Something I learned today from a coworker: if you turn your monitor sideways, subpixel anti-aliasing gets completely broken. This isn’t as much of an issue on today’s high-dpi displays, but for anything lower than a 4k screen, the effect can be noticeable.
...This week I created a custom build of the Iosevka font. I’ve used Input Mono for a long time now, and was very happy with it. However, it was missing a few glyphs that I wanted to use. Moreover, I didn’t have a license for the Input font to use on e.g. my blog. Iosevka is stupendously customizable, so I thought I’d see if I could get something close to Input’s styles.
...This is an experimental type checker/inferer for a simple lambda calculus. All the source for this may be found on my Codeberg repository.
...Today I figured out how to add a tab-bar to Emacs. I didn’t like having it in the mode-line: it gets duplicated for every window and my mode-line space is precious. In contrast, the right side of the tab-bar was always blank.
I’m not on many social media platforms these days. I like it like that. I mostly follow some academics and people who post interesting stuff. I post only occasionally, usually to show off my recent hiking exploits. I’ve come up with some rules for myself (all subject to change) about what I post.
A post must meet all the following criteria:
It must be positive and uplifting.
There’s enough that’s negative on the internet. Don’t add to it.
...μKanren (“micro-Kanren”) is a tiny, embeddable logic programming language. It’s easy to understand and implement in almost any language. It’s a great case study of an embedded language: unlike other common “embedded” languages like SQL or regex, which normally are represented as just plain-old strings, μKanren takes more advantage of the host language’s features.
I recommend reading the original paper: it’s short, well-written, and easy to understand.
I did a write-up which you can read on Codeberg. The README is my set of notes that I made while walking through the implementation of the paper, and the repository contains an implementation in Racket. I’ve included some fun use cases like a type checker/inference engine that takes up only 37 lines of code!
...Brief update on the blog: I had been running a custom fork of the Anatole theme; it diverged pretty heavily, and I found a nice way to customize the CSS. Behold! The new-and-improved blog.
Some of the new extensions to Anatole include the ability to set a static page as your profile; I’ll do this and include links to lists of publications and whatnot. This should make my blog a better place for my professional/academic life.
...I have a hard time keeping these terms straight:
This is intended as a short guide for myself; maybe someone else will find it useful too! Note that this is all to the best of my knowledge and understanding at the present time; if there be faults, they be the faults of myself. I welcome correction and clarification if I am wrong.
Liveness and safety deal with properties of a system. Contrast that with soundness and completion, which are adjectives about analyses.
...A collection of what worked well and what didn’t in classes that I took this semester. This is partially for me to record what things reduced friction for me as a student so that one day, should I become a professor, I’ll be able to run the lowest-friction class ever!
...The following is from a essay from a class on German literature and film.
Fritz Lang’s movie Metropolis is primarily about the struggle between the oppressed working class and the ruling elite. What drives this tension, however, is a particular view of technology and technological progress that exacerbates the problems the film focuses on. This mentality is called high modernist ideology by Scott in his book Seeing Like a State:
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