Rakhim's blog| rakhim.exotext.com
Finland is a high-context society that loves defaults | exotext| rakhim.exotext.com
AI is impressive because we’ve failed at semantic web and personal computing | exotext| rakhim.exotext.com
Producing a video lesson | exotext| rakhim.exotext.com
Thank you Google for breaking my YouTube addiction | exotext| rakhim.exotext.com
Programming vs. Coding vs. Software Engineering | exotext| rakhim.exotext.com
Remember how your parents would try to use Windows 95 or something like Norton Commander. They’d copy an app shortcut to a floppy disk and be amazed how much stuff they were able to put inside. All the games, and lots of space left! And you’d think they don’t understand anything at all, they are just clicking pretty much randomly, hoping this magic machine would at some point understand them and do the right thing. That was the time when programmers were building products for programmer...| Rakhim's blog
Please, recommend me a book about X | exotext| rakhim.exotext.com
But what if I really want a faster horse? | exotext| rakhim.exotext.com
Half Life and Half Life 2 are my favorite games. I've played them through multiple times. I played Half Life 1 for the first time in 1999 or 2000, can't remember. My computer at the time could barely run it. Nowadays, it's a struggle to play older PC games on a Mac. There are two fundamental issues: A while ago macOS had dropped support for 32-bit applications. Recently, Apple hardware migrated from Intel x86 to Arm architecture. My machine is Mac Studio 2023 M2 Max 64GB RAM, running macOS 15...| Rakhim's blog
Google is usually criticized for its relentless collection of personal data. It's an important and widely discussed topic, but I’m surprised there isn’t another common criticism: its responsibility for UI & UX design and its consequences. Any large company that creates products, whether software or physical, is responsible for how its design choices shape the broader perception of design itself. Google is a prime example because millions use its products, often treating them as standards....| Rakhim's blog
At first I cycled up the hill with all my force trying to impress the world. My athletic sweat was the only thing that showed the effort. My face was trying to do the opposite, to convince the unseen viewer that the ascent is effortless, easy even. Then I started noticing it. Who is the viewer? Am I in a movie? Sometimes, there aren’t even people around. This is madness. I can convince myself that the unseen viewer is a good abstraction, a tool to force better action. Is that naive religion...| Rakhim's blog
Dreaming of obsession | exotext| rakhim.exotext.com
Knight Ride: a game about rogue (chess) knight | exotext| rakhim.exotext.com
Why I prefer to git stage outside of the editor or the terminal | exotext| rakhim.exotext.com
They made computers behave like annoying salesmen | exotext| rakhim.exotext.com
YouTube picks, December 2024 | exotext| rakhim.exotext.com
I wish your bespoke React-Tailwind-etc static site generator had RSS | exotext| rakhim.exotext.com
How to make forbidden changes to SQLite tables | exotext| rakhim.exotext.com
How to build and publish multi-platform Rust binaries via Github actions | exotext| rakhim.exotext.com
Lots of scientific Python libraries are often used within Jupyter notebooks. At work, we develop and maintain plenty of such libraries for quantum computing, and some more higher-level ones include extensive user guides in form of Jupyter notebooks. Recently, I've been involved in building a new library, and it ended up containing a half dozen notebooks, covering everything from a quick start guide to niche applications and configuration examples. It being a completely new product, we wanted ...| Rakhims blog
I love science fiction in all forms, and I can't resist watching almost any sci-fi movie. So, I watch a lot of them. It's a bit annoying how "sci-fi and fantasy" became the standard pairing. In my eyes, these genres are exactly opposite. It's like grouping movies about horses with movies about cars. Anyway, here are some lesser-known science fiction movies that I recommend. The Man From Earth Can a bunch of people sitting in a room, talking, be great science fiction? Yes. (Pro top: do not wat...| Rakhims blog
A few weeks ago I've released an extremely simple note-taking app called Textpod. I just wanted a "one big-ass text file" kind of thing, but with file attachments and link archiving. The whole idea is that it's basically a text file with minor magic sprikled on top. The reception has been great! Seems like many people were looking for something similar. I also received lots of feedback and feature requests, which is fantastic. But... I found myself trying to justify the idea of the app to som...| Rakhims blog
I'm not sure how I feel about webfonts. For now, I'm using IBM Plex serif, which looks pretty, sure. It loads pretty fast thanks to Cloudflare Fonts, which rewrites Google Fonts to be delivered from my own origin. But is it really necessary? Also, reading longer texts with a serif font is not everyone's cup of tea. A standard sans-serif font stack looks kinda ugly on Windows. Verdana still feels great (for example, on Bearblog), so maybe I'll try it later.| Rakhims blog
I don't envy beginners trying to get into web development today. I haven't been doing any frontend web development for more than a decade. Today I was trying to do a simple thing: get a JS markdown editor to work in the browser. Found this beautiful looking library called Tiptap. This example seems great! Let's try to integrate it. What I naively expected: <scriptsrc="some_cdn_url.js"><divid="editor"></div> What happened: There's a documentation page for using TipTap with "vanilla javascript"...| Rakhims blog
Here we go | exotext| rakhim.exotext.com
How do you do, fellow web developers? A growing disconnect. | exotext| rakhim.exotext.com