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I've added an archive calendar to my linkblog, so you can see old posts going all the way back to 2003. The UI is a little minimal but usable and it will work for any search indexers, which is what I most care about. Note old posts will have a grey background because I wasn't classifying link sentiment (new posts are white or black). The most fun thing here are the images; I generated them for all my old links. Of course that's only possible if the site is up, I generated most of these in July 2022. I've got a total of 20,700 links going back 19 years; that's an average of about 90 a month. I've been pretty steady the whole time, 50-150 a month with no missing time. A key thing is it's very easy for me to linkblog a new post, I just use the Pinboard browser extension and it's done. The time sorted archive is not too thrilling. The other choice here would be to use the tags somehow to extract archives by topic, maybe cluster in to categories or (god forbid) do a tag cloud. A project...
over a year ago

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More from Nelson's Weblog

Angkor Wat resources

I took an amazing trip to SE Asia last month, including Angkor Wat. I had a hard time finding good reading or other resources to learn from before I went, in part because Amazon is awash in AI garbage. Here’s some books and podcasts I found useful about the Khmer empire in general and Angkor in particular: Ancient Angkor by Michael Freeman and Claude Jacques. The closest thing to a coffee-table book to preview what you will see. The practical information is outdated but the pictures and descriptions are good. Empire Podcast #185: The God Kings of Angkor Wat by William Dalrymple and Anita Anand. An entertaining and fully detailed account of the Khmer empire. It’s basically an excerpt from Dalrymple’s new book The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. Fall of Civilizations Podcast #5: The Khmer Empire by Paul Cooper. Another history, not quite as magically well told as Dalrymple but full of good information. Angkor and the Khmer Civilization by Michael D. Coe. A highly recommended history of the Khmer region. Honestly I found this very dry and too detailed, but I did learn from it. Lonely Planet Pocket Guide: Siem Reap & the Temples of Angkor. We didn’t use this much but it seemed like a useful practical guide. OTOH it dates to 2018 so things have changed. My other advice for visiting Siem Reap and Angkor is: go. It is amazing. Plan for at least two full days of touristing there. Hire a private guide and driver if you can, it is absolutely worth it. (Email me for a recommendation.)

3 months ago 37 votes
Non-alcoholic apéritifs

I’ve been doing Dry January this year. One thing I missed was something for apéro hour, a beverage to mark the start of the evening. Something complex and maybe bitter, not like a drink you’d have with lunch. I found some good options. Ghia sodas are my favorite. Ghia is an NA apéritif based on grape juice but with enough bitterness (gentian) and sourness (yuzu) to be interesting. You can buy a bottle and mix it with soda yourself but I like the little cans with extra flavoring. The Ginger and the Sumac & Chili are both great. Another thing I like are low-sugar fancy soda pops. Not diet drinks, they still have a little sugar, but typically 50 calories a can. De La Calle Tepache is my favorite. Fermented pineapple is delicious and they have some fun flavors. Culture Pop is also good. A friend gave me the Zero book, a drinks cookbook from the fancy restaurant Alinea. This book is a little aspirational but the recipes are doable, it’s just a lot of labor. Very fancy high end drink mixing, really beautiful flavor ideas. The only thing I made was their gin substitute (mostly junipers extracted in glycerin) and it was too sweet for me. Need to find the right use for it, a martini definitely ain’t it. An easier homemade drink is this Nonalcoholic Dirty Lemon Tonic. It’s basically a lemonade heavily flavored with salted preserved lemons, then mixed with tonic. I love the complexity and freshness of this drink and enjoy it on its own merits. Finally, non-alcoholic beer has gotten a lot better in the last few years thanks to manufacturing innovations. I’ve been enjoying NA Black Butte Porter, Stella Artois 0.0, Heineken 0.0. They basically all taste just like their alcoholic uncles, no compromise. One thing to note about non-alcoholic substitutes is they are not cheap. They’ve become a big high end business. Expect to pay the same for an NA drink as one with alcohol even though they aren’t taxed nearly as much.

5 months ago 47 votes
Legal aid charities for immigrants (2024)

The Trump administration has made aggressive threats against immigrants in the US. It’s not clear what’s coming, my biggest fear is a violent display of fascism. (Don’t call them camps!) But even if it’s a polite legal process it will be chaotic and disruptive to many neighbors. Back in 2018 I donated reactively to the Trump administration’s cruelty to immigrant families. This time I’m trying to get ahead of it. The need for the money is now, no matter what happens it is going to be a bad few years for immigrants in the US. To that end I asked on Metafilter about charities to donate to. I got back a remarkable reply listing 18 charities that all have some California focus. I donated to most of them. I want to highlight two groups in particular. One is RAICES. They work in Texas, not California, but they are well organized and effective. The other is KIND. They have a simple mission. They try to ensure every unaccompanied minor has legal representation in immigration court (something not guaranteed.) The other groups on the list are all also deserving of consideration.

7 months ago 68 votes
AI enhanced search

LLMs are good search helpers. Here’s three search tools I use every day. All of these use an AI to synthesize answers but also provide an essential feature: specific web search results for you to verify and further research. I use these for conversational inquiries in addition to more traditional keyword searches. Phind is an excellent free LLM + search engine. The AI writes an answer to your query but is very careful to provide footnotes to a web-search-like list of links on the right. I use this mostly for directed search queries, things like “what’s an inexpensive TV streaming device?” where I might have used keyword search too. The Llama-70b LLM that powers the free version is quite good, sometimes I have general conversations with it or ask it to generate code. Bing CoPilot has a very similar output result to Phind. I find it a little less useful and the search result links are less prominent. But it’s a good second opinion. Bing has been a very good search engine for 10+ years, I’m grateful to Microsoft for continuing to invest in it. CoPilot results are sometimes volunteered on the main Bing page but you often have to click to get to the ChatGPT 4 Turbo enhanced pages. Kagi is what I use as my general search engine, my Google replacement. It mostly gives traditional keyword search results but sometimes it will volunteer a “Quick Answer” where Claude 3 Haiku synthesizes an answer with references. You can also request one. I think Phind and CoPilot do a better job but I appreciate when Kagi intercepts a keyword search I did and just gives me the right answer. Google has tried various versions of LLM-enhancement in search, I think the current version is called AI Overviews. It’s not bad but it’s also not as good as the others. Not mentioned here: ChatGPT or Claude. Those are general purpose LLMs but they don’t really give search results or specific references. In the old days they’d make up URLs if you asked but that’s improving.

9 months ago 110 votes
8BitDo Game Controllers

8BitDo makes good game controllers. A wide variety of styles from retro to mainstream, with some unusual shapes. And wide compatibility with various systems: PC, Macs, Switch, Android. They’re well built, work right, and quite inexpensive. A far cry from the MadCatz-style junk we used to get. The new hotness is the Ultimate 2C, an Xbox-style wireless controller for the very low price of $30. But it works great, doesn’t feel cheap at all. The fancier mainstream choice is the Ultimate 2.4g at $50 which includes a charging stand and extra reprogrammability. But what’s really interesting to me are the odd layouts, often small or retro. The SN30 Pro is particularly interesting as a portable controller. SNES-styling but a full XBox style modern controller with two analog sticks, easy to throw in a suitcase. There’s a lot of fiddly details for this class of device. Controller type (XInput, DInput, switch, etc), wireless interface (Bluetooth or proprietary), etc. 8BitDo makes good choices and implementations for all that stuff I’ve tested. They seem to work well with Steam. They’re a popular brand so well tested. It helps that PC game controllers have mostly standardized around the Xbox layout and XInput. Steam can patch over any rough spots for older games.

10 months ago 111 votes

More in programming

Another tip (tip)
17 hours ago 4 votes
Get in losers, we're moving to Linux!

I've never seen so many developers curious about leaving the Mac and giving Linux a go. Something has really changed in the last few years. Maybe Linux just got better? Maybe powerful mini PCs made it easier? Maybe Apple just fumbled their relationship with developers one too many times? Maybe it's all of it. But whatever the reason, the vibe shift is noticeable. This is why the future is so hard to predict! People have been joking about "The Year of Linux on the Desktop" since the late 90s. Just like self-driving cars were supposed to be a thing back in 2017. And now, in the year of our Lord 2025, it seems like we're getting both! I also wouldn't underestimate the cultural influence of a few key people. PewDiePie sharing his journey into Arch and Hyprland with his 110 million followers is important. ThePrimeagen moving to Arch and Hyprland is important. Typecraft teaching beginners how to build an Arch and Hyprland setup from scratch is important (and who I just spoke to about Omarchy). Gabe Newell's Steam Deck being built on Arch and pushing Proton to over 20,000 compatible Linux games is important. You'll notice a trend here, which is that Arch Linux, a notoriously "difficult" distribution, is at the center of much of this new engagement. Despite the fact that it's been around since 2003! There's nothing new about Arch, but there's something new about the circles of people it's engaging. I've put Arch at the center of Omarchy too. Originally just because that was what Hyprland recommended. Then, after living with the wonders of 90,000+ packages on the community-driven AUR package repository, for its own sake. It's really good! But while Arch (and Hyprland) are having a moment amongst a new crowd, it's also "just" Linux at its core. And Linux really is the star of the show. The perfect, free, and open alternative that was just sitting around waiting for developers to finally have had enough of the commercial offerings from Apple and Microsoft. Now obviously there's a taste of "new vegan sees vegans everywhere" here. You start talking about Linux, and you'll hear from folks already in the community or those considering the move too. It's easy to confuse what you'd like to be true with what is actually true. And it's definitely true that Linux is still a niche operating system on the desktop. Even among developers. Apple and Microsoft sit on the lion's share of the market share. But the mind share? They've been losing that fast. The window is open for a major shift to happen. First gradually, then suddenly. It feels like morning in Linux land!

11 hours ago 2 votes
All about Svelte 5 snippets

Snippets are a useful addition to Svelte 5. I use them in my Svelte 5 projects like Edna. Snippet basics A snippet is a function that renders html based on its arguments. Here’s how to define and use a snippet: {#snippet hello(name)} <div>Hello {name}!</div> {/snippet} {@render hello("Andrew")} {@render hello("Amy")} You can re-use snippets by exporting them: <script module> export { hello }; </script> {@snippet hello(name)}<div>Hello {name}!</div>{/snippet} Snippets use cases Snippets for less nesting Deeply nested html is hard to read. You can use snippets to extract some parts to make the structure clearer. For example, you can transform: <div> <div class="flex justify-end mt-2"> <button onclick={onclose} class="mr-4 px-4 py-1 border border-black hover:bg-gray-100" >Cancel</button > <button onclick={() => emitRename()} disabled={!canRename} class="px-4 py-1 border border-black hover:bg-gray-50 disabled:text-gray-400 disabled:border-gray-400 disabled:bg-white default:bg-slate-700" >Rename</button > </div> into: {#snippet buttonCancel()} <button onclick={onclose} class="mr-4 px-4 py-1 border border-black hover:bg-gray-100" >Cancel</button > {/snippet} {#snippet buttonRename()}...{/snippet} To make this easier to read: <div> <div class="flex justify-end mt-2"> {@render buttonCancel()} {@render buttonRename()} </div> </div> snippets replace default <slot/> In Svelte 4, if you wanted place some HTML inside the component, you used <slot />. Let’s say you have Overlay.svelte component used like this: <Overlay> <MyDialog></MyDialog> </Overlay> In Svelte 4, you would use <slot /> to render children: <div class="overlay-wrapper"> <slot /> </div> <slot /> would be replaced with <MyDialog></MyDialog>. In Svelte 5 <MyDialog></MyDialog> is passed to Overlay.svelte as children property so you would change Overlay.svelte to: <script> let { children } = $props(); </script> <div class="overlay-wrapper"> {@render children()} </div> children property is created by Svelte compiler so you should avoid naming your own props children. snippets replace named slots A component can have a default slot for rendering children and additional named slots. In Svelte 5 instead of named slots you pass snippets as props. An example of Dialog.svelte: <script> let { title, children } = $props(); </script> <div class="dialog"> <div class="title"> {@render title()} </div> {@render children()} </div> And use: {#snippet title()} <div class="fancy-title">My fancy title</div> {/snippet} <Dialog title={title}> <div>Body of the dialog</div> </Dialog> passing snippets as implicit props You can pass title snippet prop implicitly: <Dialog> {#snippet title()} <div class="fancy-title">My fancy title</div> {/snippet} <div>Body of the dialog</div> </Dialog> Because {snippet title()} is a child or <Dialog>, we don’t have to pass it as explicit title={title} prop. The compiler does it for us. snippets to reduce repetition Here’s part of how I render https://tools.arslexis.io/ {#snippet row(name, url, desc)} <tr> <td class="text-left align-top" ><a class="font-semibold whitespace-nowrap" href={url}>{name}</a> </td> <td class="pl-4 align-top">{@html desc}</td> </tr> {/snippet} {@render row("unzip", "/unzip/", "unzip a file in the browser")} {@render row("wc", "/wc/", "like <tt>wc</tt>, but in the browser")} It saves me copy & paste of the same HTML and makes the structure more readable. snippets for recursive rendering Sometimes you need to render a recursive structure, like nested menus or file tree. In Svelte 4 you could use <svelte:self> but the downside of that is that you create multiple instances of the component. That means that the state is also split among multiple instances. That makes it harder to implement functionality that requires a global view of the structure, like keyboard navigation. With snippets you can render things recursively in a single instance of the component. I used it to implement nested context menus. snippets to customize rendering Let’s say you’re building a Menu component. Each menu item is a <div> with some non-trivial children. To allow the client of Menu customize how items are rendered, you could provide props for things like colors, padding etc. or you could allow ultimate flexibility by accepting an optional menuitem prop that is a snippet that renders the item. You can think of it as a headless UI i.e. you provide the necessary structure and difficult logic like keyboard navigation etc. and allow the client lots of control over how things are rendered. snippets for library of icons Before snippets every SVG Icon I used was a Svelte component. Many icons means many files. Now I have a single Icons.svelte file, like: <script module> export { IconMenu, IconSettings }; </script> {#snippet IconMenu(arg1, arg2, ...)} <svg>... icon svg</svg> {/snippet}} {#snippet IconSettings()} <svg>... icon svg</svg> {/snippet}}

yesterday 2 votes
Logical Quantifiers in Software

I realize that for all I've talked about Logic for Programmers in this newsletter, I never once explained basic logical quantifiers. They're both simple and incredibly useful, so let's do that this week! Sets and quantifiers A set is a collection of unordered, unique elements. {1, 2, 3, …} is a set, as are "every programming language", "every programming language's Wikipedia page", and "every function ever defined in any programming language's standard library". You can put whatever you want in a set, with some very specific limitations to avoid certain paradoxes.2 Once we have a set, we can ask "is something true for all elements of the set" and "is something true for at least one element of the set?" IE, is it true that every programming language has a set collection type in the core language? We would write it like this: # all of them all l in ProgrammingLanguages: HasSetType(l) # at least one some l in ProgrammingLanguages: HasSetType(l) This is the notation I use in the book because it's easy to read, type, and search for. Mathematicians historically had a few different formats; the one I grew up with was ∀x ∈ set: P(x) to mean all x in set, and ∃ to mean some. I use these when writing for just myself, but find them confusing to programmers when communicating. "All" and "some" are respectively referred to as "universal" and "existential" quantifiers. Some cool properties We can simplify expressions with quantifiers, in the same way that we can simplify !(x && y) to !x || !y. First of all, quantifiers are commutative with themselves. some x: some y: P(x,y) is the same as some y: some x: P(x, y). For this reason we can write some x, y: P(x,y) as shorthand. We can even do this when quantifying over different sets, writing some x, x' in X, y in Y instead of some x, x' in X: some y in Y. We can not do this with "alternating quantifiers": all p in Person: some m in Person: Mother(m, p) says that every person has a mother. some m in Person: all p in Person: Mother(m, p) says that someone is every person's mother. Second, existentials distribute over || while universals distribute over &&. "There is some url which returns a 403 or 404" is the same as "there is some url which returns a 403 or some url that returns a 404", and "all PRs pass the linter and the test suites" is the same as "all PRs pass the linter and all PRs pass the test suites". Finally, some and all are duals: some x: P(x) == !(all x: !P(x)), and vice-versa. Intuitively: if some file is malicious, it's not true that all files are benign. All these rules together mean we can manipulate quantifiers almost as easily as we can manipulate regular booleans, putting them in whatever form is easiest to use in programming. Speaking of which, how do we use this in in programming? How we use this in programming First of all, people clearly have a need for directly using quantifiers in code. If we have something of the form: for x in list: if P(x): return true return false That's just some x in list: P(x). And this is a prevalent pattern, as you can see by using GitHub code search. It finds over 500k examples of this pattern in Python alone! That can be simplified via using the language's built-in quantifiers: the Python would be any(P(x) for x in list). (Note this is not quantifying over sets but iterables. But the idea translates cleanly enough.) More generally, quantifiers are a key way we express higher-level properties of software. What does it mean for a list to be sorted in ascending order? That all i, j in 0..<len(l): if i < j then l[i] <= l[j]. When should a ratchet test fail? When some f in functions - exceptions: Uses(f, bad_function). Should the image classifier work upside down? all i in images: classify(i) == classify(rotate(i, 180)). These are the properties we verify with tests and types and MISU and whatnot;1 it helps to be able to make them explicit! One cool use case that'll be in the book's next version: database invariants are universal statements over the set of all records, like all a in accounts: a.balance > 0. That's enforceable with a CHECK constraint. But what about something like all i, i' in intervals: NoOverlap(i, i')? That isn't covered by CHECK, since it spans two rows. Quantifier duality to the rescue! The invariant is equivalent to !(some i, i' in intervals: Overlap(i, i')), so is preserved if the query SELECT COUNT(*) FROM intervals CROSS JOIN intervals … returns 0 rows. This means we can test it via a database trigger.3 There are a lot more use cases for quantifiers, but this is enough to introduce the ideas! Next week's the one year anniversary of the book entering early access, so I'll be writing a bit about that experience and how the book changed. It's crazy how crude v0.1 was compared to the current version. MISU ("make illegal states unrepresentable") means using data representations that rule out invalid values. For example, if you have a location -> Optional(item) lookup and want to make sure that each item is in exactly one location, consider instead changing the map to item -> location. This is a means of implementing the property all i in item, l, l' in location: if ItemIn(i, l) && l != l' then !ItemIn(i, l'). ↩ Specifically, a set can't be an element of itself, which rules out constructing things like "the set of all sets" or "the set of sets that don't contain themselves". ↩ Though note that when you're inserting or updating an interval, you already have that row's fields in the trigger's NEW keyword. So you can just query !(some i in intervals: Overlap(new, i')), which is more efficient. ↩

2 days ago 5 votes
The missing part of Espressif’s reset circuit

In the previous article, we peeked at the reset circuit of ESP-Prog with an oscilloscope, and reproduced it with basic components. We observed that it did not behave quite as expected. In this article, we’ll look into the missing pieces. An incomplete circuit For a hint, we’ll first look a bit more closely at the … Continue reading The missing part of Espressif’s reset circuit → The post The missing part of Espressif’s reset circuit appeared first on Quentin Santos.

2 days ago 3 votes