2023-10-02: I’d gone to buy some charcoal fixative but there was none in the bookshop. Hold my beer, I came away with these books:

2023-10-02: TIL about paps, as a replacement for a2ps for printing to a PS file (this is useful to print Neomutt email when there’s no default printer on your machine). h/t jimifiki

set print_command="paps --font='Monospace 10' > /home/chl/tmp/mail.ps"

2023-10-03: Software used to be less demanding at one time.

Cc: haskell-cafe <haskell-cafe@haskell.org>
Date: Tue, 3 Oct 2023 06:46:02 +0200
Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] two HLS processes with same namemac
OS needs just 1-2GiB of wired RAM, don’t worry…

2023-10-04: ♪ Arlo Parks · Black Dog
2023-10-08: Out of curiosity, I plugged my DAC (the little box above the Denon amp in this post) onto my computer and, guess what, it just worked!

2023-10-08:

Linux is borrowing unused memory for disk caching. This makes it look like you are low on memory, but you are not! Everything is fine! — Linux ate all my RAM

2023-10-12:

Picking when to assert is much like picking when to comment, except more explicit and more effective. — How to assert for fun and profit

2023-10-12: There was a time we were able to wait the end of film or series credits to learn about the song titles and things like that. Thanks to Netflix, this is no longer possible, you will switch to the next ep. before you have time to reach the end of (all due) credits. Old times good times.
2023-10-16:

There is a phenomenon in society which I find quite bizarre. Upon our entry to this mortal coil, we are endowed with self-awareness, agency, and free will. Each of the 8 billion members of this human race represents a unique person, a unique worldview, and a unique agency. Yet, many of us have the same fundamental goals and strive to live the same life. — Going off-script

2023-10-16: The discrete logarithm. #math
2023-10-18:

Over the last decade or so, Apple has been hard at work in simplifying the user interfaces that power its myriad platforms. I’ve welcomed most of that work, but it’s hard to deny that we’ve all lost some things along the way. — The History of Cover Flow

2023-10-18: Interesting read on enumerating trees. #haskell
2023-10-19:

2023-10-19: Vim is great for cleaning a text file using search and replace, but sometimes Unix tools are even better: if you want to remove consecutive blank lines, just call cat -s on your text file.
2023-10-19: ♪ Foo Fighters · Shame Shame
2023-10-23:

But just think back. In the past say ten years, what changes and innovations have had a real and true life changing impact on you? I am sure you can think of something, but I am also pretty sure that nothing has happened on a monthly or weekly basis that was so important that you absolutely had to know about it at that very moment. — Do you feel overwhelmed trying to stay up to date with the latest tech news?

2023-10-23:

But let’s just put it this way (and here I’m being charitable): in all my years of using Word, this happened more than once. In all the time I’ve used text editors, it’s never happened, even once. — Why (and How) I Wrote My Academic Book in Plain Text

2023-10-23:

The most important thing to learn correctly about Vim is to understand that you talk to Vim when you edit text. Vim has a grammar. The next important thing is to learn how to use Vim macros. Vim - I hate to love you

2023-10-23: No more plugin manager, yet a fast startup time. #vim

2023-10-23: OpenBSD Handbook. #unix
2023-10-24: If you are using vimtex and are interested in using Evince for forward/reverse synchronization, be sure to check sved which at least provides reverse sync in Neovim. Otherwise, Zathura works as expected. #vim
2023-10-24: TIL that you can clear your Tmux paste buffers by tagging everything (C-t) then deleting it (D).
2023-10-24: Ergonomic mappings for code formatting in Vim: Very nice tutorial on code formatting and how to write VimL functions that exploit gq. #vim
2023-10-24: Pytest is really great: even simple assert statements get processed, no need to write complex fixtures or test suite. This means you can write your scripts as usual and just import pytest. To avoid contaminating your current directory with __pycache__ and .pytest_cache directories, set the exported variable PYTHONDONTWRITEBYTECODE=1 and call pytest with -p no:cacheprovider. You can set a simple compiler and errorformat for (Neo)vim by following this blog post. Personally, I use makeprg=pytest\ --tb=short\ -vv\ --no-header\ -p\ no:cacheprovider\ $* instead. #python #vim
2023-10-26: No more nvim-lspconfig means 15 ms less time spent in starting up! #vim

2023-10-27: Everything you ever wanted to know on how to execute a command in multiple files in Vim. I mostly use argo and cdo. #vim
2023-10-27: TIL that there are some interesting C programming tips on Neovim wiki. #vim #clang
2023-10-27: Interpretable Machine Learning: A Guide for Making Black Box Models Explainable.
2023-10-28:

This document is a sort of quine. If you select the whole page in your browser and paste it into a file, this text shows up encoded in a weird Markdown variant embedded in a string literal inside a Racket lisp script. Evaluating the file with racket -f $FILE evaluates the lisp, converting the weird Markdown and producing the same HTML document that your browser received. — https://cgad.ski/

2023-10-28:

Vim is not an IDE. It can be customized to look like one, but the more you try to make it to look like an IDE, the less it behaves like vim (fast and lightweight). If you need a full-fledged IDE features, use a real IDE. — Why I Use Vim

2023-10-28: I keep getting this kind of weird stuff on my pretty old iPhone. Internet was less complicated back in the time, especially when Apple was not tying up software to hardware to such an extent.

2023-10-28: Ashby’s book “Introduction to Cybernetics”: One of the very first English textbook I bought when I was a PhD student involved in some kind of Neurosciences back at the time.
2023-10-28: Compiling Chicken Scheme scripts. #scheme
2023-10-28: ♪ Fay Claassen · Almost Blue