gupe

Anecdotally, my grandfather, who was bedridden with advanced dementia for the last years of his life, tended to be far more lucid before breakfast than at any other time of day. Knowing of the type three diabetes hypothesis, I surmised that this could be, at least partially, a result of the overnight fast, during which his metabolism likely stabilised to a degree, although it's unlikely that he'd have fully entered ketosis. I suggested that he be switched to a ketogenic diet, at least for a few weeks, as a trial, but this was considered to be a ridiculous idea by his carers, and was never done, unfortunately.

I use a Pi 400 at home as a terminal to connect to several remote servers on which I work (write code) in VIM. I connect via ssh or mosh to a usually-existing tmux session on a server. When not at home I connect to the same servers using an android tablet running Termux. When I need to use other programmes, like Excel, I connnect via VNC to a paperspace Windows server I rent.

I've been spending the past several months writing the server-side code of a web-app, which aims to improve the way in which certain difficult-to-price goods are valued. We're on the verge of launching the tool, and before that happens, I shouldn't be too much more specific about it. In any case, the server functionality is almost exclusively written in FORTH, a language for which I have a great affinity, stemming from the days when I first programmed my (stack-based) HP 48GX calculator as an undergraduate electronic engineering student. My experience in doing this has been almost exclusively pleasurable and satisfying (and nostalgic). Having tried various options, I opted to use a rather minimal forth, pForth, and so I needed to write a number of my own libraries, including ones for hash-tables, ones for handling the data files I required, ones for ways to communicate over WebSockets, and many others. The code-base is remarkably small, and it's been a stimulating experience.

(I'm responsible for the browser-side code too, and this is written in a Scheme, biwascheme, which is so much nicer than having to use Javascript, in my opinion.)

Along the way, I've created various other shell-script utilities in pForth for other purposes, which always rival the speed I'm used to getting from using AWK—mwak, specifically—which has always been impressively fast when handling large amounts of data.

Me being the only coder on this project is why I've been able to get away with indulging in this peculiar, but vastly under-appreciated, language!

I do the same, and listen to most audio books or podcasts at at least 1.33x (this four-thirds factor reduces the listening time by a quarter). A contributing element to determining what speed factor is suitable is what I think of as "information density" in the writing style. With content that requires more digestion, such as The Economist (particularly their more technical articles), I do best processing their excellent audio edition at a simple 1.0x.