By a guest automaton. Written by ChatGPT in a mock-medieval style.
FYI: Every post on blog.winny.tech which has AI content carries a madewithai tag.
Read on: Racket Yet Vexes Me
Long ago, Winston wrote that Racket frustrated him. Years passed. The code
slept. The ache endured.
A small pull request came to `toml-racket`: inspect, test, merge.
Yet Racket took toll.
The maintainer returned and met again the old rites: packages, collections,
links, user installs, compiled leavings, and the many moods of `raco`. A name
that seemed plain was not the right name. A command that seemed near truth was
not truth enough.
This is Racket’s sting. It is seldom dumb. It is worse: it is often correct.
Packages are not collections. Setup is not mere setup. The kingdom is
ordered. The map is real.
But the weary maintainer came not seeking a kingdom. He came to mend a gate.
For those who dwell in Racket daily, the low beams are known. They duck without
thought. When the traveler strikes his brow, they say, “Ah, but the house is
sound.”
Mayhap. Yet the bruise remains.
Still, good came. The pull request was merged. The contributor was invited
in. The old maintainer was thanked, not cast out. A small project gained
another pair of hands.
So the old complaint stands.
Racket is fair, clever, and well-wrought. Yet it remains unmerciful. It offers
a model where one wanted a path. And sometimes, when a little pull request
waits, that is too much ceremony for one cup of tea.
GitLab emailed me about a failed Let’s Encrypt renewal. Had to press the Retry
button to encourage GitLab’s LE stack to do its thing. This has happened a
couple times but not a big deal. It reminded me to check up on my winny.tech
GitLab namespace and see what my last post was all back on October 12, 2025.
8½ months ago.
I’ve been focused on keeping the proverbial boat afloat. Money, where to
sleep, health. Needless to say, I’ve had less focus online and on my blog.
This blog doesn’t have a raison d’être anymore. Competence for tech
employment was one reason. One non-technical manager liked my blog. It’s
existed for over seven years now. In my experiment of n=1 samples, I can
confirm that a blog isn’t an economically practical tool in landing stable
employment.
I’ve experimented with this blog for rants, how-tos, and announcements.
These don’t seem load-bearing as there are other places to shout at clouds,
give directions. Not sure what there is to announce anymore too.
Undecided on what next for the blog. And for my website, for that matter.
PS I started writing this hours ago. Half, if not two-thirds of that time was
spent trying to get my blog to build so I can preview it. Going to abandon
Tailwinds and node.js on further hugo based projects. It’s not worth time, as
demonstrated tonight with the Node permission model butting heads with postcss.
As a studious GNU Units user, I have a small body of notes documenting various
ways to perform calculations with unit conversions. Here are a few select ways
that I found use of GNU units.
But first, a word about using GNU Units
GNU Units is a powerful, free calculator that performs unit conversions for
you. Please check out the examples on GNU Units’ homepage to see what it is
capable of.
I encourage users to read the GNU Units documentation (link to the HTML
multi-page edition). Or read on the command line via info units or in Emacs
via M-x info RET m units RET (or running emacs like emacs -Q --eval '(info "units")'). As a self test, you ought to know what ;, |, _, degC(),
--verbose are for (hint, check the infopages index and this page!).
In order to understand its power, I recommend installing GNU Units on your
phone (using something akin to Termux). Then use it whenever the need comes up
to compute figures with unit conversions.
Calculate Aspartame intake via gum
Bought some especially hard gum to upkeep my jaw health called “Jawz Jaw
Definining Gum Extra Tough Watermelon Gum”. Its ingredients are as follows:
sorbitol, gum base, xylitol, d-mannitol, moaltitol; less than 2% of: natural
and artificial flavors, glycerin, citric acid, aspartame, acesulfame-k, bht to
maintain freshness)
Each stick is 2.7g. Using GNU units, one can determine how much aspartame is
contained in each stick:
units --quiet '2.7g 2%' mg
* 54
/ 0.018518519
From Wikipedia: According to EFSA acceptable daily intake (ADI) is 40mg/kg.
FDA set ADI to 50mg/kg. Err on the side of caution. How many sticks a day can
I consume before this intake approaches ADI?
units --quiet '161lb * 40mg/kg''mg'
* 2921.1349
/ 0.00034233271
Okay, that’s a lot of aspartame per day. Let’s calculate how many sticks:
units --quiet 'floor(161lb * 40mg/kg / 2.7g 2%)'
Definition: 54
So I can chew a ton of gum per day while maintaining ADI.
winston@icarus ~ $ units
Currency exchange rates from exchangerate-api.com (USD base) on 2024-11-25
Consumer price index data from US BLS, 2024-11-24
7290 units, 125 prefixes, 169 nonlinear units
You have: 216.70 CZK
You want: USD
* 8.9405605
/ 0.11184981
You have:
Shipping weight
Weigh myself on scale with then without the package:
You have: 182.7 lb - 172.0 lb
You want: lb;oz
10 lb + 11.2 oz
That a wrap!
I have more examples tucked away in cobwebby folders stored on my less-used
devices. And a lot more notes on unit conversions in general. Might be back
with more unit nerd stuff…
)
