Xavier Góngora

Whenever I hear the news of a very old person dying, I feel good for them. It's sad for us who still live, but more likely a relief for them. It's a feat to reach old age and die.

Been thinking of dead a lot lately because almost-3 year old keeps asking for longer versions of the "how skeletons come to be" story. All our poetic or scientific explanations are stories, and we iterate on them on demand. Also day of the dead is soon, so it's not like the topic is wearing out.

Algorithmic patterns is an emerging field of study, research, practice and community. APs are everywhere: they are profoundly entrenched in culture, and manifest something deep about our souls. We don't know exactly what they are, but if you want to help find out, or are just curious, check this out:

Alpaca (Algorithmic Patterns in the Creative Arts) festival is happening in Sheffield 6-9th May 2027, with conference talks, hands-on workshops, gigs and club night, all exploring algorithmic patterns in the creative arts.

This time I won't be able to attend, but will keep a close eye for online activities:

https://alpaca.cc/

@alpaca@social.thentrythis.org
@alpaca@alpaca.cc
#algorithmicpattern
#alpaca

Before the birth of my son, I thought I was mostly ready to die, like anytime if shit happened, and willing to live up to 120 years. Nowadays I simply cannot die, and would be happy to wrap-up by 90 or sooner (life expectancy is not that forgiving).

My current take on life is consciously local. It's like navigating and un-charted differentiable manifold towards some place with loving properties; think justice, hapiness and peace for the sake of argument. This place is not necessarily void of struggle, but it might. Such properties are hard, if not impossible, to define; so reaching them intentionally is at least harder, unless one is already there (totally plausible, so this becomes a question of perception). To move, I use a bundle of evolving heart-felt principles, rules-of-thumb, traditional maxims and bare intuitions that just set the direction and motion (a derivative, if you will). Movement is triggered by a fool's certainity that something has to be said or done; no trade-off analysis. This could be proven to lead to the loving place, if such a derivative happens to follow a path of least resistance and the ideal region surrounds a critical point (at this point this seems actually like a symplectic manifold).

I'm not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.

Been using Jujutsu to manage all my git repositories for around 5 months now, after Sandy Maguire recommended me to take a look. He characterize it as a life-changing addition to his workflow, and has a great post about it here:

https://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/jj-strategy/

My git experience before was not that bad thanks to the magic of https://magit.vc/ (I still use it to manage diff hunks). But the affordances that `jj` provides make rebases a breeze, changing history an easy thing, and all through terminal commands (and great docs) that just makes sense. It involves some important rewiring of how one thinks about commits and branches, as it has been argued by basically anyone discribing the switch. But it has a low entry point thanks to the polished compatibility with git, so you can always fall-back to what you know.

After this time, I've developed a working mental model through regular use and greats resources sharing wildy creative workflows to try. It feels like a skill I am coming to master and a space to confidently explore (bless you `jj undo`).Plain git feels slippery, obscure and unreachable in comparison. I'm almost tempted to say that Jujutsu brings some joy to vesion control. I cannot recommend it enough.

https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj

Autoplay is the devil. I'd rather choose what's next or not at all. God is in the silence between choices.

It's difficult to define what an intuition is. Between foresight and prophecy. When daydream becomes a half-baked idea. A subconscious reflux or a mental reflex. Believing something contradicting the evidence, to the bone, for just a second. Maybe just a transduced desire. I like intuitions because they open doors.

RE: https://social.tweag.io/@tweag/116414880112701864

Step up your doc game y'all!

Some decisions are like choosing between sleeping in sweat or being eaten alive by mosquitos. Yes, I don't have mosquito nets on my windows. But the point is, hard decisions have to be made at some point, and those shape who we are/become.

GSoC participating organizations are still to be published on Feb 19 (https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/), but the sooner the better to start checking out existing ideas to work on a proposal. It is a very nice setting to start working on a OSS project.

Ideas from Haskell.org are already published here: https://summer.haskell.org/ideas.html

Among them, there is one on type class elaboration in Liquid Haskell proposed by its comaintainer Facundo Dominguez. Last year I had a great time working with Facundo on LH, so I emphatically recommend checking that out.

What do you do when the elephant in the room becomes the fly on your face?