Tetris-Complete
Emacs Lisp is Tetris Complete
- did not mean Turing Complete
- really did not
Emacs Lisp is Tetris Complete
I’ve always maintained a philosophical appetite for the tooling that I use.
One of the core tenets of the Unix Philosophy1 is that everything is a file…
Plan92 has caught my eye due to its more homogenous design than the usual unix you’re used to.
The footnoted-paper (~pre-mature book) is somewhat unhinged and doesn’t shy away from taking a jab at the Unix ecosystem and design.
Apart from the several points the author makes, what stands out the most for me is the idea of everything truly being a file: in hindsight, Unix only realizes a fraction of the principle.
I’ve started spending some time per day without the usual modern software engineering tooling (LLMs, the Internet, etc) to explicitly maintain my cyber-deduction skills (in the context of Unix-based systems (BSDs, Linux, yet to explore Plan9), mostly because they power the majority of the global compute infrastructure).
It’s fun: init your journey with a man man
(I’m an info info
guy myself) and be extremely skeptical of your usual modus operandi, ditching all assumptions and tumbling down the rabbit hole.
Fabric1 is a collection of crowd-sourced prompts, exposed via a CLI tool. I used it for a while some time ago but never fully exploited it because I prefer Emacs.
Eshell buffers are an option, but I am principled in my tool usage and prefer to delegate longer-running CLI tasks to a combination of Alacritty and Tmux.
Maintaining my Emacs shell usage to ephemeral popups feels natural.
Gptel2 is a versatile LLM client that integrates smoothly into my workflow (buffer/text manipulation and management) without disrupting my thought flow.
For a while, I’d limited my studying endeavours to be project oriented and not domain oriented. While I enjoy the pragmatism of the former, I also wish to build up my innate curiosity to get under the hood, disassemble the engine and be able to put it back together: no project (except the explicit choice of doing so) is going to help me fit that in my studies.
Consequently, I’m planning on getting started with a regulary habit of exploring domains with depth.
From time to time, I like to make minor tweaks to my blog based on the treasure trinkets I find around in different corners of the internet from blogs/works of personalities I follow/find interesting.
I got into the practice of logging updates in reverse chronological streams from one of my professors in my sophomore year.
I began personalized hex timestamps (today is 0x2360 for me) because I don’t intuitively gel well with the (Julian -> Gregorian) cycles. The combination of lunar, solar and planetary cycles is my most recent experimental initiative for calibrating long term efforts but that would be a little too chaotic for the part of the world wide web that I mostly interact with these days.
I’m using monitors again and it’s like consuming caffeine after a long time (last recorded usage circa mid November 2024).
I guess I need to cycle my dosage so that I don’t end up being too dependent.
I’m enjoying it though.
EDIT: as of <2025-01-27 17:50:30 IST>, I’ve given up again
I have a somewhat indifferent approach towards achievements(mine and others’): with tendencies to gauge the personalities based on how their conversations flow and in terms of the quality of the questions and problems they are working on.
Recently, I’ve began to grasp why they actually might be a necessary construct:
If you do wish to make a change, you will someday have to take the helm of larger groups of humans. This is when being competent and having proofs for it becomes indispensible.
I recently have moved on from using monitors and am working (professional and writing endeavours) only via a 13 inch laptop. It is definitely a different workflow than what I’m used to.
It has been around 10 days I’ve been doing this and here are some observations:
I definitely do miss reading papers and books on a larger vertically oriented screen but I’m going to stick to this for a while.
As an aspiring polymath, you’ll soon run out of books and courses if you really wish to explore the intersection of multiple domains based on your current intellectual requirements.
That is a great problem to have and the solution is to transition into the mindset of chunking your learnings into projects rather than subjects.
I’ll recommend maintaining a sense of pragmatism (incentivize application of what you’re learning in the foreseeable future (with non-pedagogical intent)) and haste during your initial iterations. Perfection (The will to tend towards it, rather..) can follow once the prototype is principally sound.