The large Dutch pension fund ABP achieved an annual return of about 6% over the last 20 years, according to https://www.abp.nl/over-abp/duurzaam-en-verantwoord-beleggen/beleggingsresultaten. The S&P 500 had a 10.392% return (dividends invested) over 20 years, according to https://tradethatswing.com/average-historical-stock-market-returns-for-sp-500-5-year-up-to-150-year-averages/.
I'm trying to get jas (just an installer) published in the snap package registry for a few weeks now. This is how the process is going so far.
According to the docs, I can just register a new snap and publish it. So in a fresh Ubuntu 24.04, I ran:
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install neovim
$ sudo snap install snapcraft --classic
$ git clone https://github.com/rikhuijzer/jas.git
$ mv pkg/snapcraft.yaml .
$ snapcraft # installs LXD at first run
$ sudo apt install gnome-keyring
$ snapcraft login
$ snapcraft register jas
$ snapcraft upload --release=edge jas_0.2.0_amd64.snap
Store operation failed:
- resource-not-found: Snap not found for name=jas
Full execution log: '/root/.local/state/snapcraft/log/snapcraft-20250408-093243.551840.log'Kyle Chan: "BYD Mexico plant: BYD’s plans for building a new EV plant in Mexico were put on hold after Trump got re-elected. Then suddenly in March, China’s Ministry of Commerce jumped ahead and withheld approval for BYD’s Mexico plant, arguing that BYD’s technology might get “leaked” to the US (which doesn’t make any sense given the many BYD plants popping up all over the world). [...]
One explanation for this pattern of actions is a battle over symbolic control. Rather than getting hit by a ban by the other side, it looks like you have more control when you jump ahead and implement the ban first yourself. It’s like the classic line: 'You can’t fire me—I quit.'"
Arvind Narayanan: “AI is helpful despite being error-prone if it is faster to verify the output than it is to do the work yourself.”
Buffett on DOGE and the US deficit. He said the deficit is unsustainable and that it’s an extremely difficult thing to do. He concluded with: “It’s a job I don’t want, but it’s a job I think should be done.”
https://www.youtube.com/live/1LWBphTImy4 at 04:50:16.
Buffett: “You never reach an answer in this business. You reach a point of action […]”
Recently, there was another security incident with GitHub Actions. This time, an attacker managed to modify the . After the change, the action printed secrets to the logs which the attacker (and anyone else) could then scrape. More specifically, not only the most recent version, but "most versions of " were affected. For example,
In a recent post, I showed how CeTZ-Plot can be used to plot data from a CSV file. I posted this on Reddit and got some interesting comments. One comment was that CeTZ-Plot was too slow for plotting data with 90k rows to SVG. This could be due to SVG being a vector format, so it will always add all 90k points even if they are on top of each other. It's probably a better idea to plot PNG in such cases.
But let's still see how fast CeTZ-Plot is. This is actually an interesting question in general because CeTZ-Plot is written in Typst. Typst is a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX. Writing in this system is probably slower than writing in a more optimized language. But on the other hand, Typst was written in Rust so maybe the performance is not too bad.
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.
File uploads for fx are now implemented in pull request #21.
Here is an image that is hosted on this site: