Checking email in a browser is a huge distraction. I spend most of my day staring at emacs, and when email notifications ding, I feel compelled to check; switching to the completely browser pulls me out of my flow. Once you’re in the browser, you realize that you are on a slippery slope… It starts tempting you to check hacker news or reddit (at least for me), and often times it’s impossible to not succumb to it; we all know how easily time goes missing “just checking if anything new popped up on the front-page”. — Better Email with mu4e

I upgraded to Emacs 27 recently, and I found two little annoying things: there’s now a warning about the cl package that has been deprecrated for a long time now (everything is okay in Doom core modules, this is just the packages flyspell-lazy and persp-mode which happen to trigger the warning with their (require 'cl)), and Ivy posframe gets sometimes stuck. I encountered some freezing issues as well, but this may well be due to the with-no-titlebar option in the HEAD version of emacs-plus. #emacs

A Free, Interactive Course Using Tidy Tools, by Julia Silge. #rstats

How Does A Computer Calculate Eigenvalues?. It’s always a pleasure to read one of Matt Drury’s blog posts.

Using Spark from R for performance with arbitrary code.

Much better base colors in R 4.0 ;-)

d <- transform(as.data.frame(replicate(2, rnorm(30))), g = gl(3, 10))
plot(V1 ~ V2, data = d, col = g, pch = 19)

Sed one-liners.

Another interesting answer assumed that “the test of time” is somehow a cosmic optimization. But as every biologist knows, Darwinian processes “find fits” to an environment, and if the environment is lacking, then the fits will be lacking. Similarly, if most computer people lack understanding and knowledge, then what they will select will also be lacking. There is abundant evidence today that this is just what has happened. — Alan Kay himself, in response to the Quora thread What did Alan Kay mean by, “Lisp is the greatest single programming language ever designed”?

A Baby Steps Guide to Managing Your Tasks with Org. #emacs

Now it is 25 years later and the bootstrap baby is old enough to be in grad school. I have had some second thoughts about the bootstrap—its strengths and weaknesses, its foundations, what it can and cannot do, what it might do in the future—and these second thoughts are what I will talk about, briefly, here. — Second Thoughts on the Bootstrap, by Bradley Efron