Shrutarshi Basu 

Today I worked through the bf chapter of Beautiful Racket. I'm enjoying, but also kinda wary of, the macro-centric approach to writing interpreters.

Got a new job posting notification from an entity known as, I kid you not, John Galt Staffing.

Now that the website is at a stable point, I'm finally going to work through Beautiful Racket and properly learn some Racket. And after that, I'll come back to the site and write an ActivityPub server so that I can stop manually posting to Mastodon.

Had a fresh samosa, hot, crispy and just a little too spicy. Also saw a small dog wearing a pink vest in the back of a car. Good day.

After seeing a Mastodon post with embedded links, I fell down the rabbit hole of trying to figure out how to actually post HTML to Mastodon. As far as I can tell, Mastodon will accept HTML posts from other ActivityPub servers, sanitize them and display them correctly. But even though the API examples show statuses with HTML content, actually calling the API that way just creates a plain text post. So if I want to republish fleets with HTML to Mastodon, I'll have to run my own ActivityPub server.

I've been writing a bunch of TypeScript lately, and it's… fine? With Deno and the Deno language server, the developer experience is quite enjoyable, though apparently there are storm clouds brewing.

Recently I've been able to work 8 to 10 hour days, only really stopping for meals. Even a little while ago that felt impossible. This is good.

As I've been working on my website, I've noticed there are a whole bunch of non-obvious constraints for what makes valid HTML. This of course makes me think about formalizing the HTML spec in Lean (or something).

Someone please tell me this is a terrible, horrible, no-good idea.

Version 4 of my website, built with Lume, is now live. Right now there isn't much besides some journal entries ported from the previous version and some shorter stream posts from my old Tumblr. I'll add things like RSS feeds over the weekend.

Even in an increasingly interconnected world, there is much to be said in favor of isolation and solitude. For those of a creative bent of mind, much of our work is done behind closed doors, to be revealed only when ready. Our work is our testament to the ages and all that will remain when we are gone. It is not who we are, but what we do that defines us. And though the company of friends can be comforting and relaxing it can also all too often become distracting and demotivating. Only with solitude, isolation and total immersion in the task at hand does one enter a State of Flow, becoming one with the problem and ultimately finding the solution. The ultimate challenge for the creative mind is to find the balance between the peaks of genius in solitude and the nourishing stream of ideas that only comes with connection with other minds. It is a quest that can be tiring, draining, futile and possibly even rewarding.