Plotting a CSV file with Typst and CeTZ-Plot

Whenever I need to plot some data, I usually prefer to have a tool that

• is fast,

• is easy to install,

• is reliable,

• is flexible,

• is free to use,

• produces high-quality plots, and

• doesn't require many dependencies.

gnuplot and matplotlib are popular choices, but I personally don't like the appearance of gnuplot and I usually am not so happy with Python's large amount of dependencies.

For quick plotting, I recently discovered CeTZ-Plot. It's a plotting library inside Typst. Typst is a modern alternative to LaTeX, so it is meant to create full documents, but it's also quite easy to use it to create images.

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File Upload in fx

File uploads for fx are now implemented in pull request #21.

Here is an image that is hosted on this site:

I don't like the way you're running our country

An old joke from Ronald Reagan:

An American and a Russian are arguing about their two countries. The American says look: "In my country, I can walk into the Oval Office, pound the president's desk, and say 'Mr. President, I don't like the way you're running our country!'".

And the Russian says "I can do that." The American says "You can?" The Russian says "Yes, I can walk right into the Kremlin, go to the General Secretary's office, slam my fist on his desk and say "I don't like the way President Reagan is running his country."

TIL: EV fires can quickly be extinguished via a special lance that punctures the battery and sprays water on the cells directly (https://youtu.be/1FWY3LNuPU4).

Blogs are still very much alive. This post by Tommy Breslein for example would not have worked as one or more tweets. As a YouTube video maybe it would have worked but even then it’s hard to beat the effectiveness of a clear blog post.

Set -euxo pipefail

To make working with Bash scripts less problematic, I've switched to these default shebang and settings:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euxo pipefail

The first line tells the interpreter to run the file via bash as found at /usr/bin/env. This /usr/bin/env is one of the most platform-independent locations that I know (it even works on NixOS).

The second line makes it much easier to find problems in the script. The -e option will cause the script to fail immediately when a command fails, the -o pipefail will also crash if one of the commands in a pipe fails (this could have avoided a Cloudflare outage), -u will treat unset variables as error, and -x will print each command before execution.

This speech by Oliver Anthony is exactly my social media experience as well. A few people are famous and get all the attention while the rest are "nobodies". I think it's a bit inherent to the massive scale of social media. In a small town, it's hard to be a complete nobody. At least some people know your parents or have seen you in the supermarket, for example.

I think I’m going to skip the comment feature for fx (https://fx.huijzer.xyz). Niall Ferguson recently argued that people in technology often forget about the past and say that now everything is different even though usually it isn’t (https://youtu.be/giZC4pCqB4o). Most of the time, new things are just old things with slight variations.

So what are old things that are great? Publishing text from one paragraph length to multiple paragraphs. This is what newspapers did for more than a century. Then you still have book authors and authors like Dijkstra (EWD notes) that also published. To write a comment, you have to write your own publication. Not some effortless comment a la modern social media.

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"Why are big tech companies slow? Because they've packed in as many features as possible in order to make more money, and the interaction of existing features adds an unimaginable amount of cognitive load" (https://www.seangoedecke.com/difficulty-in-big-tech/).

I wish Dijkstra was alive and on Twitter. Quotes like this are perfect for the place: "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense."