Micro posting in February
2023-02-06: 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.
2023-02-07: 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.
2023-02-07: ♪ Sheri Weldon · A Taste Of Honey
2023-02-08:
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
2023-02-08: 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.
2023-02-08: 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.
2023-02-11: Made with ♡ using Stata. See this blog post for details.
2023-02-13:
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 againI’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.
Dear LazyWeb: Setting up a new Mac, what are some groovy new monospace fonts for terminals and IDEs? — Modern MonoI like screenshots. See also Monospace Acid Test for a more elaborated overview of modern monospace fonts.
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.
2023-02-18: 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.
2023-02-20: 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
2023-02-20: 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 #unixAlso, I deleted Apple Music on my iPhone. Thanks for the goodies. Back to listening to ripped CDs!
2023-02-20: ♪ Lou Reed · Lisa Says
2023-02-23: 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.
2023-02-23: 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.
2023-02-23: ♪ Marianne Faithfull · Crazy Love
2023-02-23: ♪ Memory Tapes · Bicycle
2023-02-27: 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
2023-02-27: 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
2023-02-27: 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.
2023-02-27: European Route Planning: Clear and elegant use of postgres and shell scripting.
2023-02-27: Spatial sampling with R. Lot of pretty illustrations and good old base R code. #rstats
2023-02-27: ♪ Washed Out · Amor Fati