Micro posting in February
2022-02-01: Elbow, The Seldom Seen Kid.
2022-02-01:
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
2022-02-01: 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).
2022-02-01: Installing Every Arch Package.
2022-02-01: Magma: Interact with Jupyter from NeoVim. #vim
2022-02-01: Radix Sort Revisited. #clang
2022-02-01: 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
2022-02-02:
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
2022-02-02: 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
2022-02-03: Whit Dickey, Nothingness.
2022-02-03:
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 ;-)
2022-02-05: Bush Tetras, Too Many Creeps.
2022-02-05: I still have 57 RSS feeds out of 727 unread in my inbox. Work in progress.
2022-02-05: A boring statusline for Neovim. #neovim
2022-02-05: Reducing the size of large PDFs.
2022-02-08:
Time finds problems, people fix them. — Software Deployment, Speed, and Safety
2022-02-10: Brave New Hacktoberfest — Learn4Haskell. #haskell
2022-02-10: CR+LF has a long history…
2022-02-10: How Postgres Stores Rows. #database
2022-02-10: Understanding LSM Trees: What Powers Write-Heavy Databases. #database
2022-02-16: Graham Collier, Red Sky in the Morning.
2022-02-16:
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
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
2022-02-16: Bash Pitfalls.
2022-02-16: Music theory for nerds.
2022-02-17: The Vaselines, Son of a Gun.
2022-02-17:
Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small. — Rob Pike’s 5 Rules of Programming
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
2022-02-18: Siouxsie & The Banshees, Jigsaw Feeling.
2022-02-18: Fred’s ImageMagick Scripts.
2022-02-18: My journey from macOS to FreeBSD. #apple #unix
2022-02-18: vim-wordy: Uncover usage problems in your writing. #vim
2022-02-19: Howard Devoto, Rainy Season.
2022-02-19: 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.
2022-02-21: Lee Ritenour, Dreamcatcher.
2022-02-21:
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
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
2022-02-21: My Notebook System.
2022-02-22: Live Streaming a Macintosh Plus (or Any Compact Mac). Amazing stuff as always.
2022-02-22: magma-nvim: Interact with Jupyter from NeoVim. Great plugin! #vim
2022-02-23:
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
2022-02-23: Vim’s useful lists. #vim
2022-02-23: vim cheatsheet. #vim
2022-02-24: Lingua Ignota, Wicked Game.
2022-02-24: Finally got a decent Twitter client… No more unsolicited tweets from nowhere/nobody, maybe?
Spoiler: twterm
2022-02-24: 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.
2022-02-24: Parsing series of integers with SIMD.
2022-02-24: The web is overrun by pop-ups and blockers haven’t worked in years.
2022-02-24: irssi (IRC client) - Questions and Answers.
2022-02-25: How to speed up the Rust compiler in 2022. #rust
2022-02-25: jless — a command-line JSON viewer.