Computing-and-Programming

Installation Install and enable the cron daemon. sudo pacman -S cronie sudo systemctl enable --now cronie.service systemctl status cronie.service # should be active (running) Setup To edit crontab, run crontab -e If you get an error like this, /bin/sh: line 1: /usr/bin/vi: No such file or directory crontab: "/usr/bin/vi" exited with status 127 pass the following commands: set -Ux EDITOR emacs set -Ux VISUAL emacs This defaults to emacs across different Fish sessions. Then with crontab -e add jobs like this. ...

The previous post about fast navigation involved getting to the right directory in the file explorer. Zoxide achieves that functionality for the terminal. To install, run the following. (fzf, fuzzy finder, is optional.) sudo pacman -S zoxide fzf Next, initialize the shell. For Fish, add the following to ~/.config/fish/config.fish. zoxide init fish | source This step differs for other shells: Shell File Line Bash ~/.bashrc eval "$(zoxide init bash)" Zsh ~/.zshrc eval "$(zoxide init zsh)" Fish ~/.config/fish/config.fish zoxide init fish | source Once configured, Zoxide will note your use of cd. It will remember the places you visited. You will be able to then jump straight to the relevant directory. ...

Background I have been using the Search functionality within the Dolphin file manager for KDE Plasma increasingly recently; however, the speed with which the results would show up left much to be desired. I went looking for faster options and chose Baloo indexing with KRunner, which runs a lot faster than Dolphin crawling through the directories on every search. Setup Step 1: Check the current state balooctl6 status If it says “not running” or “could not be opened,” proceed below. ...

I have listened to several discussions on the topic of a possible emergency ushered in by artificial general intelligence. Diary of a CEO : AI Emergency: The AI Labs Are Lying To Everyone, He Says 99% Chance Of Extinction All-In Podcast : Jensen Huang: The Doomer Hoax, Superintelligence is Here, and The Future of AI (ft. President Trump) and many more… My thoughts on the matter at the moment are as follows. ...

The terms agents, agentic AI, agentic development, etc. get used a lot in discussions today. I first paid attention to it after listening to DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Agentic Engineering, Vibe Coding & Linux. Then I started understanding what it was after listening to Cal Newport’s discussion of GPT 6. At their core, AI agents are prompt loops. At each iteration, the agent assembles context from available inputs, invokes an LLM to reason and select an action, executes that action, observes the outcome, and feeds the observation back into the next iteration. This process repeats until the task is complete or a defined stopping condition is reached. (Copied verbatim from What is the AI Agent Loop?). This is the perceive → reason → plan → act → observe loop. ...

This tutorial focuses on SQL usage for data analysis (rather than transaction processing). DuckDB is the engine primarily used, so some commands might not work with SQLite and vice versa. Commands largely drawn from https://www.dbvis.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/SQL-Cheat-Sheet.pdf Datasets Palmer Penguins, Chinook, Elevation of Indian Cities. The raw datasets are located in ~/Datasets/Raw. Set 1: Loading and Exporting Loading Data cd to the Raw datasets folder. run duckdb chinook.sqlite. this opens a duckdb command line with chinook loaded. run describe; or show; to see the tables and data types. Alternatively, ...

Pretty much everything I have to say on the topic is encapsulated in the title. Whether it be through Quarto + .qmd or Emacs + org-mode, the overhead is significant. Many of your experiments do not need to persist. Also, when programming, the ratio of code to the “literate components” is high enough to justify the exclusive use of comments for such components. Learn using scripts, running those through your preferred IDE. Only at the point of publishing (and possibly subsequent teaching through live demonstrations) should you consider using computational notebooks. By the time you use such a notebook, you must already have a good idea of the outcome.

The Cost of Decentralization I have been a happy Artix Linux user for several months. I had got the setup to be exactly as I liked. The choice of the distribution was prompted by a desire to contribute to the cause of keeping Linux decentralized. (See videos form Youtux.) Artix helped me retain the use of the package ecosystem of Arch while using an init system that isn’t systemd (something monolythic and centralizing) (I was using OpenRC), and without being tied to the wayland display server (which, again, seems to be pushed upon us by corporate forces in Linux (I was using XLibre, although, sadly, Artix just reverted to X.org). It needed more configuration than some of the other distros I have used. But for a one-time setup, I did not mind that. ...

These are some related ideas, easy to conflate. Terminal Emulator (aka, Terminal) When people say “terminal”, they mean the terminal emulator. Terminals used to be a physical thing in the days of yore when computers were the size of houses. Terminal emulators (like Alacritty, Konsole, Windows Terminal, etc.) render a screen with a command line the way these old terminals used to provide. Command Line The command line is the literal line in the terminal emulator which accepts commands as inputs. Commands in a terminal emulator are usually written in a ’language’ like Bash, PowerShell, and POSIX sh. However, command lines can also be for other types of languages: Java, C, Python, R, etc. For instance, you can be in a terminal emulator typing Bash commands like pwd and ls on the command line, but then you type the command python and enter the python command line. ...

Placing Images I could not find a way to automatically display the images. The best way seems to be to manually write the following. Replace image.png with the full path if the file is not in the immediate location as the org file. [[file: image.png]] With this, images can be toggled on and off with iimage-mode. You can make use of more options in the following manner. #+CAPTION: Penguin body mass #+ATTR_HTML: :width 600 [[./image.png]] Exporting to HTML I installed the package nice-org-html for exporting org files to html. Then the exporting is simply a matter of M-x nice-org-html-export-to-html followed by accepting the offered defaults. ...