move diary from SichangHe/diary@c418928

src/SUMMARY.md

@@ -91,3 +91,18 @@
         - [Linear Algebra](notes/class_notes/math202.md)
         - [Speech Recognition](notes/class_notes/cs304.md)
         - [Statistical Machine Learning](notes/class_notes/stats303.md)
+
+# Private
+
+- [Diary](diary/index.md)
+    - [start](diary/start.md)
+        - [VSCodium](diary/vscodium.md)
+        - [The Run](diary/the_run.md)
+        - [Feeling Lost](diary/feeling_lost.md)
+        - [Linux VM and Neovim](diary/linux_vm_and_neovim.md)
+    - [Back from Duke](diary/back_from_duke.md)
+        - [Elixir Phoenix](diary/elixir_phoenix.md)
+        - [`mdbook-katex`](diary/mdbook_katex.md)
+    - [Spring 2024 Ideas](diary/spring_2024_ideas.md)
+        - [Rethinking The Web](diary/spring_2024_ideas/rethinking_the_web.md)
+        - [Rust](diary/spring_2024_ideas/rust.md)

src/diary/back_from_duke.md

@@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
+<!-- toc -->
+# Back from Duke
+
+20230313
+
+I have abandoned this diary for a long time since I went to Duke last fall
+semester.
+This could be reasoned at follows:
+
+- I was taking five courses at Duke and was busy.
+- I made suboptimal ex-relationship decisions that are time-consuming.
+- I was occupied with shiny new tech, trying out Neovim, Elixir, etc.
+
+## Duke semester
+
+Duke seemed like a real school.
+People walked around carrying books and talking to others.
+In all my classes (except perhaps CS 203), class activities were unmatched
+compared to DKU classes.
+
+The courses have loads of homework, almost as much homework as DKU courses
+each week.
+But, the courses are not difficult as DKU courses in that you have the time and
+chance to "breathe."
+Unlike crappy DKU seven-week courses, Duke courses last for 14 weeks,
+and give you one extra week for reviews, one extra week for final exams.
+
+I took:
+
+- CS 203, Discrete Mathematics for Computer Science
+- CS 205, Computer Architecture
+- CS 371, Intro to Machine Learning
+- MATH 401, Abstract Algebra
+- MATH 431, Real Analysis
+
+I have not much motivation to talk about them in details.
+
+In general, Duke CS classes taught me real stuff, unlike DKU CS classes…
+
+## Ex-relationship
+
+The relationship ended with a special COVID related drama that I could not
+foresee.
+
+What I did foresee, though, was its nature of temporariness.
+Back then, I wrote the relationship contract with a clause regarding break ups.
+
+What I think went wrong, was that I pet them too much and they behaved more and
+more like a pet, dependent, purposeless, and naughty.

src/diary/elixir_phoenix.md

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+<!-- toc -->
+# Elixir Phoenix
+
+I need a back end technology.
+First, I thought Ruby on Rails was the most suitable.
+Now, I am turning to the Elixir Phoenix Framework.
+
+## Leaving Rails
+
+Rails was said to be the most productive back end framework.
+
+I learned Ruby and walked through the Rails "getting started" document
+last summer.
+Then, I made [a forum](https://github.com/SichangHe/forum).
+
+Pain started to increase when I was making the forum:
+
+- The template Rails generated became less useful as the project went on.
+- For adding functionalities such as history, tags, and search,
+    I introduced more and more plugins,
+    each of them:
+    - needed me digging documentation to find my usecase
+    - had part of their documentation out-of-date,
+        so I had to dig the GitHub issues as well
+    - introduced more "magic" to the codebase
+
+Main reasons why Rails suck:
+
+- Too much "magic."
+    - Everything works highly relying on metaprogramming.
+    - Global namespace pollution means it is hard to figure out
+        what things are, where they are defined,
+        and the language server couldn't find those either.
+- Backwards incompatibility.
+    - Rails 7, as I was using, clearly made a lot of solutions that worked in
+        Rails 6 not working any more.
+        Devise, the authentication plugin, e.g., wouldn't work properly.
+- Hotwire was not fun to play with.
+
+    It's like playing a puzzle game, instead of helping me.
+
+## Learning Elixir
+
+- Went through Elixir official doc.
+- Did a few Exercism exercises.
+- Went through *Functional Web Development with Elixir, OTP, and Phoenix*
+    until they started to use Phoenix channels and the API has changed.
+    - Technically, only learned about Elixir, not Phoenix.
+    - GenServer is the main way to handle states and side effects.
+
+## Learning Phoenix
+
+I have not actually started using Phoenix yet.
+
+When following the *Functional Web Development* book,
+I wanted to separate the Elixir project into several modules,
+so I created an umbrella project and initialized a Phoenix project inside it.
+The project straight-up could not build.
+
+I then initialized a Phoenix umbrella project.
+It builds and runs fine.
+But, it creates a weird project structure that intertwines with Phoenix.
+So, I guess I will just not use umbrellas when I want true separation.

src/diary/feeling_lost.md

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+<!-- toc -->
+# Feeling Lost
+
+2022-05-15
+
+It is 12 p.m. at night and I'm the only one up at home.
+I just had a shower and my hair is still half-dry.
+During the shower,
+I was thinking and I was feeling lost.
+I thought again about my Signature Work,
+which does not exist at the moment.
+
+I wrote to a computer science professor for recommendation for mentors.
+In that email,
+I stated that I wanted to deploy a server with Rust and WASM
+but I felt that it would be impossible to accomplish anything alone
+and I considered scientific computing as well.
+One move I think I did wrong was to mention a project
+with another computer science professor,
+who the professor I wrote to recommended for mentor without a reason.
+I guess they are just pushing me back to whatever I have.
+
+The reason I asked another professor for recommendation for mentors
+is right because I sensed that there are something wrong with the way
+the current project runs.
+I feel like that we are not doing anything special
+while getting excited
+—we are just reinventing the wheel and trying to enjoy it.
+Text searching and test processing,
+both are something that countless people have done before,
+and our team is just importing Python libraries,
+smashing it into the project and writing glue code,
+and calling it a progress.
+
+A while ago there was a seminar where computer science professors
+and students showed what they had done.
+All of them used machine learning to treat some problems
+that may or may not have any meanings.
+I have this impression that people are machines learning for machine learning.
+It looks tempting,
+but I know that machine learning is extremely data-demanding and therefore hard.
+I decided that machine learning would not be a main theme in any research of mine
+unless I really have a huge amount of preprocessed data,
+which I probably won't have.
+
+I have this feeling that computer science people in DKU tend to play with
+little toys that people from a more academic background would discard.
+This could be similar for data science people.
+I am considering to do some mathematics studies…
+I thought about it and recall that
+my mathematics is a huge pile of mess,
+being taking all these "applied" math classes at DKU.
+I just took the advanced linear algebra last session
+and I had zero motivation to study it along side with CS301
+with our lockdown and online classes.
+I don't really know what the heck I learned in these courses.
+I know they have a lot of proofs that is important,
+but I don't really understand why any of them is constructed like that.
+I also did horrible in CS301,
+which I confirmed today by checking the final exam grade.
+
+I thought to myself that I don't care grades that much.
+I figured that I care more about my experiences.
+But, I do care about grades.
+The way this shows is that bad grades make me visibly unhappy,
+and good grades does not make me happy.
+It is just poisonous.
+
+I am now thinking that I really should reread the books that I ought to read
+but instead attended "slides classes."
+I think learning mathematics is not about taking those freaking classes.
+The classes that I did well,
+I learned them in advance by book.
+I am guessing that I actually learn much less effectively taking classes
+than reading books for the following classes.
+But, I have been too lazy to read all the books before taking all these classes.
+A lot of the time definitely went to YouTube.
+
+Right now,
+I'm learning JavaScript,
+while also planing for more Rust,
+Python,
+and C exercises.
+But, I suspect that these are not as important as reading more mathematics books for me.
+I need to change…

src/diary/index.md

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+<!-- toc -->
+# Diary

src/diary/linux_vm_and_neovim.md

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+<!-- toc -->
+# Linux VM And Neovim
+
+20220806
+
+After a long time,
+I decided that I should write something again.
+I've been sick multiple times during the months since coming back to Canton.
+I highly doubt that the pathogen density here is much higher than in Kunshan.
+Despite that,
+I have actually done quite a lot of stuff recently.
+
+## Linux VM on M1 MBP
+
+After fiddling with qemu and virt-manager on my M1 MBP,
+I gave up and went back to Parallels Desktop.
+
+### virt-manager and qemu
+
+I used virt-manager with qemu on Arch Linux and Ubuntu Linux.
+On M1 MBP, though, KVM does not exist,
+and virt-manager cannot connect to hvf in my experience.
+Therefore, I was merely using qemu's emulation and the performance was dreadful.
+
+### Parallels Desktop
+
+Having met obstacles using virt-manager,
+I decided to try out Parallels Desktop again.
+
+The problem was how to get it.
+
+At first,
+I searched for the good old Russian TNT.
+The search took a long time and the results were diminishing.
+I then looked for Chinese cracks.
+
+All of the Chinese cracks use PD runner,
+which I knew about and also tried.
+Basically, it is a standalone program that calls functions from Parallels Despite
+to launch VMs after the trail period has ended.
+Some sites even sell PD runner for quite an amount of money.
+
+I don't like the idea of getting a caller program somewhere randomly on the internet
+and using it just to launch an official program.
+I remembered vaguely that this thing was leaked from GitHub.
+And, that was the right place to search for it.
+The program was hidden behind a non-default branch for some reason,
+but I managed to download it.
+
+I simply got Parallels Desktop from their official website.
+It turned out later that the PD runner from GitHub works just fine.
+Now, the problem became which distro I should use.
+
+### The distro for the VM
+
+A big thing about Linux distros is that no all of them support ARM that well.
+It also come with the actual reason why I need a Linux VM.
+There are certain tools,
+such as valgrind,
+that cannot be used on macOS.
+And, I want to be able to get my hands on some of them.
+Because that's the reason,
+I decided that compatibility is the top requirement.
+Therefore, Alpine, which is very lightweight and "suckless,"
+is excluded from my choices.
+I use Arch Linux for my other laptop,
+but I believe ARM is not a first class support for them.
+It usually comes to Ubuntu as the choice for such VMs.
+But, I dislike distros like Ubuntu because they fiddle on the original repos
+(like Debian's repos)
+and produce what effectively is a Frankenstein of repos.
+
+Their base, Debian is good though,
+but Debian stable provides packages that are on average one or two years old.
+Luckily, I recently got to know that Debian testing is actually very usable.
+It is also a rolling-release distro.
+It seems like a very good choice for development
+which is what I would do on the VM anyways.
+
+### Installing the VM
+
+I grabbed a weekly build ISO and installed it as a Parallels Desktop VM.
+The first time, I got it wrong.
+I used TUI install, partitioned the drive,
+gave it 100MB for the boot partition and the rest for the home partition.
+At the end of the installation I selected "install system utilities"
+and did not install any desktop environments.
+As the installation process proceeds,
+I was watching the virtual disk growing larger and larger in size on Finder.
+It grew from under 1G to over 2.5G.
+
+I wanted a minimum installation, and that was not.
+I deleted the VM and tried a second time.
+This time, I did not select anything to preinstall during the installation process.
+However, I made another mistake.
+At the end of the installation,
+it prompted me to remove the installation media,
+which I did later by deleting the ISO.
+What happened was, it said that the VM did not have any OS installed!
+I reconnected the ISO and booted into rescue mode,
+but I didn't know what to do to rescue it.
+So, I installed it again on the same virtual disk.
+
+Upon fresh install, the VM was about 2G, which makes me happy.
+However, I tried to install packages using sudo and found out that sudo wasn't installed.
+So, I used su to install doas
+because I heard that doas is smaller and simpler to use.
+I began to understand why people just stick to Ubuntu.
+Most people would not be able to handle this.
+They would just go online
+and type in whatever command they see in a guide to install something.
+And, the guide would most certainly tell they to sudo.
+I installed both clang and GCC and both of them are about 0.5G,
+therefore the VM grew much bigger.
+It was still much smaller than it could be if I were to install a desktop environment.
+My previous VMs took around 5G to 7G even without the compilers.
+
+I decided that I want to stick with the terminal for this VM.
+So, the text editor choice would naturally be Neovim.
+
+## Neovim
+
+My main text editor is Code - Insiders at the moment.
+The reason why I switched from VSCodium was
+that the fantastic Pylance extension would only run on Microsoft's builds.
+Also, the insider build is slightly faster in my experience.
+I also tried Emacs, but ended up not using it.
+That would be for another story.
+Previously, I was using SpaceVim, which is a Vim distribution.
+It has numerous plugins built-in and supports various languages out of the box.
+The problem though, is that it is large and hard to install.
+The installation depends on GitHub connection,
+but my VM is not guaranteed to have that.
+I decided to go vanilla on the VM.
+But, at the same time,
+I want to go full vanilla Neovim because that is how I can learn.
+
+I went ahead and read the neovim-lua guide on GitHub,
+and added the configurations I want to my pure-Lua config files.
+To keep things small,
+I found a theme on GitHub based on One Light and copied it to my repo.
+
+After all that was done,
+I was pretty happy about my Neovim setup on the VM.
+But, I was less happy about my Neovim setup on my Mac.
+I tried to port my configurations to the macOS side
+but apparently those conflict with SpaceVim settings.
+I finally decided to ditch SpaceVim,
+which also meant that I would need to have my own plugin manager.
+I landed on dein for its lazy-loading features for performance.
+It took two days to fiddle my Neovim setup and learn Lua.
+After using some language servers,
+I concluded that Neovim cannot replace VSCode for me.
+It is much more convenient to open up a file instantly from terminal with Neovim.
+But, it lacks features like toggling comments on keyboard shortcuts.
+Although one could probably configure Neovim to do all that,
+it take quite a amount of time.
+Also, the way VSCode is used is that you start it and let it stay,
+therefore, you get much faster startup speed when you open another file.
+But, you start and close Neovim frequently,
+and each time, the language server or whatever extensions you have loads for a while.
+
+### Lua
+
+However, I am largely happy about how the configurations turned out.
+I got to fiddle with Lua,
+which is a different beast than the other scripting languages I used.
+Lua's performance is simply fantastic while it sucks at not having arrays.
+It also took me a while to learn Lua's custom Regex.
+After gaining some familiarity with Lua,
+I decided to write the yabai helper in Lua.
+The helper takes the information about all of the windows in the current space
+and calculates the next window to switch to.
+In this way,
+I managed to let yabai switch window in a circular fashion,
+including the windows yabai does not manage.