Shrutarshi Basu 

Got nerd sniped and spent a couple days moving from Spacemacs to Doom Emacs, so I wrote up my initial thoughts and experience: v3.basus.me/journal/2…

Flow state programming is a great restorative activity for mental health. I really missed this.

Wrote a quick post about deciding to move from Hugo to Lume because of how Hugo does not Spark Joy.

Polar Nuclear Lighthouses

From Warren Ellis and English Russia:

So the Russians erected autonomous nuclear-powered lighthouses. Which worked great, until the collapse of the Soviet Union. In fact, they probably would have been fine after that, if people hadn’t looted them for copper and anything else that looked like it wasn’t nailed down too hard. Including, apparently, reactor shielding.

It’s wild to me that the Soviets built a network of nuclear-powered lighthouses, and that they got looted by scavengers leading to radioactive deadzones. This also reminds me of A24’s excellent movie, The Lighthouse, which is required viewing if you’ve ever lived in New England.

Sara Soueidan talks about not wanting to work on her website because even using a static site generator is so complicated. It’s an issue I’m facing right now too. One of HTML’s original sins was not having an abstraction mechanism. In an ideal world, we’d be using something like Pollen to build our own layers and generate HTML5 at the end. But we don’t live in an ideal world, we live in a fallen world, hence we’re stuck with Markdown, HTMX, and all the various JavaScript thingies.

Happy POPL Till You Dropl day to all who celebrate! May the odds be ever in your favor.

I sent my Beats earbuds through the wash (case and all) and they still work. I’m pleasantly surprised.

I’ve been going down the “make a programming language” rabbit hole the last few weeks, but I also think I should really write more Rust first:

without.boats/blog/owne…

Recovered 17GB of space by clearing out my Trash folder. Take out your trash, folks!

The Acolyte seems like it’s off to a good start, but I am miffed that we only got about 15 minutes of Carrie Anne Moss as a Jedi. The trailers made it seem like she’d have a pretty major role in the show.

For most of my adult life I’ve struggled with purpose, what I want to die with my life, and how to go about it. Today for perhaps the first time I managed to fully articulate what it is I want to do. I just wish I’d figured this out 10 years ago.

Some days, like today, I really hate that we don’t have a standardized instant messaging protocol. I want to be able to send short messages to friends and professionals acquaintances without figuring out which of n apps and platforms I should use.

Watching Dune Part 2 last weekend really rekindled my love of languages. I think that I really am a languages person at heart, and it’s incidental that the languages I deal with are programming languages.

As I’ve been learning more Rust I’ve come to appreciate it as a step forward for practical systems programming languages, but boy is it ugly.

Every time I teach a new session of my Intro to Computer Science class, I am increasingly convinced that Python is in fact a really bad first programming language.

I was not prepared for how much of my time in my Intro to Computing class is taken up by teaching basic file management.

Man, Agents of SHIELD was so good. Yes, it was completely crazy and went totally flying off the rails half way through, but it did so in the best way possible.

There’s something particularly depressing about coming back from Spring Break to “we’ve had two winters yes, but what about third winter”.

Finally upgrading to macOS Sonoma. Send thoughts and prayers.

Really curious to see the upcoming Apple TV show Franklin, about Ben Franklin, the objectively best Founding Father. Could be terrible, but I hope it’ll be great.

Time for some spring cleaning, starting with cleaning out my open tabs across various devices.

Programming in Racket feels like what I imagine waterbending is like.

In addition to Daylight Savings Time-induced tiredness, and having to teach an 8:15am class, today I also had to deal with Vermont shifting into “we’ve had one winter yes, but what about second winter” mode.

I added a stream to the website for short posts, status updates, single links, pictures and so forth. Basically, I want it act like a tumblelog, or microblog. The stream is currently hosted on micro.blog, which may change in the not-too-distant future.

Feed readers really need to be baked into browsers. It’s really annoying to have to copy a URL, switch to a different app, paste it in and then subscribe to the feed. Subscribing to a site’s feed should be as easy as a single click (and one or two more if you want to categorize).