miniblog.

I've been really enjoying paru as a pacman substitute on Arch Linux: https://github.com/Morganamilo/paru It allows you to update both normal and AUR packages in one go, which is super convenient. It also shows you PKGBUILD files, so there's still a human audit step for AUR.

Writing a parser that is resilient to syntax errors, and why a parser should always return something: https://duriansoftware.com/joe/constructing-human-grade-parsers (The latter property is important in e.g. IDEs and it's rarely discussed!)

I'm fascinated to learn that people are discovering weaknesses in state-of-the-art bots for playing Go, such that a novice player can reliably win: https://goattack.far.ai/human-evaluation This suggests that self-play doesn't always generalise: it's not sufficient to beat earlier versions.