2022-09-01:   Shane Quartet, Stablemates.
2022-09-01: I think I still prefer Cmus and Irssi over Rhythmox and Element. Lean text interfaces forever. #unix
2022-09-01: Regular cleaning of $HOME done: +4 Go. Also removed a lot of unused stuff on /, including Discord which I no longer use.
2022-09-04:   BENEE · Doesn’t Matter.
2022-09-04: Trying out Tactile as an additional Window Manager for Gnome shell. Looks great. No auto-tiling (you have to manually assign new windows to predefined tiles on a grid, but this is flexible. However, it works like a charm right (and out of the box), unlike Forge or gTile. Gnome default tiling behavior works alongside, which is great. Together with Simple terminal or Gnome terminal (preferred), this makes for a great tiling WM. Also, none of the shell extensions (Unite, undecorate, …) I tried were able to properly remove window decorations, and it seems like there always are edge cases anyway.

2022-09-06:

The WHATWG spec follows the good old browser mantra of being very liberal in what it accepts and trying to guess what the users mean and bending backwards trying to fulfill. (Even though we all know by now that Postel’s Law is the wrong way to go about this.) It means it’ll handle too many slashes, embedded white space as well as non-ASCII characters. — My URL isn’t your URL

2022-09-06: Waiting for a reply to my query on Vim Vixen GH repo. Would be great to have the same facilities as on Nyxt browser to yank both URL and title at some point.
2022-09-06: Gemini: A Modern LaTeX Poster Theme. #tex
2022-09-06: How fast are Linux pipes anyway?. #unix
2022-09-06: Persistent SSH sessions with proper scrollback. I have to try this with both ssh jump and Tmux instead of Screen, and with scrolbback buffer enabled because i like it.
2022-09-06: ♪ Placebo · Teenage Angst
2022-09-07:

I have had my eye on Julia for many years, and I now consider it ready to be my “everyday” programming language. — From Common Lisp to Julia

2022-09-07: > The story is different with a REPL: you will have played with each piece of code in isolation before running the whole program, which makes you quite confident that each of the sub-tasks is well implemented. — What makes a good REPL?
2022-09-07: Difftastic, the Fantastic Diff. #git
2022-09-07: ♪ Apoptygma Berzerk · Until The End Of The World
2022-09-07: ♪ Lords of the New Church · Russian Roulette
2022-09-08:

The historical justification for a /bin, /sbin and /lib separate from /usr no longer applies today. They were split off to have selected tools on a faster hard disk (which was small, because it was more expensive) and to contain all the tools necessary to mount the slower /usr partition. Today, a separate /usr partition already must be mounted by the initramfs during early boot, thus making the justification for a split-off moot. In addition a lot of tools in /bin and /sbin in the status quo already lost the ability to run without a pre-mounted /usr. There is no valid reason anymore to have the operating system spread over multiple hierarchies, it lost its purpose. — The Case for the /usr Merge

2022-09-08: Tip of the day: If you want to get ride of Ubuntu putting screenshots with arbitrary filenames in arbitrary folder, without resorting on the good old gnome-screenshot tool, just use:

% xdg-user-dirs-update --set PICTURES ~/Media/Pictures
% cd ~/Media/Pictures/Captu*  ## NOTE: update according to your settings
% rename 's/Capture\ d’écran\ d[eu]\ //g;s/\s/-/g' *

Don’t forget to update the last instruction to reflect basename on your system, use a Makefile or shell script to automate the process. Usually, Ubuntu will create a subfolder (“Screenshots” or “Captures d’écran” or whatever) in the default PICTURES folder. What’s funny is that instead of a straight single quote, Ubuntu decided for whatever reason to use a curly quote! I used to use the following Bash script on X11, but it no longer works under Wayland:

scrot '%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S.png' --thumb 300x200 -e 'mv $m $f ~/Media/Pictures/screenshots'

Here, screenhots is a soft link to the default subfolder where screenshots are saved.
2022-09-08: I Tracked Everything I Read on the Internet for a Year. It reminds me of my defunct Emacs refiled links.
2022-09-08: ♪ Antony & The Johnsons · You Are My Sister
2022-09-09: Analyzing Every Clojure Project on Github. #clojure
2022-09-09: At least one Vim trick you might not know. #vim
2022-09-09: Ramanujan’s factorial approximation. #math
2022-09-12:

I have an IDE, but I keep going back to essentially the same setup you have. I find that GUI IDE’s tend to try to be too many things at the same time. I like having nothing on the screen that isn’t directly related to what I’m doing, and I strongly dislike ribbons of things I could click on but rarely, if ever, do. — I don’t use an IDE, should I be using one?

2022-09-12: SQLite Doesn’t Use Git. #git
2022-09-12: Why you shouldn’t invoke setup.py directly. #python
2022-09-12: mvp.css: A minimalist stylesheet for HTML elements.
2022-09-12: ♪ Helen Merrill · You’ve Got a Date With the Blu
2022-09-13:

Common Lisp is a fine language with exceptional interactivity, multiple implementations providing the potential for acceptable performance, useful features like condition system, and a stable standard base. This, in theory, makes is very much suited toward data processing and analysis. Although practice paints a less favorable picture, there are still use cases where Common Lisp could be considered to be a very good pick. Also, I simply like writing Lisp code. — sirherrbatka/vellum

2022-09-13: What is a LSM Tree?
2022-09-13: mtime comparison considered harmful. #unix
2022-09-13: ♪ Killing Joke · Sun Goes Down
2022-09-16: ♪ New Order · Blue Monday (Instrumental Outtake)
2022-09-19:

Purely functional programs are easier to test, they make better and more reliable APIs, and our environments, compilers, and run-time systems take advantage of functional style. — Getting rid of set-car! and set-cdr!

2022-09-19: Lovely.

One way to solve the delays is to disable your internet connection. This is tough medicine, but if you notice these delays, try it for an hour just to verify that indeed the issue is resolved by disabling internet connectivity. — macOS 10.15: Slow by Design

2022-09-19: Algorithms for Competitive Programming. See also my review of The Competitive Programmer’s Handbook.
2022-09-19: An X11 Apologist Tries Wayland. #unix
2022-09-19: Automatic Differentiation in 38 lines of Haskell. #haskell
2022-09-19: ♪ The Only Ones · Peter and the Pets (2008 Remastered)
2022-09-25:

I don’t tap my own phone. I don’t xerox postcards before I mail them back from vacation. I don’t take a voice recorder when I go out with friends. And I don’t have a copy machine at home to duplicate hand written notes I may send. — The cost of saving sent e-mailI do like having local copies, both of my handxritten notes and of my sent e-mails. Digital nomadism, with one foot in the analog world.

2022-09-25: > I keep trying to quit vim. I keep ending up inside a terminal, inside vim, writing code. Like SQLite, vim is an island of stability over my career. While I wish IDEs were better, I am extremely thankful for tools that work and respect the effort I have taken to learn them, decade after decade. — Software I’m thankful for
f2022-09-25:

The internet is no longer a place where a relatively-small fraction of the human population go to find something different than everyday life. It is everyday life for billions of people. As long as life is megacorps and information gatekeepers, so too is the global ubiquitous internet. Mission accomplished. — Searching the Creative Internet

2022-09-25: Incrementing Vectors.
2022-09-25: Using GPT-3 to pathfind in random graphs.
2022-09-28:
Cmus revamped!
2022-09-29:

The relationship between developers and App Store reviewers is tense at best. Most people are trying to build well-designed, useful mobile apps. Apple has instituted App Store reviews to maintain a high-quality bar for apps and weed out spammy or nefarious actors, using human evaluators to test individual apps and provide direct feedback. However, malicious apps are relatively rare; arguably, Apple doesn’t do a great job filtering them out anyway. — Outdated vs. Complete

2022-09-29: TIL about Rclone, thanks to the following blog post: An Upside-Down Backup Strategy.
2022-09-29: Data types à la carte. #haskell
2022-09-29: Explained from scratch: private information retrieval using homomorphic encryption.
2022-09-29: Types at the edges in Python. #python
2022-09-29: ♪ Nadje Noordhuis · Migration
2022-09-30:

My personal productivity cycle is tied to this industry hype cycle. My schoolfriend back in 2003 was my personal “technology trigger.” From him, I rapidly learned some standard tools from Gartner’s plateau of productivity: PHP, MySQL, Apache. Then I surveyed the plateau more widely, finding Python, Postgres, and Nginx. A little further away, I had heard of Gartner’s trough of disillusionment. I sneered at the Perl, Java, CORBA. I’ll keep my Python, thanks. — The hacker hype cycle

2022-09-30: The full text of my Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages book (second printing, 1991) is now available.
2022-09-30: Alternatives to bloatware.
2022-09-30: Homotopy Type Theory. #maths
2022-09-30: ♪ The Dresden Dolls · Coin-Operated Boy