Moonlight Xanadu

When working with some files for our paper, I needed to extract some input data from an archive, not all as there's many of them, convert them, and then run it all through some pipelines. There's different tools such as Nix or Snakemake which allow you to systematically work with isolated pipelines.

A few let's say statements about system design decisions followed by ponderings. Efficiency is actively sidelined.

I've created a repo for the package which implements an MVP of this system, using algorithms from the paper The Simple Essence of Algebraic Subtyping, specifically implementing Simple-Sub.

I try to approach most technology with a healthy dose of scepticism. But I do try to approach it, most technology isn't worldchanging yet almost none of it is dry of some good ideas.

I did make about a 14€ mistake today, which I want to write down so I can be reminded of it and not spend another Wei on this nonsense. I did set this money aside for experiments and the sort today, but I'd still very much preffered if that didn't end up being the case.

Today I did an experiment, way back when I played SWTOR they allowed you to play in the starting area before the download was finished, similarly World of Tanks allows one to play with low-tier tanks before the high-tier download etc.

It's a nice thought to be able to play immediately, games are specifically great for this since much of their data is stored in separate files most of which are unloaded at any given time.

And with modern tools like FUSE, we can simulate this behaviour for arbitrary games.

Computers are built on top of abstractions, I would perhaps even be willing to say that it is one of the few things in life that are pure abstractions all the way down. And while languages are excellent at that, some parts of the current computer systems are rather more lacking.

If I were to tell you that I want a trivial program, that takes two numbers and adds them, how much work is that gonna be?

I went through a few configurations recently trying to get the perfect networking setup.

I gave a bit of my time today, to an attempt at packaging Starship for Guix. After having it on Nix for a while now, since it was a simple to setup prompt, with very sane defaults.

You might be surprised to see both Guix and Nix in the tags today.

That’s because I decided to look into something that’s been sitting in the back of my mind for a few years now.

There’s these two awesome projects, that sadly don’t really want to talk nice with each other. So what if, we made something that could be the middleman.

Today we’ll just be looking at the ideas and possibilities, nothing concrete.

G-Expressions are one of the more difficult edges one needs to understand when learning Guix more into depth, especially because their errors can be slightly cryptic and as it may be, usually the more different explanations the merrier for difficult subjects, since maybe the next one is the one for you that’ll make it click.

This is quite a specific document for quite specific people My UNI teaches a course on Programming Paradigms, which is great and all, however it focuses solely on those, even though it teaches Racket and Prolog as a byproduct. Sadly omitting some crucial general programming concepts in the languages, for Scheme at least that I hope to introduce here.

When you want a list of regular files in a directory in Guile Scheme, you might want to recursively list everything in a tree and check the files in there. And you might see scandir which works nicely, and has an incredibly simple interface, however it doesn’t recurse. Aaand it returns . and .. which you need to throw away and it doesn’t show the entire path, so if you’d want to recurse yourself you need to deal with that as well.

I’ve seen the Linux version of this quote stated so many times, that after quite a while of using both systems, I have to make a few points.

This code is a completely valid C source file:

$($){
  return $
;}

main () {
  printf("%d\n", $(23))
;}

and I don’t even mean that it’s part of a project or whatever, this verbatim compiles in both gcc and clang!!! Go ahead try it, I’ll wait.

This is a reaction to some of the points made in DistroTube's video on GNU Guix.

I was walking along with a dear friend of mine, debating about the universe and everything. And he mentioned a school project he did, a bencode parser written in Haskell.

Hello everyone, as somebody living in Emacs atop GUIX, browsing with Firefox and letting Sourcehut host my Git and website, I owe immeasurable thanks to all the wonderful people that make all these things possible.