I use the simplest mainstream language available (Go) and very basic Python. I write simple (though sometimes verbose) code that is easy to understand and maintain. I avoid deep abstractions and always choose composition over inheritance or mixins. I only use generics when absolutely necessary. I prefer flat data structures whenever possible.

To print out a clickable hyperlink in a [terminal that supports] the OSC8 escape code, use:printf ‘\e]8;;http://example.com\e\This is a link\e]8;;\e\\n’

Over the last year or two, I’ve seen an increasing numbers of these folks pop up. Most from a small set of companies like Vercel, Linear, The Browser Company and Replit, known for their attention to interface design detail and slick product interactions, who are clearly encouraging and cultivating design-engineer hybrids.

The first Luddites were artisans and cloth workers in England who, at the onset of the Industrial Revolution, protested the way factory owners used machinery to undercut their status and wages. Contrary to popular belief, they did not dislike technology; most were skilled technicians.

How Jane Austen changed fiction, especially how interiority is rendered

It has been a minute since I wrote anything new, but thankfully I have found time for another side project and, by extension, another blog post. This one is going to be a little different though. Like everything on this blog it is in fact a data science post. I’m going to talk about art, object-oriented programming in R, and the grid graphics system. It being the time of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras – or “Gay Christmas” as it is affectionately known – I’ll do it with a rainbow palette. Nevertheless, pretty palettes notwithstanding this won’t be a particularly upbeat pride-flag-waving kind of post. There will be art, and there will be code. But there will also be little slivers of darker stories, and in a moment I’ll explain why I’ve made the decision to include them. But let’s start with the art.

That’s because sometimes, Copilot can be uncannily helpful. It can, and does, accomplish in mere seconds what might take me several minutes of focused work and/or rote repetition. It’s excellent at math, at boilerplate, and at pattern recognition.Other times, however, Copilot is clearly just regurgitating irrelevant code samples that aren’t at all useful. Sometimes, it’s so far off base its suggestions are hilarious. (It regularly suggests that I start my components with about 25 nested divs, for example.)

It is common knowledge that Frank Herbert’s classic Dune novels are chock-full of Islamic and MENA (Middle Eastern and North African) references.1 However, as a Muslim reader, I have long maintained that the Muslim influences go deeper than many may have realized. I am of the theory that if one is Muslim, or otherwise intimately aware of Muslim traditions, that person’s experience of Dune differs vastly from any other reader’s encounter with the saga.

Part of the appeal in Julia is that it’s designed to be a high-performance language for scientific computing. Like other scientific languages (e.g., R, Matlab, etc) it has 1-based indexing rather than 0-based indexing (Python, C , etc). Julia code is automatically compiled giving you performance that is comparable to compiled languages like C , without the hassle of actually having to deal with the compiler yourself. But we’ve all heard the sales pitch for Julia before, there’s no need for me to repeat it here, and anyway I kinda just want to dive into the code.

Single executable(static), batteries included, Lua 5.1 interpreter.

You’ll find here a walkthru of what will eventually be all the glyphs in Dyalog APL, in an order where no glyph is used in an example until it’s been introduced. So far there’s no prose – the explanations are purely through examples for now (but we’ll add prose later).

A really excellent educational document from Greg Wilson for folks who wanna learn sql.

A simple single binary file server, good for sharing things fast and quick

A very detailed, approachable clerk notebook that gives an overview of clojure’s semantics

As smartphone ownership and use grow, the front ends we deliver are ever-more mediated by the properties of those devices. The inequality between the high-end and low-end, even in wealthy countries, is only growing. What we choose to do in response defines what it means to practice UX engineering ethically.

Article demonstrates how origami is Turing complete

convert from curl to a bunch of other formats

Physically based approaches to rendering, where an accurate modeling of the physics of light scattering is at the heart of image synthesis, offer both visual realism and predictability. Now in a comprehensively updated new edition, this best-selling computer graphics textbook sets the standard for physically based rendering in the industry and the field.Physically Based Rendering describes both the mathematical theory behind a modern photorealistic rendering system and its practical implementation. A method known as literate programming combines human-readable documentation and source code into a single reference that is specifically designed to aid comprehension. The book’s leading-edge algorithms, software, and ideas—including new material on GPU ray tracing—equip the reader to design and employ a full-featured rendering system capable of creating stunning imagery. This essential text represents the future of real-time graphics.

A pre-made spreadsheet for running accessibility audits

In a newly translated column called “The Author of the Robots Defends Himself,” published in Lidové Noviny on June 9, 1935, Čapek expresses his frustration about how his original vision for robots was being subverted. His arguments still apply to both modern robotics and AI. In this column, he referred to himself in the third-person:

For his robots were not mechanisms. They were not made of sheet metal and cogwheels. They were not a celebration of mechanical engineering. If the author was thinking of any of the marvels of the human spirit during their creation, it was not of technology, but of science. With outright horror, he refuses any responsibility for the thought that machines could take the place of people, or that anything like life, love, or rebellion could ever awaken in their cogwheels. He would regard this somber vision as an unforgivable overvaluation of mechanics or as a severe insult to life.