Some New Year experiments

Hyvää uuttaa vuottaa! As stated before, my TIL is up and running once more. Some things I’m going to be experimenting with this year: Self-hosted stuff, speficially on the Raspberry Pi. One of those fancy new split keyboards I keep hearing everyone talk about. Coding more, and thinking about coding less.

January 1, 2024

Git aliases for fun and profit

haskell-kata’s Quickstart now has this neat little ditty at the start: 1 2 git config --local alias.build '!sh -c \'for file in *.hs; do ghc -o "${file%.hs}-bin" "$file"; done\'' git build Git is the gift that keeps on giving. I was on the hunt for a subdirectory-scoped alias, and I just discovered this incredibly flexible way to create new Git subcommands. History: 2 years ago I read through the 1200 page behemoth Haskell Programming from First Principles....

December 3, 2023

Pomodoros and leverage ratios

I love pomodoros 🍅. But I have to admit, most of the time when I reach for them, it’s because I"m already having trouble staying on task with whatever I’m doing. I generally don’t get a lot of value out of the ’longer break’ option, a steady beat of work and breaks is enough for me. In those circumstances I often find solace in the idea that a well-constructed pomodoro creates a certain lower bound on my work-to-play leverage ratio....

November 27, 2023

The Rule of Four

A communication heuristic, optimized for asynchronous communication of detailed concepts between human beings. Not really a TIL, I’ve been sitting on this one for a while. Rationale Existence “proof” Our short term memory can hold at best about 7 +/- 2 chunks of information at a time. Start with the lower end of that: 5 chunks. Assume that whatever someone is “really” trying to do takes up 1 of those 5....

November 24, 2023