So far, it’s been 3 weeks that I ran Emacs in terminal only. No worry, I’m fine: I just started diving into plain TeX again!

Typesetting a Textbook. Nice Latex class for Tufte-like textbook! #tex

Functional programming is a radical and elegant attack on the whole enterprise of writing programs. It’s very different from the “do this and then do that” programming mentality. You have to rewire your brain in quite a different way. For a long time it was well understood theoretically—there was lots of stuff about semantics and it had these very deep foundations in logic. But in terms of a practical programming medium it seemed like a completely virgin field. — Interview with Simon Peyton-Jones

TIL that we can use references and labels in Org babel!

You can also add a ‘-r’ switch which removes the labels from the source code. With the ‘-n’ switch, links to these references are labeled by the line numbers from the code listing. Otherwise links use the labels with no parentheses. Here is an example:

    #+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp -n -r
    (save-excursion                 (ref:sc)
        (goto-char (point-min))      (ref:jump)
    #+END_SRC
    In line [[(sc)]] we remember the current position. [[(jump)][Line (jump)]]
    jumps to point-min.

Rust does not have a stable ABI. #rust

Mac OS Big Sur logbook (intro). #apple

I don’t believe in upgrading your devices for the sake of upgrading, but I believe that in this day and age one has to be technologically flexible.

At this point in time, I don’t think I will buy a new Macbook or even upgrade to Big Sur (I skipped Catalina too), even if I like the revived design of most of Apple apps. I work with a terminal emulator and Safari most of the time, I use Preview for reading PDF files, and Marked to render Markdown files; I barely have any use of the Finder these days. Sort of I could live in another BSD machine without noticing it, except for the browser.

I think we are in the middle of a pendulum swing where some creators are moving away from proprietary platforms and taking more control of their relationship with their audiences. And I think a lot of audience is trying to remove themselves from engagement-driven timesink platforms that don’t respect their users. The majority will still be on YouTube and all the socials. But the movement seems significant. And I’m all about it. — The Strong Technologies

Understanding Memory Fragmentation. #haskell

macOS-Security-and-Privacy-Guide: This guide is a collection of techniques for improving the security and privacy of a modern Apple Macintosh computer (“MacBook”) running a recent version of macOS (formerly known as “OS X”). #apple

History and effective use of Vim. #vim