Fernando Borretti
Fernando Borretti
Fernando Borretti
I’m a software engineer. In my free time I write code, a blog, fiction, and build a programming language.
Latest Posts
Right now there’s a cruise ship parked outside Cabo Verde because of an outbreak of Andes virus. Yep, another cruise ship. I don’t get the appeal. It’s like a big open-air serial passage experiment: you get a bunch of old people with...
I write a lot of Makefiles. I use it not as a command runner but as an ad-hoc build system for small projects, typically for compiling Markdown documents and their dependencies. Like so: And the above graph was generated by this very...
The other day I went to an AI hackathon organized by my friends Lucia and Malin. The theme was mech interp, but I hardly know PyTorch so I planned to do something at the API layer rather than the model layer. Something I think about a...
“For man, or for a man, there can be no new beginnings.” — David Zindell, Shanidar Re: A Call for New Aesthetics. At some point in the 20th century, we filled out the last few basis vectors of humanity. We explored the whole game map....
Earlier today I noticed the syntax highlighting on this website was broken. But not fully: on reload I’d see a flash of highlighted text, that then turned monochrome. The raw HTML from curl showed rouge tags, but the web inspector showed...
The DS-640 is a compact USB scanner from Brother. It was surprisingly hard to get it working on NixOS, so I wrote up my solution so others don’t have this problem. The bad news is you need Brother’s proprietary drivers to make this work....
The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen by nostalgebraist. A revelation (ἀποκάλυψις = “unveiling”) told through the eyes of a developmentally-disabled teenager. You will never guess where it goes. This came across my desk because I really...
When DALL-E came out, it took me a couple of weeks to pick my jaw up from the floor. I would go to sleep excited to wake up to a full quota, with a backlog of prompts to try. It was magical, miraculous. Like discovering a new universe. I...
Probably not a popular thing to say today. The zeitgeisty thing to say is that we should all log off and live terrible cottagecore solarpunk lives raising chickens and being mindful. I wish people were more online and more public. I have...
You can use Nix as a package manager for Emacs, like so: { home-manager.users.eudoxia = { programs.emacs = { enable = true; extraPackages = epkgs: with epkgs; [ magit rust-mode treemacs # and so on ]; }; }; } Today I learned you can also...
This post describes my experience using Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729. The tl;dr is that it’s a delightful laptop, and Linux runs flawlessly, and all the hardware things I’ve needed run OOTB. The only difficulty I had was in...
To install Agda and its standard library, add this to your config: environment.systemPackages = with pkgs; [ (agda.withPackages (p: [ p.standard-library ])) ]; Or, using home-manager: home-manager.users.$username.home.packages = with...
hashcards is a local-first spaced repetition app, along the lines of Anki or Mochi. Like Anki, it uses FSRS, the most advanced scheduling algorithm yet, to schedule reviews. The thing that makes hashcards unique: it doesn’t use a...
tl;dr: you have to modify the application bundle. Celestia is a space simulator: you can fly around space and look at moons and exoplants, fast forward time. It is sometimes used by sci-fi artists for worldbuilding because you can easily...
The pleasure is in foreseeing it, not in bringing it to term. — Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Non-Fictions This post is about managing ADHD. It is divided into two sections: “Strategies” describes the high-level control system, “Tactics”...