Microessays

I wrestle with boredom from time to time: probably because I maintain a healthy addiction for novelty.

Although my days are scheduled along with a mostly invariable undercurrent of overarching directives, a deliberate portion of “something new” keeps me engaged and aware in the longer run.

This idea of needing “something new” everyday has become the most recent constant in my life: to the point of me considering adopting a “new new” of “nothing new for a while and seeing how that feels”.

Lately realized that I like reading the docs: don’t know if such a psychological disorder has been classified so far but I’m going to lean into it, for humanity’s sake, and document how my condition unfolds.

I, implicitly, have gathered a certain corpus of incommunicable collation of engineering wisdom (/ overenginering foolery?), surfing the architectural and conceptual sections of docs in quite some well-known, mystical, ancient or infamous sections of the internet.

I’ve lately been thinking deeply about how I interact with my computing environments; when working, I’ve a
- an unrooted snapdragon ARM Android with Termux and Tmux for ephemeral vimmin & sshing around when on the move
- an Intel x86 FreeBSD home lab for some asynchronous compute that I don’t need right away and some redundancy for my important files
- a personal ubuntu VPS with a couple of intel x86 vCPUs for my self hosting endeavours and overall context orchestration
- several compute clusters (avx enabled x86s, ARM, “the propietary GPU driver guy on the street” GPUs, “the other open source GPU driver guy on the steet” GPUs, k8s orchestrated production & development playgrounds) for work
- an AMD x86 Tumbleweed with emacs as the daily driver where I actually “work” : this is desk where I dissect, analyse, reconstruct and dispatch for usage across the above

Emacs Lisp is Tetris Complete

• did not mean Turing Complete
• really did not

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