents using your plotting toolkit of choice .

♪ Tindersticks · Factory Girls

Hopefully other email clients can get to state where they too can do all of this. — Patch Workflow With Mutt 2019

Configuration, scripts and tips for using mpv as an image viewer. See also this GH issue for extended discussion.

♪ Tindersticks · Raindrops (John Peel 1993)

Just when I spent about half an hour compiling swayimg with all its dependencies, wondering how long it would take to compile the latest version of zathura and zathura-mupdf, it just came up to my mind that Ubuntu 24.04 LTS was released a few months ago. Time to upgrade the whole system I guess. #vim

Yet another round of computer cleansing today. I also removed VirtualBox since I can certainly manage everything with qemu, and lot of unused Gnome garbage that I installed for testing purpose. Ironically, I also uninstalled Gapless since I always returned to Cmus with which I am so comfortable and which fits my TUI workflow so perfectly. #unix

♪ Tindersticks · Raindrops (John Peel 1993)

Flat is a good thing but at some point I wish there could be a way to avoid unecessary duplication of core frameworks. I mean, below you’ll find that I need 4 versions of the Qt goodies that I don’t even use on my system.

This all results in several Gig of wasted space, IMO. But this probaby is the way to go, as far as containerization is concerned.

» du -sh /var/lib/flatpak
11G     /var/lib/flatpak

Someone’s Been Messing With My Subnormals!: one can only appreciate the obstinacy and quality of the data munging using Python and shell scripting!

I wanted to get rid of raw <img> tags and replace then with <figure>, available as a shortcode in Hugo. It turned out I had a lot of replacements to perform:

» rg -nc "\!\[.*\]\(" content/post | cut -d: -f2 | paste -sd+ | bc
688

Here’s a classical one-liner using Sed:

sed "s/^\!\[.*\](\(.*\))/{{< figure src=\"\1\" >}}/ content/post/*.md

I took the opportunity to add a small colored insert to each figure using the following CSS code:

figure {
  box-shadow: 0 0 0 .5em #f3f3ed;
  margin: 2em 4em;
}

TIL that \%V can be used to replace only in a visual selection (very handy for rectangular selection with <C-V>). #vim

And so, one year later, we got a few dozens of additional functions and a brand new name.

♪ The Doors · The Crystal Ship

Creating and managing a package seemed much harder than I expected. — An unbiased evaluation of environment management and packaging tools

… to put it very mildly… This, however, does constitue a very good overview of what’s available in the Python ecocystem as of this writing. #python

I try to use all the features of fzf-lua, and it’s quite easy to reproduce a Git time machine with the bcommit command. If you’re not, you may want to give a shot to git-time-lapse: It does the job pretty well with zero dependencies (e.g. Telescope, plenary), and it can be installed as a simple optional plugin. #vim

From time to time, I make a few infidelities with cmus and use gapless (formerly g4music). It’s a great piece of software which I initially compiled from scratch until I decided to rely on the Flathub version. I once generate m3u playlists for relevant folders in my global library and they come up nicely in the playlist view. See my review here.

Lot of useful tips and tricks for Zsh users. I particularly like the hash -d approach for directory bookmarks. #unix

♪ Editors · Formaldehyde

♪ Archive · Sleep

I finally got ride of most of the (Neo)vim packages I was only using on an occasional basis, which led me to the following setup: (I barely use Rust, but I happen to read some Rust code from time to time.)

~/.config/nvim
» tree -L 3 pack
pack
└── plugins
    ├── opt
    │   ├── haskell-tools.nvim
    │   ├── molten-nvim
    │   └── rustaceanvim
    └── start
        ├── fzf-lua
        ├── nvim-treesitter
        ├── nvim-treesitter-textobjects
        └── vimtex

Also, I deleted my custom colorscheme, even if I was just using zenbones for the past few months, and I switched to the builtin quiet colorscheme, which is great (pending some minor changes which I implemented in an autocommand). Good-bye orgmode as well, especially since I don’t use the agenda and capture stuff. #vim

♪ Northside · Tour de World

After 4 years I think fzf-lua remains one of my favorite Neovim plugin. That being said, it is also one of the most astonishing GitHub project where the author is so active that all issues are resolved in due time while he is also providing useful tips all time. Last find is how live grep could potentially handle current word (C-r C-w doesn’t work when using Fzf terminal). #vim

“Vim experts” don’t prefer buffers over tabs: they use buffers as the file proxies they are and tab pages as the workspaces they are. Buffers and tab pages have different purposes so preferring one to the other makes no sense whatsoever. — Why do Vim experts prefer buffers over tabs?

A good understanding of Vim’s various lists is a massive productivity boost — it’s taken me many years of Vim use to truly appreciate this. — Vim’s useful lists.

♪ New Order · Truth

TIL that Racket comes with a migration utility for packages installed using a preceding release: raco pkg migrate.

♪ Tindersticks · What Is A Man

Grabbing some new tracks from https://archive.org, mostly good old post-punk. Together with music I bought and music I found here and there, I’m nearing 18,000 tracks on my HD. Time to get a NAS I guess.

I had noticed that many of our live shows were ending really early: a couple times recently, the last band was done and we were closed by 10pm. That seems weird and wrong to me. Especially in the summer: who wants to show up at a night club while the sun is still up? “Why are we doing that?”, I asked. Well, Devon did some research, and the answer seems to be, “Because everyone else is doing that too.” — Wherein this is just a sleepy seaside town now

♪ Good Lovelies · Blurry Days

I just tried musikcube as an alternative to cmus. The UI is really great, but I fear I will miss some cmus features, like having different views for albums and playlists, filters, and so on.

How I stopped worrying and loved Makefiles.

The history of the ROC curve: Interesting read which highlights how it is worth double checking Wikipedia with historical records.

Lasagna were tasty last week!

“When the underlying measurements are normally distributed, you can “convert” a range measurement into an estimate for the standard deviation” using the D2 constant. As always, Rick Wicklin wrote a very interesting article for those involved in QC or dealing with small samples. See also On using flexible distributions to fit data for another interesting story.

Some estimators provide reasonable estimates even when there are correlations among observations, but estimates of uncertainties of estimates can be badly affected by correlations. — What Does a Statistical Method Assume?.

I have almost two years of backup data for my home directory, thanks to kopia. It works great, it runs smoothly and doesn’t harm the RAM or disk, and it wakes up nicely when the laptop returns from idle.

~/tmp
» kopia snapshot list
chl@aliquote:/home/chl
  2022-10-31 21:00:37 CET k105eb1435351bfdfba85874cd06ebf75 14.9 GB drwxr-xr-x files:226411 dirs:45856 (monthly-18)
  2022-11-30 22:00:39 CET k01dd605c67ca579cbec33fb5eb386648 15.5 GB drwxr-xr-x files:232391 dirs:46879 (monthly-17)
  2022-12-31 23:00:38 CET k5a01672b76af59461061c3fe25003785 15.7 GB drwxr-xr-x files:234220 dirs:47516 (monthly-16,annual-3)
  2023-01-31 21:00:13 CET kec7a24dd874b20376f160f1fe3e0acd8 15.4 GB drwxr-xr-x files:226071 dirs:45741 (monthly-15)
  2023-02-28 21:00:08 CET kc707921ee53be6aa7ff2be4da99387c4 14.6 GB drwxr-xr-x files:228097 dirs:46041 (monthly-14)
--%<-----------------
  2024-03-25 08:12:51 CET k9cb5afcc7ce355e2b64c8f980ef6bb24 14.1 GB drwxr-xr-x files:218701 dirs:35849 (hourly-11)
  2024-03-25 09:00:14 CET kdec17d1a1ed35833b0eed730c491ed87 14.1 GB drwxr-xr-x files:218716 dirs:35849 (latest-10,hourly-10)
  2024-03-25 10:00:35 CET ka52066cb5588c88a7d259140e5c02683 14.1 GB drwxr-xr-x files:218702 dirs:35849 (latest-9,hourly-9)
  2024-03-25 11:00:35 CET kd96a4c841b76c75e4b5b569594f9e87b 14.1 GB drwxr-xr-x files:218704 dirs:35849 (latest-8,hourly-8)
  2024-03-25 12:00:35 CET k0ec385fbd40ce68a14250da3e4e72ac9 14.1 GB drwxr-xr-x files:218710 dirs:35849 (latest-7,hourly-7)
  2024-03-25 13:00:35 CET k635fb4cf4fd0e3f4c45c58b7a14ed690 14.1 GB drwxr-xr-x files:218730 dirs:35850 (latest-6,hourly-6)
  2024-03-25 14:00:35 CET k722ecc32f98028829e258d2582548281 14.1 GB drwxr-xr-x files:218741 dirs:35851 (latest-5,hourly-5)
  2024-03-25 15:00:35 CET k87f64132d71b14eccbc7f5bb362b53aa 14.1 GB drwxr-xr-x files:218732 dirs:35851 (latest-4,hourly-4)
  2024-03-25 18:07:22 CET k4af30387d39daf1dd1b3002dffde3543 14.1 GB drwxr-xr-x files:218733 dirs:35851 (latest-3,hourly-3)
  2024-03-25 19:00:35 CET k66f7a97a2b50611e047524da6cc0e640 14.1 GB drwxr-xr-x files:218745 dirs:35851 (latest-2,hourly-2)
  2024-03-25 20:26:20 CET kbd44c2958916a894deab100da949f302 14.1 GB drwxr-xr-x files:218745 dirs:35851 (latest-1,hourly-1,daily-1,weekly-1,monthly-1,annual-1)

♪ Flock of Dimes · Given/Electric Life

Writing Python like it’s Rust. Or how to make use of Python types in a meaningful way.

♪ Passenger · Summer Rain

TIL about Faircamp which looks amazing.

Time Machine like Backups on OpenBSD.

I recently switch from MC 1.19.4 with Forge and Optifine to MC 1.20.4 with Iris and Sodium. Now I got a lot more mods available with less frictions overall. And it looks like we can now play MC on a laptop with texture packs and shaders all time long.

It’s probably time to stop building on 1.19.4 I guess, and just start a new survival journey.

This difficulty is often not due to math - because of the aforementioned frameworks machine learning implementations do not require intense mathematics. An aspect of this difficulty involves building an intuition for what tool should be leveraged to solve a problem. This requires being aware of available algorithms and models and the trade-offs and constraints of each one. — Why is machine learning ‘hard’?

♪ Kendra Morris · Dry

Lots of tips and tricks for Mathematica aficionados.

When optimising code, never guess, always measure. — When Optimising Code Measure

TIL about Asahi Linux. Looks cool, although Ubuntu LTS already runs fine on my Mac, but it’s an old one, not one of the newest cool kids made in Silicon.

No, really, I’m astonished at how much software is basically useless without an internet connection. Net is no longer something additional to your daily tasks, it is essential for your daily tasks. — We’ve become overdependent on the net

♪ Jelly Cleaver · Black Line

Wanna get a plain text list of your Pocket bookmarks? Go to getpocket.com/export, then apply the following snippet on the HTML result file:

cat YOURFILE.html | grep -o '<a .*href=.*>' | sed -e 's/<a /\n<a /g' | sed -e 's/<a .*href=['"'"'"]//' -e 's/["'"'"'].*$//' -e '/^$/ d' > pocket.txt

What strikes me about my personal experience with LLMs is that I have learned precisely when to use them and when their use would only slow me down. I have also learned that LLMs are a bit like Wikipedia and all the video courses scattered on YouTube: they help those with the will, ability, and discipline, but they are of marginal benefit to those who have fallen behind. I fear that at least initially, they will only benefit those who already have an advantage. — LLMs and Programming in the first days of 2024

A simplified boxplot, with (much) fewer Stata commands than the one proposed in this old post:

sysuse auto
graph box mpg,  over(foreign) box(1, color(white)) ///
  medtype(marker) medmarker(mcolor(black) mlwidth(0)) ///
  cwhiskers alsize(0) lines(lpattern(solid) lwidth(medium)) ///
  ylabel(, nogrid) yscale(noline) ///
  title("{bf}Box Plot", pos(11) size(2.75)) ///
  subtitle("City Mileage over number of cylinders", pos(11) size(2))
graph export /home/chl/tmp/better-bxp.eps

It looks like this site renders properly on sixel-aware terminal with w3m (w3m -sixel -o auto_image=TRUE https://aliquote.org):

I still hold 14 draft posts in my inbox, but for now let’s start this fresh new year with some good vibes.

TIL that you can use xeyes to check if an app is running under Wayland or XWayland.

Micro-posting goes well as far as I can tell.

Just when I was about to try out boosting and bagging in Stata (rforest and boost), I realized that most programs now require Stata 15 or newer. Even Lasso penalization has been integrated in the core modeling facilities starting with Stata 18. At least, I can still run lassopack to perform L1, L2 regularization or a combination thereof. They use the same convention as in glmnet, where the parameter $\alpha$ stands for the elasticnet mixing parameter ($\alpha=0$ corresponds to the ridge penalty while $\alpha=1$ is the lasso penalty). The authors compared Stata builtin and R regularized estimation, which is great: Replication of glmnet and StataCorp’s lasso. See also An introduction to the lasso in Stata on the Stata blog. #stata

To choose an implementation is to choose a tribe. Since Scheme is so minimal, you begin to rely on extensions that are only present in your implementation, and so through code you bind yourself to a world of code, people, and practice, loosely bound to the rest of the Scheme world through a fictional first-person-plural. This is OK! Going deep into a relationship with an implementation is the only way to do great work. The looser ties to the rest of the Scheme world in the form of the standards, the literature, the IRC channel, and the mailing lists provide refreshing conversation among fellow travellers, not marching orders for a phalanx. — an opinionated guide to scheme implementations

♪ Jelly Cleaver · Black Line

iMessage, explained: When you learn what com.apple.madrid does on your machine, and all the other goodies Apple put into their APNs.

A good explanation of how Shazam work in practice, and an implementation in Python.

A Very Subtle Bug, or how to re-enable SIGPIPE in the subprocess child. #python

My general advice for maximizing the battery is only use your battery as much as you need, i.e. charge it as often as possible, and as little as possible. If you need a rule of thumb, stay within 30%-80%. Wouldn’t charging a lithium battery to 80% only defeat the purpose of putting the battery into longer use in the first place?

Poor man “fd(find)” command:

#!/bin/sh
find . -iname "*$1*" 2>/dev/null

The qeML package: “Quick and easy” wrappers for machine learning. Norm Matloff also published a new book. #rstats

♪ New Order · Sub-Culture

TIL that Spotify originally relied on Fisher-Yates algorithm to shuffle their playlists.

A computer game taking the shape of instant messaging software. The inherently paradoxical goal of the game requires no small amount of strategy, wit and cunning: The main objective is gaining as large a following of people as possible while simultaneously getting as many people as possible banned from the game. — Explaining the Internet in 2020

Environment variables for Wayland hackers.

Note to myself:

$MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND

Enables Wayland for Mozilla products (notably Firefox) if set to 1. Firefox uses GTK so setting GTK_BACKEND=wayland will force it to run on Wayland regardless of if MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND. However, it will default to X on GDK_BACKEND=wayland,x11 unless MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 is set.

There are a lot of small websites on the Internet: Interesting websites, beautiful websites, unique websites. Unfortunately they are incredibly hard to find. You cannot find them on Google or Reddit, and while you can stumble onto them with my search engine, it is not in a very directed fashion. — The Small Website Discoverability Crisis

Human optimism leads us to believe that we can easily know where a program spends most of its time. — Four Kinds of Optimisation

♪ Millie Turner · January

Still decent timing…

aliquote master*
» make deploy
[+] Building public files in /home/chl/Sites/aliquote/public
hugo --gc --minify
Start building sites …
hugo v0.92.2+extended linux/amd64 BuildDate=2023-01-31T11:11:57Z VendorInfo=ubuntu:0.92.2-1ubuntu0.1

                   |  EN
-------------------+-------
  Pages            | 4705
  Paginator pages  |  381
  Non-page files   |    1
  Static files     | 1318
  Processed images |    0
  Aliases          |    1
  Sitemaps         |    1
  Cleaned          |    0

Total in 10170 ms

Recursive data suggest recursive solutions. This is the key insight you need for understanding recursion. Not only does it make sense once you think about it, it also demonstrates why most other approaches to teaching recursion are essentially incorrect. — How Not to Teach Recursion

A Data-Centric Introduction to Computing

pytest supports running Python unittest-based tests out of the box. — How to use unittest-based tests with pytest

This is great since it allows me to use the same compiler (pytest) in Neovim, independent of the testing framework.

During the Internet’s adolescence, words (and thus blogs) were easier to come by, because for the most part, almost all of the interaction we had online was using devices designed for interaction via text. With the shift to phones as a more popular interaction device, the ease of pouring thoughts into a textual medium has decreased. — Blogging Shift

♪ Marianne Faithfull · Broken English (12" Remix)

Profiling in Haskell for a 10x Speedup: Great read. #haskell

Bit Twiddling Hacks.

Editing Lisp dialect in Neovim like a pro: beside Vim’s builtin (e.g., vib to select inside brackets), paredit.vim (e.g., [[ go to top-level form), treesitter and nvim-treesitter-textobjects lets you navigate around your code easily, and incremental selection is a breeze. I originally used vv (init the selection), va (aka increase or <C-a>) and vx (aka decrease or <C-x>), but now I just use <tab> that other folks often use as an alias for %. #vim

  incremental_selection = {
    enable = true,
    keymaps = {
      init_selection = "<tab>",
      node_incremental = "<tab>",
      node_decremental = "<S-tab>",
    },
  }

Learning (Some) Haskell by Building Tetris. #haskell

If you get such a garbage when launching Firefox (official deb package, not the crappy snap one) from the command line or as an external browser for Newsboat, try force disabling accessibility as suggested here.

» firefox

~
» [Parent 25471, Main Thread] WARNING: invalid (NULL) pointer instance: 'glib warning', file /build/firefox-LOPdVD/firefox-119.0+build2/toolkit/xre/nsSigHandlers.cpp:167

(firefox:25471): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: 11:46:47.027: invalid (NULL) pointer instance
[Parent 25471, Main Thread] WARNING: g_signal_emit_by_name: assertion 'G_TYPE_CHECK_INSTANCE (instance)' failed: 'glib warning', file /build/firefox-LOPdVD/firefox-119.0+build2/toolkit/xre/nsSigHandlers.cpp:167

(firefox:25471): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: 11:46:47.027: g_signal_emit_by_name: assertion 'G_TYPE_CHECK_INSTANCE (instance)' failed
[Parent 25471, Main Thread] WARNING: invalid (NULL) pointer instance: 'glib warning', file /build/firefox-LOPdVD/firefox-119.0+build2/toolkit/xre/nsSigHandlers.cpp:167

(firefox:25471): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: 11:46:47.027: invalid (NULL) pointer instance
[Parent 25471, Main Thread] WARNING: g_signal_emit_by_name: assertion 'G_TYPE_CHECK_INSTANCE (instance)' failed: 'glib warning', file /build/firefox-LOPdVD/firefox-119.0+build2/toolkit/xre/nsSigHandlers.cpp:167

(firefox:25471): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: 11:46:47.027: g_signal_emit_by_name: assertion 'G_TYPE_CHECK_INSTANCE (instance)' failed

Scheme from Scratch by Peter Michaux: intro, and full list of posts. #scheme

♪ sean thornton · edith says

Solving the puzzle of the address-of operator. #clang

Other subtleties of the C language: There are two ways to index an array a, either a[i] or i[a], as illustrated below:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
  int arr[5] = {1, 2, 3, 4, 5};
  int i = 2;

  printf("i[arr]: %d\n", i[arr]);
  printf("arr[i]: %d\n", arr[i]);
}

Almost 50, I remain philosophical because I spent about the first ~45 of them living without Youtube. Did that well enough. — https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-users

I generated a docset for Purescript with pursuit.docset. However, I’m skeptical about its added value. I’m using Dash docset in Neovim via vim-dasht, and I noticed that oftentimes the online help for simple query like filter or partition are pretty vague. E.g., in the case of filter the very first hits are all about _filter :: forall r a. Lens' { ... } a, while none of the first matches for partition yields the same result as a simple query on Pursuit (filter :: forall a. (a -> Boolean) -> Array a -> Array a).

This document is a sort of quine. If you select the whole page in your browser and paste it into a file, this text shows up encoded in a weird Markdown variant embedded in a string literal inside a Racket lisp script. Evaluating the file with racket -f $FILE evaluates the lisp, converting the weird Markdown and producing the same HTML document that your browser received. — https://cgad.ski/

Compiling Chicken Scheme scripts. #scheme

Vim is not an IDE. It can be customized to look like one, but the more you try to make it to look like an IDE, the less it behaves like vim (fast and lightweight). If you need a full-fledged IDE features, use a real IDE. — Why I Use Vim

Ashby’s book “Introduction to Cybernetics”: One of the very first English textbook I bought when I was a PhD student involved in some kind of Neurosciences back at the time.

♪ Fay Claassen · Almost Blue

I keep getting this kind of weird stuff on my pretty old iPhone. Internet was less complicated back in the time, especially when Apple was not tying up software to hardware to such an extent.

Everything you ever wanted to know on how to execute a command in multiple files in Vim. I mostly use argo and cdo. #vim

TIL that there are some interesting C programming tips on Neovim wiki. #vim #clang

Interpretable Machine Learning: A Guide for Making Black Box Models Explainable.

No more nvim-lspconfig means 15 ms less time spent in starting up! #vim

TIL that you can clear your Tmux paste buffers by tagging everything (C-t) then deleting it (D).

Pytest is really great: even simple assert statements get processed, no need to write complex fixtures or test suite. This means you can write your scripts as usual and just import pytest. To avoid contaminating your current directory with __pycache__ and .pytest_cache directories, set the exported variable PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE=1 and call pytest with -p no:cacheprovider. You can set a simple compiler and errorformat for (Neo)vim by following this blog post. Personally, I use makeprg=pytest\ --tb=short\ -vv\ --no-header\ -p\ no:cacheprovider\ $* instead. #python #vim

If you are using vimtex and are interested in using Evince for forward/reverse synchronization, be sure to check sved which at least provides reverse sync in Neovim. Otherwise, Zathura works as expected. #vim

Ergonomic mappings for code formatting in Vim: Very nice tutorial on code formatting and how to write VimL functions that exploit gq. #vim

OpenBSD Handbook. #unix

But let’s just put it this way (and here I’m being charitable): in all my years of using Word, this happened more than once. In all the time I’ve used text editors, it’s never happened, even once. — Why (and How) I Wrote My Academic Book in Plain Text

The most important thing to learn correctly about Vim is to understand that you talk to Vim when you edit text. Vim has a grammar. The next important thing is to learn how to use Vim macros. Vim - I hate to love you

But just think back. In the past say ten years, what changes and innovations have had a real and true life changing impact on you? I am sure you can think of something, but I am also pretty sure that nothing has happened on a monthly or weekly basis that was so important that you absolutely had to know about it at that very moment. — Do you feel overwhelmed trying to stay up to date with the latest tech news?

No more plugin manager, yet a fast startup time. #vim

♪ Foo Fighters · Shame Shame

Vim is great for cleaning a text file using search and replace, but sometimes Unix tools are even better: if you want to remove consecutive blank lines, just call cat -s on your text file.

Over the last decade or so, Apple has been hard at work in simplifying the user interfaces that power its myriad platforms. I’ve welcomed most of that work, but it’s hard to deny that we’ve all lost some things along the way. — The History of Cover Flow

Interesting read on enumerating trees. #haskell

The discrete logarithm. #math

There is a phenomenon in society which I find quite bizarre. Upon our entry to this mortal coil, we are endowed with self-awareness, agency, and free will. Each of the 8 billion members of this human race represents a unique person, a unique worldview, and a unique agency. Yet, many of us have the same fundamental goals and strive to live the same life. — Going off-script

There was a time we were able to wait the end of film or series credits to learn about the song titles and things like that. Thanks to Netflix, this is no longer possible, you will switch to the next ep. before you have time to reach the end of (all due) credits. Old times good times.

Linux is borrowing unused memory for disk caching. This makes it look like you are low on memory, but you are not! Everything is fine! — Linux ate all my RAM

Picking when to assert is much like picking when to comment, except more explicit and more effective. — How to assert for fun and profit

Exploratory Data Analysis for Humanities Data, and a load of Awk and Python scripts on the Literature as Data homepage.

What is in a modern code editor? Auto-formatters and terminal emulators are really a plus, indeed.

Out of curiosity, I plugged my DAC (the little box above the Denon amp in this post) onto my computer and, guess what, it just worked!

Stuff I made recently.

♪ Arlo Parks · Black Dog

Software used to be less demanding at one time.

Cc: haskell-cafe <haskell-cafe@haskell.org>
Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2023 06:46:02 +0200
Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] two HLS processes with same name

macOS needs just 1-2GiB of wired RAM, don’t worry…

I’d gone to buy some charcoal fixative but there was none in the bookshop. Hold my beer, I came away with these books:

TIL about paps, as a replacement for a2ps for printing to a PS file (this is useful to print Neomutt email when there’s no default printer on your machine). h/t jimifiki

set print_command="paps --font='Monospace 10' > /home/chl/tmp/mail.ps"

♪ Alfa Mist · Sorry

It was the precursor of what was later known as the Gifi System, which is a large reorganization of descriptive multivariate analysis techniques in such a way that they apply both to numerical and non-numerical data. That covers regression and principal components analysis, factor analysis, all those techniques in one common framework and ultimately in a series of computer programs as well. My dissertation was basically the first programmatic statement of that program. The Gifi project itself ran until about 1990, I left in 1987, but there was still some ends to wrap up and the Data Theory group in Leiden that still existed at the time, wrapped up those loose ends. They produced a book, the final version of the Gifi book. — Interview of Jan de Leeuw by Lisa Wijsen

I was surprised to learn that he’s still publishing peer-reviewed papers and I was also very impressed to see that he’s still hard at work on working papers and books. h/t

♪ Portishead · The Rip

Measured: Typing latency of Zutty (compared to others): Sadly no stats for foot. Given the existing benchmarks, I would expect it to be in lowest range of typing latency as well but this would need some perf tests. #unix

♪ P!nk · Glitter In the Air

Building LISP, in under 6 C files (876 LOC). #lisp

Sidenotes In Web Design: I didn’t know there were so many JS and non-JS based framework for HTML sidenotes.

TIL about Harlequin which looks really great. #database

Thanks to notify-send.sh I can now update the mail notification from Neomutt in Ubuntu notification center since it allows to replace an existing notification. This should be available in more recent versions of notify-send (Ubuntu ≥ 22.10).

set new_mail_command="notify-send.sh --replace-file=/tmp/muttnotification -a neomutt -u low -i neomutt 'New Email' '%n new messages, %u unread.' &"

Beforehand I tried notify-send.py which didn’t quite work.

The idea is to take a train somewhere (unspecified) for four hours, have lunch, then take another train home. The train would be my 90mph office with scenery for those four hours in each direction, and I’d get to enjoy lunch somewhere new. I’d do a full days work with the view out the window constantly changing. — The 90mph office

(Python) types are very broad hints and they are sometimes lies. — Compiling typed Python

Trying out texlab since yesterday. So far it has been working smoothly alongside vimtex and null-ls (to format bibtex files). Last year I played with Tectonic, which looks great, especially if you don’t want to manage a full installation of the $\TeX$ system. Both seem to play well together. #vim #tex

Exploring the Top Neovim Distributions: LazyVim, LunarVim, AstroVim, and NVChad — Which One Reigns Supreme?: either you get limited capabilities or you are blowing your RAM, right? #vim

Lovely: pastel.

Another nice article by Brian Hayes, on AI and the end of programming.

It appears that Neomutt can be quite slow when filtering/searching emails using body keyword or patterns and the “limit” (l) command. It seems that Neomutt needs to open all emails beforehand, which makes sense but slow down any search operation. Now, as suggested in #3273, we can speed up things a lot by disabling the auto_view text/html feature. My benchmarks confirm those of the poster, with around 13K messages in my Archives. I don’t know how to disable auto_view temporarily, but since I can use mu-find to search my email database, with almost the same syntax, I do’nt have to worry much: results are almost instantaneous!

macro index \Cf "<shell-escape>mutt-mu " "mu find"
macro index gf  "<change-folder-readonly>~/.mu/results<enter>" "mu find results"

Here, mutt-mu is a short shell script for mu find --clearlinks --format=links --linksdir=~/.mu/results "$1".

Category Theory Illustrated “is a primer in category theory and other mathematical theories that is made to be really accessible to people with no prior exposure to the subject, without being dumbed down, by utilizing visual explanations.”

OMG, now they call it Drive… #apple

Common Lisp Nova Spec: A better (?) help center than the CLHS. #lisp

In the end, the main thought here is the following: build using simple proven techniques even if you’re using a technology like Haskell. For anything extra (like dependent types, formal verification, etc.) you might want to think twice and thrice. And still remain uncertain. — The types got you

Yet Another Rust Resource (YARR!): If you ever wanted to quickly get some insights about Rust, it offers a nice overview of the language.

A slightly updated version of all my emails as discussed in a post in 2014. Note that I’ve reduced my mailbox to 20% of its original size since I wrote the blog post, and I keep archiving very few new messages. Also I resubscribed to a bunch of mailing-lists in 2022, which I keep in separate Maildirs but they are included in this chart. I’m still a happy user of mu.

Updated code (because mu-find now uses the system locale to format dates):

$ export LC_ALL=C
$ mu find --sortfield=date --fields="d" date:17y..1d | \
  awk -F " " '{print  $5 "-" $2}' | \
  uniq -c | awk '{print $2 " " $1}' > 1.dat

library(ggplot2)
library(scales)
library(zoo)
Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL","C")
d <- read.table("1.dat", header = FALSE)
d$V1 <- paste(d$V1, "15", sep = "-")
d$V1 <- as.Date(as.POSIXct(d$V1, format = "%Y-%b-%d", tz = "GMT"))
names(d) <- c("Time", "Emails")
p <- ggplot(data = d, aes(x = Time, y = Emails)) +
       geom_line(color=grey(.5)) +
       geom_line(aes(y=rollmean(Emails, 12, na.pad=TRUE)), linewidth = 1.5) +
       scale_x_date(breaks = "1 year", minor_breaks = "2 months",
                    labels = date_format("%Y")) +
       xlab("") +
       theme_bw()
ggsave("allmyemails.png", p, width = 12, height = 5)

A little wrapper around the terminal version of What-The-Format.

One of the guiding lights of the UNIX utilities or software tools has been the deeply-felt conviction that text should be stored in as simple, as general a format as possible so that any program can easily process it. This idea (it seems to have been present from the beginning) has had the widest impact possible on UNIX in all its varieties. However, there has been a regrettable tendency to move away from it in recent times, especially among commercial software developers. — UNIX Evolution: 1975-1984

The point is, there’s no reason why this bug — and it is a bug! — should have stuck around for so long. If your terminal emulator gets told to make text blue, and instead it makes it unreadable, then you can’t say that’s not a problem with the terminal emulator. — That Annoying Shade of Blue

♪ Bentley · Left Right Goodnight

Visual explanations of core machine learning concepts: Very nice and interactive illustrations. #statistics

TIL about CIEL, an an Extended Lisp that looks really cool. It includes a bunch of useful libraries (Alexandria, Trivia, arrow macros, etc.) and provide an IPython-like REPL experience (shell pass-through, helper commands, documentation and lisp-critic). #lisp

♪ Angel Olsen · All The Good Times

Curl supports a crazy number of protocols, from HTTP, FTP and TELNET to IMAP, LDAP and GOPHER. It runs on 92 operating systems and has over 20 billion installations worldwide. — Mastering curl: interactive text guide

binary search trees: A thorough treatment of binary search trees enriched by an interesting comment thread.

Doppler looks like iTunes reinvented. (via Tom Macwright)

An Intuition for Logarithms. #math

13 ways to look at table joins. #database

Carole Zalberg, Tes ombres sur les talons (Grasset).

Among many of the text-based UIs advantages, I found that the ability to copy-paste almost anything using Vim shortcuts via tmux or the shift+ctrl combo of my terminal emulator is one of my preferred. Here is an excerpt from my long-running (server side) Irssi session, as a tribute to Vim’s creator:

23:57 -A_Dragon(A_D@libera/staff/dragon)- [Global Notice] The Matrix bridge is experiencing continued stability and privacy issues; we have requested it be shut down until they are resolved. Matrix have agreed
          to shut down the bridge no later than 1400UTC on Saturday. Feel free to ask further questions in #libera-matrix
---- Day changed to 05 août 2023
17:35 WALLOP kline:  Bram Moolenaar finally :wq after many years contributing to free software, his relentless hard work making vim arguably the #1 editor in the world. RIP Bram, and thank you for your work.
          https://groups.google.com/g/vim_announce/c/tWahca9zkt4
---- Day changed to 06 août 2023

TIL that GitHub renders warning or note blocks with a special formatting in Markdown document, e.g. here.

Nushell isn’t exactly a shell, at least not in the traditional Unix sense of the word. Nushell is trying to answer the question: “what if we asked more of our shells?” — The case for Nushell

With recent support for data frames, it becomes an interesting challenger for tiny on-the-fly data wrangling scripts. Beware that it relies on polars-arrow which (most of the time) require a recent stable Rust. Also, if you encounter an E0034 (“multiple applicable items in scope”) when compiling polars-related dependencies, try adding --locked to cargo install. When you’re done, enjoy the power of data frames right into your shell!

With my last timing for processing a 30 Mb CSV file, loading the file in Nu shell is a breeze:

~/tmp> timeit {dfr open ./nycflights.csv}
70ms 682µs 766ns
~/tmp> timeit {open ./nycflights.csv}
1sec 194ms 477µs 961ns

First instruction uses dfr open while the second instruction relies on builtin open command.

♪ Benoît Delbecq · Anamorphoses

Until now when reading my feeds using Newsboat, I was simply filtering unread feeds, sorted by count using a dedicated keybinding (bind-key S rev-sort, which allows me to simply press Su to get the desired output). Now, I learned about l which filters unread feeds. It is quite handy since it acts as a filter and the list of unread feeds empties itself as you read articles.

Understanding Automatic Differentiation in 30 lines of Python: A simplified yet effective illustration of AD in the context of neural network training. #python

Why does all() return True if the iterable is empty?. #python

My thoughts on Haskell in 2020. tl;dr Stick to Simple Haskell. #haskell

A Modern C Development Environment: A complete step by step tutorial to develop using Docker and GitHub workflow. Note that clang-tidy is available in ALE for Vim. If you use Neovim, the the clangd LSP already uses clang-tidy, or you can just add --clang-tidy to clangd parameters. Extra options can also be added in a .clang-tidy file. See also clang --help-hidden.

As a sequel of one of my last benchmarking post, here’s a rough estimate of Polars vs. Datatable performance when reading a 34 Mb file (NYC Flights Dataset, available from avrious sources; see e.g., this post):

import time

import datatable
import polars

tic = time.time()
flights = polars.read_csv("nycflights.csv", null_values="NA")
toc = time.time()
print(f"Elapsed time: {(toc-tic) * 10**3:.2f} ms")
## => Elapsed time: 54.61 ms

tic = time.time()
flights = datatable.fread("nycflights.csv")
toc = time.time()
print(f"Elapsed time: {(toc-tic) * 10**3:.2f} ms")
## => Elapsed time: 57.60 ms

Polars also offers a lazy CSV reader using scan_csv, which is way faster (1.22 ms). #python

Identity Beyond Usernames. For random UUIDs, see also Fixed Bits of Version 4 UUID.

Now, I’ll be quick to admit that you probably shouldn’t spend a huge amount of time trying to install something from source. For many packages the best case scenario is a complicated process requiring specific build tools and dependencies with their own complications. The worst case scenario is poor or lacking documentation and no idea how to even get started. — Try installing from source first

I did install from scratch almost any app/program on my Mac 15 years ago. At that time, Mac systems were transitioning from 32 to 64 bits, and it was kind of a mess for some programs. Then I got bored and I choose to rely on Homebrew. Then Homebrew got sort of broken on my Macbook, and I was back at the magic incantation configure && make && make install.

Email Authentication: A Developer’s Guide: I got my emails treated as spam by Gmail when using my www provider (OVH), which is probably why. And this doesn’t happen when I send emails via may mac.com account. Note that Google only started rejecting my principal domain name a few months ago, or maybe last year.

Also, whenever someone tells me that Arch never breaks, “You just have to read the blog”. Uh, okay. No thanks. I’m not reading all the latest news about any other device I allow updates to. I’m not starting that nonsense in my fifties. — Why I use Ubuntu

The missing C++ smart pointer.

If you cannot solve the proposed problem try to solve first some related problem. Could you imagine a more accessible related problem? A more general problem? A more special problem? An analogous problem? Could you solve a part of the problem? — G. Polya, How to Solve It

Which is probably why we face so many times the XY problem on forum, QAs sites, and mailing lists.

This post is a detailed discussion into user profiles, their directories, and how they are—to put it bluntly—in total disarray on Windows and Linux (I haven’t used a Mac in ages, but I assume the situation is very similar there, too). Applications treat the user profile as a dumping ground, and any user with a reasonably wide list of installed software will find their user profile very difficult to traverse after some time in use. There are platform conventions and attempts to standardise things on more open-source platforms, but a lot of developers resolutely refuse to change the behaviour of their software for a variety of reasons (some less valid than others). — $HOME, Not So Sweet $HOME

TIL about lei: Using lei, b4, and mutt to do kernel development.

Non-Euclidean Geometry Online: a Guide to Resources: As the title suggests, a bunch of online resources to learn more about elliptical and hyperbolic geometries.

GNU Parallel, where have you been all my life?: Yet another nice example of why parallel is such a great program. I learned to use it a while ago, after having read Jearoen Janssens’ wonderful book, Data Science at the Command Line, in its first edition. BTW, the 2nd edition is available online for free.

Home sweet home.

Usually I send read-only documents to clients. They don’t know or care what program created the PDF I sent them. The fact that they cannot edit my reports is a feature, not a bug: if I’m going to sign off on something, I need to be sure that it doesn’t include any changes that someone else made that I’m unaware of. Convert LaTeX to Microsoft Word

I used to do the same for years when I was consulting. Main issue was tabular output, which can be beautifully rendered in $\LaTeX$, but not so in plain MS Word.

Data-oriented design takes its cues from the data which is seen or expected. Instead of planning for all eventualities, or planning to make things adaptable, there is a preference for using the most probable input to direct the choice of algorithm. Instead of planning to be extendable, it plans to be simple and replaceable, and get the job done. Extendable can be added later, with the safety net of unit tests to ensure it remains working as it did while it was simple. Luckily, there is a way to make your data layout extendable without requiring much thought, by utilising techniques developed many years ago for working with databases. — Data-Oriented Design

Desktop Linux Hardening. Lot of useful advices in this article. E.g.,

snapd (Snap) assigns a unique ID to your installation and uses it for telemetry. While this is generally not a problem, if your threat model calls for anonymity, you should avoid using Snap packages and uninstall snapd.

Moving Blazingly Fast With The Core Vim Motions, but see the whole tutorial. The author makes use of sound illustrations and takes us on a tour of Vim’s core concepts, with casual or VS Code users in mind. #vim

Just found out that we can get cover art with cmus thanks to this fork!

Functional Programming in Data Science Projects: Interesting thoughts about FP for statistical computing. Another take was once available on Brian Lee Yung Rowe’s weblog, soon to be published as Modeling Data With Functional Programming In R. Thomas Mailund also wrote some words about that approach (see Functional Data Structures in R). And of course, Mathematica with its native support for multiple programming paradigms would be a good candidate too. #statistics

Never used them, but I noticed there are now two alternative workflow to barebone Git: sapling and gitless.

Interesting Lisp-related stuff on this HN thread about Reddit. #lisp

>>> import sqlean as sqlite3. #database #python

Shell programming is remarkably easy in many cases; what’s sad is that this common case (file processing) is far complicated than it needs to be. This is not a problem limited to shell; while shell is especially tricky, it is difficult to correctly process POSIX pathnames in all languages. — Filenames and Pathnames in Shell: How to do it Correctly (via The shell scripting trap)

In my view this isn’t about adhering to the XDG standard[3], it’s about getting things out of $HOME. Unix dotfiles were always a (somewhat accidental) hack[4], and over the years we’ve accumulated entirely too many of them in our $HOMEs. The XDG option isn’t particularly perfect, but it’s at least a standard approach and it achieves the goal of getting dotfiles out of $HOME. As a side effect the XDG approach makes things more legible if you look in ~/.config. — Where your program’s configuration files (‘dotfiles’) should go today

♪ Johanna Warren · I’d Be Orange

Your true audience (those who care) is about 1% of your subscribers. 1000 followers on Twitter? Your audience is 10 people. 10000 email subscribers? 100 people. — Blogging Myths You Should Care About

But the language landscape has changed a lot since then, and realistically no programmer today cares about what made a language stand out 50 years ago. Clearly, the good ideas have been copied into other languages. Paul Graham even suggests this convergence towards Lisp is inevitable. I wouldn’t go so far. But this begs the question: Is there anything left? Are there any features that couldn’t be copied so easily into the various descendants of Algol? — What Are the Enduring Innovations of Lisp?

Reduce vs fold in Common Lisp: Interestingly, R whihc is often referred to as a Scheme-like language has Reduce as one of its higher-order function, but no fold[lr] functions in base. Modeling Data With Functional Programming in R (whole book available in 2024 maybe?) looks like an interesting take on this topic. #rstats #lisp

The idea is that if I found it confusing, lots of other people probably did too, even though the information might theoretically be out there on the internet somewhere. Just because there is information on the internet, it doesn’t get magically teleported into people’s brains! — Some blogging myths

Shoot at night

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it? (Brian Kernighan) — Clever Code Considered Harmful

it also confirmed another sad aspect of being on the spectrum: you can have a very large tolerance for people having bad expectations of you because you learn at an early age that you must accommodate others in order to survive. — Autism is everywhere and in everything

Pretty little music player. See this review for more details.

♪ P!nk · Bad Influence

Or maybe I’m just an old guy looking back and romanticizing the early days. I’m back to coding in C again, writing little inconsequential games to amuse myself. Or maybe there was something a little magical then. Simpler times? — Same Stop

The people who insist that the manpages are all you need will sometimes dismiss guide-type documentation as tedious to work through; they’d rather learn things from a reference, they say, because that way they can jump around in it and look for the specific bits that are relevant to them right now. And that’s fine—if they’re right that the stuff they’re skipping over isn’t relevant to them. But it also has negative practical consequences. — I Didn’t Learn Unix By Reading All The Manpages

Nice stuff. The evolution of a Scheme programmer. You may also like The Evolution of a Haskell Programmer. #scheme #haskell

At the time, however, Linux didn’t seem to have a word processor (I’m sure it actually did). What did people use to write documents? When I asked someone at the local Linux Users’ Group about this, they told me about LaTeX. And that began a very long love affair with typesetting in general and TeX in particular. I have used some variation of TeX/LaTeX to write pretty much every paper, every article, every talk, every letter, every slide, and every lecture I’ve written for the last twenty-five years. — Beautiful Documents with Groff

It basically boils down to two things - using type hints as much as possible, and upholding the good ol’ making illegal states unrepresentable principle. — Writing Python like it’s Rust

TIL about click, a package for creating beautiful command line interfaces in a composable way with as little code as necessary. #python

Autocompletion is not an aid to make it easier to write code. It does not do that. What it does actually do is make it easier to architect code. Writing code is easy; all it involves is writing text. Any trained monkey can write code. Deciding what to write is decidedly harder. That’s the true task that programmers do. Following from that assertion, writing code and deciding what code to write (designing or architecting) are distinctly separate tasks. Therefore you should not decide what to write as you are writing code. — Why I Don’t Use Autocomplete

First peonies of the year.

For example, you remove an attribute from a class definition. Your existing objects get (lazily) updated to reflect that change, following a rule you even have control upon. You don’t have to restart a process and then re-create your objects. The same is true for Lisp web development. You can create a new route, compile it and try it live without restarting the server. You didn’t have to restart a process. It’s all very interactive with instant feedback! — Why Lisp?

Spinach, goat cheese and chorizo.

Today I had to rollback nvim to a previous state: one or some of the last pushes on the nightly branch broke my LSP setup, which would no longer autostart. No luck, just when I said I never encountered a single breaking change in Neovim core in months. #vim

Config (282.0 total hours, 5.0% of all time): Time spent on actual Emacs configuration. — 916 days of Emacs

But there’ll be winners and losers – everyone agrees. If it’s good, then the productivity gains will be unevenly distributed and those with only basic abilities - in programming, writing, music will be replaced by the machines, or by someone using a machine to produce a lot more of the product. If it’s bad, the people using the AI will benefit but those at the other end of the algorithm, those subjected to AI-powered policing, healthcare, or hiring are subject to the inaccuracy, bias, or malice built into the system. — The one about AI

Back to Kitty, as a replacement for Alacritty which I enjoyed using the past few months. I still use Tmux, though. #unix

I will probably watch Millenium again, and I thought I need to watch Noomi Rapace’s recent movies. Seven sisters (which is not listed on his filmography on Wikipedia) was so great after all. I watched Close two days ago; quite bad, actually. Bright was better, though.

Interesting blog post if you want to learn more about Chicken Scheme’s internals: CHICKEN internals: data representation . #scheme

Functors and monads are powerful design patterns used in Haskell. They give us two cool tricks for analyzing data. First, we can “preprocess” data after we’ve already trained a model. The model will be automatically updated to reflect the changes. Second, this whole process happens asymptotically faster than the standard method of preprocessing. In some cases, you can do it in constant time no matter how many data points you have! — Functors and monads for analyzing data

♪ Lady Blackbird · It’ll Never Happen Again

Blade Runner 2049: +1. Although, (1) it is way too long (163’), and (2) the end (I mean, the last hour really) leaves much to be desired. Now, I started watching The Last Kingdom, after Vikings and Vikings Valhala. I guess I will still prefer Vikings over the two other ones. #self

TIL about vifm. It looks like a much more improved version of lf, and I should probably give it a try some day.

The Serokell and Tweag blog are really amazing if you are interested in Haskell (or Rust, or Python). Even older posts are still relevant today: Enter the matrix, Haskell style. #haskell

At some point, I should make a chart to inspect how the tags on the main blog evolved over time. I expect that R progressively faded in after 2016, and that the rate of functional programming language-related posts increase in recent years, while readings and other technical reviews actually remain quite the same as in previous years. #this

A ChatGPT Emacs shell. Of course. What if we can’t put this right under an Emacs key chord? ;-) Nice work by the way! See also Building A ChatGPT-enhanced Python REPL.

TIL about another DB backend: How RocksDB works.

Most of the software I write is not for sure going to become a big system. — Why Perl?

♪ Cabaret Voltaire · Be Free

♪ Adam Wakeman · Sunrise Over L.A.

Today’s lunch.

In a perfect world, I imagine a little robot reading everything alongside me. He records the references and key ideas of each piece. After I write a post, he’d comb through my post sentence by sentence, linking every important phrase to its source. — Keep Stuff Linkable

You want to work with a co-worker on a piece of software? If you’re in the same room, sitting at the same table, looking at screens side-by-side, any communication between those two computers is actually happening [by sending signals] across the ocean to some data center, to some other server and then coming back to you. One: that’s crazy. But two, it’s also very slow and expensive and it doesn’t have to be that way. — Offline Is Just Online With Extreme Latency

Back from the old town.

Time to go back watching God’s Crooked Lines.

Writing a Simple Garbage Collector in C. #clang

Looks nice: “I like Janet so much that I wrote an entire book about it, and put it on The Internet for free, in the hopes of attracting more Janetors to the language.” — Why Janet?

Common Lisp Tweaks. #lisp

Writing lets me do that while also helping me avoid going around in circles. When thoughts are in my head, it’s easy for them to get jumbled up. I miss things, and I keep coming back to the same thoughts, leading to the unproductive ruminating. But writing my thoughts down stops that process. I am forced to organize my thoughts in a coherent manner and to acknowledge when they don’t make sense. Thoughts in my head are like a mixture of dirty water, while writing is like a filter. It removes the nonsense from my thinking. — Why I Blog

TIL about closing a stale SSH connection.

Farewell @kinkybambou. Even after I left Twitter, I have been following you irregularly to hear from you. I have no words. All of my thoughts to you, Minette, Loulou and Nono.

Fast reference to common SRFI. Handy bookmark. #scheme

TIL about ruff, for linting Python code. #python

If you see a count: int, what kind of guarantee do you have that the count name is actually bound to an int object at runtime? — The different uses of Python type hints

No guarantee at all since Python’s type hints do not enforce type safety: “The Python runtime does not enforce function and variable type annotations.” However, the author makes a good point in exposing the different use cases of type hinting.

The immediate future is easy to predict, because the same things that has been happening for years will continue to happen: Some of the exciting recent advances will be cancelled out by new compiler regressions due to fancy new compiler features. We users will create still deeper code stacks that racks up latency, even more so with Julia 1.9 now that latency has improved and we can “afford” to do so. — Julia’s latency: Past, present and future

Trying out J!

» jconsole
   comb=: [:;(,.&.><@:>:@;\.)^:(i.@>:@-~`[`(1:<@i.@{.~<:@-,2:))
   2 comb 3
0 1
0 2
1 2

Reading answer like this makes me think I should have spent more times with J when I first discovered it years ago.

♪ Avenged Sevenfold · So Far Away

The Many Faces of an Undying Programming Language. An entertaining discussion of Lisp, Scheme(s), and other dialects. #lisp #scheme

Deforming programs so they are ‘iterative’ in order that they do not run out of the stack we imagine to be so costly is ridiculous: if you have a program which is inherently recursive, let it be recursive. — The absurdity of stacks

The LAPACK (Linear Algebra PACKage) online document browser is really nice. TIL there’s even a routine to perform QR factorization without pivoting to a real or complex matrix (related R package: QR).

littler 0.3.18 on CRAN. It’s been a faithful and reliable alternative to Rscript for a long time now (17 years and counting). #rstats

Multiple Linear Regression in SQL with Only SUM() and AVG(). For those interested in multiple regression and residualized regressors as well! #statistics

If you type something that looks like a filename, you probably want to prioritize filename matches. When your search query looks like a filepath, you probably want to use an algorithm designed for filepath matching. This makes zf a “do what I mean” program. — A different approach to fuzzy finding

♪ Plain White T’s · Hey There Delilah

Together with Vinfo, dpans2texi makes it easy to navigate through CL help files. Be sure to apply the following patch as well. #vim #lisp

Peonia is waiting for its time…

Testing my new mapping of the month:

nnoremap <expr> <tab> tabpagenr('$') ==? 1 ? "<C-^>" : ":tabnext<cr>"

Basically, use TAB to switch to the alternate buffer when there’s no other tab, otherwise go to next tab (and cycle). #vim

♪ Washed Out · Amor Fati

Each time I take a look at This week in Neovim (#33 right there), I feel like there’s so much new stuff published every week that we will get another (M)ELPA for Neovim packages at some point. #vim

European Route Planning: Clear and elegant use of postgres and shell scripting.

I’ve been using part of mini.nvim last year but for now I’m just loading the completion module. I noticed there’s an increased number of modules developed since last time I checked. I warmly recommend those modules if you want something light, easy to install and to setup. #vim

My IRC bouncer (BNC4FREE) has been down for one week. Time to go back running Irssi in a detached Tmux session on a local server.

Spatial sampling with R. Lot of pretty illustrations and good old base R code. #rstats

♪ Memory Tapes · Bicycle

Kopia is ridiculously fast and over-optimized. I don’t miss Arq or Borg. I have an hourly schedule for local snapshots, and a weekly sync to an external HD, which never failed me so far.

I successfully installed Forge and Controllable for the Minecraft (Java Edition) running on my laptop. Now I can use a PS5 controller to play instead of keyboard shortcuts. Okay, it must be 5 years since I last played, but I’m glad to find a game environment close to the PS4. Sadly, I can’t play my old PS4 maps on the Java edition, which means I need to create a new one.

♪ Marianne Faithfull · Crazy Love

♪ Lou Reed · Lisa Says

The highest upvotes I got on Cross Validated is for a quick reply where I mentioned the Gifi “nom de plume”, which I miss a lot. Enjoy your “unfinished” retirement, Mr./Dr. Jan de Leeuw, and happy foometrics (PDF)!

If Foo is a science then Foo often has both an area Foometrics and an area Mathematical Foo. Mathematical Foo applies mathematical modeling to the Foo subject area, while Foometrics develops and studies data analysis techniques for empirical data collected in Foo. Each of the social and behavioural sciences has a form of Foometrics, although they may not all use a name in this family. — de Leeuw, 2006

The thing I really appreciate under Ubuntu or OpenBSD compared to macOS is the package manager. So bad Apple decided to move away from the Un*x world. I miss the old good stuff that was lying around there. #apple #unix

Also, I deleted Apple Music on my iPhone. Thanks for the goodies. Back to listening to ripped CDs!

I recently came across some Racket code on Reddit that implements Fenwick trees, aka binary indexed trees (BIT). Fenwick’s article, which is not the original paper on that particular data structure, A New Data Structure for Cumulative Frequency Tables (PDF) explains all the details, but there’s also a nice tutorial, as well as some applications for competitive programming.

So basically, I pay a yearly fee to get access to their SDK? Most manufactures provide that to you for free because they really want you to build apps for their platform. — Apple doesn’t want you developing hobby apps

UNIX contains a number of features very seldom offered even by larger systems. — Unix Edition Zero.

Dear LazyWeb: Setting up a new Mac, what are some groovy new monospace fonts for terminals and IDEs? — Modern Mono

I like screenshots. See also Monospace Acid Test for a more elaborated overview of modern monospace fonts.

Perhaps I’m on one of my periodic ‘minimalist’ adventures (which would seem to be borne out by my keyboard choice), but Emacs has recently felt a bit much to me, and made me curious about the current state of the art in Neovim. — Neovim again

I’m also quite happy with my minimal setup these days. It’s been running smoothly for several months now.

Alacritty with font ligature support, Tmux, Cmus, Neovim nightly.

Made with ♡ using Stata. See this blog post for details.

Shells are Two Things. The Python scripting example reminds me of a blog post written by Mathias Fußenegger who uses Haskell in interpreted mode as one of his scripting engine (see Why Haskell became my favorite scripting language), even if this totally unrelated to the points raised by Fernando Borretti.

I’ve been following Darren Wilkinson’s work for a long time now, and even if I’m not really interested in Scala I keep checking his blog and GitHub from time to time. He just released a course on functional programming for scientific computing, available at GH. Go check his blog to learn more: An introduction to functional programming for scalable statistical computing and machine learning.

The GIL is a major obstacle to concurrency. For scientific computing tasks, this lack of concurrency is often a bigger issue than speed of executing Python code, since most of the processor cycles are spent in optimized CPU or GPU kernels. The GIL introduces a global bottleneck that can prevent other threads from making progress if they call any Python code. There are existing ways to enable parallelism in CPython today, but those techniques come with significant limitations (see Alternatives). — PEP 703 – Making the Global Interpreter Lock Optional in CPython

♪ Sheri Weldon · A Taste Of Honey

I just made my GH biostats public, just so you know how I like playing with translating R code to other languages, without any hope of finishing this new side project anytime soon. Details in this longer blog post. Want some crazy plots? Go to the figs directory in each language and compare the output. Be aware this is highly work-in-progress, as advertised on the GH repo, and there are many bugs lying around. Anyway, no more raw Matplotlib for me, I felt in love with plotnine.

Best way to learn about recent (non-breaking) changes in ggplot2 is to rerun your old R code. Now I know that :

Using `size` aesthetic for lines was deprecated in ggplot2 3.4.0. Please use `linewidth` instead.
The `<scale>` argument of `guides()` cannot be `FALSE`. Use "none" instead as of ggplot2 3.3.4.

Other than that, I found that the theme_minimal() is as good as the hrbrthemes:theme_ipsum. Less dependencies, clear and elegant graphical output.

Listening to the last album from Tindersticks, Stars at Noon. Great artwork, as always. Now I need to buy their Past Imperfect compilation, which featured a limited edition box set comes with a double LP of Live at Glasgow City Halls, 5th October 2008.

Users who want to block all such external mediaanalysisd look-ups can do so using a software firewall to block outgoing connections to Apple’s servers by that process through port 443. That may well disable other macOS features. — Is Apple checking images we view in the Finder?

Twenty years-old stuff that are still lying around, even though I wear the ring most of the time.

Secure Ubuntu 18.04 server setup: Never tried to use an encrypted LVM volume unlockable via SSH. It looks like an interesting approach:

Applying encryption is fast when it is done upon creation: since the initial contents of the partition are ignored, they are not encrypted; only new data will be encrypted as it is written. — Ubuntu LVM Encryption

♪ Massive Attack · Inertia Creeps

Algorithms for Modern Hardware is a gold mine in the field of high performance computing.

Elements of Data Science is “an introduction to data science for people with no programming experience. My goal is to present a small, powerful subset of Python that allows you to do real work in data science as quickly as possible.” Great work by Allen Downey as always.

In fact, the vast majority of my editing tasks – probably as much as 98% – are performed exactly as if I was in Vim. (For the other 2% I’ve invented my own Vim-style keybinds.) Normally, I don’t notice that I’m actually not in Vim. The fact that I happen to be running the Emacs process is a mere technicality. — On Escape Meta Alt Control Shift

RIP Tweetbot. Ironically, I started my review of this app by saying that Twitter retracted their own client for OS X long ago; now they simply suspended access to 3rd party clients.

♪ Carpenter Brut · Maniac (feat. Yann Ligner)

As a sequel of this old post of mine, here is the complete archive of the 467 answers I provided on Cross Validated during ten years or so. Note that this a raw (unedited) HTML, with many tiny bugs along the way, mostly related to Unicode encoding and missing images from imgur. I can probably with the UTF-8 issue by using a different processor than htmldoc. As for the latter, I believe the issue comes from Pandoc, since I retrieved a larger number of images manually using curl (tarball archive).

The family therapist Salvador Minuchin declared, “The human experience of identity has two elements: a sense of belonging and a sense of being separate.” This is as good a description of digital identity as it is of our psychological identity. A digital identity contains data that uniquely describes a person or thing but also contains information about the subject’s relationships to other entities. — Defining Digital Identity

♪ John Scofield · Danny Boy

The faker’s guide to reading (x86) assembly language.

Understanding N + 1 queries problem 01 Jan 2023.

In the beginning, there were blogs, and they were the original social web. We built community. We found our people. We wrote personally. We wrote frequently. We self-policed, and we linked to each other so that newbies could discover new and good blogs. I want to go back there. — Bring back personal blogging (h/t Jack Baty)

TIL that TeXlive now includes pdfxup as a replacement for the good old pdfnup. Time to update my oldie shell alias alias p2x1="pdfnup --nup 2x1 --landscape --suffix '2x1' --batch ".

♪ Kaiser Chiefs · Ruby

Have been sick during two weeks. One week later, here are my top tags on Last.fm:

How to annotate literally everything.

ooh.directory: If you’re looking for unusual or hard-to-find websites via Google or friends… (h/t bsag).

26 programming languages in 25 days.

♪ Wolfsheim · Once In a Lifetime

Happy lazy loading of Neovim plugins (actually 15 plugins, including 13 opt plugins):

» vim-startuptime -vimpath nvim
Extra options: []
Measured: 10 times

Total Average: 15.662100 msec
Total Max:     16.085000 msec
Total Min:     15.505000 msec

♪ Matthew E. White · Will You Love Me

Introduction to Locality-Sensitive Hashing. #statistics

The Boxer, the Wrestler, and the Coin Flip: A Paradox of Robust Bayesian Inference and Belief Functions (PDF, 5 pp.). #statistics

Challenging algorithms and data structures every programmer should try.

APITable, an API-oriented low-code platform for building collaborative apps and better than all other Airtable open-source alternatives.

Wavefunction Collapse is a very independent-minded algorithm, and needs almost no outside help or instruction. You feed it an example of the vibe you’re going for, and it figures everything else out for itself. Despite this self-sufficiency, it is surprisingly simple. It doesn’t use any neural networks, random forests, or anything else that sounds like machine learning. — The Wavefunction Collapse Algorithm explained very clearly

Reanimate: Build declarative animations with SVG and Haskell. #haskell

How I still use Flash in 2022. I sometimes miss that time. CSS is great but Flash was really adding value to some indie websites back in the day.

Comprehensive Rust.

♪ Joy Division · Love Will Tear Us Apart

JSXGraph: Dynamic Mathematics with JavaScript.

LosslessCut: The Swiss Army Knife of Lossless Video/Audio Editing.

♪ Mal Waldron · Mistral Breeze / Sieg Haile

Code can only ever be fast if it’s written with the contraints of computer hardware in mind, and idiomatic Python isn’t. — What’s great about Julia?

♪ New Order · 5 8 6 (2020 Digital Master)

And we see that machines can fail Statistics, just like college students. — Just How Good Is ChatGPT in Data Science?

The Database Cookbook For Developers. #database

♪ Neil Young · Heart Of Gold

♪ Norah Jones · To Live

So many things already built-in in Mathematica… via Using Julia from Mathematica

Introduction to Genomics for Engineers. #bioinformatics

The Matrix Calculus You Need For Deep Learning.

Pattern Matching and Tail Recursion in Emacs Lisp. #lisp

Everything I wish I knew when learning C. #clang

Sane Vim defaults (from Neovim). #vim

The short version is that most of your Instagram photos are hidden from your followers unless they receive engagement in the form of likes and comments. — The Indie Web is Dead, Long Live the Indie Web

Figuring out round, floor and ceil with integer division. #clang

Ranking is a farce. Apparent performance is actually attributable mostly to the system that the individual works in, not to the individual himself. — W. Edwards Deming, via Statistical process control after W. Edwards Deming

♪ Anthony Joseph · Swing Praxis (Kaidi Tatham Remix)

GNOME doesn’t need to be that huge. #apple #unix

Using a 12-bit colour depth limits the available colours, so slight changes to hue, chroma, and luminance must be made, but these are small enough not to be noticeable. The resulting palette has evenly-spaced hues, only small variations in chroma, and smoothly increasing and decreasing luminance. — The 12-bit rainbow palette

x86 and amd64 instruction reference.

Quirks of C. #clang

Writing Interpreters in Rust: a Guide. #rust

Python Tips & Tricks. #python

Today’s readings: Clojure’s Transducers in Haskell, and Understanding Clojure transducers through types. #clojure #haskell

♪ Catherine Moan · Drop It!

Blot/Painting p5js sketch. Lovely.

Build Your Own Text Editor. #clang

Get ready to read a sentimental post about a data structure, and don’t tell I didn’t warn you. — In defense of linked lists

♪ Bauhaus · In The Night

Why does calloc exist?. #clang

Privacy is necessary for an open society in the electronic age. Privacy is not secrecy. A private matter is something one doesn’t want the whole world to know, but a secret matter is something one doesn’t want anybody to know. Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world. — A Cypherpunk’s Manifesto

treevis.net - A Visual Bibliography of Tree Visualization 2.0 by Hans-Jörg Schulz. #dataviz

Great set of lecture notes: QuantEcon Lectures.

♪ Anna Smyrk · Wallace Street

Beware of fast-math.

Understanding async Python for the web. #python

♪ Patti Smith Group · Seven Ways of Going

Futhark is a small programming language designed to be compiled to efficient parallel code.

Numbers in a Nutshell, an Update. #lisp

Why does zsh start so slowly?. #unix

♪ The White Stripes · Truth Doesn’t Make A Noise

This is not your grandfather’s Perl.

It’s easy to get hung up on this. I’ve definitely felt the self-imposed pressure to only write something if it’s new, and unique, and feels like it’s never been said before. This is a mental trap that does nothing but hold you back. — What to blog about

Performance Musings. #unix

Enjoying music curation again (via O. Valadares’ Blog).

Linux Boot Partitions and How to Set Them Up. #unix

Before we embark on yet another defense of the language along the lines of: parentheses in Lisp are great, but only insiders can understand them. Let’s notice a second element that often confuses those who learn the language: in Lisp everything is prefixed. — Why Lisp

♪ Joy Division · Transmission

♪ Melanie De Biasio · Your Freedom Is the End of Me

Shell Script Best Practices. #unix

On the one hand, the hardware is great and so is the performance. On the other, getting a new Mac today means it comes with Ventura or Monterey preinstalled, which is unfortunate, and of course there is no downgrade path. — My next Mac might be the last

Little shell script to listen to some free internet radios:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

# sources
jazz="https://jazzradio.ice.infomaniak.ch/jazzradio-high.mp3"
misc="https://www.lemellotron.com/stream"
piano="https://pianosolo.streamguys1.com/live"

case "$1" in
  jazz)
    src=$jazz
    ;;
  misc)
    src=$misc
    ;;
  piano)
    src=$piano
    ;;
  *)
    echo "Unknown streaming source..."
    ;;
esac

mpv --no-video $src

♪ Clan of Xymox · A Day

TIL that sending Fzf results to the quickfix list is as simple as pressing <cr> after selecting items using <tab>. #vim

I find the developer experience of Common Lisp to be superior to almost anything imaginable, and this is not an empty statement: having used all sorts of IDEs and editors for over 25 years, I have seen many. — Between two Lisps

♪ Kavinsky · Nightcall

The history of documented Unix facilities. #unix

Python 3.11 is much faster than 3.8. #python

That’s right: what’s good for the lurkers is also good for everybody else. Just like all the great practices that enable remote work also made things better for anybody working in an office (if you remember what that was like and can believe that so many people just put up with that for so long), so does favoring transparency and following up on questions in the open improve all your team dynamics. — Learning By Lurking

Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so…. #unix

♪ Johnny Klimek & Tom Tykwer · Neo and Trinity Theme (Johnny Klimek & Tom Tykwer Exomorph Remix) [from “The Matrix Resurrections”]

Overthinking Leetcode’s Two Sum with SIMD. #rust

Render looks like an interesting alternative to Heroku.

Howdie! Eglot has landed on master

I think it all stems from Apple’s desire to simplify things for themselves, architecture-wise — Apple Silicon is quite innovative in bringing the advantages of iOS devices to Macs (performance + power efficiency). The terrible decision, in my view, has been to also want to bring the iOS look and feel to the Mac. It was unnecessary, it has broken so many tried-and-true Mac interface guidelines, and it has delivered a massive blow to the whole operating system’s identity. Just to make the Mac what, more fashionable? — My next Mac might be the last

I’m definitely not in favor of fossilizing Unix, but there’s a difference between avoiding fossilization and the kind of minimal, mathematical purity that we see GNU Grep trying to impose here. Unix has long since passed the point where it had that sort of minimalism in the standard commands. Modern Unix has all sorts of duplications and flourishes that aren’t strictly necessary, and for good reasons. One of them is that it’s nicer for the actual people using Unix. — We are stuck with egrep and fgrep (unless you like beating people)

Despite the fact that I spend hundreds of dollars a year and hours of work to host my own email server, Google has about half of my personal email! Last year, Google delivered 57% of the emails in my inbox that I replied to. They have delivered more than a third of all the email I’ve replied to every year since 2006 and more than half since 2010. — Google Has Most of My Email Because It Has All of Yours

Compilation database. #clang

♪ Adam Wakeman · Speak

Debugging C With Cosmopolitan Libc. #clang

Eggplant is a self-hosted music streaming service.

I dread the day in which I will hear a loud knock on my door and one of those programmers will barge in informing me that he is going to store a piece of his furniture in the middle of my living room, if I don’t mind. — Dotfile madness

OpenBSD Minimalist Desktop. #unix

make a static site with find(1), grep(1), and lowdown or Markdown.pl.

TIL about FiraGO. Togther with Fira Math, it makes for a perfect combination of fonts for handouts and slides. Now, it’s a matter of adding the following declaration in my $\LaTeX$ preamble:

\documentclass[presentation,9pt]{beamer}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\defaultfontfeatures{Mapping=tex-text,Scale=MatchLowercase}
\setmainfont[Numbers={Tabular}]{Fira Sans}
\setsansfont{Fira Sans Condensed}
\setmonofont{Fira Code}
\usepackage[mathrm=sym]{unicode-math}
\setmathfont{Fira Math}
\usepackage{lstfiracode}

And it works perfectly well using Emacs Org export facilities!

♪ Clan of Xymox · Equal Ways

How Python programmers can uncontroversially approach build, dependency, and packaging tooling (+ a note on Zig). #python

Instagram users can only write plaintext without any formatting and it even doesn’t look nice on the phone and you have to insert an image even in case you only want to post a message and you know what? Nobody cares. I can only talk about russian speaking segment of the platform but the amount of activity there is just crazy. People not only share cat photos there, but also buy and sell stuff, write analytical articles, do workshops and trainings without any problem. The fact that sometimes they have to literally edit the photo and put a text overlay on top of it (and it often looks like some of the worst myspace examples) doesn’t bother anyone. And all the communication is solved with a restricted instagram account or a closed whatsapp group. — From the basics to complexity and back

Typing Haskell in Haskell (PDF, 38 pp.). #haskell

Never got into J, but what a language! Random walk in 2 lines of J.

C23 is Finished: Here is What is on the Menu. #clang

https://www.solopianoradio.com/. A good deal of piano for everyone!

The academic prestige of Latin and Greek underwent a steady, centuries long decline. Where do C and assembly fit on this map? We certainly aren’t in a Medieval University, where these topics were mandatory, but neither are we in a post-modern sociology class, where the classics are not only dead, but whose distant memory haunts our conscience. — Learn enough C to survive

The Plain Text Project.

(…) code should be as evident and transparent as possible in it’s intent and declarative programing (therefore functional programming) help us achieve this goal more effectively and efficiently than imperative programing. — Why I use typed functional programming

♪ London After Midnight · Demon

Running GUI Linux in a virtual machine on a Mac. #apple

PDF processing and analysis with open-source tools.

♪ Dead or Alive · You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)

If you just want the executive summary, here it is: these are definitely interesting algorithms from an arithmetic complexity theory standpoint – especially for the case of 4×4 matrices over finite fields, where (to the best of my knowledge) Strassen’s algorithm from 1969 was still the reigning champion. These algorithms are also practically relevant, meaning that not only do they have better asymptotic lower bounds than Strassen’s algorithm, they are still algorithms you might actually use in practice, unlike essentially everything else that has been written on the topic in the last 50 years: these algorithms are correct, and will in principle win over Strassen’s algorithm with large enough matrices, but that cut-off is well beyond the sizes that anyone is actually doing computations with. — On AlphaTensor’s new matrix multiplication algorithms

Partitioning in Postgres, 2022 edition. #database

An open-source tribute to the macOS Drift screensaver. I always enjoyed the “flame” screensaver, but that may well do the job as well! #apple

♪ Front 242 · Headhunter

How to configure neovim to properly format python code?. Simpler solution is to add this mapping to your after/ftplugin/python.vim: nmap <buffer> g= :!black --quiet %<cr>:redraw!<cr>:!isort -q %<cr>:redraw!<cr>. Not sure if we really need two redraw, but it works quite well. This could be put in an autocommand if we want to format on save, say. #vim

Move a running process into a tmux session. This happened to me in the past, and I came up with a different solution, which involves the same steps but without reptyr IIRC. Now I forgot how I did…

What are the odds?

Design and Implementation of Programming Languages. #racket

♪ Bauhaus · Bela Lugosi Is Dead

Mathematical recipes (early draft).

Querying Postgres Tables Directly From DuckDB. #database

♪ This Mortal Coil · Song to the Siren

Newsboat can use any external browser for displaying posts. E.g., Elinks instead of Firefox to allow for a more comfortable browsing experience while staying in a terminal:

New LSP features in Neovim 0.8. #vim

Homotopy Type Theory. #maths

My personal productivity cycle is tied to this industry hype cycle. My schoolfriend back in 2003 was my personal “technology trigger.” From him, I rapidly learned some standard tools from Gartner’s plateau of productivity: PHP, MySQL, Apache. Then I surveyed the plateau more widely, finding Python, Postgres, and Nginx. A little further away, I had heard of Gartner’s trough of disillusionment. I sneered at the Perl, Java, CORBA. I’ll keep my Python, thanks. — The hacker hype cycle

The full text of my Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages book (second printing, 1991) is now available.

♪ The Dresden Dolls · Coin-Operated Boy

Alternatives to bloatware.

♪ Nadje Noordhuis · Migration

The relationship between developers and App Store reviewers is tense at best. Most people are trying to build well-designed, useful mobile apps. Apple has instituted App Store reviews to maintain a high-quality bar for apps and weed out spammy or nefarious actors, using human evaluators to test individual apps and provide direct feedback. However, malicious apps are relatively rare; arguably, Apple doesn’t do a great job filtering them out anyway. — Outdated vs. Complete

Explained from scratch: private information retrieval using homomorphic encryption.

Data types à la carte. #haskell

Types at the edges in Python. #python

TIL about Rclone, thanks to the following blog post: An Upside-Down Backup Strategy.

Cmus revamped!

I don’t tap my own phone. I don’t xerox postcards before I mail them back from vacation. I don’t take a voice recorder when I go out with friends. And I don’t have a copy machine at home to duplicate hand written notes I may send. — The cost of saving sent e-mail

I do like having local copies, both of my handxritten notes and of my sent e-mails. Digital nomadism, with one foot in the analog world.

Incrementing Vectors.

The internet is no longer a place where a relatively-small fraction of the human population go to find something different than everyday life. It is everyday life for billions of people. As long as life is megacorps and information gatekeepers, so too is the global ubiquitous internet. Mission accomplished. — Searching the Creative Internet

I keep trying to quit vim. I keep ending up inside a terminal, inside vim, writing code. Like SQLite, vim is an island of stability over my career. While I wish IDEs were better, I am extremely thankful for tools that work and respect the effort I have taken to learn them, decade after decade. — Software I’m thankful for

Using GPT-3 to pathfind in random graphs.

♪ The Only Ones · Peter and the Pets (2008 Remastered)

Automatic Differentiation in 38 lines of Haskell. #haskell

Lovely.

One way to solve the delays is to disable your internet connection. This is tough medicine, but if you notice these delays, try it for an hour just to verify that indeed the issue is resolved by disabling internet connectivity. — macOS 10.15: Slow by Design

An X11 Apologist Tries Wayland. #unix

Purely functional programs are easier to test, they make better and more reliable APIs, and our environments, compilers, and run-time systems take advantage of functional style. — Getting rid of set-car! and set-cdr!

Algorithms for Competitive Programming. See also my review of The Competitive Programmer’s Handbook.

♪ New Order · Blue Monday (Instrumental Outtake)

What is a LSM Tree?

mtime comparison considered harmful. #unix

Common Lisp is a fine language with exceptional interactivity, multiple implementations providing the potential for acceptable performance, useful features like condition system, and a stable standard base. This, in theory, makes is very much suited toward data processing and analysis. Although practice paints a less favorable picture, there are still use cases where Common Lisp could be considered to be a very good pick. Also, I simply like writing Lisp code. — sirherrbatka/vellum

♪ Killing Joke · Sun Goes Down

♪ Helen Merrill · You’ve Got a Date With the Blu

mvp.css: A minimalist stylesheet for HTML elements.

I have an IDE, but I keep going back to essentially the same setup you have. I find that GUI IDE’s tend to try to be too many things at the same time. I like having nothing on the screen that isn’t directly related to what I’m doing, and I strongly dislike ribbons of things I could click on but rarely, if ever, do. — I don’t use an IDE, should I be using one?

Why you shouldn’t invoke setup.py directly. #python

SQLite Doesn’t Use Git. #git

Analyzing Every Clojure Project on Github. #clojure

At least one Vim trick you might not know. #vim

Ramanujan’s factorial approximation. #math

♪ Antony & The Johnsons · You Are My Sister

The historical justification for a /bin, /sbin and /lib separate from /usr no longer applies today. They were split off to have selected tools on a faster hard disk (which was small, because it was more expensive) and to contain all the tools necessary to mount the slower /usr partition. Today, a separate /usr partition already must be mounted by the initramfs during early boot, thus making the justification for a split-off moot. In addition a lot of tools in /bin and /sbin in the status quo already lost the ability to run without a pre-mounted /usr. There is no valid reason anymore to have the operating system spread over multiple hierarchies, it lost its purpose. — The Case for the /usr Merge

I Tracked Everything I Read on the Internet for a Year. It reminds me of my defunct Emacs refiled links.

Tip of the day: If you want to get ride of Ubuntu putting screenshots with arbitrary filenames in arbitrary folder, without resorting on the good old gnome-screenshot tool, just use:

% xdg-user-dirs-update --set PICTURES ~/Media/Pictures
% cd ~/Media/Pictures/Captu*  ## NOTE: update according to your settings
% rename 's/Capture\ d’écran\ d[eu]\ //g;s/\s/-/g' *

Don’t forget to update the last instruction to reflect basename on your system, use a Makefile or shell script to automate the process. Usually, Ubuntu will create a subfolder (“Screenshots” or “Captures d’écran” or whatever) in the default PICTURES folder. What’s funny is that instead of a straight single quote, Ubuntu decided for whatever reason to use a curly quote!

I used to use the following Bash script on X11, but it no longer works under Wayland:

scrot '%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S.png' --thumb 300x200 -e 'mv $m $f ~/Media/Pictures/screenshots'

Here, screenhots is a soft link to the default subfolder where screenshots are saved.

♪ Apoptygma Berzerk · Until The End Of The World

Difftastic, the Fantastic Diff. #git

I have had my eye on Julia for many years, and I now consider it ready to be my “everyday” programming language. — From Common Lisp to Julia

The story is different with a REPL: you will have played with each piece of code in isolation before running the whole program, which makes you quite confident that each of the sub-tasks is well implemented. — What makes a good REPL?

♪ Lords of the New Church · Russian Roulette

Gemini: A Modern LaTeX Poster Theme. #tex

Waiting for a reply to my query on Vim Vixen GH repo. Would be great to have the same facilities as on Nyxt browser to yank both URL and title at some point.

The WHATWG spec follows the good old browser mantra of being very liberal in what it accepts and trying to guess what the users mean and bending backwards trying to fulfill. (Even though we all know by now that Postel’s Law is the wrong way to go about this.) It means it’ll handle too many slashes, embedded white space as well as non-ASCII characters. — My URL isn’t your URL

Persistent SSH sessions with proper scrollback. I have to try this with both ssh jump and Tmux instead of Screen, and with scrolbback buffer enabled because i like it.

How fast are Linux pipes anyway?. #unix

♪ Placebo · Teenage Angst

  BENEE · Doesn’t Matter.

Trying out Tactile as an additional Window Manager for Gnome shell. Looks great. No auto-tiling (you have to manually assign new windows to predefined tiles on a grid, but this is flexible. However, it works like a charm right (and out of the box), unlike Forge or gTile. Gnome default tiling behavior works alongside, which is great. Together with Simple terminal or Gnome terminal (preferred), this makes for a great tiling WM. Also, none of the shell extensions (Unite, undecorate, …) I tried were able to properly remove window decorations, and it seems like there always are edge cases anyway.

  Shane Quartet, Stablemates.

I think I still prefer Cmus and Irssi over Rhythmox and Element. Lean text interfaces forever. #unix

Regular cleaning of $HOME done: +4 Go. Also removed a lot of unused stuff on /, including Discord which I no longer use.

  New Order, Blue Monday.

OCaml at First Glance.

Rewriting my blog in Rust for fun and profit.

Just replaced ranger with fff. Looks great and lightweight, and ultra-fast. I had problem with displaying images with ranger now that I am under Wayland. With fff, I can simply open them in feh or eog and browse an entire directory using keyboard shortcuts only. (h/t DJ Adams, Exploring fff part 2 - get_ls_colors #unix

Some interesting Bash notes. #unix

SSH Tip: Connecting to a Private Network Without Trusting the Bastion Host. #unix

TIL that I no longer need to worry with launching ssh-agent automagically in case it isn’t already running in the background using the following hack:

if [ -f ~/.ssh/agent.env ] ; then
    . ~/.ssh/agent.env > /dev/null
    if ! kill -0 $SSH_AGENT_PID > /dev/null 2>&1; then
        echo "Stale agent file found. Spawning a new agent. "
        eval `ssh-agent | tee ~/.ssh/agent.env`
        ssh-add
    fi
else
    echo "Starting ssh-agent"
    eval `ssh-agent | tee ~/.ssh/agent.env`
    ssh-add
fi

There’s probably a better way: Howto: auto-start ssh-agent with systemd on Debian Bullseye.

If you spend a lot of time typing plain text, writing programs or HTML, you can save much of that time by using a good editor and using it effectively. — Seven habits of effective text editing

Only fast languages are interesting. Don’t know if lush is still a thing nowadays, but some benchmarks were quite impressive back in 2011. #clojure #lisp

Suckless life.

Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Suckless terminal. Cmus music player.

Mutt, the Vim Way.

Here’s a rather long list of RSS feeds accumulated over the years. It has been purged on several occasions, depending on my mood and succesive jobs (e.g., rstats and stats stuff has been severely impacted in the past 6 years). It targets Newsboat, so all you have to do is put this file in your $HOME/.config/newsboat directory. Tags are not always very accurate, as the original posters may have changed their posts over time.

All of a sudden, those brackets look kind of cool! — An Intuition for Lisp Syntax

Website’s look’n feel should now respect your system color theme. Dark theme heavily inspired from the Nord color palette of course. Last thing to fix is transparent background images.

TIL Ubuntu and its default WM allows to move and resize windows without even touching the mouse with Alt-F7 and Alt-F8.

ssh, tmux and vim: A Simple Yet Effective Pair Programming Setup. #vim

I somewhat forgot about this sticky TUI for processing spreadsheet data: VisiData is an interactive multitool for tabular data.

Using FZF instead of DMENU.

  Morcheeba, What New York Couples Fight About.

And a great Firefox plugin to review soon: Vixen Vim.

Ubuntu Dock completely hidden now, which makes for a cleaner desktop!

gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.dash-to-dock autohide false
gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.dash-to-dock dock-fixed false
gsettings set org.gnome.shell.extensions.dash-to-dock intellihide false

I also installed the Suckless terminal, as a popup terminal always opened on second workspace, with semi-transparency enabled thanks to Luke Smith’s patch and no border (Stein Gunnar Bakkeby ’s path). I can launch Cmus without messing my current Tmux workspace, and forget about it.

Labeling mail with mutt. Interesting idea, especially for those who rely on notmuch for mail processing. But, well, it’s been a long time I left Gmail and I don’t regret those pesky virtual folders.

A Lisper’s first impression of Julia .

Unifying fold left and fold right.

Hugo documentation theme as simple as plain book.

Combinator Formatting. #scheme

  MIKA, I See You.

The 10 stages of Vim. #vim

  Michael R Oldham, Two Pieces Ripe Fruit.

With Vim as a sort of secondary editor, I want to be able to fire it up unconfigured and continue to be nearly as productive. A pile of remappings would prohibit this. In my mind this is like a form of emergency preparedness. Other people stock up food and supplies. I’m preparing myself to sit at a strange machine without any of my configuration so that I can start the rewrite of the software lost in the disaster, so long as that machine has vi, cc, and make. If I can’t code in C, then what’s the point in surviving anyway? — My Journey with Touch Typing and Vim

  Marianne Faithfull, Guilt.

Macro elegance: the magical simplicity of Lisp macros. #lisp

Why your website should be under 14kb in size.

Beautiful code is likely to be simple – clear and easy to understand. Beautitful code is likely to be compact – just enough code to do the job and no more – but not cryptic, to the point where it cannot be understood. Beautiful code may well be general, solving a broad class of problems in a uniform way. One might even describe it as elegant, showing good taste and refinement. — A Regular Expression Matcher

Use plaintext email.

Integers, decibels, and graphs.

Should I use Signed or Unsigned Ints In C? (Part 1). #clang

A simple way to make HTML websites: https://john-doe.neocities.org.

Deconstructing the “Unix philosophy”. #unix

Look what came up in the mailbox a few days ago:

  Mannequin Pussy, Romantic.

  Magazine, Cut Out Shapes.

Playing with exceptions inside lambda expressions in Python . #python

I’ll take economy over excess any day - give me a nice, uncluttered interface, a simple man page and power to spare for those occasions when I need it, and I’m a happy guy. My dream email client is a lot like my dream car, the Ferrari F355 Spider: plain-vanilla seats, a simple dashboard and the ability to accelerate from 0 to 60 miles per hour in under six seconds. — A Man And His Mutt.

Searching this site using Pagefind. Looks like it works quite well with Hugo website.

FreeBSD - a lesson in poor defaults. #unix

Visual Sum of Cubes.

Uncommon Uses of Python in Commonly Used Libraries. #python

Readable s-expressions and sweet-expressions: Getting the infix fix and fewer parentheses in Lisp-like languages. #lisp

Great! You can now use default keybindings from https://getpocket.com in Nyxt 3 (pre release).

Watching with tmux | Arabesque. #unix

The way I look at it, the apps themselves are the workspaces. On a smaller screen I usually full screen everything and on larger display scenarios, I have nearly everything laid out in front of me so I really just want to be able to switch between apps as fast as possible. — How I GNOME or Why I Don’t Use a Tiling Window Manager by Josh Sherman

That’s the conclusion I reached as well on OS X and Ubuntu when I started (re)using native window manager facilities. This remains so even after me trying i3 then Regolith, since Tmux can do a lot of tiling too, and the only thing I really need is to have apps maximized on screen, or split vertically (who need to fully split a 16:10 or 4:3 laptop screen horizontally these days?).

Howto: auto-start ssh-agent with systemd on Debian Bullseye — Debiania. #unix

  Jewel, Foolish Games.

SQLite works with hundreds of millions of records just fine. Regular INSERTs show about 240K records per second on my laptop. And if you connect the CSV file as a virtual table (there is an extension for that) - inserts become 2 times faster. — SQLite is not a toy database

Tom Mitchell’s Machine Learning book is a bit old but it’s now free. Note that the PDF version offered on the website is huge (60 Mo) since it’s a scanned copy.

Glmnet for python. I somewhat missed or forgot about that package. #python

Deconstructing Bézier curves.

I’m done with Season 1 of Mindhunter. Beautiful script, brilliant actors, nicely orchestrated plots. Informal ratings of others TV shows available here.

Stop using DICT dictionary apps (such as GNOME/MATE Dictionary). #unix

Expect to pay, now or later. — Give nothing, expect nothing: GitLab’s the latest punching bag for entitled users

Hot days (again). Salad parties almost every day.

Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux. #unix

Where things really got broken was when multithreaded applications became commonplace. That’s when ctrl-c basically stopping working at all. — Ctrl-C: Why Programmers Can’t “Reset” Programs With Ctrl-C, but Used to Be Able To, and Why They Should Be Able to Again

more-itertools is yet another gem when working with Python’s iterables. #python

Top 20 Latex Fonts. #tex

  The Frames, True.

Clipboard integration between tmux, nvim, zsh, x11, across SSH sessions. #unix

Git is built on a graph. Almost every Git command manipulates this graph. To understand Git deeply, focus on the properties of this graph, not workflows or commands. — Git from the inside out

What Comes After Git.

  Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, The Mercy Seat.

Mathematical Tours.

Mathematical Python. #python

  Alain Kan, Speed My Speed.

25,011 scrobbles on Last.fm in 9 months.

  Iggy Pop, Some Weird Sin.

Crafting Interpreters: A Review.

Oh Shit, Git!?!. #git

And another round of cleansing for my Neovim setup: down to 15 plugins now (the screenshot below includes popup.nvim which is no longer needed).

Just started watching Sense8 a few days ago. Looks great so far. It’s the fourth TV shows I watch after a long break (December 2021).

Time to quit, I guess.

  Meredith Brooks, Bitch.

Unix History Repository. #unix

While it’s tempting to switch to one of the endless new apps out there, there are good reasons to trust old tools. — Cool desktops don’t change

  Enrico Rava Quartet, Choctaw.

Run any code on any client. With WebAssembly and Wasmer.

Two understandable deficiencies in Common Lisp. #lisp

Learn Haskell by building a blog generator. #haskell

Even with a lot of help from a good text editor, writing HTML can be a drag. Nice documents end up as tag-swamps with little bits of content perched atop hills of tabs. — Write HTML Right

(…) being overly tense works against giving your best performance. — The 85% Rule - When Giving It Your 100% Gets You Less than 85%

Illustrating Python via Bioinformatics Examples. #python

  Lydia Loveless, Let’s Make Out.

  Miley Cyrus, Nothing Else Matters.

Now I know that even installing the rms package implies crap packages from so-called “modern R”…

  Swamp Children, Taste What’s Rhythm.

A vision of a multi-threaded Emacs. #emacs

Saying that I’ve been maintaining my dotfiles for a decade is like saying that I’ve been decorating my home for a decade. I probably know what works for me, but that doesn’t mean I know what you’ll like! — A decade of dotfiles

Well, it looks I could not wait any longer, and I just upgrade to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Great distro. #unix

Donald Knuth on work habits, problem solving, and happiness.

Bit Twiddling Hacks.

  Elliott Smith, Waltz #2.

The big endian advantages tend to be cosmetic or convention based, or of minor usefulness. The little endian advantages offer real world performance boosts in many cases (given the right algorithm or encoding to take advantage of it). — On Endianness

Useful Python decorators for Data Scientists. #python

The unreasonable effectiveness of f‍-‍strings and re.VERBOSE. #python

10 Tips for Writing Fast Mathematica Code.

Modern Python: Big ideas, Little Code. #python

Python Standard Library changes in recent years. #python

What’s in which Python. #python

Useless Use Of dd. #unix

Shy away from numbers or concrete analysis during design. Good engineers estimate. Great engineers speculate. — The mindless tyranny of ‘what if it changes?’ as a software design principle

Logging C Functions. #clang

A maximally-dense encoding for n-choose-k.

  Laurie Anderson, Slip Away.

  Kajagoogoo, Too Shy.

I suppose this is another one of those things we all end up doing: Write a printf() implementation, create an IRC bot, and author a book about Open Source. — Uncurled

Org-babel as an alternative to Jupyter notebooks.

Unfinished Business with Postgres. #database

The Big Six Matrix Factorizations.

  Iggy Pop, Some Weird Sin.

Professional Programming: The First 10 Years.

So, having spent hundreds of frustrating hours developing a working OAUTH2 solution for GMail, I am defeated at the final hurdle. Google’s demands mean that I am simply not going to be able to support GMail past May 31st, however much it hurts me to feel that I am letting my users down. My deepest apologies to you all. — http://www.pmail.com/newsflash.htm

Starting with Common Lisp in 2020. #lisp

Real-time LaTeX Using (Neo)Vim. #vim #tex

menyoki: Screen{shot,cast} and perform ImageOps on the command line.

  Aaron Neville, Tell It Like It Is.

The Modern JavaScript Tutorial.

My conclusion after using Julia for many years is that there are too many correctness and composability bugs throughout the ecosystem to justify using it in just about any context where correctness matters. — Why I no longer recommend Julia

R Workflow by Frank Harrel. #rstats

  The Cure, The Hanging Garden.

Lisp has a specific world view which makes it less compatible with the current outside world. — Why Lisp is different

htmx gives you access to AJAX, CSS Transitions, WebSockets and Server Sent Events directly in HTML, using attributes, so you can build modern user interfaces with the simplicity and power of hypertext.

Why Did Heroku Fail?

Giant salad for today’s lunch!

Tuning and overoptimizing Neovim startup time (19 plugins, including 7 opt ones).

I just rewrote (again) the build policy for my Stata lecture notes. Org markup language is fantastic after all!

  Vampire Weekend, This Life.

Vim’s useful lists. #vim

Making Things Flow: Making the behaviour of Vim flow . #vim

The point is to support programming interactively. You don’t want to have to kill your program and rebuild it from scratch just because you changed a definition. That’s silly; adding and changing definitions is most of what you do! If your development environment is going to support interactive development, then it had better know how to keep your program running when you change some definitions. — On repl-driven programming

Use Fast Data Algorithms.

Roll A Lisp In C - Evaluation. #clang #lisp

Running a personal website is an emotional roller coaster. This fact seems strange to me, because I feel I do a fairly good job of keeping my ego disengaged from the process. I realize that whether people like what I write or hate it has absolutely nothing to do with my worth as a human being. Yet, receiving comments and emails from readers who say they enjoy my website and understand its value feels good. — The Joys and Sorrows of Maintaining a Personal Website

Lush plants on the loggia…

RSS Feed Best Practises.

How to Use Autocompletion in Vim. #vim

My story on “worse is better”.

The /bin vs /usr/bin split (and all the others) is an artifact of this, a 1970’s implementation detail that got carried forward for decades by bureaucrats who never question why they’re doing things. It stopped making any sense before Linux was ever invented, for multiple reasons (…) — Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split

  Marianne Faithfull, Love more or less.

4,000 static pages!

Core values are self-reinforcing. They attract like-minded people, who will then defend them. — The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla

Pollen’s sequel? Quad: document processor. #racket

What we can deduce from a leaked PDF.

Parquet and Postgres in the Data Lake. #database

Substrait: Cross-Language Serialization for Relational Algebra. #database

I’m on holydays, btw. First week and a half since the start of the year. It’s going to be a good break, or I hope so.

First draft done: A minimal Org setup to write scientific notebooks (PDF). Needs some polishing, but it’s almost finished.

  Aaron Goldberg, The Wind in the Night.

Now I’m calculating with constructive reals!

I know you’re going to be tempted to reply with “you’re using it wrong” - but I’m not. This is how I like to use my computer. And it is clear that the MacBook isn’t my computer - it is Apple’s. — Things I can’t do on MacOS which I can do on Ubuntu

Working at producing elegant (or at least less common) notebooks using Org babel.

  Dirk Maassen, Still.

You dumbass. You thought you needed media queries to be responsive, but no. Responsive means that it responds to whatever motherfucking screensize it’s viewed on. This site doesn’t care if you’re on an iMac or a motherfucking Tamagotchi. — This is a motherfucking website

  Jiři Horák, Ravens Home.

Creating a tmux Colour Theme.

I don’t think it was a big technical innovation (it’s obvious that you want to separate a language-agnostic editor and a language-specific server). I think it’s a rather bad (aka, “good enough”) technical implementation (stay tuned for “Why LSP sucks?” post I guess?). But it moved us from a world where not having a language IDE was normal and no one was even thinking about language servers, to a world where a language without working completion and goto definition looks unprofessional. — Why LSP?

Helix: A post-modern modal text editor. Looks cool.

Choosing the Right Integers. #clang #rust

Scheme for scientific computing.

Exponentially Better Rotations.

LaTeX A Modern Approach. #tex

Memray is a memory profiler for Python. #python

  Alice in CHains, Down in a Hole.

  Alain Kan, Speed My Speed.

Nixery provides ad-hoc container images that contain packages from the Nix package manager.

Being `pure functional’ does not eradicate state; it merely changes the way state is handled – which could be either more or less clearer and convenient. — Grasping ‘all-the-apples-at-once’

A Quick Guide to Mutt.

Git Jump to Vim Quickfix. #vim

  Akira Kosemura, Mercy.

Vim Key Combinations. #vim

TypeScript / How the compiler compiles.

Unlike systems software, the values demanded from text editors or IDEs vary greatly depending on who you ask. These are much more personal tools and make room for a diverse set of desires. — The values of Emacs, the Neovim revolution, and the VSCode gorilla

Prettify your screenshot using imagemagick.

How I Vim: Andy Stewart, a.k.a airblade. #vim

What are the dark corners of Vim your mom never told you about?. #vim

Starship: The minimal, blazing-fast, and infinitely customizable prompt for any shell!

What Is Rust’s unsafe? #rust

An Ode to Apple’s Hide My Email.

What scientists must know about hardware to write fast code.

What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory?.

  P!nk, So What.

An Intuitive Guide to Linear Algebra.

The 0,5 MB of nothing in all Apple Music files.

After Nova, yet another code editor for Mac: Zas Editor.

Textbook examples are there to illustrate a method. The recommended approach is to first give two examples where the method works, then one where it fails. But we, the textbook writers, are busy, so we’ll often just give the one that works and stop. As I wrote once, “the book has a chapter on regression discontinuity designs. That’s fine. But all we see in the chapter are successes.” — The examples you see in the textbooks are not representative of the sorts of problems you see in the real world

Sometimes, though, I think there’s a value in doing things the old fashioned way, if only to get a little “closer to the ground” on what our tools are doing behind the scenes. — The Simple Joy of Coding by Hand

Principal Component Analysis for Data Science .

Roll your own Ngrok with Nginx, Letsencrypt, and SSH reverse tunnelling.

Using Vim/Emacs is like a refactoring process. #vim

Why we don’t use a staging environment.

Consume input from stdin, produce output to stdout. Put another way, your program should be a filter. Filters are easily integrated into shell pipelines, arguably the most important utility for Unix tools composition. — Hints for writing Unix tools

Atom Editor was, and still is, an amazing piece of technology. It was the first practical example of web technologies running locally, applied to a really hard problem: text editors. It it was, and still is, darn good at handling code. — The impossibility to maintain Atom

Apparently, the formers developers of Atom (whose status remains unclear at the time of this writing) are now developing a new text editor, Zed. Note that there’s also Lapce in the radar.

Hot off the kitchen

Building a Full Stack Application with Flask and HTMx.

Note that “semantic understanding” is mostly unrelated to the traditional interpretation of “IDE” as Integrated Development Environment. I personally don’t feel that the “Integrated” bit is all that important. I commit&push from the command line using Julia scripts, rebase in magit, and do code reviews in a browser. If anything, there’s an ample room for improvement for the integration bits. For me, I in “IDE” stands for “intelligent”, smart. — Why an IDE?

Implementing cosine in C from scratch. #clang

Like many here, I turned off commenting years ago. My motivation had less to do with spam. (I’m on WordPress and it does a pretty good job with that.) It had more to do with the conversations moving from my site to the social web. Folks wanted to talk about stuff where they already were, rather than centralizing that conversation on individual blogs. — Ask HN: Are blog comments a thing of the past?

  Soft Cell, Kitchen Sink Drama.

Statistical Learning with Sparsity: The Lasso and Generalizations.

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

  Mo-Dettes, White Mice.

Hot off the kitchen.

LaTeX2e unofficial reference manual.

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

[I]n biology, when one research team publishes something useful, then other labs want to use it too. Important work in biology gets replicated all 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 something that 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

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

  Alice in Chains, Rooster.

Rust ownership, the hard way. #rust

Two Logging Options Better than Print Statements. #python

Nice add-on to hide Firefox tab when there’s only one.

First peony on the balcony.

Structured Concurrency.

  Nicole Glover, Hive Queen.

T>T: When Double Precision is Not Enough. #python

Rust’s Unsafe Pointer Types Need An Overhaul. #rust

Foliate: A simple and modern eBook viewer for Linux desktops. I should note that Zathura handles Epub documents perfectly well.

XTerm: It’s Better Than You Thought. #unix

The Cluttered Web: A Scrapbook of Sreenshots.

An Introduction to Just Enough Cython to be Useful. #python

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

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

  John Cale, Chinese Envoy.

Amateur archiving activities, January 2022.

Why Dark and Light is Complicated in Photographs.

  Happy Mondays, Step On.

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

Python Design Patterns. #python

Software Design for Flexibility: a review. #scheme

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

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

Binary search with confidence.

The Art of Assembly language programming.

Python built-in functions to know. #python

Practical Python Programming. #python

[Unix] Maildir, mutt and vim.

SymSpell: 1 million times faster spelling correction & fuzzy search through Symmetric Delete spelling correction algorithm.

You’re using email wrong. My philosophy is much simpler: Inbox zero, block toxic people as well as spams and hoaxes.

When the software changes, people want to know why and how. — Keep a Changelog

  Yumi Zouma, Give It Hell.

  Steve Cardenas, Language of Love.

Roswell: Hidden feature of “-s” option. #lisp

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.

Symbols vs. Strings (via Irreal). #lisp

Debugging with GDB. See also GDB dashboard. #clang

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

BLAS-level CPU Performance in 100 Lines of C. #clang

A almost perfect rsync over ssh backup script.

Using Zig As Cross Platform C Toolchain.

jless — a command-line JSON viewer.

How to speed up the Rust compiler in 2022. #rust

I thought I would write a short post to explain how to fetch genome data from NCBI the old way, but here’s the gist, assuming you want to fetch all bacterial genomes:

% wget ftp://ftp.ncbi.nih.gov/genomes/refseq/bacteria/assembly_summary.txt
% mkdir bacteria_refseq
% awk -F '\t' '{if($12=="Complete Genome") print $20}' assembly_summary.txt > assembly_summary_complete_genomes.txt
% for record in $(cat assembly_summary_complete_genomes.txt); \
    do wget -P bacteria_refseq -e robots=off -r --no-parent -A "*genomic.fna.gz" "$record"/; done

Then wait, like me.

  Lingua Ignota, Wicked Game.

Finally got a decent Twitter client… No more unsolicited tweets from nowhere/nobody, maybe?

Spoiler: twterm

irssi (IRC client) - Questions and Answers.

Parsing series of integers with SIMD.

The web is overrun by pop-ups and blockers haven’t worked in years.

vim cheatsheet. #vim

Vim’s useful lists. #vim

Read three books on a topic and you know more about it than 99% of the world. Watch news all day for years and you have a distant, water-cooler-level awareness of thousands of stories, at least for the few weeks each is popular. — Five Things You Notice When You Quit the News

Live Streaming a Macintosh Plus (or Any Compact Mac). Amazing stuff as always.

magma-nvim: Interact with Jupyter from NeoVim. Great plugin! #vim

  Lee Ritenour, Dreamcatcher.

Personally, in every activity I’ve participated in where it’s possible to get a rough percentile ranking, people who are 95%-ile constantly make mistakes that seem like they should be easy to observe and correct. “Real world” activities typically can’t be reduced to a percentile rating, but achieving what appears to be a similar level of proficiency seems similarly easy. — 95%-ile isn’t that good

I generally consider theory to be useful background knowledge but fastidious study a poor substitute for firsthand experience. I “learn with my hands,” is the way I’ve always put it. it has its upsides and downsides — how I think when I think about programming

My Notebook System.

Tired of Tmux prefix (C-b or C-a, depending on your taste)? Let’s rebind everything we used on the Alt key using bind-key -n M- whatever. It may not work on all terminals, but let’s that not stop us adding more aliases to our Tmux config file.

  Howard Devoto, Rainy Season.

vim-wordy: Uncover usage problems in your writing. #vim

Fred’s ImageMagick Scripts.

My journey from macOS to FreeBSD. #apple #unix

  Siouxsie & The Banshees, Jigsaw Feeling.

What makes old manuals so fascinating to me is that they document the history of applied computer science. This gives the entire field, including tech comms, the resemblance of a past. Let’s not dismiss that: in a sector where startups seem to build new things on top of blurry or nonexistent foundations, reading about old software reminds us that there’s indeed a giant upon whose shoulders we’ve climbed. — Why I collect and read old computer manuals

  The Vaselines, Son of a Gun.

Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small. — Rob Pike’s 5 Rules of Programming

What you don’t realize is that you’ve been self-censoring yourself from searching most of the things you would have wanted to search. You already know subconsciously that Google isn’t going to return a good result. — Google Search Is Dying

Music theory for nerds.

Bash Pitfalls.

  Graham Collier, Red Sky in the Morning.

Monad is the name of the class for “and_then”, defined in a sensible way, with some laws for how it should behave predictably, and then a bunch of library code works on anything that implements “and_then”. — A plain English description of monads without Haskell code

CR+LF has a long history…

Brave New Hacktoberfest — Learn4Haskell. #haskell

How Postgres Stores Rows. #database

Understanding LSM Trees: What Powers Write-Heavy Databases. #database

Time finds problems, people fix them. — Software Deployment, Speed, and Safety

  Bush Tetras, Too Many Creeps.

I still have 57 RSS feeds out of 727 unread in my inbox. Work in progress.

A boring statusline for Neovim. #neovim

Reducing the size of large PDFs.

  Whit Dickey, Nothingness.

In December, in my article When dropping support feels like sabotage, I was complaining that Apple was limiting the support of security updates to just the two previous versions of Mac OS, and not extending such support to even older versions like High Sierra or Mojave given the amount of people that are still using them. But I was forgetting that on iOS the situation is even worse. — → No more security updates for iOS 14

Lovely, #apple. I’m still on Mojave and iOS 12.5 ;-)

The Common Lisp Document Repository is a repository of documents that are of interest to the Common Lisp community. The most important property of a CDR document is that it will never change: if you refer to it, you can be sure that your reference will always refer to exactly the same document. #lisp

Mike Caulfield invented the term “a chorus of explanations” several years ago to explain why sites like Stack Overflow are useful. Where a lesson typically explains something once, SO and similar sites present several explanations with different levels of detail, different assumptions about the reader’s background, and quite possibly different solutions to the original problem. Most readers may be satisfied by the top answer, but others can scroll down to find one that’s a better fit for who they are, what they are ready to understand, and what they’re trying to do. — A Cacaphony of Explanations

Installing Every Arch Package.

Radix Sort Revisited. #clang

Fundamentally I think C trusts developers while C++ trusts compilers. This is a massive difference that sharing the same native types or syntax for while loop cannot hide. — The problem with C

Magma: Interact with Jupyter from NeoVim. #vim

  Elbow, The Seldom Seen Kid.

Update on Regolith Desktop: Now installed on my own laptop for more precise control. Back to a dark theme (Nord) – long time no see. One of the main advantage of Regolith over, say, i3 or i3-gaps, is that all Ubuntu apps and settings remain available, including controllers that would have to be defined manually otherwise (e.g., brightness or volume control, screen sharing or screen capture). The integration of native apps (e.g., nautilus or gnome-terminal) is also really nicely handled by the WM without excessive RAM usage (< 800 Mo).

Regolith Desktop looks awesome. I’m currently testing it on a work machine: it worked right out of the box after reboot, and it provides sensible default settings to i3 WM. #unix

‘Clean code’ means a different thing to everyone. — There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code

(neo)vim and Haskell, 2021 edition. #vim

What is the Inverse of a Circle?

Advanced Vim topics, tips and tricks. #vim

TIL about Convos, an IRC client that runs in your browser and brings the IRC experience into the 21st century.

Reclaiming the lost art of Linux server administration. #unix

One of the most worthwhile exercises I recommend here is to consider how you would solve your immediate problem without adding anything new. First, posing this question should detect the situation where the “problem” is that someone really wants to use the technology. If that is the case, you should immediately abort. — Choose Boring Technology

Hooray! racket-langserver got a proper Hover method, which displays full help when pressing K in Neovim, and not only a link to the online doc. #racket #vim

Got nvim-dap to work for all languages I configured (C, Python, Rust), except Haskell for the moment. Together with ’nvim-telescope/telescope-dap.nvim’ and ’theHamsta/nvim-dap-virtual-text’, it provides a neat interface to DAP. #vim

  Current 93, All the Pretty Little Horses.

You can fix spelling error by selecting the first suggested alternative automagically using 1z=. Add this to your (Neo)Vim config, and you will thank me later:

inoremap <C-s> <c-g>u<Esc>[s1z=`]a<c-g>u

(Or bind whatever key you want.) This allows to fix any previous error(s) (thanks to the last bit of magic) using the first suggested entry while you’re in insert mode. #vim

  Lydia Loveless, Let’s Make Out.

What Gemini is doing, is saying “we don’t need no videos, images, stylesheets, nor JavaScripts, because we want to have a lightweight web experience, so we throw all that crap out!”. Fine, sounds great. But why does it require a new protocol for that? Why couldn’t one simply build on top of existing HTTP infrastructure, throw away all the baggage and instead implement a new Content-Type, which existing browsers then could parse? — Gemini is Solutionism at its Worst

Do you feel like Google search results keep getting worse?

Hot end of the week in the kitchen ;-)

  Jacques Loussier Trio, Gymnopédie No. 1, Variation 1.

Postgres Indexes for Newbies. #database

  Stefano di Battista, Cosa avete fatto a Solande.

How vectorization speeds up your Python code. #python

Luschny’s webpage cites, for example, recent treatments of the subject by leading mathematicians such as Terence Tao. And his most compelling argument, from my personal perspective, is the way he unveils the early publications: I learned from him that my own presentation of the story, in The Art of Computer Programming and much more extensively in Concrete Mathematics, was a violation of history! I had put words and thoughts into Bernoulli and Euler’s minds that were not theirs at all. This hurt, because I’ve always tried to present the evolution of ideas faithfully; in this case I’d fooled myself, by trying to conform what they wrote to what I’d learned. — Concrete Mathematics and Bernoulli

  Current 93, All the Pretty Little Horses.

What goes into making an OS to be Unix compliant certified?. #apple

Best resources to learn about data and distributed systems. #database

The worst possible way to learn Rust is by vaguely looking at it, or trying some small stuff, in short scattered sessions at night after your demanding work. Sure you did learn a few languages like this before, so you may be confident in your abilities. But at some point in Rust, and it may come soon, you’ll encounter a higher step and if you don’t fight it with concentration and dedication, you risk not overcome it. — How not to learn Rust

Lesser Known PostgreSQL Features. #database

Automating the annotation of PDFs.

Climbing Mount SICP.

Digit Sum Patterns and Modular Arithmetic.

Counting with martingales.

Ways I Use Testing as a Data Scientist .

  Les Ogres de Barback, Nos vies en couleurs. Clin d’oeil à Peyo.

Tasty

  Anja Lechner & François Coutu, Vague / E la nave va.

Halfway through my RSS reading list of the week. It’s amazing how much I learn from all those posts, even if I don’t necessarily have enough time to recollect all the interesting stuff I read. I should take more note, but I’ve became so lazy lately.

YYMMDDHHMM … will no longer fit into a signed 32 bit number.
The last value for last year is December 31, 2021 at 23:59, and in this format it becomes 2112312359. That just fits into a signed 32 bit number (which tops out at 2147483647).
The first value for this year is January 1, 2022 at 00:00, which turns into 2201010000, and that does not fit! — YYMMDDHHMM just overflowed a signed 32 bit int

  Glenn Gould, Goldberg Variations, BWV 988.

Pointers/references in Python. #python

My ideal Rust workflow. #rust

  The Feelies, The Boy With the Perpetual Nervousness.

The Rust Performance Book. #rust

Scientific computing with Rust:

• Rust Vectors
• From Julia to Rust

Database-like ops benchmark. Interesting to note that Polars wins over well-established competitors from Apache or Python. #rust

Why I Use a Debugger. #rust

Topological Data Analysis.

The Art of Lisp & Writing. #lisp

Cognitive load is important. I don’t expand much on this here, but if a programming language or a library makes me feel stupid, then I’m less likely to use it or like it. C++ does that a lot :) — “Modern” C++ Lamentations

The real enemy addressed by inlining is unexpected dependency and mutation of state, which functional programming solves more directly and completely. However, if you are going to make a lot of state changes, having them all happen inline does have advantages; you should be made constantly aware of the full horror of what you are doing. When it gets to be too much to take, figure out how to factor blocks out into pure functions (and don.t let them slide back into impurity!). — John Carmack on Inlined Code

While browsing GitHub, I noticed that the nvim-lua organization offers a “starter kit” init.lua file for Neovim users. It is a single Lua file, which is quite handy when you want to quickly bootstrap a sane config on external servers. I tested it in my own environment and it’s pretty good actually. If you are new to Neovim, and especially Lua config files, I recommend taking a look at how this file is organized. Except for a few packages (theme and snippets), and the default key mappings, you will likely find a working setup for your daily editing tasks. I like the idea of having a single file for the whole config, although I can understand why we may want to split our whole config in separate files, which is actually what I do.

csview: A high performance csv viewer with cjk/emoji support.

  Maxence Cyrin, As the Darkness Falls.

  Eusebius, Water Lily.

Idle puzzles 2: Revenge of the Shift. #lisp

… there are thousands of reusable patterns I’ve picked up … Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten about 95% of them. … The point is to reflect on what actually stuck, so that others may save time by spending their time learning what is more likely to stick. — Practical Shell Patterns I Actually Use (via John D. Cook)

xsv: A fast CSV command line toolkit written in Rust. Handy (and faster) alternative to csvkit.

Bayesian Modeling and Computation in Python. #python #statistics

IRC technology news from the second half of 2021.

During discussions with my friends and colleagues, whenever the topic of chat protocols comes up, I often remark how simple the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol is and how this simplicity has fostered creativity in the lives of many young computer hobbyists growing up in the late 1990s and early 2000s. — Simplicity of IRC

Finally:

Summary of the morning cooking session.

Fast and Elegant Clojure: Idiomatic Clojure without sacrificing performance. #clojure

First Steps With Clojure. #clojure

  Orange Juice, I Can’t Help Myself.