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