2021-05-01: Flowers.

To a lot of people, C is a dead language, and ${lang} is the language of the future, for ever-changing transient values of ${lang}. The reality of the situation is that all other languages today directly or indirectly sit on top of the Posix API and the NUL-terminated string of C. — The Most Expensive One-byte Mistake

2021-05-06: DuckDuckGo Tips & Tricks.
2021-05-06: Online color picker for 256 colors terminal.
2021-05-06: The UNIX Command Language (1976). #unix
2021-05-10: Flowers (again).

2021-05-10: Still relevant: Things to Know When Making a Web Application in 2015.
2021-05-10: Lisp: Common Lisp, Racket, Clojure, Emacs Lisp.
2021-05-10: Right and left folds, primitive recursion patterns in Python and Haskell. #python #haskell
2021-05-10: Tectonic is a modernized, complete, self-contained TeX/LaTeX engine, powered by XeTeX and TeXLive. #tex
2021-05-10: The Connoisseur of Number Sequences.
2021-05-10: Vim scripting cheatsheet. #vim
2021-05-10: αcτµαlly pδrταblε εxεcµταblε.
2021-05-11:

The benefit of a form, is that one no longer needs to use a mouse or some awkward key combinations to painstakingly select a region of code first, before sending it out for evaluation. Instead, one can use a single key stroke that means “evaluate the form under the cursor”, or “evaluate the form before the cursor”, etc, to precisely define the scope and send the code at the same time. — How much can a Clojure developer do alone?

2021-05-11: In case you’re in an urgent need for a working VIM+Lisp toolbox, check out slimv_box. I’m using vlime in my regular setup, but maybe slimv works well too. #vim
2021-05-11: Data Is Plural. Didn’t know there was such a thing. This would have been very useful when I was teaching R and Stata for data analysis and statistical modeling.
2021-05-11: R for applied epidemiology and public health. #rstats
2021-05-11: Starting New Projects in Common Lisp (SBCL) using CLPM in VsCode in 2021. #lisp
2021-05-12: https://vim.help/. #vim
2021-05-12: Bayesian Statistics using Julia and Turing. #julia
2021-05-12: Using (neo)vim for C++ development. #vim
2021-05-12: Using Computer Modern on the web. I’m happy with my current setup, but I must admit those fonts look so great.
2021-05-14: On .plan files. With some nice ideas to manage them with Vim.
2021-05-14: TIL about pledge() and unveil(). #unix
2021-05-14: VIM Testing and Workflow. #vim
2021-05-15:

If you’re reading this and you use Sublime Text or VSCode or anything else, and this gives you the feeling that you should or must switch to vim, or that I consider it a lower class of editor and think that the mere existence of vim makes other tools ‘newbie’ tools and you immediately start installing vim and spending the rest of your day learning the modes: please don’t. If the editor you’ve been using is working for you, it’s working. Somehow text editors became status symbols in technology, the kind of topic that some jerk in the office goes ‘harumph’ when he (it’s a he) discovers that the new hire uses Coda. — How and why I use (neo)vim

2021-05-15: 5 steps to faster web fonts. See also Tom Macwright’s article, This page weighs 15kb.
2021-05-15: Modern Javascript: Everything you missed over the last 10 years. #js
2021-05-15: Sqliteviz is a single-page offline-first PWA for fully client-side visualisation of SQLite databases or CSV files.
2021-05-18:   Marianne Faithfull, Give My Love To London.
2021-05-18:

Research is characterized by allowing yourself to make mistakes: performing experiments; drawing conclusions; later, realizing that your experiment was not sufficient and you got it wrong; and trying again. — Verifying vectorized Rust revisited

2021-05-18: I’m done with Season 1 of Homeland. So far this is a pleasant TV show. Back to Black Mirrors for some days, though.
2021-05-18: Last posts I was read on Vim and Neovim:- Learn Vim Progressively- Vim and To NeoVim, Or Not to NeoVim on rwx.gg
2021-05-18: Neovim 0.5 features and the switch to init.lua.
2021-05-18: Replacing Elasticsearch with Rust and SQLite.
2021-05-18: Speedup neovim. #vim
2021-05-18: The Book of Statistical Proofs.
2021-05-19:   The National, Boxer.
2021-05-19:

Thirty years later, when Cervone created MathJax, I was amazed again—though perhaps not for the right reasons. I had supposed that the major programming challenge would be capturing all the finicky rules and heuristics for building up math expressions—placing and sizing superscripts, adjusting the height and width of parentheses or a radical sign to match the dimensions of the expression enclosed, spacing and aligning the elements of a matrix. Those are indeed nontrivial tasks, but they are just the beginning. My recent adventures have helped me see that another major challenge is making TeX work in an alien environment. — MathJax turns 3.0

2021-05-19: A night in.

(…) Infect the host quickly, before anybody notices; all the while telling people how much the company is investing in the community that it cares about (making lots of money from). — Complexity is a source of income in open source ecosystems

2021-05-25:

In the 1980s and 1990s, when the GPL was written, the enemy of the free software movement was Microsoft and other companies that sold closed-source (“proprietary”) software. The GPL intended to disrupt this business model for two main reasons (…) In the 2020s, the enemy of freedom in computing is cloud software (aka software as a service/SaaS, aka web apps) – i.e. software that runs primarily on the vendor’s servers, with all your data also stored on those servers. Examples include Google Docs, Trello, Slack, Figma, Notion, and many others. — It’s time to say goodbye to the GPL

2021-05-25:

Instead, I believe the widest gap between the two cultures involves sampling variation. It forms the very core of statistics, while ML mostly ignores it. I’ve observed this over the years in writings and statements by ML people, and in conversation with them. — Efron Updates breiman’s “two cultures” essay

2021-05-25: Check out these math problems (with solutions) by the Mathematics Department at Iowa State University.
2021-05-25: A Map of the Internet 2021.
2021-05-25: My God, It’s Full of Dots!.
2021-05-25: The Essence of Mathematics Through Elementary Problems.
2021-05-25: VIM Modes Transition Diagram. #vim
2021-05-25: Writing Pythonic Rust. #rust
2021-05-26:   London Grammar, If You Wait.
2021-05-26:

The success of Julia in the scientific-computing sphere is an important development at the intersection of science, engineering, and free software (in the free speech sense). Until the advent of Julia, the only programming language with comparable influence and ubiquity in the science world was Fortran. — Julia 1.6 addresses latency issues

2021-05-26: At last, a tool to cleanup the mess in your $HOME/.stack directory. Just went down to 3.9 Go instead of 9.1 Go.

2021-05-26: First contrib for a very useful Vim plugin ;-)
As I write this, I realized that this PR has already been merged.
2021-05-26: I updated my Zsh config today, just to make terminal tabs (in Kitty) show the current running process, instead of the default $SHELL. Looks much nicer!TL;DR Add this to your .zshrc or wherever you put custom settings:

preexec() {
    # See, e.g., https://www.davidpashley.com/articles/xterm-titles-with-bash/
    print -Pn "\e]0;$1\a"
    # or, equivalently,
    # printf "\x1b]0;%s\x07" "$1";
}

precmd() {
    # Clean up terminal title (in case Neovim doesn't restore it to its initial state)
    # printf "\033]0;\a"
    # or print relevant stuff
    # (%~ current working directory; %1~ directory name only)
    print -Pn "\e]0;%1~\a"
}

2021-05-26: I’m delighted to start using Julia again. The 1.6 milestone, which may eventually becomes the next LTS version, looks much more stabilized than the previous versions I quickly tested in the past (1.0, and 0.3 to 0.5 beforehand). And, they got a true graphical engine. #julia
2021-05-27:

I mostly don’t care how popular Lisp is. I am not using Lisp in order to score better in a popularity contest. I am using Lisp because it is the best programming language I know for the kind of programs I write. I don’t think there is anything particularly or seriously wrong with Lisp. It might be that at the moment it does not provide what some people have come to expect from a programming language (free cross-platform implementation with all the libraries you could possibly want). Whether this will ever happen, I don’t know, and I don’t care (though I respect that others might). I do think I know that some of the people who want this to happen will have to get their hands dirty and just do it. No amount of lamenting is going to magically create any libraries. — What is wrong with Lisp?

2021-05-27: Successful Lisp: How to Understand and Use Common Lisp. #lisp