What are you doing this week?
10 points by caius
10 points by caius
What are you doing this week? Feel free to share!
Keep in mind it’s OK to do nothing at all, too.
We have acquired a new megalomaniacal engine of chaos and madness: https://alopex.li/data/images/PXL_20250630_033821414.MP.jpg. So I suspect I will largely be dealing with that.
After the Helix post and after postponing it for a long time, I’m going to review my Emacs config, properly learn how to use Meow, configure some language modes that are still a bit finicky, adding some TRAMP configs, etc
I sent in my first PR for the Ghidra compiler just now (https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra/pull/8312), after hacking on it for what feels like an eternity.
I bought claude pro and am using claude-cli to play around with it a little. I am between jobs right now, and severely feel burnt out, so this is helping me get my enthusiasm for code back up, little by little.
do you mean claude code? afaict that requires claude max (the $200/m), or API access
No - you can use the $20/month plan for it now too (since some weeks ago). It gets rate limited but it’s fine.
$HOME: put up some pressure, temp and gyro sensors to spy on my cisterns and watering system. Also think of some way to monitor the hydraulic ram water pump.
$WORK: keep everything running and online because of vacation time of my colleagues.
I’ve used notebooklm to convert some of the books I always wanted to read but never got them read into podcasts. The result is asnonishingly good for some, and hilariously bad for others — but anyways, I have my custom audio feed for morning walks with dogs! Now I’m in obsession phase, looking for more stuff to convert into ELI5-like podcasts.
Are you doing this for fiction or non-fiction? Would be interested in the latter potentially :)
Non-fiction only; can’t think of a fiction that is good and bad enough at the same time. Think of a science article or some documentation for a software system
Have you ever gone back and compared the original source and the podcast, in terms of accuracy? Especially for technical stuff, the fear of hallucinations would be on the back of my mind, I imagine. But maybe it’s not a problem after all?
Yes — I have several chapters of Feathers’ Working Effectively with Legacy Code, that I know pretty good. Haven’t heard hallucinations as is, once I heard repeat (that is not in the book) — took around a minute out of general length, also experimented with the translation from English to Ukrainian — it was pretty damn good! So while I would not totally beleive the results, I tend to beleive enough to understand if I have to read the original.
I just created a long podcast about Apache Druid (not a ad for sure, just something I know enough about). Welcome: https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/6ff237d4-f5c5-43f6-8c48-c9e1e6bf9362/audio (have no idea how good/bad google supports sharing those)
Why convert to a “podcast” and not just convert to an audiobook? /genq
Learn how to actually use LaTeX for real rather than copy-pasting somebody else’s overleaf config, and use that to improve my CV.
Read as many papers on GNNs as possible so I can start the phase of my project where I feed processed ECG data to a GNN to screen for a few specific arrhythmias (or at least indicate the need for further testing)
Try and learn a few more jazz chords since I got a new amp
Learn how to actually use LaTeX for real rather than copy-pasting somebody else’s overleaf config, and use that to improve my CV.
You might want to give Typst a shot – it is much more intuitive/modern compared to LaTeX (unless you’re already used to its various incantations).
The output looks nice but the input format for typst seems far worse. It has a lot of special-case syntax and, especially, it favours short-form markup that loses semantics. One of the papercuts that made me give up on AsciiDoc[tor] was that ++ was special syntax. That meant I had to use a {cpp} macro instead of typing C++. There were a load of other similar things.
SILE did the right thing here and has a simple, uniform syntax for everything. Every command is \command_name[optional, list, of, key=value, pairs, or, single, words, or="things in quotes if you need to capture whitespace]{and a command body}. In SILE \begin{foo}content\end{foo} is syntactic sugar for \foo{content} for places where you don’t want to do bracket matching over large blocks.
Short-form syntax is nice for very simple things, but it quickly becomes annoying. For example, if it’s easier for me to mark up ‘code’ than ‘code in this language’, then I will do the wrong thing, and then later syntax highlighting is harder to add.
In practice, I’ve found the input syntax for Typst remarkably well considered and predictable in my use of it so far. I haven’t run into nearly as many of the papercuts I’ve experienced in Markdown or AsciiDoc, and there is a much more robust support for structured data and conventional programming compared to LaTeX macros, so the hard parts don’t even take place in a syntactic context where the short-form formatting syntaxes exist!
I was pondering adding Typst as an alternative back end to the flow I use for books, but trying to generate their format looks too hard. So many things I’d need to escape.
Hmm, it’s hard to say not knowing the specifics, but I would personally rather generate a simple format that I can process using Typst code rather than directly generating Typst source – e.g. given a nested JSON object representing a document, it would be an easy recursive Typst function to expand it into formatted content.
Might be nice if they could directly emit and consume a stable IR someday, like DocBook.
Yup, XML has the properties I want for interchange (as well as a load of things I don’t want, but can ignore): a consistent way of expressing a tree structure that contains commands (which may have key-value pairs as attributes) over runs of text and other commands. The SILE format is isomorphic to an XML document model and so SILE also has an XML front end (it also has some other pluggable parsers for things like djot.
The main lesson from LaTeX is that 90% of the commands I type regularly are from packages (100% if you remember that LaTeX itself is a pile of macros atop TeX), so defining special-case syntax in the first version locks you into those.
It’s not very documented, but this is the thing I use to generate SILE, HTML, and ePub.
I have a certain friend who likes to throw in a #5 chord everywhere. It usually does sound fun, though, if everyone is on board with it.
Applying for jobs (if any come up), finishing debugging my home library system, then possibly starting in on learning C++.
I’m trying to finish up an implementation of a new API in a simulator we use at work. It’s used for running unit tests in our pipeline. The goal is to get it done before I go to vacation on Friday, so I don’t have to deal with it when I come back from holiday. I worry that if I’m not done by then, I will forget everything I’ve done after five weeks. I’d rather start fresh with a new task.
Adding final touches to some work projects before starting my summer vacation next week. Very much looking forward to four weeeks of not working.
I’m consolidating data from a tower PC and an old-ish gaming laptop onto a Framework 16 to better fit my nomadic retirement. I loved having a nicely outfitted office but a big tower and a power inefficient laptop don’t fit well with van life. Also, I’m setting up the components of my van LAN. Cellular modem, OpenWRT router, Home Assistant on a SBC, that sort of thing. It’s pretty fun to build out a network for having fun. 😸
