nfd's blog: software, amateur eschatology, miscellany
Posted on October 22, 2021 by nfd Tags: medium , weird Every handful of years, some new master organizational tool shakes up how weird productivity nerds micromanage their lives, and they inject their own ideosyncracies into that process, and those ideas in turn get rolled into the Productivity Memeplex. It’s a beautiful process to someone who works in software; it conjures mental images of…
Posted on October 3, 2021 by nfd Tags: explainer , technical , short Magic Wormhole is a way to move files between computers over the Internet securely. I’m writing this guide for people who just want to send or receive a file and don’t want to have to mess around too much. You can also find my latest guide on using Magic Wormhole (likely this page) with this URL, which is easier to read over the…
Posted on September 19, 2021 by nfd Tags: housekeeping , tiny Just some quick housekeeping: I’ve migrated the static generation of this blog from Jekyll to Hakyll. I’ve done my best to avoid breaking old links to posts and the RSS feed, but if I did, it’s my bad.
Posted on February 27, 2021 by nfd Tags: essay , short , technical , es: criticism , cw: extremism Some thoughts on hostile forks/hostile offshoots, discussion of Suckless. There’s a concept in the free software world of “hostile fork:” a fork that’s motivated by some sort of perceived shortfalling in a project’s direction or leaders. Sometimes it’s personal, sometimes it’s a result of internal…
Posted on February 20, 2021 by nfd Tags: essay , short , politics , es: criticism , cw: child abuse discussion , cw: mainstreaming of extremism , neoreaction , accleration , prompted A response to a topic prompt: “What are the differences between skill, talent, good strategy, luck, etc?” I discuss ableism as a sort of broad critique of the question. A handful of acquaintences of mine decided to…
Posted on December 31, 2020 by nfd Tags: essay , es: personal experience , es: aneristic principle Like many of my best stories, all of my love stories pivotally involve buses. Now, normally, “I love you” ought to read like “my investment in us-as-a-unit continues to be worth it.” I’m going to go ahead and take another angle on the topic. Call it a fun little retrospective at the end of a year…
Posted on December 17, 2020 by nfd Tags: technical , tiny Just a quick Haskell pattern for you. foldl' ( flip ( $ )) :: Foldable t => a -> t (a -> a) -> a It’s a handy gadget if you ever need to quickly compose a bunch of endomorphisms (sorry, values of type a -> a ) and thread a value through them. This may smell like the Endo newtype , given the sweet monoid perfume you may have noticed.…
Posted on November 17, 2020 by nfd Tags: technical , es: advice , short Nanawo Akari has a song called Complete Resignation Declaration (well, in my mother tongue), and it has some lovely life advice. Let me specialize that advice to software. Alright, well, listen to the full song first, if you please. It’s fun. Else skip to timestamp 2:55 for the part whose English translation I’m quoting.…
Posted on September 28, 2020 by nfd Tags: Here’s my advice for how to learn to program, or how to up your programmer-game, speaking as some kid with a computer science degree. This is about how to become software-literate or a software-generalist. If I later decide to replace this post, this will be a link to the next step in the chain. Beginners Why do you want to learn to program? Do you want to…
Posted on September 26, 2020 by nfd Tags: technical , short , es: review In brief, if you want a Linux PC in a form-factor that fits in your pocket and you’re comfortable messing with a couple slightly-janky DE/WMs and some manual setup, just get a Pinephone. If you don’t want that, don’t get one, but take a moment to think about why. I’ve often found myself missing my old Nexus 5 throughout the…
Posted on August 31, 2020 by nfd Tags: politics , public policy , es: criticism , cw: mental illness , cw: police , medium In various different leftist calls for policy changes to policing, you’ll hear people discussing mental health. Remember: the “crisis” part of a mental health crisis is the context. Back where I went to university, the police recently used a man with mental health issues as a…
Posted on April 17, 2020 by nfd Tags: politics , es: criticism , cw: extremism/bigotry , short Ideology doesn’t necessarily have very much to do with actual governance. If it did, what’s the simplest meaningful humanist “mission statement” for society? Here’s something I wrote in a groupchat about a week ago: > now, it’s no secret that i’m a leftist: if you say any society is “correct” other than…
Posted on March 22, 2020 by nfd Tags: politics , notes , es: notes , cw: extremism/bigotry , cw: rape , cw: murder , cw: terrorism I read The Turner Diaries, so you don’t have to. It’s a bad book. If you need to know about this book, here’s my notes on what I think you need to know. Okay, this is going to turn into a Choose Your Own Adventure post, now that we’re past the part that shows up as a…
Posted on January 25, 2020 by nfd Tags: politics , criticism , es: criticism , es: personal experience , cw: extremism/bigotry That title’s weaselwordy. What exactly do you mean? First, you should probably read this. There, Scott Alexander provides a bunch of examples to help you understand a mental model that you can use to understand how people approach political issues. That model is patterned…
Posted on January 12, 2020 by nfd Tags: politics , criticism , es: criticism , es: analogy , es: personal experience , cw: extremism/bigotry In the wise words of James Whitcomb Riley : When I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck. Technical digression (just try to get the gist!) We sometimes use this concept in software engineering.…