Zig is a newer language that is only on version 0.16.0. Despite it not being at version 1.x yet and therefore could have major breaking changes, there is a lot to get excited about with the current implementation of the language. It shows such promise that I’m learning it now and hope for it to become a regular member of my toolbox. Here’s what excites me about it:

Type System Sanity

I’m a very big fan of Programming Language Theory (PL Theory) and of course that means type-systems and how to encode guarantees into the types. Part of that is having the actual type system be sane and detailed enough that you can represent those requirements and prevent users (including yourself) from breaking those requirements. Zig has an advanced metaprogramming technique called comptime that I will discuss later. But part of why comptime works well is that the underlying system it builds on is sane.

I’ve been on PTO for the past two weeks to recharge and I am feeling energized to go back to work tomorrow. Part of this is getting the rest I’ve needed and spending time on my hobbies. But another part of this is the massive shift in public opinion on LLMs and their usefulness. I thought LLMs were a dead-end tech and not a path to true AGI (Artificial Generalized Intelligence - the holy grail of computer science) around 2023 or 2024, so seeing the entire industry be fully onboard with this tech has been very demoralizing. It has done nothing but take up space from real research that could be happening. I used to love reading Hacker News every day to expand my knowledge, but the majority of the content the past few years have just been “how you can better utilize LLMs”. So let’s start by talking about the problems with them.

About a year ago I walked into a game store in my new old town and saw a Blood Bowl Second Edition box on the shelf. During the Pandemic my friends and I ran frequent Blood Bowl leagues using the computer version (see my discord bot for managing leagues), but I had never played the physical game.
In fact, I had never painted a mini before and thought that was a huge barrier to entry. I assumed I was going to be terrible at it and that kept me from trying any miniature games. But here I was in a new apartment and this city actually had other people that played Blood Bowl! So I picked up the box, not knowing what I was getting into.
A guy at the store (who unfortunately moved away the next week to be closer to family. Same reason I moved, can’t blame him.) got me started by telling me to lookup the slapchop technique and showing me some pictures of his orange and navy Tyranids. I fully admit that my Tyranid color scheme is a copy of his. I love the orange and blue combo and it looks incredible on Tyranids.

I originally wrote this for a friend that was switching their homeserver over from Windows to Linux and needed help keeping a Minecraft server alive. I hope it can help others!

Systemd is the Linux init system. It includes a bunch of rules on services/devices/other resources that the system needs to run in order to function. It also includes complex dependency management so that you can set up services to only start when pre-requisites are done.

TL;DR

I really like 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 10-2, and 12. All are compelling in their unique ways. Look them up, play what seems interesting to you.

Most culturally relevant

FF7 - your party are ecoterrorists trying to stop a megacorp from literally sucking the planet’s lifeforce dry. No further comment.

Best overall

FF10 - has a compelling story with some information drops that totally change your perspective on what’s going on, a great combat system, interesting character progression system (the sphere grid), and - besides the temple puzzles that I hate with a passion - is very fun.

Introduction

I’ve recently started playing Magic the Gathering and have been experimenting with a few decks to try and learn the game better and see which style(s) of decks I like to play. In order to do so I’m playing practice matches against myself. Despite my best efforts, one of the decks I’m very excited about, the Bloomburrow squirrel deck, has lost most of the practice matches I’ve played against myself.

Method Call Syntax

In Nim, a.f(b) is really just syntactic sugar for f(a, b). Note: they look like methods but aren’t attached to the type/object at all. Which function to call will be figured out at compile time, just like normal function calls.

You can use this to implement pseudo extension methods on standard types like strings:

import
  nim_utils/files,
  os,
  strformat

proc makeBackup(filename: string) =
  let backupPath = fmt"{filename}.bak"
  case filename.fileType
  of ftFile, ftSymlink:
    copyFile(filename, backupPath)
  of ftDir:
    copyDir(filename, backupPath)
  else:
    raise newException(IOError, fmt"Cannot make backup of {filename}")


for f in @["fstab", "systemd"]:
    fmt"/etc/{f}".makeBackup() # Same as makeBackup(fmt"/etc/{f}")

You can also use this to chain calls together nicely:

I’ve been interested in algebraic effects in programming languages for a while, but they’ve been theoretical-only for a while. That’s soon to change though!

OCaml early on adopted algebraic effects and handlers as a way to implement concurrency, something that had been lacking in the language until now. But changing the langugage’s memory model, runtime, garbage collector, etc. proved to be a long task.

OCaml 5.0 is on the horizon at last and includes an implementation of algebraic effects. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any good tutorials on the version of effect handlers in 5.0. I found a really good tutorial from 5 years ago that was based on a proposed version of OCaml effects, but nothing modern.

Intro

Bon Iver is easily one of my favorite artists. So much so that I love singing along with the songs. Sadly, my musical chops are not enough to fully recreate or even do these complex songs justice. However, I do what I can and a friend told me they liked the stripped down, simple versions that I do. So here’s a collection of all the ones I’ve done so far. I’ve included links to the originals for easy comparison.

This book took me by surprise with how much I enjoyed it. The book starts out kind of slow, but once I got around half way through it, it really picked up. A large part of this is that it’s very similar to cyberpunk books, where it just throws you into the setting and very slowly reveals things. Characters will talk about events and things like they normally would. They don’t need to explain these concepts to each other, they’re already very familiar with them. This is disorienting and leads to a slow start, but I think this book will be very rewarding if I ever decide to reread it, since I will already have a good grasp on the setting. Eventually though, you figure out what they are talking about and then the pages start to fly. A lot can happen in just a short amount of time, and because you understand the setting, a lot can be left unsaid. Things will happen and the book expects you to piece together the implications. There are plenty of moments where I would read a paragraph, and then be overwhelmed by ideas of how things were going to play out. And I wanted to keep reading to find out. The book’s strength is easily its world-building, so let’s talk more about that.