2025-03-14 : Random Geekery

You’re not reinventing Wikipedia

Just a reminder to myself to persist notes that are useful for me. Maybe touch them up a bit for the idea of being published, but that’s it. I don’t need detailed topic pages for every domain. Just hooks for the useful bits.

Styling Polars DataFrames in Quarto

Polars + Quarto is producing some classless HTML. Worked around it with some clever Sass.

Code Sample

    :is(div):has(small):has(table) {
	display: grid;
	grid-template;rows: 1fr auto;
	
	small {
		text-align: center;
	}
	
	table {
		margin-inline: auto;
	}
}

Except Obsidian’s code highlighter gets real weird with Sass, so this is the SCSS version.

Show counts based on a property in Cypher

Code Sample

    MATCH
	(j:Page {note_type: "journals"}),
	(p:Page {note_type: "pages"})
RETURN
	count(DISTINCT j) as journals,
	count(DISTINCT p) as pages

Activity Log

hackers.town: 2025-03-14 Fri 07:10

“Vibe coding” is maybe the most depressing concept to enter the programming taxonomy this year.

Then again it’s only March.

My preferred pairing has always been official docs (as opposed to man pages) and search engines (back when they worked).

As a general habit I avoid Stack Overflow. Seeing that someone had a solution would trick me into thinking it was a solution to my problem, and then of course also getting distracted by folks complaining about how the question was asked.

I also avoid autocomplete in the editor. Getting it wrong reinforces my learning. Repeatedly getting it wrong suggests bad API & maybe a wrapper is needed.

Larry Wall once said something to the effect of “IDEs are nice but I’d rather learn the language.”

(and yes my beard has an awful lot of gray these days)

Another sidenote is all the heavily pushed tooling has shifted to subscription services (it’s not whether but which coding LLM you use).

When I got into programming, the options were a commercial IDE (paid or pirated) or maybe Linux if you were adventurous. I worked at a gas station, so Linux it was. On a borrowed 486. That was enough to get me employable skills.

I haven’t seen a plausible equivalent to “Linux on a borrowed 486” entry point for LLMs yet. Local models maybe, but a robust system is encouraged.

hackers.town: 2025-03-14 Fri 08:26

The Monster At The End Of The Book was a favorite as a tot.

Small wonder that I ended up getting into Zen by way of Watts and absurd existentialism by way of Camus.

(for some reason my meme images rarely caught on)

Sad-looking Grover against a black backdrop: “This is the end of the book, and the only one here is … me. I, lovable, furry old Grover am the monster at the end of this book.”

I was already a weird little philosopher, because I remember having that conversation with Mom and saying I must be the monster holding the book.

(we already had running jokes about me being her little monster, so 5yo me wasn’t as weird and deep about it as it sounds)

hackers.town: 2025-03-14 Fri 13:30

putting on my glasses to help me find my glasses

hackers.town: 2025-03-14 Fri 13:45

grumbled about “rerolling” as in repeating the query with the same prompt and letting the randomness factor produce a new response from an LLM. I don’t hate it. Just seems a bit silly.

Friend: “Haven’t you ever rerolled a D&D character to get better stats?”

Me: “nah, I played GURPS. I took the setting, checked my points, and made the characters I wanted to play.”

Friend: “of course you did”