Posts

A while back I stirred up some controversy on Hacker News by talking about why I liked it when tutorials take you from clean VM to working, installed software. I’ve since taken to calling this the “tutorial-in-a-box” method. When I write them myself, I usually put them under the header Slowstart, a riff on the proverbial Quickstart. Two examples: A gentle introduction to reposurgeon. The Slowstart for selkokortti, some flashcard generating software based around my Finnish language news archive....

The best websites are home-cooked meals. Andrew’s Selkouutiset Archive was birthed after I realized there was no obvious way to fetch the previous articles of the “Easy Finnish” daily news broadcast. This annoyed me as a student of the language. “Here we have a stream”, I thought, “of high-quality, human-written, interesting practice material, and no easy way to access it!” So I went out of my way to create such a way, and me and my language skills have been profiting off of it ever since....

There are few things I think about more than the essays on gwern.net, and there are few with as satisfying a theoretical payout to contemplate in my orb as his essay on “leaky pipelines”, aka log-normal distributions. The skulk: Say you’re working on a Laravel web app. You’re about 90% sure you know how to start the app. You’re 80% sure you know how to handle the infra you’ll need to get it online....

I was 100% mouseless back before it was cool. Between dropping out of high school and enrolling in community college, I replaced my laptop with a $80 HP EliteBook I found on eBay; when I discovered its trackpad didn’t work anyway, I went all in on a no-X setup. I eventually concluded that going 90% mouseless got me almost all of the benefits, with almost none of the downsides. It’s almost as if returns are usually diminishing!...

tmux (short for “terminal mux” (short for “multiplexer”)) is i3 for your terminal. Oh, it’s so much more than that, and I recently discovered with some joy that it is installed by default on OpenBSD, but its fundamental value add to any programmer who has to SSH into servers more than once a week is it allows you to split your screen up into multiple independent shells without needing a graphical environment at all....

Most of us work in companies with something approximating a shared online internal wiki, be it Confluence or MediaWiki or even a searchable, static website custom built for the task. A common problem with these sites is making what you write discoverable to other people on the site. Your chosen title might tell you, a person fully in the weeds of whatever you were just doing, exactly enough to know this is the article you were looking for....

I’m kidding, I’m switching to OpenBSD because I like security or code quality or something. It’s totally not because the inexorable march of aging is starting to show its effects on my ability to down necessary-evil trivia like me and my friends used to down forties in the Ahhhnald after dark, and so I’d like to settle down with a software ecosystem I can study in real depth once without feeling like 20% of what I absorb in year X will be deprecated by year X+10....

One of the cooler things about working in a firm founded and run by a lot of dyed-in-the-wool Linux hackers like my current place is that there is a lot of Bash lying around, accumulated over a good 25 years or so. For all their faults, pure shell solutions still set the silver standard for programs which appear almost entirely immune to bit rot. But you know what? So does vanilla PHP....

I am, emphatically, not the language learning type. I’ve done enough of it over my life to know this. It’s certainly one of the better hobbies out there: You can do it for free (in principle), you can sink as many hours as you care to into it, and if you get good enough at it you get to reap some unique cultural and economic1 benefits. But there’s a reason I picked up Python when 14 year old me decided he wanted to get ahead in life instead of (say) German....

I Robert Anton Wilson was, is, and always will be a fascinating and hiliarious writer to me. I first read The Illuminatus! Trilogy when I was 13, and while it was coincident with a total and suffocating blackout of meaning, I no longer think reading it actually caused that to happen in any significant sense. Au contraire: Teen me found refuge in his absurdity - it felt bedrock nihilstic, sure, but a far more artfully and deeply buried nihilism than I was able to find elsewhere at the time....