Micro posting in October
2020-10-01: A minigolf game written without a game engine in C.
2020-10-01: Ah, it looks there’s a new thing for editing text on the Mac: Nova. The choice of names for Mac text editors never ceases to amaze me. The last one I heard about from Jan de Leeuw was Fraise, but there were many others at that time (around 2008-2010) and I forgot all about their names.
2020-10-01: CleanMyMac is really a great tool when it comes to manage your Macbook!
2020-10-01: I swear by vsearch since a week. It’s so fast and handy for all sort of things involving Fast[aq] files.
2020-10-01: I’m halfway thru Season 2 of Fargo. Like True Detective, each season is independent from the preceding one. I didn’t like True Detective S2 (probably because I very much liked S1) so I quit after the first episode. Likewise, I find Fargo S2 far less intriguing than S1. I will probably stop after that one.
2020-10-01: Back to basics: org-mode agenda. #emacs
2020-10-01: Data Visualization and the Modern Imagination. #dataviz
2020-10-01: MOAR survey regression models. #rstats
2020-10-01: What Every Programmer Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic.~ ❯ nodeWelcome to Node.js v14.11.0.Type “.help” for more information.> 0.1 + 0.20.30000000000000004
2020-10-02: Panopticon is a debugger-powered tracer for Python code to quickly visualize and explore code execution. #python
2020-10-03:
At least 24 annoyances per day I have to live with. That’s the world WE ALL are living in now. Welcome. — People expect technology to suck because it actually sucks
Unzip and run it in-place anywhere. It’s also entirely offline. It will never automatically update, or even touch the network. In mere seconds any Windows system can become a reliable development machine. — [w64devkit: (Almost) Everything You Need](https://nullprogram.com/blog/ 2020/09/25/)
When dreams come true. Replace Windows by anything like macOS, Linux, *BSD, of course.
2020-10-03: It’s been more than a month now than the interactions I have with my Macbook can be summarized to using Emacs (or Neovim) and Zsh in a Terminal (with 24 bit color enabled) and, optionally (more often than I would like), Firefox or Skim to read PDFs. It’s been relaxing, at least. Digital minimalism, plain text mode; I like it.
2020-10-03: Okay, so I uninstalled Textual app. Circe (Emacs) and irssi should be enough to chat on Freenode in the future. #apple
2020-10-03: There we go. Apple requiring macOS 10.15 to upgrade some apps. #apple
2020-10-03: Trying out irssi. So far I like it better than weechat, because simplicity.
2020-10-03: Future Alterations. #lisp
2020-10-05:
These are what engineers of my generation call “eyewash:” Something of no utility meant to impress the outsiders. — Red Meat Friday: Modernizing Emacs
2020-10-05: Another great post by Peter Ellis, with outstanding data viz: Free text in surveys. #rstats
2020-10-05: GitHub Actions: first impressions.
2020-10-05: It used to be simpler to teach. #unix
2020-10-05: Video: C Programming on System 6 - Intro. Nice setup, and I learned a lot of interesting stuff about Apple System 6.
2020-10-05:
Your grep one-liner du jour. Count how many words of each length appear in the /usr/share/dict/words dictionary.
— Steve Hayman 💉💉💉💉💉 (@shayman) September 29, 2020
for n in `jot 25`; do printf "%2d letter words: " $n; grep -E "^.{$n}\$" /usr/share/dict/words | wc -l; done
But if you’re one of those people who loves nothing more than to quote how bad Apple is because of their walled garden, please do some fact checking as, to me at least, it doesn’t exist. — The Apple Walled Garden
2020-10-08: So long, Apple.
No worry, I’m still happy with my Macbook, this is just that I don’t need these apps anymore. The online versions on iCloud seem decent, and may come out for rescue in case I need to edit old stuff.
2020-10-08: Error handling under Unix and Windows.
2020-10-08: Learn Vim for the last time. #vim
2020-10-08: Lisp and Haskell.
2020-10-08: Polite Bash Commands.
2020-10-08: The Animated Guide to Paredit. #emacs
2020-10-09:
Fortran has ruled scientific computing, but Julia emerged for large-scale numerical work. — The unreasonable effectiveness of the Julia programming language
2020-10-09: Python LSP under Emacs: up to 700 Mo (three files opened, less than 20 files in the project). WTF? Switching back to Anaconda: 2 process, 20-30 Mo each. #emacs
2020-10-09: What are the Clojure Tools? #clojure
2020-10-11: OMG. One of the last goodies of the new version of kitty (0.19).
2020-10-12:
The new platform is a winner. Everything is clean, quick, and configurable. When I ps uaxww, I’m not hogging ‘gigs’ of RAM just to have things up and running. There’s no black magic that derails me at every turn. In short, my sanity has been long restored. — Bye-bye, Apple
2020-10-12: I started updating my stata-sk notes and I’m now using jupyter instead of ESS to process Stata code (because I couldn’t compile the project with my old setup). Looks great so far. I will write a full blog post once I get some time.
2020-10-12: Now I get this annoying message regarding battery status on my Macbook (only 331 cycles out of the 1000 expected for this model).
2020-10-12: The “Widescreen Tall” layout in Amethyst is that it works pretty well for everything related to plotting!
2020-10-13:
Before I get into the strategy, I want to congratulate the Notes team for making what may be the only Apple app that has been unambiguously improving over the past few years. While it still shows evidence of the limited and ugly app it started out as, Notes is now one of the best note-taking apps on iOS, with features that nicely balance simplicity and power. — What is Notes good for?
In March I bought a 16" MacBook Pro, reasonably well tricked out: 2.3GHz 8-core Intel i9, 32G RAM, Radeon 5500M with 8G, 4T of disk. I hate it. It is slow and buggy enough that I wonder if maybe it’s a lemon? Herewith the gripes, for no particular reason other than it makes me feel like shouting at the world. — I Hate My MacBook
2020-10-13: Comprehensive guide on handling long lines in Emacs (via Irreal). #emacs
2020-10-14:
In many ways memory capacity is more important than clock frequency: a program won’t run unless enough memory is available but people can wait for a slow cpu. — Memory capacity growth: a major contributor to the success of computers
Since I became an Apple user back in 1989, I’ve always felt there was more to it than just being a returning customer of a tech company. There was a sense of belonging to a common set of principles that went against the mainstream. That was extremely appealing for someone like me who always moved countercurrent to everything. There were the Mac user groups, places (whether physical or online) to share a passion with like-minded people. There was the idea of ‘thinking differently’ way before it was formalised in 1997 by Apple itself. Apple products weren’t just computers and peripherals, but specialised tools made for people with a creative, think-out-of-the-box mindset. — This nine-year chasm
2020-10-14: Improved Ctrl-p/Ctrl-n macOS movement. #apple
2020-10-14: Racket Templates: Unofficial collection of racket app templates. #racket
2020-10-15:
E-mail takes too long to respond to, resulting in continuous inbox overflow for those who receive a lot of it. — three.sentenc.es
2020-10-15: The Software Foundations series is a broad introduction to the mathematical underpinnings of reliable software.
2020-10-15: All of the python 3.9 standard library. #python
2020-10-15: How to explain gradient boosting.
2020-10-15: JuliaMono: a monospaced font for scientific and technical computing.
2020-10-15: Loading CSV File at the Speed Limit of the NVMe Storage.
2020-10-15: PCG, A Family of Better Random Number Generators
2020-10-20:
As a rule, new users, right after introduction to a few basic commands, start indulging in Vim configuration porn. Such porn has various different flavours. There is the “exhibitionist” variety which includes dressing Vim up in status lines, colorschemes, and font decorations in order to impress others. It often leads to Vim being displayed on videos and, nomen omen, “vim-porn” screenshots. There is an “integrated” category where people plug and stretch their Vim until it resembles an IDE. Git integration, autocompletion, language servers, refactoring, and debugging are the tools of trade in this version. And then there are a few more variants, including “fuzzy”, “packaged”, “conveniently re-mapped”, and I am sure anyone could think up some of their own. — Porn, Zen, and .vimrc
The analogy in my mind is that Stata is to the iPhone as R is to Android, as far as social science data analysis goes. I guess SAS would be BlackBerry, insofar as it’s dated and propped up by a strong lock-in among government employees. And SPSS is a Nokia phone that has a slick interface for dialing your friends but requires you to push dozens of extra buttons in a non-intuitive sequence if you want to call anyone new. — stata 12!
2020-10-20: Emacs Shells on Irreal. After many attempts at using Eshell, I gave up and I’m a happy user of vterm since last year. #emacs
2020-10-20: FreePN is the first open-source peer-to-peer VPN service.
2020-10-20: Lisp from nothing. #lisp
2020-10-20: Visualizing binaries with space-filling curves. I may have posted this on Twitter long ago, but it’s never to late to revisit this post.
2020-10-20: What is the XY problem?
2020-10-27:
Every lisp hacker I ever met, myself included, thought that all those brackets in Lisp were off-putting and weird. At first, of course. Soon after we all came to the same epiphany: lisp’s power lies in those brackets! In this essay, we’ll go on a journey to that epiphany. — An Intuition for Lisp Syntax
Multiplicity comes from the chances (over study repetitions and data looks) you give data to be more extreme (if the null hypothesis holds), not from the chances you give an effect to be real. It is only the latter that is of concern to a Bayesian. Bayesians entertain only one dataset at a time, and if one computes posterior probabilities of efficacy multiple times, it is only the last value calculated that matters. — Continuous Learning from Data: No Multiplicities from Computing and Using Bayesian Posterior Probabilities as Often as Desired
2020-10-27: Nice online textbook on the Design of Experiments.
2020-10-27: Replacing Zoom with Open Broadcaster Software.