Notes
Using Hyprland dispatchers to move floating windows.
Lazyvim is great, but the way the word that’s being typed was being highlighted with a background
color was driving me nuts. It took a while to track down what was going on.
Surround words that have already been typed with brackets.
Interacting with Processing via OSC.
Learning about the Mandelbrot set and creating some fractal art.
The challenge was to translate the Processing window coordinates into Cartesian coordinates, then
create a graph of the unit circle.
Pronouns function as placeholders for nouns.
The Omarchy default configuration sets GDK_SCALE to 2. What is the GDK_SCALE environmental
variable?
To push to GitHub with SSH, the remote URL needs to be the remote’s SSH URL.
Choosing the appropriate level of abstraction.
Processing implementions of some examples from the Wikipedia Parametric equations page.
Given two points on a Cartesian plane, draw a new point that’s exactly one-third of the distance
between the original points.
Given two points on the Cartesian plane, draw another point that’s in line with them.
Figuring out how to draw dotted lines between points on a Cartesian plane.
A test to see if it’s possible to use the Cartesian coordinate system in a Processing sketch.
The coordinate system for pixels on a computer puts the point (0, 0) at the top left. The x-axis
points to the right (same as on the Cartesian plan), but the y-axis points down.
The polar coordinate system uses distance and angle to describe a point on a plane.
The complex conjugate of a complex number is the number with an equal real part but with an
imaginary part that has an equal magnitude, but the opposite sign.
Figuring out why some internal links are pulling in the wrong fragment.
The imaginary unit i, and imaginary numbers in the form bi.
Creating a complex number class in a Processing sketch.
Tentatively, phase space is a representation of all possible points of a system. It the maps
time-dependent behavior of a system onto a geometric space.
The Lorenze equations (for reference).
There is a correlation between the structure and movement of the Malkus waterwheel and the Lorenz
differential equations.
A branch of mathematics focusing on the behavior of dynamical systems that are highly sensative to
initial conditions.
A set of differential equations…
yet: (adverb) up until the present time
Using a script to automate the deploy process.
A waterwheel with leaky buckets undergoes chaotic motion.
A computer simulation of two Malkus waterwheels with different initial conditions.
Can the embeddings that have been generated for chunks of text be averaged into embeddings that
represent entire documents?
Basic example code for creating visualizations with PyPlot.
“Most generally, a vector is a list of things.”
“Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery\Make me a poster of an old rodeo\Just give me one
thing that I can hold on to\To believe in this living is just a hard way to go”
A cheatsheet for typing math symbols with LaTex.
“Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection (UMAP) is a dimension reduction technique that can be
used for visualization similarly to t-SNE, but also for general non-linear dimension reduction.”
Further explorations of htmx.
How to setup a static website with a Python HTTP server for local development.
“htmx gives you access to AJAX, CSS Transitions, WebSockets and Server Sent Events directly in
HTML, using attributes, so you can build modern user interfaces with the simplicity and power of
hypertext.”
Details about the Hugo links render hook PageInner field.
Hugo link render hooks override the rendering of markdown links to HTML.
A record of posts that are involved in the link experiments.
Using FastAPI with Chromadb.
Memory issue to look out for related to the Chroma HTTP client and FastAPI.
The yield keyword is used to create a generator function.
Making database queries from a FastAPI application.
A loosely held, local first web manifesto.
Tentatively: A set where the elements can be added together and multiplied (“scaled”) by numbers (“scalars”).
Vector embeddings are numeric representations of text that make it possible to relate semantic
similarity between chunks of text to the proximity of the embeddings in vector space.
The embeddings_generator app associated with this blog is currently saving HTML fragments that are
associated with each embedding to a Chroma database. I want to save the HTML fragments to an SQLite
database instead.
Practicing retrieval practice.
Studying materials over and over (for instance, looking over your notes repeatedly) is not the most
effective way to learn.
To copy a directory and its contents on a Linux system, use the cp command with one of several
options.
Omarchy is a distribution of the Arch Linux operating system.
Dealing with customizations of default Omarchy themes after Omarchy version 3.3.0 update.
Throw a warning in Hugo development mode if internal links are broken.
Attempting to not deploy broken links to production.
“Diacritics, often loosely called ‘accents’, are the various little dots and squiggles which, in
many languages are written above, below or on top of certain letters of the alphabet to indicate
something about their pronunciation.”
“SQLite is a C library that provides a lightweight disk-based database that doesn’t require a
separate server process and allows accessing the database using a nonstandard variant of the SQL
query language…. the [Python] sqlite module was written by Gerhard Häring. It provides an
SQL interface compliant with the DB-API 2.0 specification described by PEP 249, and requires the
third-party SQLite library.”
How to force a linebreak in HTML that’s rendered from a Hugo markdown file.
Proposal for a universal electronic publishing system and archive.
“We progress by means of NASHR, an Arabic word that means scatter technique.”
How to enter HTML entities like the trademark symbol in markdown files.
Command line command for Neovim (and possibly Vim).
Examines the impact of the internet, artificial intelligence, robotics, etc, on human life.
“To us, you appear to be the only one around who is clinically sane!” (Werner Herzog, from his
interview with Ted Nelson in ‘Lo and Behold’.)
Transclusion: the inclusion of a part of all of an electronic document into another document by
reference. Couned by Ted Nelson.
Noice (Nice, Noise, Notice). “Highly experimental (Neovim) plugin that completely replaces the UI for messages, cmdline and the popupmenu.
“Python threading allows you to have different parts of your program running concurrently.” What’s
the difference between concurrent and parallel code execution?
Vim motions for my configuration that I’ve had to look up or discover by trial and error.
A basic re-implementation of the Cell class from the Zhangtaining/cell_research GitHub repo. (All mistakes are
mine.)
Memory and sensory systems-based cognition in organisms (biological systems) lacking
animal/human-type brains.
Looking for basal intelligence in sorting algorithms.
TODO: tags should be added to the text that’s used to generate semantic search embeddings
This site doesn’t use categories, but it’s got a /categories route. Fix that.
Updating the Hugo taxonomy template to display tag post counts.
How to use warnf or errorf to print debug information to the terminal.
Getting up-to-speed with Go templates as they are used by Hugo.
How does Hugo handle tags (and other taxonomy terms)?
Markdown footnotes are automatically inserted into the HTML during the Hugo build process. How does
that work?
A rough styleguide for the Zalgorithm blog.
Guidlines for writing useful notes.
em units for the font-size property are relative to the font-size of the parent element. rem unit
sizes are always relative to the root (html) element.
Deploying a Docker application to a VPS running Ubuntu 24.04.
Notes related to setting up a semantic search application for my Hugo blog.
Different ways of persisting the results returned on the search page.
Breaking the blog’s text into chunks for semantic search.
A simple HTML document for testing HTML element navigation.
Exploring XML and HTML elements through trial and error and reading the docs.
This is a test, this is only a test.
First steps parsing Hugo HTML files with lxml.
After some amount of preliminary effort, go for it.
Following along with the lxml tutorial.
What is the factory design pattern (briefly)?
Tools and software used by the Levin Lab.
Notes related to the lxml Etree Tutorial.
Configuring a Hugo theme to use Tailwindcss in development
Getting familiar with Hugo’s template system; fixing problems related to having followed deprecated
Hugo docs.
Using XkbOptions to tweak keyboard configuration on Hyprland (and Linux in general).
Keybindings that I use in the Ghostty terminal.
Testing a custom image markdown renderer. (It started as a shortcode.)
How to override Hugo’s default markdown rendering with a render hook.
What are sine, cosine, and tangent?
Debugging glitchy rendering of webpages that contain video elements after updating Omarchy on a
machine that has a hybrid GPU.
Clarifying a point of confusion about the use of the term “dimension”.
Considering how real and complex numbers can be represented in space. Trying to get a better
understanding of complex numbers by starting from a definition of real numbers.
How to stop tracking files and folders after adding them to the gitignore file.
Steps taken to convert this blog’s theme to a submodule
Code for tracing complex plane points as they’re iterated towards a root with Halley’s method.
Why are fractal patterns generated by finding polynomial roots for a complex plane with Halley’s
Method?
The source code for the halleys_roots_fractal function.
A note about the Hugo ‘ref’ shortcode
Working through Halley’s Method fractal code
How I removed the notes path from the Hugo homepage.
How to use the square root function to solve for the value of the cosine of Pi/4.
Random notes about polynomial functions.
I’ve been putting this off for a while.
Halley’s method is a foot-finding angorithm that’s used for functions with one real variable with a
continuous second derivative.
Newton’s Method for finding roots of functions.
The logistic map is a discrete dynamical system defined by the quadratic difference equation.
Language understanding entails not just extracting the surface-level meaning of the linguistic input, but constructing rich mental models of the situation it describes….
Notes on Dr. Michael Levin’s Platonic space article.
The Zalgorithm citation style guide.
Notes on the FastAPI tutorials and documentation.
Learning about Docker through a real project: configuring a local multi-container Docker application
that uses the Chroma DB docker image and FastAPI.
My attempt to get up-to-speed with Docker in a systematic way, starting at the beginning. It’s a
boring way to learn.
A study of the influence of language upon thought and of the science of symbolism.
This paper presents SimCSE, a simple constrative larning framework that greatly advances
state-of-the-art sentence embeddings.
GPT-style models predict the next token, embedding models output a single fixed-size vector.
This book reveals and studies a common and fundamental problem behind almost all modern practices of (artificial) intelligence. That is, how to effectively and efficiently learn a low-dimensional distribution of data in a high-dimensional space and then transform the distribution to a compact and structured representation?
Following the Chroma “Getting Started” guide.
A biography of Fredrick II.
In any judgement respecting the scientific activity of the court of Frederick II, much depends upon
the opiniion formed of Michael Scot, the emperor’s astrologer, whose writings form a large part of
the scientific and philosophical product of the Magna Curia.
The study of nature and the physical universe, ignoring any supernatural influence.
Alchemy now holds an important place in the history of science.
The practice of magic was much in vogue in the Renaissance and even the word had gained a limited respectability.
Without experience, nothing can be properly known.
A mathematician, astronomer, and physicist of the Islamic Golden Age.
Sources of information about Roger Bacon.
What’s known about Roger Bacon’s family life?
The University of Oxford is the oldest university in the English-speaking world.
Language understanding entails not just extracting the surface-level meaning of the
linguistic input, but constructing rich mental models of the situation it describes.
Some notes about Roger Bacon.