Tuesday, April 25 2023

Created: by Pradeep Gowda Updated: Nov 04, 2023 Tagged: books · git · latex

Read Ted Gioia’s review of Christopher Burney’s Solitary Confinement; another review Solitary Confinement, by Christopher Burney - The Neglected Books Page

the remarkable powers of rhythm and music, which are sadly underappreciated in our society today. We use songs for entertainment and diversion, when they can offer so much more. Burney also came to this realization, but through sheer necessity.

Anything he could summon from memory was a treasure—a few lines of a poem, a recollection of a good meal, a proverb or literary passage, or some other tidbit from the past. Sometimes he would set himself arbitrary tasks—trying, for example, to list the counties in England and Scotland, or the states in the US. Or he would pick two cities and imagine a journey from one to the other, identifying all the people and places along the way.

Yet he now embarked on detailed meditations on the great problems of human existence. He explored the paradoxes of free will, the nature of individual responsibility, the dualism of soul and body, and other issues that a philosophy grad student might examine. But in Burney’s case, he had no teacher or texts, merely his own intellectual resources and dogged persistence, fueled by the empty hours

You can use git push -u <remote_name> <local_branch_name> to set the default upstream. I forked this littlebook repo and made some changes. It is midly annoying to see

git status
On branch master
Your branch is ahead of 'origin/master' by 2 commits.

when the origin refers to the upstream repo, to which I have no write access.


The experience of installing LaTeX/TeX and friends via MikTeX has improved a lot via the miktex-console package on MacOS.

brew install --cask miktex-console

However, as of today, it instlalls the x86-64 build of the package. The new GUI appears to be built using tk.


[2304.11062] Scaling Transformer to 1M tokens and beyond with RMT

New research scales the Recurrent Memory Transformer to retain information across a staggering 1 million tokens. Perspective: GPT-4 handles 32,000 tokens (~50 pages of documents), and the entire Harry Potter series is around 1.5 million tokens. via


ianklatzco/bsky-telegram-bot: post to bluesky from telegram.

  • DONE: generated a token using the botFather bot.
  • TODO: follow the instructions on the github page to create the bot.