Blog Posts
Table of Contents
- 1. Interested in a weird graduate student project?
- 2. Lean 4, Emacs, and Archlinux
- 3. Haskell, Eglot, Language Servers, and Emacs
- 4. Use
fdmto make your emacs-org-mode email workflow smoother - 5. Just Use Common Lisp
- 6. Tagging Posts with the Ox-Publish
:makeindexFunction - 7. The Genesis of Category Theory
- 8. Setting up email with gnus, mbsync, dovecot, and davmail
- 9. Epicurus - If it ain't wrong it is still game
- 10. Coincidence and Inductive Inference
- 11. RSS Feeds From Org Mode and Ox-rss
- 12. Publish Your Embarassing Code
- 13. Back to Org Mode
1. Interested in a weird graduate student project?
- 2024-10-29 Tue
The question is can we bring the language of category theory and verifiable programs to the world of cognitive modeling? To be honest, I rather doubt it, at least in the near term, but I am going to try, and I would love to have some help on this quest, but anyone contemplating it should think long and hard about the trade-offs. It will be an adventure of exploration, fun to be sure, but a risky foundation for a career. The surer path to academic stability will be to grind away in a lab that is exploiting known science to accumulate incrementally new knowledge on a socially important topic.
To Read More ...2. Lean 4, Emacs, and Archlinux
- 2024-08-22 Thu
2.0.1. Formalizing Cognitive Science
This is the clear goal. The path remains murky. But, inspired by the recent Topos Institute Colloquium by Will Crichton, I decided to download Lean to my computer to see if I could begin to explore it as yet another tool I will only use intermittently, if at all, in my pursuit of the "clear goal" via the process of iterative preparation.
To Read More ...3. Haskell, Eglot, Language Servers, and Emacs
- 2024-04-19 Fri
3.0.1. Haskell Coding in Emacs
Haskell is a programming language where the rate of development and the evolution of its tooling can make it challenging to love. But love it I do, even though in many ways it is the antithesis of Common Lisp. If the latter is a forever language it sometimes feels as if Haskell is a never language, because I spend so much time trying to figure out how to get it working (admittedly I am only an intermittent user) that by the time I am done, I never write any code.
To Read More ...4. Use fdm to make your emacs-org-mode email workflow smoother
- 2024-01-22 Mon
4.0.1. FDM: a tool to make an emacs email workflow smoother
5. Just Use Common Lisp
- 2023-12-08 Fri
5.0.1. Why Aren't We All Just Coding in Common Lisp?
There is history here, and I don't have the expertise to revisit it or adjudicate, but I can say that my beginner's experience with Common Lisp has been very favorable.
To Read More ...6. Tagging Posts with the Ox-Publish :makeindex Function
- 2023-07-20 Thu
I have been wanting to have a way to tag different blog posts with different topics. This is a personal blog so the topics can ramble from fun one offs, to technical thoughts, to code snippets I want to remember. I did not see an easy way to do this until I stumbled across the :makeindex option for orgmode.
7. The Genesis of Category Theory
- 2023-06-25 Sun
7.0.1. A creation narrative for category theory
In the beginning was chaos.
To Read More ...8. Setting up email with gnus, mbsync, dovecot, and davmail
- 2023-06-15 Thu
8.0.1. The problem
My university's connect server was recently hacked, which meant that I had to leave the University's internal email system (something I had been resisting for years) for the University's preferred alternative: microsoft 365. So, now I have to reconstruct the pipeline that gets my emails from my various accounts to GNUs on my laptop.
To Read More ...9. Epicurus - If it ain't wrong it is still game
- 2023-05-19 Fri
9.0.1. A distribution over all possible answers
Most of us are familiar with Occam's Razor. It is a heuristic for reasoning that is often framed as the simplest explanation is the best explanation. What many of us do though is misinterpret this heuristic as suggesting that the simplest explanation is the right explanation. A nice by product of reading some of the literature around Solomonoff induction is to be reminded of the companion idea that any hypothesis not contradicted by experience should be retained in your set of possible answers.
To Read More ...10. Coincidence and Inductive Inference
- 2023-05-15 Mon
10.0.1. Crazy beard and crazy smart
During the pandemic, and for a term or two thereafter, I, like a lot of men, let myself grow a beard and let my hair get a bit crazy. One day when I was trying to track down a reference about something (I forget exactly what) I came across this image of Ray Solomonoff and was struck by our similar hair-dos. Who was this guy? While it was the overlapping of my interests and his work that led me to the web page where the picture appeared it was the overlap of our beard aesthetics that led me to read more about him in particular. I am so glad I did.
To Read More ...11. RSS Feeds From Org Mode and Ox-rss
- 2023-04-08 Sat
Just a place holder for now, but to come is a tear stained entry of my efforts to come to terms with RSS feeds and org for blogging.
To Read More ...12. Publish Your Embarassing Code
- 2023-04-03 Mon
I am a long term Emacs user, and I love it, but while I am quick to adopt new packages (and frequently break my init.el) I have never fully exploited the fact that Emacs is programmable. The pitch I am making here is to publish your embarassing code so that you help give courage to others to try. You do this by debunking the myth that everyone else is an Uber-coder, and by giving more beginner friendly examples to help people get a leg up.
13. Back to Org Mode
- 2023-01-09 Mon
For sometime now my laboratory website has been in Jekyll. This was a really nice solution in the beginning. The look was clean, everyone in the lab could update their own content, and new members could learn to use a mark-up language to write posts. However, Jekyll and the Ruby engine that powers it have gotten a bit harder to use over the years, and now everytime I want to update the lab webpage I have to figure out how to update all my gems, and various other housekeeping procedures just to write a blog post or remind myself how to create an internal link. I wanted to simplify again and use something that I would not have to constantly re-educate myself how to use.
To Read More ...