Micro Blog

Waiting for #NixOS to merge the PR for #Mastodon 4.2 so that I can deploy it on https://fantastic.earth.
#MastoAdmin

My fork of the #Mastodon digest has accumulated enough new features that I'm getting antsy of writing #Python, which is what the original is written in. I’m thinking of a rewriting it, but I'm conflicted between using #Haskell, which is my comfort language, #Golang, which may be easier for others to contribute to, and #Rust, which I want to learn.

The program involves fetching a bunch of JSON data from the internet, doing some statistical calculations on that data, and then outputting an HTML page.

What do you think I should rewrite it in? #Programming

X¹ is gonna take it² from ya.

¹ X was formerly known as #Twitter.
² 'It' refers to the money they are planning to charge.

One of my biggest regrets of my life is not being able to watch #DeathCabForCutie on stage because I was stuck in a typhoon, just 100 meters away from the stage. In grief, I gave up listening to them almost completely for many years after that. #music #personal

I could hear the echos of the songs they played from where I was stuck, utterly drenched and tired. The far-away sounds still haunt my dreams.

I almost died of hypothermia that night but that's a story for another time.

"You think you know what it takes to tell the user it's their birthday? You know nothing!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ

#SoftwareEngineering

Never knew that closing channels in #golang is such an involved affair: https://go101.org/article/channel-closing.html
#programming

#programming What is your preferred way of following log files:

Seems like almost everyone uses tail or some variation of it to follow log files. Well, I'm glad that there is at least one person out there who uses less to follow logs like me.

I've been trying to build a personal #AlgorithmicTimeline for #Mastodon for myself for some time and I've got a basic version working. Here's how it works:

1. Fetch posts in my home timeline for last 24 hours.
2. Apply my Mastodon filters on them to remove unwanted posts.
3. Remove private posts.
4. Remove posts that I have liked, boosted or replied to.
5. Remove foreign language posts.
6. Fetch like, boost and reply counts for the posts from their origin server.
7. Partition posts into boosts and non-boosts, and apply next steps for each partition separately.
8. Assign scores to posts using this formula:
`score = geometric_mean(like_count, boost_count, reply_count) / square_root(follower_count_of_poster)`
9. If a post contains any of my specified favourite tags, increase its score by multiplying it by a constant factor (I use 1.2).
10. If a post is from any of my specified favourite accounts, increase its score by a constant factor (I use 1.2).

1/2

continued …

11. Reduce the scores of each post by a factor of `power(2, (time_now - post_create_time)/half_life)` where `half_life` is something like 6 hours. This causes older posts to have lower scores.
12. Group posts into threads they are part of, if any. Then select the highest scored post from each thread. This prevents posts from popular threads from taking over.
13. Sort posts by their score and select top 10% of posts.
14. Randomly select some posts from the bottom 90% of posts.
15. Render these posts as a webpage and serve on internet.
16. Run this entire process twice or thrice a day, and read the rendered webpage, interacting with the posts.

The initial inspiration for this algorithm came from @MattHodges's work (steps 1–4, 7–8, 13, 15) that I improved upon (steps 5–6, 9–12, 14, 16).

I have few more ideas like reducing the scores of posts with certain tags, but the current algorithm works pretty well for me. I'm also thinking about how to make it near-realtime instead of a batch process.

2/2

I feel happy when I find people who are/were programmers and also write/wrote fiction #books. Like here's a person who has mastered the languages of both the natural and machine world. It give me hope for my own creative endeavors beyond #programming.

Similar feelings for programmer musicians.

Today, after a long time, I'm playing my playlist of songs I want to learn to play on drums. Some are easy to play, some are difficult, all fun though. #music

I must have been very ambitious back then because this playlist has My Favorite Things by John Coltrane in it. 🤯

Injured my back while lifting the baby. Is this what being old feels like? #personal

Finished reading "Type Systems for Memory Safety" https://borretti.me/article/type-systems-memory-safety by Fernando Borretti. It is a comprehensive review of various type system features across different #ProgrammingLanguages that are used to enforce (varying degrees of) memory safety at compile time.

As expected, it talks a lot about #Rust because Rust is probably the most used PL with compile time memory safety, but it features other languages like Ada, Val and Austral as well.

An interesting read if you are interested in #compilers.

I wonder where this "it's impossible to quit Vim" meme comes from. I have successfully quit Vim dozens of times in my decade long #programming career.

Mostly by yanking out the power cord.

If you are wondering why there was a gap of 40 minutes between the posts, I was busy trying to quit Vim.

Read https://noidea.dog/glue by @whereistanya and found this:

> In fact, doing glue work too early can be career limiting, or even push people out of the industry.

This reminds me of the time when I was the only senior (and glue) engineer in an important team of a big e-commerce company in India. I was coordinating seven projects between multiple teams, seting up the CI process, doing code reviews, mentoring multiple people, writing design documents etc.

At the end of the year, my manager gave me a bad review saying I didn't have enough code contribution. Ironically, that was probably the year when I had most impact on a company’s bottom-line. But the bad review after such hard work broke my heart. I switched to a different job soon after. It has been the shortest work stint of my whole career (1.25 years).

It's great to be a glue engineer if that's what you love doing. But it is very important to make sure that your contributions are counted.

#personal

To be honest, the aforementioned company was infamous for its bad work culture. A friend had a bet going with me that I wouldn't last even a year in it. Well, I won the bet but at the cost of my mental health.

Any #MastoAdmin willing to share their experience of upgrading to #Mastodon 4.2? In particular, I'm concerned about the increase in resource usage by ElasticSearch.

I'd also like to know if removing the old posts using the maintenance command removes them from the search index.

I really miss a #ProgramingLanguages conference in #India. There used to be Functional Conf, which at least covered functional PLs, but they are not running anymore. And I can't be bothered to secure a visa to go to abroad ones. :sadface:

Being a #parent to a new human, I can never tell why I'm feeling unwell. Is it lack of sleep? Stress of feeding the baby? Stress of work? Daily commute wearing me down? An infection? Am I just hungry? Ate something wrong yesterday? Am I unwell because the baby is unwell? Or is it the other way? I have no clue. #personal

TIL that I have to run `home-manager expire-generations` before running `nix-collect-garbage` to actually delete all the old stuff in my #Nix store. Till now I kept wondering why I have five versions of VSCode installed on my machine.

Ah, there is goes:

11778 store paths deleted, 18809.04 MiB freed

Feeling so clean now.

I'm trying to set up #Netdata alerts on #NixOS for https://fantastic.earth but I can't find good documentation or examples of it. Help me out #lazyweb? #MastoAdmin

This is pretty cool: Parabolas in sequences of digits from the Fibonacci sequence https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1416854/parabolas-in-sequences-of-digits-from-the-fibonacci-sequence
#maths

The good thing about having cucumber juice is that you are well hydrated. The bad thing about it is cucumber.

Is it weird to crave ice-cream all the time because you haven’t slept a full night in over a year? Too bad, there is no ice-cream in the fridge because I ate all of it already. #personal

I’ve been on Mastodon for nine month now, so maybe I should make an introduction post now?

#QT So that's why my legs are so strong! https://botsin.space/@trekkies/110898699520011164

Me starting to learn #Rust in 2023:

HEY COMPILER, if you know where to add the missing semicolons, why don't you add them yourself‽

Now that I follow around 500 people here, I often wake up to over a thousand #Mastodon posts. What are some good ways to keep up with them?

This post led me to explore #Mastodon clients with unconventional interfaces and I found some interesting one:

– Ebou (https://terhech.de/ebou) has the layout of a desktop messenger: leftmost column shows account names that have posted recently; clicking on them shows recent posts by them in an adjacent column, and clicking on the posts shows their conversation threads in the next column.

– Tut (https://tut.anv.nu) is a terminal UI client inspired by Vim, the code editor. It supports Vim like keyboard navigation as well.

– Macstodon (https://github.com/smallsco/macstodon) is a Classic Mac OS app, and looks kind of like old-school IRC clients.

– Stomp (https://stomp.social) run on Apple watch. You can scroll timelines or mention or lists but only one post at a time.

– Mastotron (https://github.com/mastotron/mastotron) completely eschews the concept of linear timelines and instead presents posts as graph of connections.

If you know any other such unconventional clients, please feel free to add to this thread.

Forgot to mention Toot.

– Toot (https://github.com/ihabunek/toot) is a CLI client, which provides you commands to interact with Mastodon. For example, to see the recent posts by me, you can run `toot timeline -1 -a abnv@fantastic.earth`. You can also use it to automate interactions. For example, to follow accounts that recently made posts with the Haskell tag on the https://discuss.systems instance, you can run: `toot timeline -1 -i discuss.systems -t Haskell | grep -oP "@[^ ]*@[^ ]*" | sort -u | xargs -n1 toot follow`. I love it!

https://fantastic.earth went down for few hours today because #NixOS decided to build the new nodejs package from scratch on the server. And that ate all the CPU and memory, causing the #Mastodon server to become unresponsive. I need to figure out a remote building strategy for Nix so that this doesn’t happen again.

@arun and I have finally succeeded in setting up the remote build for the https://fantastic.earth #NixOS setup.

We ran into an issue where Nix runs a command on the remote machine with sudo, but we didn't want to give sudo permissions to the remote build user. It turns out, sudo is not really needed and the build works fine without it. So @arun hacked up a no-op sudo substitute, which when put in the $PATH satisfied Nix and the build worked. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Finally, no more build caused downtimes!

I really wish feed readers would support syntax highlighting of code in blog articles. Then I’d finally have no reason to go to blog websites, and would read everything from the comfort of my reader.

I’ll never forgive Sword Art Online for making Isekai #anime so popular that 90% of anime made these days are Isekai. The deluge of so many mediocre Isekai anime has completely destroyed my interest in the subgenre that used to me one of my favourite.

The biggest problem with mechanical #keyboards is that you can buy one only once in ten years but the new models keep coming out all the time.

Attending an introductory course to #Rust tomorrow after trying to get started on it and giving up multiple times on my own. Hopefully it will click this time.

EDIT: This is the course I’m attending https://google.github.io/comprehensive-rust.

Done with the first day of the course. I have a better understanding of ownership in #Rust than before, but coming from garbage collected languages like Java and Python, I am still struggling a bit with move and copy semantics of variables.

Did any #MastoAdmin upgrade to #Mastodon version 4.2 yet? Do you have any additional notes?

Now that #Mastodon will have list import and export in version 4.2, someone should build a service to share lists. That would make it easier for new people to join and get started.

Followed a bunch of interesting people found using https://whomtofollow.com. Hoping that it'll make my timeline more lively, maybe even change my life!

Switched to yearly licence for @ivory after some fighting with the Apple payment system. I hope Ivory adds more useful features to make it worth it.

There's a new season of Futurama‽ This upsets my whole worldview.

Today's XKCD comic touches my soul. https://mastodon.xyz/@xkcd/110821269775454063

My today's cab's engine sounds like a sports car one. Though there is no opportunity to go fast because of this terrible traffic. Maybe the driver uses this car for racing in nights?

Toot is not a very feature rich client for #Mastodon but it is certainly useful for automating interactions using scripts.

Made some #python code multithreaded today. Now it runs in 30 minutes instead of 2 hours. Protip: always log the thread name in multithreaded programs.

#Spotify is playing me 80s Bollywood disco music today for some unknow reason. This is not a complaint. #music

So, umm, how is Threads doing now?

My shoes used to wear out on the inside of the feet because I have flat feet, and caused me knee pains. So I started using the foot arch support insoles for correction, and then my shoes started wearing out on the outside of the feet. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Now, I alternate between using and not using the insoles so that my shoes wear out evenly. #running

Used https://federike.social to quickly and easily categorise the accounts I follow into lists. I think it'll help me in keeping better tab on posts. #Mastodon

Just paid my dues for #selfhosting #Mastodon https://fantastic.earth, #Pixelfed https://arti.stic.earth and #Bookwyrm https://linguistic.earth. Came out $4.8 for a month.

I just noticed that @trunksapp #Mastodon app has gained inline threading of posts in timelines! This makes it so much easier to read threads. However it sorts threads by the first post date instead of last, which causes new replies to old posts to appear much later in timelines. I wish they'd fix this.

I took two back-to-back early morning flights last weekend and only today I feel rested enough to do any mental work. I'd have recovered quicker but baby fell sick and I couldn't sleep at nights. I was on vacation the whole week but all I could do was to watch Netflix and scroll Mastodon. Couple of more days left in my vacation, in which I hope to write and publish a blog post. #personal

Of course, I wasn't able to write a blog post. Between caring for the baby, working for my job, and training for the 10k run, I barely have enough mental and physical strength left to do anything else productive. It feels bad but there is nothing I can do but persevere till I build enough stamina to be able to do my other hobbies. On the bright side, I can run over 8km now and not almost die afterwards.

The #Pixelfed companion to https://fantastic.earth is up on https://arti.stic.earth now. Check out my profile @abnv@arti.stic.earth.

And now, we have the #Bookwyrm companion to https://fantastic.earth also up at https://linguistic.earth. Follow me @abhin4v.

It's the file-my-taxes kinda day. And I must admit, I really dislike doing it.

#runnersofmastodon How is your experience with bone conduction open ear headphones like https://shokz.com/products/openrun ? On paper, they seem pretty suitable for #running outside but I can't tell if they are really worth their price. Please share your thoughts so that I can decide if I should get them. Boosts for reach appreciated.

Upgraded https://fantastic.earth to #Mastodon v4.1.3. The process was smooth as ever, thanks to #NixOS packaging.

I'm not getting a Threads account. It took a lot of effort for me to get out of Facebook's grip, I'm not going back just like that.

Followed a bunch of people from my #Pixelfed account @abnv@arti.stic.earth and now waiting for them to post photos so that my feed fill up.

I've been writing a lot of #Golang code these days after a gap of five years, and while newly introduced generics make working with collections tolerable, the error handling is still terrible. Also, I’m never sure if I should be using pointers or values. Are there any established practices for writing good Go these days? #Programming

I’m waiting for #Pixelfed 0.11.6 to land in #NixOS so that we can finally host an instance for the https://fantastic.earth folks.

It is a beautiful rainy day in #Bengaluru, so I took the day off from work to stay inside and do all my pending chores.

After upgrading my server to #NixOS 23.05, my Nix based CI that runs as a #Systemd service fails to run `nix-build` with the error "unable to mount /proc". Something has changed in Systemd sandboxing that is breaking my previously working code. Does anyone have any clues?

Update: removing these lines from #Systemd service config fixed the issue:

ProtectKernelLogs = true;
ProtectKernelModules = true;
ProtectKernelTunables = true;

Though, I feel like this is something that #Nix should be addressing instead.

EDIT:

Found out that having the ProtectKernelModules flag does not actually cause any issues. So the fix now it to remove ProtectKernelLogs and ProtectKernelTunables flags.

Hey, it's my cakeday on #Reddit. I've wasted 16 years of life on it.

I wrote the fourth part of my #blog series “Implementing Co, a small programming language with coroutines”. And this time, we add support for channels in Co for inter-coroutine communication. https://abhinavsarkar.net/posts/implementing-co-4/

#Programming #PLT #ProgramingLanguages #Compilers #Haskell #concurrency

Sometimes I have my computer read my #blog posts to me aloud for the purpose of proofreading. It is really funny to hear it say "Right arrow curving left" again and again when it encounters the footnotes.

Latest #Garmin software update added running dynamics measuring to my #running watch! It's a completely unexpected but great surprise. But now I have to worry about my low vertical ratio.

OK @ivory, you win. You've made a subscriber out of me. Now please implement post threading in the timelines. I really hate reading posts in reverse order.

Upgraded my server and https://fantastic.earth to #NixOS 23.05. Faced only one issue of Man cache generation not working, which I then disabled because I don't need Man cache on a server anyway. Rest went smooth.

#Spotify just made my day: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1EIdfxn5SYf57p?si=50e30f027deb4e8c
#spotifyplaylist #music #ska

I love @ivory, it is probably the best #Mastodon client there is, but I really miss threaded posts in my timeline, which @phanpy and @elk do really well. Another feature I wish Ivory had is Boost carousels from Phanpy. If Ivory adds these two features, I'd use it all the time, on all my devices.

Today I had to write #nix code that looked like this:

```
blah.overrideAttrs (oldAttrs: {
x = oldAttrs.x.overrideAttrs (oldAttrs: {
y = oldAttrs.y.overrideAttrs (oldAttrs: {
outputHash = "xxxxx";
});
});
});
```

#nixos folks, is there a better way to do this kind of nested overriding of attributes?

I have a suspicion that @ivory on iOS supports multiple column layout but I am not able to figure out how to enable it.

Trying out the #Mastodon client @phanpy for the first time:

— Rounded corners everywhere, which is a little too much for my taste.
— I love the Boost carousels, and clean post threading, and post detail popups.
— The light mode somehow looks better than the dark mode, which is very unexpected because I use almost everything in dark mode.
— Really missing having keyboard shortcuts for navigation and actions.

I'm going to try it for a couple of days to see how it compares to my current client @elk.

Also, I don't like how @phanpy hides the multi-column view under Shortcuts settings, and how changing the timeline from home to something else reverts the view to single column.

I hope they work these issues out in time. I definitely see the potential for @phanpy to become a great #Mastodon client.

Update after two weeks of trying @phanpy: I love it and now I am using it full time in the browser (I use @ivory elsewhere). I still miss the keyboard navigation and shortcuts though, but Phanpy is so much better for quickly going over hundreds of posts when I wake up. I'm guessing that's because of the way it groups boosts.

Drove a car for 84 kms today, the longest I've ever. Can't say that I'm a fan of #driving cars yet, but it wasn't as bad as I had imagined it would be.

@gotosocial is an up-and-coming #Fediverse server, which is great for running single-user instances because of its low resource footprint. I wrote a #blog post about how to run a GoToSocial server on #nixos: https://notes.abhinavsarkar.net/2022/gotosocial-on-nixos

#selfhosting

@trunksapp does not render ‽. How am I going to express my conflicted emotions‽

I wrote a #blog post about my #bicycling journey. https://notes.abhinavsarkar.net/2023/bicycling

Tired: using #AI to write formal emails.
Wired: using AI to turn emails in pop songs:

(Verse 1)
Hey Josh,
I've got a question for you.
Can you tell me when the slides will be available?
I've got a meeting that might conflict,
So I need to know the schedule.

(Chorus)
Hey Josh,
I need to know the timing.
Can you please let me know?
I'm counting on you,
So don't let me down.

(Verse 2)
I know you're busy,
But this is important to me.
I need to know the schedule,
So I can plan accordingly.

(Chorus)
Hey Josh,
I need to know the timing.
Can you please let me know?
I'm counting on you,
So don't let me down.

(Bridge)
I know you'll come through for me,
Josh.
You're always there for me,
And I appreciate it.

(Chorus)
Hey Josh,
I need to know the timing.
Can you please let me know?
I'm counting on you,
So don't let me down.

(Outro)
Thanks, Josh!
I knew I could count on you.

I recently set up backups for our #Mastodon instance https://fantastic.earth, and wrote a note about it: https://notes.abhinavsarkar.net/2023/mastodon-backup

#selfhosting #mastoadmin #nixos

Added very dumb preview cards to my #blog so that you can read the article titles before visiting them. Eg: https://abhinavsarkar.net/posts/implementing-co-3/

I generated these by taking screenshots using headless Chrome, like this:

`chrome --headless --disable-gpu --screenshot --window-size=500,255 <url>`

That's why they look so unrefined.

Configured a macos shortcut to post to #Mastodon so that I can be even more of my lazy self.

I'm really starting to like this shortcut. Now I can post more of my random thoughts in much quicker way!

TIL that #Mastodon has RSS feed per hashtag for each user. For example, you can find the feed for all the posts by me tagged “programming” at https://fantastic.earth/@abnv/tagged/programming.rss.

Spent some time fixing small bugs in my website. Sometimes it's nice to write code for oneself.

How do I find which revision of #nixos nixpkgs-unstable is available in cache for darwin-x86_64? Every time I update to latest unstable revision, I have to rebuild a lot of packages and it takes hours.

Left the air purifier running at home for three weeks of vacation, came back to clean air and the unexpected electricity bill.

And the kid forget how to walk because we left the walker at home. Though it came back to them in 5 minutes.

@raito I found your Pixelfed PR in nixpkgs (https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/207194). Is it stable enough to be deployed? I don't want to wait for months for approvals.

I love that on #Mastodon you can turn a public thread into a private thread and the thread still continues with the same context.

One downside of purely chronological timeline in #Mastodon is that my home feed is mostly silent during my day time, and most active during my night time. So I read all the interesting stuff hours later, and I have to scroll my entire feed for that.

I'd love it if one of the third party clients can surface most interesting
posts by locally running some algorithms based on boost and favourite counts.

I do have Mastodon digest (https://github.com/mauforonda/mastodon_digest) set up to find and show interesting stuff from my timeline twice a day, but it'd be good to have it integrated directly in @ivory or some app like that.

Some interesting #programming related things I read on the internet last month: https://notes.abhinavsarkar.net/2023/links-23-04

Installed MonaApp for #Mastodon on MacBook. I can’t say I like its old-school Mac sliding panes UI. But it does have scores of settings and seems pretty configurable. Maybe I’ll give it a shot later.

Ran into a bug in @MonaApp almost immediately. It assumes that posts have character limit of 160, which is not true on my server.

I wish #PDF readers supported dark mode. I have dark mode turned on everywhere, but I still have to road PDFs like cavemen staring into blindingly bright fires.

Spent hours trying to package https://moaparty.com for #nixos. After failing to use mach-nix, poetry2nix and pip2nix, I'm finally trying the fixed-output derivation hack. It shouldn't be this difficult to package #python applications for nixos.

OK great! The output of `pipenv install` is actually not fixed and fixed-output derivation does not work either. If someone with more experience in packaging #python applications for #nixos can help me out, I'd be very grateful.

I wonder if I should write a #mastodon rebooster script that will boost my (or your) certain posts periodically, for a week or a month. Would people be interested in that?

I analyzed my sleep over the last one year and wrote a note about it: https://notes.abhinavsarkar.net/2023/sleep-analysis #blog #quantifiedself

I've been feeling unusually sleepy today morning, and I just realized that I forgot to drink #Coffee today. I wonder if I can still drink a cup without wrecking my early sleep plan.

@abnv drank a cup and that definitely fixed the sleepiness. Let's see if i can wake up for the morning run tomorrow.

Just raised the #Mastodon post size limit at https://fantastic.earth to 1000 so that I can write mini blog posts right here.

Should have set it to 1337 characters. What a missed opportunity.

@samebchase Welcome!

Fun fact: I drank 1259.5 litres of water in 2022. That's 3.45 litres of water every day on average. #quantifiedself

Using the iPad Air as an extended screen for my MacBook makes me wish I bought an iPad pro instead. :(

One downside of using dark mode everywhere on my laptop is that I rarely notice the dirt slowly accumulating on the screen. So I guess that's a ... win-win?

This maybe a #India specific thing, I wonder why nobody turns off their vehicles at traffic signals. Even if you don't care about the environment, why not save some money, fuel being so expensive now.

Changed my microblog page (https://abnv.me/mb) to point the post links to https://elk.zone instead of the default #Mastodon UI because of superior threading UI on @elk.
#indieweb

One think no one tells you about having children is how difficult it is to get the forever looping baby rhymes our of your head.

Upgraded to #GotoSocial 0.8 and connected to Elk. The #selfhosting experiment continues.

I've got to invent more filters to block US politics news from my Mastodon feed.

The price I pay for being on the #NixOS unstable channel is to build #LLVM every 15 days.

This is the best marketing video for a #programming language. https://youtu.be/oGkCwSdZBds

Updated #macOS to the latest version and had to input my password three times. Sometimes I rue the day I chose the super long password for extra security.

Some interesting #programming related internet web pages I read last month: https://notes.abhinavsarkar.net/2023/links-23-03

I really wish for more #blogs to support per tag RSS/Atom #feeds so that I can subscribe to content that interests me and not clutter my feed reader.

@yudistrange welcome!

Wrote a script to fetch missing replies to posts users on my server reply to in #Mastodon, trying to fix the issue described at https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/discussions/22608. Running it as a cron job every 5 minutes. Seems to be working fine.
If there is any interest, I can share the script. #mastoadmin
cc @alexelcu

Wrote the script in #Python and found myself mixing `filter`, `itertools`, `yield`, generator expression and list comprehensions, and `for` loops. It offends me to use so many different control flow mechanisms at the same time. I feel like there must be a better way to do this, but I'm no Python expert.

The script: https://notes.abhinavsarkar.net/2023/mastodon-context?mtm_campaign=mastodon.

I wrote a Python script to fetch missing context toots for #Mastodon. https://notes.abhinavsarkar.net/2023/mastodon-context?mtm_campaign=mastodon

#mastoadmin

#bangalore is very dry this year because it hasn't rained in over four months. I don't remember when was the last time it didn't rain in winter here. Thinking of getting a humidifier, but then it may start raining this month.

Got myself a #Pixelfed account at @abnv@pixelfed.qayamat.se, thanks to @arun. Follow me to like my okayish photos.

Added a #hashtag cloud to my Microblog page https://abnv.me/mb because why not! #indieweb

Some interesting (and mostly #programming related) things I read on the internet this month: https://notes.abhinavsarkar.net/2023/links-23-02

Changed the commenting service on my website from Staticman to a self-hosted Isso instance. Looks good so far.

#selfhosting

Now, only if someone would comment on one of my posts ...

After a break of about one and half years, I have started reading Crafting Interpreters again, and I am still amazed by the lucidity of the writing. The only other #programing #book I recall to be this much fun reading is Learning Perl.
#ProgrammingLanguages

Someone commented just “Roll credits!” on my #blog post and I think l am either too old or too non-american to understand what it means. Anyone's got any clues?

It's the perfect lazy stay-in-bed-reading-a-book kinda #Saturday.

Now it's turning into a going-for-a-walk-around-the-lake #Saturday.

Or not. We are drinking fancy tea instead.

Upgraded my website generator to use #GHC 9.4 and it took two hours to build. Well, that's the cost I pay for using bleeding edge software.

To clarify, it wasn't GHC that took two hours to build. It was my website builder which uses #Pandoc and Shake.

I wrote the third part of my #blog post series: “Implementing Co, a Small Language With Coroutines #3: Adding #Coroutines”. https://abhinavsarkar.net/posts/implementing-co-3/

Reply to this toot to post comments on the article.

#programming #programminglanguages #plt #compilers #haskell #concurrency

My cab is taking an unusual route today and as a result I am back in parts of #bangalore that I have not been in many years. Things have changed but at the same time, they seem very much the same.

I've lived in so many different parts of Bangalore over the last decades that travelling within the city sometimes triggers waves of nostalgia.

Running a massive update on my #nixos VPS today. I wonder what changed to cause this.

I should integrate nvd in my deploy script to be able to see diffs.

The just released #haskell book Production Haskell looks great for making the jump from the forever beginner/intermediate level to professional level. https://leanpub.com/production-haskell

Went to a chafé today for some tea. Some people were sitting with their laptops as usual. But there was this woman sitting next to me with an entire server computer with her. I didn't disturb her. #bangalore

On the other side of my table was sitting a guy with a small laptop, wearing a black hoodie, with the hoodie on in this heat. I overheard him say, “The deployment is broken because some new guys checked in some code in our repo. I think the right way to solve this is to break our repo into smaller repos and create more microservices from them.” I didn't disturb him either. #bangalore

The tea was okayish and very overpriced. ~fin~

I hate how the hum of the cab engine hides the bassline of the #music I listen to while commuting. But I'm too cheap to buy good headphones with noise cancellation. So I guess this is my life now.

What's a reasonably priced and good RSS feed to email #newsletter service that I can use to send my #blog posts to my twelve subscribers?

Went for a morning walk after a long time. It's strange how expending energy makes us feel better compared to conserving energy as a couch potato.

A random Netflix show about a guy going around the world on a #bicycle inspired me to dust off my bike and go out for a ride.

Almost immediately I was reminded of why I don't cycle in #bangalore anymore: Dust and smoke everywhere. Even with mask and goggles on, it was in my nose and eyes. Not to mention, the broken roads with pot holes and the terrible traffic.

5 years ago, I used to commute to work daily on my bicycle. Now it is hard for me to even imagine doing that. 😭

Pulled in the posts from my types.pl Mastodon account to my website's microblog page https://abnv.me/mb. Next, add the posts from my Twitter archive.
#indieweb

Now my website's search indexes my Mastodon posts as well, along with my blog posts and notes. Another step towards #indieweb.

Switched from LocalStorage to IndexDB for caching the search index on the browser. Apparently, that's the recommended thing now. 🤷

I've started downloading files to the temp directory now. That way, I don't have to go back and delete all the junk later on. And if something is important enough to be kept around, I move it the proper location fearing the automatic deletion.

Set up a mesh router in my house. Finally I can read Reddit in each of my washrooms.

I have feed reader apps on my phone, my iPad, my laptop, and my Kindle. Now to actually read all these blog posts ...

Tell me #Fediverse, should I swap a Google Pixel 4a phone for an Apple iPhone 12 mini? #Android vs. #ios.

I tried out @elk and I've decided that I'll switch to be as soon as they add support for hashtag and account lists.

Some days I wake up inexplicably #tired even after a full night's sleep. Today is one of those days.

I've got to fix my #bicycle and go for a ride one of these days. The weather has been lovely in #bangalore.

Some interesting #blog posts I read last month: https://notes.abhinavsarkar.net/2023/links-22-12

#programming

Spent the day thinking about how to compile my small language with coroutines to Javascript, without actually doing a CPS transform of the AST. I think I may have a solution involving yield* and setImmediate. Proof of concept yet to be done.

#ProgrammingLanguages #compilers #programming

I wrote a #blog post about implementing a small interpreted #programming language with #coroutines: https://abhinavsarkar.net/posts/implementing-co-1/
#ProgrammingLanguages #plt #haskell

Last week I spend almost three days to figure out a bug in my code. And the final fix was a single line change. It was both infuriating and exhilarating at the same time. #programming

I'm so glad I deleted my #Lastpass account years ago when they had their first breaches.

I've got an estimated billion things to read and instead of actually doing that, I'm here tooting about it. 🤷
#reading #procrastination

I really like reading things on my Kindle. I wish there was an easy way to read all these interesting blog posts on it. Maybe a service to which I can send URLs, or points them to an RSS feed and it sends me a #Kindle book for them.
#reading

Is it me or this year's #AdventOfCode seems too heavy on automata, game plays and simulations? I was hoping for more parser and interpreter related problems.

I wrote a note about patching #Mastodon on #NixOS for removing old user avatars and headers https://notes.abhinavsarkar.net/2022/patching-mastodon

#mastoadmin

So tempted to drink 5 cups of #coffee today.

Decided to play some old school #ska today as work #music, instead of the usual. Liking it so far.

I wrote a new #blog post: Writing a Static Site Generator Using Shake https://abhinavsarkar.net/posts/static-site-generator-using-shake/

#haskell #programming #buildsystems

The new Arctic Monkeys album is even more mellow than the previous one. Maybe I'll grow to like the new AM, but for now I miss the old one. #Music

TBH, I like the albums in the middle the most, around early 2010s. When they started out to mellow out, but were still Rock like.

@pratul शुभ जन्मदिवस ब्रो

A reminder that you can pull your posts from your #Mastodon server using the RSS feed or the JSON API, and put them on your own website, like I did: https://abhinavsarkar.net/microblog/

#Indieweb

I use the bookmarking feature on #Mastodon as a read-later list to mark interesting posts that I want to read in depth, but I can't at the moment while scrolling the timeline. After reading them later, I remove the bookmark. Am I doing it right?

Thinking of doing my next personal project in #Clojure. It's been a while.

I wrote a post about how to populate small #Mastodon Instances using #FakeRelay: https://notes.abhinavsarkar.net/2022/fake-relay

cc @g3rv4 #mastoadmin #programming

I'm not doing all of #AdventOfCode this year after doing it for past couple of years. Most of the problems seem very similar to those in previous years. So this time, I'm going to pick only the ones that truly interest me.

Moved to @abnv@fantastic.earth.

I've been using https://github.com/pwm/nixkell for managing my #Haskell projects with #Nix, but it doesn't support Nix flakes. So I decided to try out a new template for my new project. I tried https://github.com/input-output-hk/haskell.nix but it started to compile GHC from source, so I ditched it. Now, I'm using https://github.com/srid/haskell-template and it works flawlessly. Well, at least till now. #programming

I solved #AdventOfCode day 7 in #Haskell with parsers, zippers and interpreters, and wrote a note about it: https://notes.abhinavsarkar.net/2022/aoc-7

I'm gonna have to read this multiple times over the next few days to understand it completely, but for now, it sounds awesome: https://ziglang.org/news/goodbye-cpp/
#programming #zig #compilers

Time to catch up with #AdventOfCode problems of this week.

My plan this year was to solve them in #Zig. Unfortunately, Zig 0.10 is not available on #Nix and I was too lazy to install it manually. So I defaulted to #Haskell.

Added a Micro Blog page on my website that syndicates from my #Mastodon toots. https://abhinavsarkar.net/microblog/
#indieweb

Also hooked up IFTTT to hit a webhook to deploy my website when I post a toot here.

Finally a challenge that requires writing an interpreter. Solving #AdventOfCode day 7 will be fun.

Looks like I'll also need to write a parser and use a tree zipper. Great!

Saw someone's toot about trying to learn how to drive a geared car (or drive stick, as they say in USA). And here I am driving a geared car, and hating it, being anxious all the time about missing gear changes and driving in wrong gear. I'd love to not drive stick, but I can't buy a new car right now.

I like solving #AdventOfCode problems with one liners, and I cannot lie (split into multiple lines below for your convenience):

solve n input =
(+ (n - 1))
. fst
. fromJust
. find ((== n) . length . snd)
. zip [1 .. ]
. map nub
. transpose
. map (flip drop input)
$ [0 .. (n - 1)]

#AdventOfCode #Haskell

Is it just me or 80% of songs in #Spotify's Best of Indie India sounds like Prateek Kuhad songs? WDYT @s3thi?

My website is on #Fediverse now, thanks to https://fed.brid.gy. Follow my blog posts at @abhinavsarkar.net.

Turns out, ChatGPT cannot write quines, at least in Haskell. Quite a serious limitation.

Took my 3am server admin sleep break to drink a cup of water and to ban those DDOSsing domains. #mastoadmin

Finally found time to catch up with my feed reader.

If you are running a #Mastodon instance, be sure to ban the bad bots using Fail2Ban. Otherwise they'll soak up all your bandwidth by crawling the public assets and media. #mastoadmin

I solved today's #AdventOfCode challenge in type-level #Haskell https://notes.abhinavsarkar.net/2022/type-level-rps. #programming

Going to try to upgrade my VPS to #NixOS 22.11.

The upgrade to #NixOS 22.11 worked almost smoothly! I had to
— disable a python service because of "infinite recursion encountered" error (I wanted to disable it anyway),
— change config of one service, and
— fix dependencies of two services.

Advent Of Code '22 Day 1 was easy

Solved in GHCI REPL:

λ> import Data.List.Split (splitWhen)
λ> maximum . map (sum . map read) . splitWhen (== "") . lines <$> readFile "input1"
λ> import Data.List (sortOn)
λ> import Data.Ord (Down(..))
λ> sum . take 3 . sortOn Down . map (sum . map read) . splitWhen (== "") . lines <$> readFile "input1"

#AdventOfCode22 #AdventOfCode #Haskell

I'm a bit disappointed that the #Matrix hashtag is not about the 90's movie about a speeding bus that could travel in time.

I've found and followed so many interesting people from different walks of life on Mastodon in the last one week. I don't think this would be possible on the Twitter of now.

@Preethi Sup. How's the winter going? Also: https://pruvisto.org/debirdify/

#TIL: Mastodon creates and exposes a public key for each user at <instance-url>/users/<username>.json.

I wonder if that can used for signing things we put on internet.

I hate waking up and finding spam comment on my blog 😠

Today I learned how to replace #NixOS modules: https://gist.github.com/LnL7/bd05394218033cff17ec20eb93a44a4a

Just found out about https://fedi.directory. Followed a bunch of interesting people and accounts from there.

@arun Welcome to this earth.

Trying to figure out how to write health checks for #Netdata on #NixOS. Can't find anything on Google. Netdata docs are not straightforward.

@Preethi Welcome to the fantastic earth!

#Mastodon / #fediverse protip for people #selfhosting an Nginx server: add the following line to your Nginx virtual host config so that you can be found by a search like @me@yourdomain.com:

rewrite ^/.well-known/webfinger.* https://<your-mastodon-host>/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:<your-username>@<your-mastodon-host>? permanent;

For example, my server at abhinavsarkar.net has this config:

rewrite ^/.well-known/webfinger.* https:// fantastic.earth/.well-known/webfinger?resource=acct:abnv@fantastic.earth? permanent;

(Minus the space after https://. Mastodon converts it to a link so I had to put the space.)

So you can find me in Mastodon search by @me @abhinavsarkar.net

(Minus the space between. Mastodon automatically convert it to the resolved account so I had to put a space between.)

I just moved my #Mastodon account from @abnv@types.pl to @abnv. I can't believe how smooth it was. Took 5 minutes!

Hardest part of #selfhosting is fixing the damned fail2ban that is too eager to ban everyone, including myself. But I wrote those ban rules so I'm the one to blame.

Watching Mastodon Sidekiq logs is a very unhealthy obsession.

Welcome message

@deobald welcome

Got a #Mastodon server up and running in 2 hours with 240 lines of #NixOS code. Nix is amazing!

Code to run Mastodon was only 20 lines. Rest was for system setup and security.

I live on a ball of dirt going really fast around a ball of fire.

I wrote a note: "Self-hosting GoToSocial on NixOS" https://notes.abhinavsarkar.net/2022/gotosocial-on-nixos

#nixos #selfhosting

I've been running Debirdify every day and it's nice to see my following numbers climbing with each day. #mastodonmigration

I hear read that Mastodon supports Markdown.

I wonder if it can show highlighted code?

main = putStrLn "Hello world"

Well, no code highlighting but at least we got:

1. numbered
2. lists

• Bullet
• lists

This Tweag article on staged programming with typeclasses in #Haskell is pretty cool https://tweag.io/blog/2022-11-15-unrolling-with-typeclasses/

My website has been my biggest personal project so far, ongoing for more than five years. It has accumulated so many features by now that I had to make a list today (for mostly myself): https://abhinavsarkar.net/about#features

I knew about #Mastodon for at least a few years but I was afraid that the clients would be unpolished. Now that I'm here, I must say I am pleasantly surprised by how good all Mastodon apps are. Both Android and iOS apps are easy to use and reasonably smooth. Though I don't use the web UI much, it's pretty good as well.

Still trying to get Bridgy Fed working on my website. I can see my website on Mastodon but I don't see any posts, neither am I able to follow it. I guess it's time to look at the Nginx logs.

I uninstalled Reddit, Hacker news and Twitter apps from my phone so Mastodon is my only friend now.

@deobald say something Steven

My levels of yak shaving:

1. Get on Mastodon.
2. Enable Activity Pub for my website using Bridgy Fed.
3. Embed h-card on my website's home page.
4. Add support for transclusion in Markdown files.
5. Modify Mustache templating code to add support for chasing dependencies using Shake build system.

Fortunately, the stack has unwound now, for I am posting this on Mastodon, and my website is Activity Pub enabled.

So I got on Mastodon. Next, find people to follow.