I just use https://hckrnews.com/ for a better glance at a given's day posts.
Sorted by upvote, I think, and then I can choose to see the top 10, 20, or 50% of posts. It's an ok curation, but I much preferred one over a newsletter that the author stoped delivering a couple of years ago.
Or, OR, maybe, not every bit of code needs to match all the common good practices and standards. I bet you don't write formally or in Elizabethan English all the time. Context matters in the form of common language. Why should it be any different with code? Just because LLMs can pick those practices up?
Let me tell you how I did it.
I remember I wanted to start using Linux full-time no BS and have had some exposure to the terminal. I took the opportunity of a new position, I said I had to use Linux for the day-to-day activities and they bought it. So I had to use the terminal/Linux without disrupting any of the necessary activities.
Meanwhile, I read the beginning half of "The Linux Command Line" [1]. I highly recommend it. Looking back, I might have read it until part 2 and skimmed the rest, and read it as I needed it.
Try to do everything through the terminal. File creation, reading, managing stuff, changing wifi, configuring editors, writing files. Try to find the conversion tools with the rest of the "world". Some examples of what I mean are pandoc for md->docx conversion, python pandas for csv -> xlsx. Build small scripts for your tasks. For example, I work in a multilingual company and I have a tool for translation which at first used Google Translate and now uses gpt.
At some point in the journey I even had my own custom dwm build. Fun times. Do read about suckless software, a fun philosophy with some genuine principles, and a nice (but not friendly) ecosystem.
So my recommendation is to read something to give you breadth on linux/terminal knowledge so you can navigate around and stick to it as your main driver.
Another book one I recommend is the "Unix and Linux system administration handbook"[2]. It will tell you more about the history and inner workings when compared to the previous one.
I've followed the Strange Loop conference on yt for a long time, and your mention led me to search more about it. Just found out the 2023 edition was the last one. Sad to see such a nice gathering not having another edition.
And that matters if you are mostly worried about value, to a large extent. If you are evaluating "better" as in "supports more symbolic operations," none of those really enter into it? Right?
This is like opining that the best "car" out there is a gokart you can get complete schematics on, for all of these reasons. I think most of us would accept the argument that the better cars are the ones that pass metrics aimed at cars. In this analogy, the better algebra system is the one that does the most algebra.
If SymPy meets your needs, it is objectively better. Mathematica is expensive and you probably have to pay for licenses on a continuous basis for every instance you use. Many benchmarks are stress tests and not representative of common work.
This is kind of silly, though? Yes, if you do not need a full car, a bike may fit your needs. The bike is still not a better car, though.
You can try to broaden it to saying it is a better vehicle for you. And, sure, for a lot of folks the cost will be important there. As a CAS, though, Mathematica is tough to beat.
No it's not silly. A Lamborghini might be a better performing vehicle that could solve problems I didn't even know I had, but if I don't have the money for it and/or a Ford Pinto covers 99% of the cases I need, the Pinto is better.
I'm not arguing that SymPy is going to beat Mathematica on benchmarks. But if both of them meet your needs, and you like having money and/or control of the code, SymPy wins.
So, in this we don't really disagree. But, I would only agree that it is an objectively better choice for you. It is not an objectively better CAS. Demonstrably so, per that benchmark.
Similarly, a lamborghini is almost certainly an objectively faster car. Such that if you were discussing fast vehicles and someone pointed out that their ebike was good enough for them, it would be a statement out of nowhere that is not using the rubric for ordering that was being discussed. Are they wrong that the ebike is a better choice for them? Almost certainly not. Would it be valid to say that it is the best fast vehicle because of that? (I say this as someone that loves bikes and is fairly anti car...)
And there would be other rubrics that would shine light in either direction regarding python. Arguably, the stewardship of the language lost a lot of trust with people in the hilariously bad 2->3 migration. More so in how bad dependency management has become. Yes, you can roll your own, but people with large support contracts can almost certainly offload a lot of that to the team on Mathematica, if that is truly a concern.
(I could similarly cast shade on Mathematica, but I think my point is made. Yes, you can have a rubric that changes which is the better choice for a situation. No, there is no total ordering of correct choices.)
We are essentially in agreement. I just don't think Mathematica is worth the money unless you need it for something specific like solving tricky problems. As much shade as you can throw on Python, there are lots more possibilities to use Python with SymPy than to use Mathematica. Unfortunately, the cutting edge FOSS math scene will always lag behind the commercial tools, as it is incredibly hard for them to get donations. I remember hearing a story about the developer of Octave (the most popular Matlab clone). He had worked on it for years and hardly got any donations, despite probably having hundreds of thousands of downloads and constant feature requests.
I also think the math systems will lag for more than just donations. The work to make a good CAS is pretty intense. A lot like a good SAT system. Or really anything that is deep in the weeds of computer science. A lot of us are so far removed from the math that they focus on, that it can be mind bending to try and get back into it. (Indeed, for a lot like me, we were probably never really great at it, in the first place.)
Mathematica and Matlab are interesting to consider, as they are likely very well integrated into older workflow systems from the mainframe era. In particular, I'd expect the high end simulations for car and vehicle designs are much more integrated with those than anything open source. And a lot of that is largely availability of what they are integrating with. Most of us do not have the science labs and all of the equipment that goes with it.
Which, I think, is a bad feedback loop on this. For folks without those labs, Mathematica/Matlab are prohibitively expensive. For those with the labs, they are probably a rounding error. And there is no real path from the current equilibrium to one that can get it to more people. (The old path was free access in college. But that is becoming less of a thing in modern programming jobs.)
It's not just initial installation. I have not pursued a license lately but these kinds of products cost money for every running instance. Institutions often have license servers on premises that allow a fixed number of people to use the stuff at once. If you use a SDK to build a program with it, that's got a separate license. If you need it for a real product, we are generally talking like thousands of dollars per developer per year in perpetuity, plus god knows whatever you use for SaaS. You might have to negotiate a price for your use case.
(1) is true, but Mathematica is also supported because it is paid. (2), (3), and (4) are very iffy stances. Open source projects also fail when leaders move on, and it's actually less likely for a company. (5) has nothing to do with open source, and Mathematica is extensible.
I ask because I always see open source thrown around as if it's some paragon of quality and productiveness. In reality, the actual usefulness of a product is fairly independent of its open source status. And rarely does it matter all that much to a project that a software component is open source or not.
I’ve been just trying out different options listed on the official manual.
Options are searchable by ctrl-f.
I’d recommend you to use home-manager as well.
What do you think the reason is? I had hypothesized that it was because I keep tons of tabs open, and over time more of them are made active (they are in a quasi-hibernated state when I first reopen Brave). But if that is true, then quitting and restarting Brave would have the same effect — which it doesn't seem to.
Honestly, memory leaks are common in software, so I really don't buy it when people say they don't need to do it. Unless it is a server where the memory footprint is arguably simpler due to not having graphics + UI + different interfaces and peripherals, I can't convince myself that a reboot won't freshen things up.
