Linkdump #2

When I started this linkdump thing, the plan was having regular dumps. But life always has got surprises It was no surprise. Everyone in Iran was waiting for the next war. And war means the regime will close the doors of the Internet.

After I got access to the Internet, I started writing the 2nd linkdump. But for some reasons not unrelated to the environment, I couldn’t spend time on it. Anyway, here it comes now!

Software

Terminal

• zoxide is a cd alternative. So many traditional utilities or programs in Unix and Unix-like operating systems really need modern new replacements. So far, I am very much satisfied with lsd to replace the traditional ls and neovim as the editor I use. I have installed zoxide and aliased cd to it. It takes time to learn all features of it. Let’s see how it’ll go. And as an important advantage, I can send patches to zoxide if a feature is useful. But I cannot do the same for coreutils/busybox/bsdutils.

Other

• iroh-lan: If you want to do LAN gaming across the Internet or otherwise have heavy file transfers, you might want to try this and see if it fits. A friend of mine starred it on Github and as I talked to him, he uses it for gaming.
• ChatGuard is a browser extension to use E2EE in an IM which does not support it. As you can see, the developer behind it is Iranian. During the internet black out, the IMs within the country were the only options for us to communicate. Many of us, including me, went on self hosting open source messengers like Delta Chat and promoting it. Unfortunately, the regime started mass blocking those servers. The other option was government backed IMs. Even for the normal people it is obvious these messengers are supposed to watch people. So this browser extension is a very clever solution!

Libraries/Infrastructure

• mimalloc: If you’ve got a compute heavy project, and allocations are a bottleneck for you, you might want to try mimalloc and see if it’ll be better. Of course, you should also try to make less allocations and re-use already existing ones!
• rmk: A keyboard firmware written in Rust. I started a project to turn a Sega Genesis gamepad into a wireless gamepad for PC. But unfortunately thanks to the situation in here, I have to halt such these projects for now…

AI

• nanochat is an effort to minimize cost of training an LLM. A tradition always in the hackers community is that if giants do it with 10k, we should be able to do it in 500! I haven’t get started on training models yet. As I am busy with a research I have in Evolutionary Machine Learning field. As a side note, a brief post about upsides and downsides of LLMs is in drafts.

Hardware

Recently, I’ve been browsing hackaday and I’ve found excellent hardware projects.

• LightInk: A smart watch project with e-paper display and solar power. This seems like the smart watch I want. As Pebble was relaunched after so many years, I thought it would be a good watch for me. But then I realized it won’t do if I go for idealism. What I’m looking for is a watch I can program with many good features but without any connectivity. I do NOT want to receive notifications. And I do want a very long battery life. The Casio on me hand has got multiple years of battery life. Perhaps in future I would build a smart watch for meself.
• LVDS Laptop Display Interfacing: You want a cheap display for your next hardware project? Why not recycle displays from old laptops?

Website/Service

• Programming Fonts A gallary of programming fonts. Maybe one day when I have free time, I will go to find the best colorscheme and font for neovim…
• Kagi Search: A search engine you have to pay for it. Years ago, I switched from Google to DuckDuckGo for less crap results. But over the years, DuckDuckGo results became worse and worse. With the rise of LLMs, the mainstream web has become a big field of trash and it’s hard for you to find good quality content among them. As I found Marginalia search engine, it was excellent for finding small websites and personal blogs. But with Kagi, you can find good stuff on the mainstream web. It has been sometime I’m using it especially for academic papers and it’s excellent. I am pretty sure I’m gonna buy the paid plan and fortunately for me in Iran, they accept cryptocurrency.