In which I summarize what I’ve read recently on the intertube.

• I haven’t touched my Neovim config during 30 days, except for minor adjustments of my custom mappings. Well, it may well be because I was on holidays as well. Anyway, things start to come up right, I think. The more stuff I delete, the more it let me think about internal stuff, much like in this nicely set up blog post by Joe Nelson that I already mentioned somewhere on this site: History and effective use of Vim. Likewise, I reverted back to Ubuntu defualt settings (default display manager, defualt font, etc.), and it has been working great for me.

• TIL about whonix, which is a full operating system, including common chat and office applications, that runs inside your current one via Tor, with added security layers. It might be a good way to get a secured OS on a USB stick.

• If you’re looking for lightweight and minimalist, stop by the Inconsolation blog. You will likely find useful suggestion for old-fashioned but resilient software for pretty everything. But see this blog post if you look for a different take on so-called digital minimalism.

• The Ghostscript suite got a new PDF interpreter. It’s been a while since I no longer rely on DVI+PS conversion for $\LaTeX$ typesetting – maybe I should, at least for the quality of the fonts in print form – but I still use Ghostscript utilities from time to time. A recurrent command I use if gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dAutoRotatePages=/None -sOutputFile=merged.pdf *.pdf to assemble a series of individual PDF files.

• Differentiable Programming from Scratch covers the basics of numerical and symbolic differentiation, as well as automatic differentiation, with lot of pretty illustrations.

• An old but good post about page weight, by Chris Zacharias: Page Weight Matters. For a related discussion, check out Tom MacWright’s opinion on web design, especially his site redesign.

• Clojure needs a Rails, but not for the reason you think. If I were to use a functional language to write my genomic data apps, I would certainly chose either Clojure or a combination of Elm+Elixir. I’m surpised there’s nothing already for starting right away with Clojure. I remember the Noir framework, but well it looks like 10 years old and unmaintained.

• I always reading “naturalistic” data science or web scraping on real data. Here’s the most recent one: Famous HNers and Their Sites.

• Reference Count, Don’t Garbage Collect: An interesting overview with pros and cons of reference counting vs. garbage collection.

• The best average time complexity of Timsort is $\mathcal{O}(n)$. Hard to beat. See more in Timsort – the fastest sorting algorithm you’ve never heard of.

• How a window manager with tiling layouts makes a 1024x600 resolution livable. And, yes, he lives in a cabin. Since I’m now on Wayland, I may try Sway at some point, but see Trying out Sway and Wayland.

• SQLite Internals: Pages & B-trees: A technical review of SQLite internals. Pretty good job!

• Flipping until you are lost: A summary of a recent paper on convex polygon triangulation flip walk (arXiv:2207.09972).

Still, the purists proclaim, it’s not enough. Python is not a replacement for Haskell. But does it matter? 90% of the impressive magic from early functional languages has been rolled into mainstream languages. That last 10%, well, it’s not clear that anyone is really wanting it or that the benefits are actually there. Purity has some advantages, but it’s so convenient and useful to directly modify a dictionary in Python. Fold and map are beautiful, but they work just as well in the guise of a foreach loop. — Functional Programming Went Mainstream Years Ago