Arguggi

A substitute for the conky part in my $ conky | dzen status bar. It's practically a learning exercise.

I was inspired by posts like this one [1] to give the free monad a spin and after ~300 lines i'm almost done. But then I found other posts that talk about free and cofree [2] that I still can't really understand so I guess there still is some room for improvement.

[1] http://www.haskellforall.com/2012/06/you-could-have-invented... [2] http://dlaing.org/cofun/posts/free_and_cofree.html

I just switched from dmenu to the contrib prompt, only thing to look out for is that the searchPredicate function of the XPConfig doesn't actually seem to do anything.

Setting:

  searchPredicate :: String -> String -> Bool
  searchPredicate = \_ _ -> False

seems to make no difference.

And the default is:

  searchPredicate = isPrefixOf

Patching and recompiling with this patch[1] mentioned here[2] seems to fix the issue.

[1]: https://code.google.com/p/xmonad/issues/attachmentText?id=39... [2]: https://code.google.com/p/xmonad/issues/detail?id=393

This seems pretty similar to the Haskell Maybe Monad.

"Learn You a Haskell for Great Good!" has an example[0]:

  routine =   
    case Just (0,0) of   
        Nothing -> Nothing  
        Just start -> case landLeft 2 start of  
            Nothing -> Nothing  
            Just first -> case landRight 2 first of  
                Nothing -> Nothing  
                Just second -> landLeft 1 second

becomes (using some 'do' syntactic sugar):

  routine = do  
    start <- return (0,0)  
    first <- landLeft 2  
    second <- landRight 2 first  
    landLeft 1 second

Checking for Nothing is taken care of 'automatically' and if any of start, first, second or (landLeft 1 second) are equal to Nothing routine is equal to Nothing too.

[0] http://learnyouahaskell.com/a-fistful-of-monads#walk-the-lin...

You can stop certain packages from being updated [0] but the wiki explicity says it's "unsupported" [1] so probably best to update everything and hope nothing breaks.

New packages for the "core" repo, for example the Linux kernel, are first introduced to the "testing" repo, which isn't enabled by default. You would have to manually change your pacman.conf to use it.

From the wiki [2]:

"After a kernel in core broke many user systems, the "core signoff policy" was introduced. Since then, all package updates for core need to go through a testing repository first, and only after multiple signoffs from other developers are they allowed to move. Over time, it was noticed that various core packages had low usage, and user signoffs or even lack of bug reports became informally accepted as criteria to accept such packages."

[0]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman#Skip_package_fro... [1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Pacman#Partial_upgrades... [2]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Official_repositories#H...

pacman (Arch's package manager) does not build from source, it downloads binary packages from the repos just like Ubuntu. Differently from Ubuntu packages are usually as vanilla and up to date as possible.

You build packages from source when you install something from the AUR[0] or you can build from the Arch Build System [1].

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_User_Repository

[1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Build_System

Shameless plug: I've been trying a list with every issue I encounter while using arch [0], as of today I've had ~10 issues in ~170 days. Each issue has taken me ~5 minutes to solve.

[0] https://arguggi.co.uk/blog/list.html

TFA and your blog post both mention SLiM as a login manager, according to the Arch wiki[0]:

"The SliM project has been abandoned (the project homepage is down, leaving a github mirror), and is not fully compatible to systemd, including logind sessions. Consider using a different Display manager or Xinitrc."

Lightdm [1] seems to be a better alternative.

[0] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/SLiM [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/LightDM

I've been trying to keep a problem log for arch updates for the past few months [0] but I haven't tried not updating for a while.

Now I'm curious, so I guess I'm trying it for a month [1].

[0] https://arguggi.co.uk/blog/list.html [1] https://arguggi.co.uk/blog/Not-Updating/

The usual "Arch is unstable" convinced me to put up a very simple jekyll blog [0] with all the arch related problems I run into from here on out.

I've only listed the last 2 problems now. As months go by the list will probably get longer and better reflect how much arch actually breaks (or doesn't)

[0] https://arguggi.co.uk/blog/I-Just-Want-It-To-Work/

I agree that only answering "You just committed a fallacy, goodbye" would not be the right choice, but at least mentioning it and then try to explain why I think it's relevant doesn't seem so wrong.

Am I the only one troubled by the last example?

And then suppose you encounter a woman who tells you that because of the insults she has received from guys in the skeptic community, she has decided that the skeptic movement is fundamentally sexist.

Receiving insults from men that identify as skeptics does not mean that the skeptic movement is fundamentally sexist.

Telling her she just committed a fallacy doesn't seem so wrong to me.

I had trouble with the "You can't read without subvocalization." part too.

I can't understand if by subvocalization he means moving your throat/mouth or simply repeating the words you are reading in your mind without moving any muscles.

Wikipedia says "subvocalization is defined as the internal speech made when reading a word"[1], which further confuses me.

I don't move any muscles while reading, but my internal monologue repeats the words I read, does this mean i subvocalize?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization

"So who governs what is the correct application and interpretation of data?"

Morozov doesn't worry about the correct application of data but, from what I understood reading the link, is more worried about this:

"Morozov fears a future in which such “intuitive knowledge” about how to deploy resources is overruled by algorithms that can work only with hard data and can’t, of course, account for the data they don’t have."

It could be argued that decisions based on "intuitive knowledge" without any data are as biased as the one's based on only data.

"The solution proposed here is "Don't have data". Because if we stick our heads in a hole, it'll all get better?"

I don't think this is the solution Morozov is proposing. He's just saying that collecting and distributing more data will not necessarily be beneficial because data interpretation is subjective and data collection may be biased.