Hard to discover tips and apps for making macOS pleasant

Related (and linked to from the above): (Emacs) Keyboard Shortcuts for Editing Text Fields in OS X

Let Me Show You My Restaurant

Kenji shows the inside of his restaurant, how everything works behind the scenes.

Finger Trees Explained Anew, and Slightly Simplified (Functional Pearl)

We explicitly motivate the subtle intricacies of Hinze and Paterson’s Finger Tree data structure, by step-wise refining a naive implementation. The result is a new explanation of how Finger Trees work and why they have the particular structure they have, and also a small simplification of the original implementation.”

Word Expansion Supports POSIX Shell Interactivity

The POSIX shell is the standard tool to deploy, control, and maintain systems of all kinds; the shell is used on a sliding scale from one-off commands in an interactive mode all the way to complex scripts managing, e.g., system boot sequences. For all of its utility, the POSIX shell is feared and maligned as a programming language: the shell is feared because of its incredible power, where a single command can destroy not just local but also remote systems; the shell is maligned because its semantics are non-standard, using word expansion where other languages would use evaluation. I conjecture that word expansion is in fact an essential piece of the POSIX shell’s interactivity; word expansion is well adapted to the shell’s use cases and contributes critically to the shell’s interactive feel.

Related: shell/AWK/Perl-like scripting in OCaml (Oleg)

Why are there 5280 Feet in a Mile?

  • The word “mile” stems from the Latin for thousand (as in a thousand paces of a roman footsoldier).
  • “furlong” = “furrow long”
  • “An acre was thus the surface area that one man and a team of oxen could till in one day. It was long and narrow because of the development of the heavy plough around the end of the 10th century, which turned the soil over, revolutionizing agriculture in northern Europe where the clay-heavy soil (vs sandier south European soil) went from being a handicap to an asset, in fact contributing significantly to the eventual inversion of economic power in Europe from the south to the north.”

Lots more good tidbits at the link.

Muse App

Muse is a spatial canvas for your research notes, reading, sketches, screenshots, and bookmarks. Because deep thinking doesn’t happen in front of a computer.

The Weisfeiler-Lehman Isomorphism Test

Twitter section

Really happy to see good work coming from a safety team (one of >=2 apparently). Excited to see more of this.

Our labelers prefer summaries from our [model] ~70% of the time to the human-written reference TL;DRs.

“Goodhart’s Curse”, the combination of Optimizer’s Curse plus Goodhart’s Law.

This is now a blog post: Sublime introductory lectures