2021-03-08: I moved out last week, and moved in right away. I just finished unpacking all the boxes. What a journey! I’m exhausted, and I probably need a few weeks to recover. In the meantime, here is the new home office:

2021-03-08: Random effects and penalized splines are the same thing. #rstats
2021-03-21: Meanwhile, I’ve been playing with OpenBSD a bit more, and guess what: Kitty terminal emulator is available there too. I’m impressed by the number of packages that are readily available: Kitty, Neomutt and Neovim work right out of the box. I wish Linux (Ubuntu) was using /usr/local as the default user directory for local programs, this would simplify config files a lot! #unix
2021-03-21: What a week (or two, in fact)! Just starting to feel better right now, after three days at the hospital. I should be ready for the next 8 years, hopefully.
2021-03-21:

New Post: An Ode to Stable Interfaces, and Praise To Base R and R Core

In which I run code I posted fourteen years ago: it works unaltered. That should be cherished, celebrated--and encouraged. We need more examples like this.https://t.co/9khR7TwRk0#rstats #reproducibility pic.twitter.com/BKS0GXjRGs

— Dirk Eddelbuettel (@eddelbuettel) March 20, 2021

2021-03-22: > My overall feeling is that if I could spend infinite time and effort, my C programs would be as fast or faster than Rust, because theoretically there’s nothing that C can’t do that Rust can. But in practice C has fewer abstractions, primitive standard library, dreadful dependency situation, and I just don’t have the time to reinvent the wheel, optimally, every time. — Speed of Rust vs. C
2021-03-22: A hacker’s guide to numerical analysis.
2021-03-22: Decoded: GNU coreutils. Lot of useful references and very detailed explanations. #unix
2021-03-22: Why are tar.xz files 15x smaller when using Python’s tar library compared to macOS tar?. TL;DR https://stackoverflow.com/a/14885821/420055.
2021-03-23: Writing Small CLI Programs in Common Lisp. #lisp
2021-03-24:

2021-03-24: > Software engineers have been led to believe that their time is more valuable than CPU time; therefore, wasting CPU cycles in order to reduce development time is always a win. They’ve forgotten, however, that the application users’ time is more valuable than their time. — The fallacy of premature optimization
2021-03-24: Clojure from a Schemer’s perspective (via Irreal). ̀#scheme
2021-03-24: Practical Cryptography for Developers.
2021-03-24: Understanding JSON Schema.
2021-03-25: > The friction of having to write, to structure thoughts in plain text, to remember the name of the person I need to reference on this page: that is the point. Frictionless note-taking produces notes, but it doesn’t - for me - produce memory.
> The same goes for a lot of things. I use neovim to edit code like a grandpa, and I don’t use a file tree. There’s no “directory listing” in my editor. I hit ctrl-p and fzf helps me find the file by name. This is obviously not the future of coding: shouldn’t I be navigating the source tree in 3D like in Jurassic Park? Sure, but the names of things, their functionality, and how it all fits together should be things that exist in one’s mind, not just in a computer. — The return of fancy tools
2021-03-25: At first I thought Github allowed for personal blog as a derived GH-like UI. Well, no, it’s all CSS (managed with Hugo): https://neapowers.com/.
2021-03-25: A Poetic Apology: Or Why Should You Use Poetry to Manage Python Dependencies. #python
2021-03-25: Foldable Words, (via mostlymaths.net). #python
2021-03-25: Searching for RH Counterexamples — Setting up Pytest. ̀#python
2021-03-25: Server(shiny)-less dashboards with R, {htmlwidgets} and {crosstalk}. #rstats
2021-03-29: > The havoc wrought by the combination of these two changes is considerable. Those Python virtual environments you created over the last year? All of them are now broken. Why? Just because you ran brew upgrade ponysay? Yup. — Homebrew Python Is Not For YouThis is sad, really sad.
2021-03-29: Regression, Thermostats, Causal Inference: Some Finger Exercises.
2021-03-30: Random links from Tuesday:

• Learn Vimscript the Hard Way – actively using Vim
• Thoughts on Rust bloat – slowly learning some bits of Rust
• A batteries-included extended standard library for seven R7RS Scheme dialects – must go back to Scheme after exploring Python more extensively
• Donald Knuth’s “Algorithm D”, its implementation in “Hacker’s Delight”, and elsewhere – must reread part of Knuth’s artwork
• PostgreSQL 8.3 and later include a soundex(text) function in the fuzzystrmatch extension – wait, how comes I forgot about that
  

2021-03-30: SQLite is not a toy database. #database