AI stands for “Artificial Inanity”
4 Aug 2025
There’s something icky about LLM-generated text when you think it’s written by a human. I think I finally put my finger on one reason why I feel this way.
...
Technical Blog
Bedrock Version 1.5.0 Released
15 Jul 2025
I just released version 1.5.0 of Emacs Bedrock—a super minimal starter kit for Emacs. This is a minor change: I’ve fixed a few bugs and added a package or two to some of the optional config files under extras/.
How I Take Notes for Research
11 Jul 2025
The key principle I follow is this: how I take my notes will evolve over time. I do not stick to any system too dogmatically.
That said, I’ve settled on a system that’s been fairly robust and stable for the past few years. I have tweaked it here and there to make it easier for me to find what I need.
...Programmers and Their Monospace Blogs
24 Jun 2025
Many developers seem to have a fanatic obsession with monospace fonts and using them to make their blogs look “cool”. I won’t call out anyone’s blog specifically, but you don’t have to look to hard to find some. As an example theme using a monospace font by default, look at hugo-theme-terminal, which has over 2,400 stars on GitHub. If you have a blog or are thinking about starting one, and you are writing mostly prose (you probably are), I have one suggestion for you about fonts:
Do not use monospace fonts for prose.
...Real Programmers
13 May 2025
There’s been an explosion of tools for software development. At the same time there’s a growing sense that software quality isn’t what it used to be—or that developers these days don’t understand what it takes to be a “real” programmer, whatever that means. I’m not that old, but I have some old-school tool preferences. Some tools I really like; in other cases I feel that by not adopting particular habits, I’ve gained or retained an edge over others in the software development space.
...A Quick Guide to LaTeX
6 Feb 2025
LaTeX is a powerful typesetting system hamstrung by a few decades-old decisions and some… ahem… questionable design decisions. Nevertheless, its ability to typeset technical documents remains unmatched, and it enjoys wide support across STEM fields. Learning LaTeX is a worthy use of your time, if you intend to pursue a career in science.
This is meant as a short and simple how-to guide for learning LaTeX. It is not meant to be comprehensive, but rather serve as a guide of where to look to get the information you need to know. It is organized as a problem → solution mapping.
...What's New in Emacs: Last Decade Edition
14 Dec 2024
Emacs has come a long way in the past decade. This is meant as a guide to anyone who’s been using stock or near-stock Emacs for some years and wants a quick update on the new shiny stuff that comes bundled with Emacs.
...Should Programming Languages be Safe or Powerful?
21 Nov 2024
Should a programming language be powerful and let a programmer do a lot, or should it be safe and protect the programmer from bad mistakes? Contrary to what the title insinuates, these are not diametrically opposed attributes. Nevertheless, this is the mindset that underlies notions such as, “macros, manual memory management, etc. are power tools—they’re not supposed to be safe.” If safety and power are not necessarily opposed, why does this notion persist?
...Towards the Fastest Brainf*** Implementation Ever
22 Oct 2024
In my last post I described how I made a very fast BF interpreter. Well, there’s a lot more speed to be had with an optimizing compiler. This post is a write-up of my assignment for a compilers class, so the post a little rougher than normal.
...How to Make Racket Go (Almost) As Fast As C
15 Oct 2024
I recently wrote about using first-class functions to help make a BF interpreter. This is a follow-up post to describe a nifty solution to a tricky problem that made my program go 2–5× faster and put it about on-par with an interpreter written in pure C.
A basic interpreter works by walking down the AST and evaluating nodes recursively: when the interpreter encounters an expression, it dispatches on the type of expression to decide how to perform the evaluation. Here’s the key insight to get a massive speed bump with very little effort: that dispatch is expensive and can be performed ahead-of-time. We can walk through the code once and precompute all the dispatching work.
...