Software

This

you’ll need this to grasp that

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.

I’ve lately taken to watching Alan Kay talks during my lunches and dinners.

The idea of this being a campfire talk near the end caught me offguard and is something I would like to use in the future.

I finished my first pass of SICP (structure and interpretation of computer programs) around 3 years ago. Since, I’ve realized the elegantly implicit existence of symbolic algebra in several domains that I personally explore on a regular basis.

That initial infatuation with Lisp ( and consequently symbolic computation ) has simmered and fermented enough in my mind to be realised as a potent generic thinking device. To cement my commitment to the same, I’ll regularly dive deeper into relevant academia so I don’t lose out on the joys of thinking for the sake of itself.