The old blog was an express server that looked for .md files in a directory, converted them to HTML, and served it. That worked mostly fine. However, the converter didn't support many Markdown features, and was pretty buggy. Using an express server also meant that the site wasn't static, and had limited options for hosting.
Replit's free tier was pretty unreliable, and Render only allowed one free web service per account, which I was already using to run my faucet. I could've created a new Render account, but they recently started requiring credit card verification, which I didn't really want to do.
Besides, making the blog static instead of relying on an express server wouldn't be that hard. A month before, I had already wrote a better (?) or at least more fully featured Markdown to HTML parser, Makoto, so that was already one of the problems with the old blog solved.
Anyways, once I decided to start completely rewriting the blog, I established some goals that I wanted the new blog to accomplish.
path and fs are ok of course, makoto is not third party, also doesn't count)Hedgeblog (oh, that's what I'm calling it by the way) is made of three components: Makoto (Markdown to HTML parser), Ryuji (templating language), and Saki (build system).
You can find the code here.
Makoto is the Markdown-to-HTML parser, made with no dependencies. It was made around two months before Ryuji and Saki, and is meant to be more of a standalone thing. This is the sole npm dependency of the project. I npm installed it instead of just copying the file over mostly because I published Makoto to npm and wanted to make sure it worked. Also, it has a different license, documentation and stuff.
All the standard Markdown are supported (headers, bolds, italics, images, links, blockquotes, unordered lists, ordered lists, code, code blocks...), as well as superscripts and tables (although tables are probably buggy). Makoto also does some pretty neat stuff like passing on the language of the code block (if given) as a class in the resulting div: code-<language>, or automatically add ids to headers, so they can have anchor links.
It also has a very cool warnings feature, which isn't used in this project, but can be seen in action if you use the Makoto Web Editor.
Ryuji is a simple templating system that supports if statements, for loops, components, and inserting variables. It isn't quite as fully featured as Jinja/Nunjucks, but on the upside, Ryuji is less than 280 lines of code, and worked very well for my usecase. I think it's pretty cool.
Here's a quick overview of the syntax:
After finishing writing Ryuji, and writing some tests to make sure it all worked, I realized that I needed a few features that were missing.
There was no way to see the current index in a for loop, or the max index (length-1) of whatever variable we were looping over. This was needed for the tag links in the post.
In addition, if statements only checked if the variable was truthy (not false or 0 or ""), but I needed if statements making sure two variables were equal, as well as if statements making sure two variables were not equal. You can see this being used in the post's tags along with the new for loop features, as well as the "Next Post" link at the bottom of the post.
So, I added those features. Let's take a look of these new features being used to show and link post tags.
Formatting the code a little nicer, this is what it looks like:
Ok, in the first line (for:post.tags:tag:index:max), we are looping over the variable post.tags, and assigning each item in post.tags as the variable tag. That's nothing new, what's new is the :index:max portion. index is the index variable, starting at 0 and incrementing every loop, while max is the maximum index (the length of the variable to loop over - 1).
If you look at the Ryuji code, now you can see that it is looping over the tags of the post, and creating a link for each tag. If the tag is not the last tag (index is not equal to max), we will also add a comma (and a space).
Here's the equivalent python code, if it helps:
While Ryuji is meant for HTML, there is no reason it can't be used for other formats.
Take a look at the docs for Ryuji.
Saki is the build system that uses Ryuji templates to generate all the HTML files, and then outputs everything (including static files, of course) to the build directory. Even more simple than Ryuji, it is just around 70 lines of code.
Here are the very short docs for Saki.
When building, the program (index.ts) reads /posts/_metadata.json and passes all the post metadata information to the templates/index.html template, which is the home page! Then, it renders all the posts with the templates/post.html template and outputs to /posts/*. Next, it looks again at the post metadata and gets all the tags used. Once it has all the tags, pages for the tags are generated at /tags/*. That page lists all the posts with that tag. Scroll up and try it! It also outputs the static directory, as well, static files.
Tip: Serve Without The
.htmlSay we want to serve a HTML file at
/posts/exampleinstead of/posts/example.html. Just create a directory calledexampleand putexample.htmlinside it, renaming itindex.html.Basically,
/posts/example.htmlbecomes/posts/example/index.html, and now the HTML file is served at/posts/example. You probably already knew that, but if you didn't now you know [citation needed].
If you think back to around 950 words ago, you may recall that this site has zero frontend Javascript (or WebAssembly, as cool as it is). If you didn't recall that, I just reminded you. I will be sending an invoice later.
So how does the "Show MD", "Fancy Title", and Dark/Light theme toggle work? The key thing here is that all three of these are checkboxes. Yes, even the Dark/Light theme toggle is a checkbox. That toggle hides its checkbox and takes advantage of the fact you can click on a <label> with an appropriate for attribute to toggle a checkbox, and uses the ::after psuedo-element to change the content between the moon emoji and the sun emoji, depending on the state of the checkbox.
What's so special about checkboxes? The :checked (see MDN) property, that's what! With the :checked property, we can apply styles depending on whether a checkbox is checked. See the following, which scales the checkbox by 3x when the checkbox is checked:
And because of the a ~ b (select selector b after selector a) and a + b (select selector b immediately after selector a) CSS selectors, we can change the properties of other elements. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a pure CSS way to change the style of elements before the checkbox. There are ways around this, like putting the checkbox before the desired element in the code, but using position: relative, position: absolute, and other ways to make the checkbox visually look like it is after the desired element. I didn't really want to do that though, so you can notice that all the checkboxes on this website are before the element whose style they change.
Here's a real example. The following CSS makes the "Show MD" checkbox functional:
I used Verdana for headers, Courier New for code, and Times New Roman for everything else. These fonts were chosen mostly because they are websafe, ie included in most OSes. You cannot stop me from using Times New Roman. I like the look.
The colour for visited links is orchid, and the colour for non-visited links is forestgreen.
Since this blog is basically for my own "enjoyment", and doesn't need to look "sleek" or "professional", this site's design philosophy is moreso a rejection of those overdesigned corporate sites with too many popups, as well as certain React (or other framework) sites that don't even load with Javascript disabled, than a specific set of tenets. Combined with the fact that choosing colour schemes makes me angry, don't expect very consistent or aesthetic designs.
But I'll try my best.
After git cloneing the repo, cd into the directory and install the (sole) dependency:
To build:
To build and preview locally at http://localhost:8042:
To run tests for Ryuji:
In the future, I would love to have those fun box gifs[0] you used to see on geocities and other websites (like the ones on the bottom of the pensquid website), plus also something similar to Wikipedia Userboxes.
And I'll keep improving the site and fixing bugs, and occasionally write articles for the roughly four readers of this blog.
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Legally speaking, that's a problem for the courts.
But what about those of us who believe that copyright law, or rather the concept of copyright itself, is heavily heavily flawed and in need of great reform? To what extent are the critics' criticisms valid? I thought it would be nice to write out a very abbreviated argument of how the actions of the aforementioned companies should be taken in our ideal world. Then afterwards, I'll throw in some updates about this blog and just generally about your favourite German state currently inhabiting a human body.
Richard Stallman has an excellent article about why "intellectual property" (sc. copyright + trademark + patents) is not a good way to analyze things. He is right, and his points are very strong especially for trademark being quite different from the rest. Unfortunately, I'm going to conflate patents and copyright in this post, since they do have similarities.
To have a basis for judging the actions, we must first see why patents and copyright exists in the first place. It's quite simple. There is a belief that the "creators" of something should be able to derive benefit from it. What is less simple is in what manner they should benefit.
I wager that the following two rights are the most important, and quite reasonable for "creators" to ask for:
Now, the second one is worded quite carefully. If there is no revenue, there is nothing to give to the "original" creators. And how long should the second right be valid for? Most people would agree 70 years after the death of the creator is pretty absurd. But the exact length would be a subject of much debate. This post is not about that debate, so we'll leave that issue be.
More contentious is allowing the copying and distribution of works without paying anything to the creators if there is no revenue made. If you aren't one of the people who think this is a good idea, this post is not really meant to convince you, because again, this is supposed to be a shortish post, not a 50 page manifesto.
So now, pretending that we have justified that those two rights are what copyright and patents should be about... what? Fine, let me provide some very brief reasoning, while flippantly treating any counter arguments.
Copyright and patents are exist because we care about fairness and economical incentives. Creators, we say, deserve to benefit from their work. It wouldn't be fair for some third party to "steal" the work and profit from it. If we didn't let them profit, why would they ever share their works with the world? Then after some amount of time, it enters the public domain and becomes the property of everybody, so everyone wins!
While this is a perfectly reasonable line of thinking, "IP" law as it stands cannot be explained solely by that basis.
How is it fair to have the right to deny reproductions, translations, distribution, and public performance of a work long after the creator's death[0]? Who does it benefit? Theoretically, the inheritors, who have done nothing[1]. But of course, the reality is that often it is middlemen taking advantage of (or even creating) market inefficiences that capture most of the profit; not the creator or any one of their party.
How is it fair for a work, influenced and defined by countless previous works from the public domain (even if only as an opposing reaction to what came before), to remix the influences, add more or less "original" thought, and demand all the profit? Is the moral thing to do not to pay back our immense debts to society by allowing folks to freely benefit from our works, regardless of their economic means?
How is it fair to hold the whole of humanity hostage with a patent or copyright monopoly? The world we live in right now is built on patent violations by American manufacturers in the 1800s, and more recent IP "theft" by Chinese firms. If both countries were burdened by the full weight of patent law, how much worse would our "standard of living" be right now? How many decades (yes, decades) would that world be lagging compared to us?
Who is being harmed when a patent or copyright is violated, when credit is given, and no revenue is made? Copyright apologists will tell you that this is financial theft, because the potential, theoretical income of the creator is being reduced. This is called "greed". Many things reduce the hypothetical income of the creators. Like when 20 people check out the same library book in a year. Or when you watch a TV show and recommend someone else not watch it. Or...
Ok, you get the point. I will say it: There is nothing morally wrong with gathering petabytes of books and papers and drawings and photos. There is nothing morally wrong with then feeding that into the training process of a LLM.
What is wrong[3] is the lack of credit and profit-sharing. Unfortunately, it seems technically difficult to do either when it comes to LLMs. What a moral LLM company could do is open source the weights, training data and code. Though open sourcing the training data is currently illegal, but the other two are doable. But... how will they make money? Dunno, sell inference? Make custom models? Not our problem, nobody forced them to scrape all that data.
That turned out a little shorter and more comprehensible than I anticipated. A great success. Now to the news:
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[0]: Moral rights are usually non-transferrable and gone with the death of the creator, so we'll leave it be for now.
[1]: Not to mention the author has plenty of time while living to distribute the profits to their inheritors or save it to pass on if they so chose to.
[2]: Yes, I know fair use exists. It is far too narrow.
[3]: Okay, there's a lot more wrong with LLMs and their effects. But the scope here is only about copyright.
[4]: It sucks that programmers, artists, and all sorts of other professions would get economically outcompeted in many cases, open model or not. It's going to be bad, probably. But again, out of scope. And also, while this sort of thing is awful and comparisons to the industrial revolution putting millions out of work are obnoxious, this seems to be inevitable. Even in professions protected by licensure, the professionals themselves are using "AI". At the end of the day this is the problem with tying your art to money. Realistically, I understand why creatives do it, even when the art form isn't something expensive like filmmaking. But if there is any chance to decouple ourselves from that system and make art without worrying about the economic or clout side of things, and there often is, we should take it! n0thanky0u has a post expressing a more extreme view than mine, regarding something similar, titled "Fuck Artists". I don't agree with it, but it is worth reading.
]]>It's difficult to express my feelings on this. Simple living, or thinking about it, tends to give a nice feeling. Thinking of yourself as a person amenable to such things gives the same. Looking at the small stacks of books laying around (and the pile of currently unused but very importanttm laptops) pretty much shattered my delusions of that I was living simply. I couldn't deny that I was greatly attached to my books, and to the idea of having many more.
Digital hoarding, on the other hand, feels guilt-free, as long as more drives don't need to be bought. Why not, then, just download all the books as pdfs?
It's just not the same. It is nice to be able to insert tons of little bookmarks and notes, and flip through and read them and review them. I do have books that are too expensive for me to afford downloaded (thank you Anna!), and the reality is that I just don't look at them often. Only very rarely, and only ever a quick ctrl+f search to find something on my mind. All the software I've used have been just too cumbersome. But surely there are better softwares that can do all that stuff in a probably even more ergonomic manner than physical books. Perhaps paper can still be justified with that oft-cited study about having a physical component to your learning improving memory retention (or whatever). I have yet to see the study in question, mostly because I don't care to search. It does, at least, seem completely reasonable, and intuitively expected. In the end though, it doesn't matter and it is probably better to not have a reason to take it seriously.
In the end, the "feel" of a real book is just not replicable digitally. Is the preference just arbitrary? The reasoning ineffable? No, you can certainly describe that feel: of the paper, of the blackness of the ink, of the lighting, of the sound of pages turning, of cutting strips out of sticky notes and placing them on so they stick out of the top. That's a perfectly good justification on its own. We devalue our own experiences in favour of tryng to quantify things using "science". It is much easier to turn it all into numbers and praise the largest one. Or sometimes the smallest one; I'm told it depends. But we just fool ourselves.
Maybe this line of thinking is getting too far ahead of itself. In the first place, does it make sense to have a strong distinction between digital and physical possessions? Or rather, are digital possessions and physical ones any different in terms of "living a simple life"? Of course, digital stuff exists physically[0], but you know what I mean. Something something duality, abstractness, etc etc. This isn't a philosophy blog, thank the lord. But we'll take a small cautious step in that dangerous direction. Maybe it is about our attachments to the object? In that case, since many of the digital things are easy to replace, maybe they do weigh less? For example, I would be a little miffed if my mp3 collection got wiped. But I could rebuild it, it would just cost me a few hours, and even if there would be some songs I forget and never add back, that wouldn't bother me all that much.
On the other hand, having tons of stuff, just disposable, doesn't really seem like simplicity. It seems worse than having stuff you hold on to a little too tightly. It just seems wasteful and unthoughtful. If you don't own anything, but you buy or get tons of shit and just throw it away, that's not any different. So then you might consider the net "displacement" of things (as opposed to the "distance"); that is, how many things pass through your possession, however brief.
A more nuanced, though not especially novel, take might be that it is a combination of that "displacement", as well as the lifespan, attachment and mental attitude toward that thing. But whoops, are we trying to make numbers again?
Or maybe this entire line of thought is overcomplicating things, maybe living simply is just the bare minimum you need to survive. You know, sleep in a cave or something. That certainly is simple, but it sounds unpleasant. Though the blurry image of "simple living" in my head is probably similarly unappealing to others[1]. Surely one could become accustomed to an extreme ascetic lifestyle and begin to enjoy it. I am reminded of the romanticised rail vagrants hopping trains with their cartoon-style sack on a stick and some breed of stringed instrument. Difficult of a life as it was, the romanticism wasn't totally unjustified. After all, much of it was created by the vagrants themselves.
All that is to say, I really don't have a real definition for what a simple but good lifestyle would be. What then?
Well, having such a poor understanding of my current and especially future selves, I struggle to think of anything better than just experimenting. Cutting things out, seeing how life is. If it isn't better, then putting it back in. No different than diagnosing any other problem. Just like hunting down bugs in the code or rabbits in the heat. Happy hunting.
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[0]: Electrons and such, amirite?
[1]: Much like the monastic "middle way" of the Buddha was in relation to extreme ascetics, and so is super mega different from modern living today.
]]>QED, destroyed with facts and... aw, damn.
]]>mi open tawa lon suno open. mi pini tawa lon pimeja open. noka mi li pilin ike. lawa mi li pilin lape.
mi lukin e nena wawa e kulupu kasi wawa e jan wawa e tomo wawa. mi pilin e ni: "pilin ike ali li lili tawa mi. ali li pona lukin a! noka li pilin ike la lawa mi li pilin lape la tawa mi li awen ken." tan ni la, mi awen tawa.
jan li pana e sona tawa mi: "tenpo poka kama la telo sewi li kama." mi wile ala e telo sewi. mi weka e toki ona tan lawa mi.
tenpo poka kama li kama. telo sewi li kama ala. mi toki insa e ni: "sewi o, pona tawa sina a!" mi awen tawa.
tenpo suno mute li pini. tenpo ni la, kon pimeja li lon sewi. mi lukin e ilo mi la, ilo mi li toki e ni: "telo sewi li kama." mi wile ala e telo sewi. mi weka e toki ona tan lawa mi.
tenpo ona la, toki ona li lon. telo mute li tawa anpa tan sewi. mi jo e len pi weka telo. mi pana e len ni lon sijelo mi. len ni li awen e sijelo sewi mi. len ni li awen ala e sijelo anpa mi. poki noka mi kin li ken weka e telo. poki noka mi li lon telo la insa pi poki noka li kama ala telo. ni li pona mute tawa mi. mi toki insa e ni: "telo sewi li pona ala. telo mute li lon nasin. tan ni la, nasin li kama ike. taso, mi jo e len pona e poki pona. sijelo mi li ken ala kama telo. ni li pona." mi awen tawa.
taso, mi kama sona e ni: len anpa mi li weka ala e telo a! sijelo anpa mi li kama telo. telo li tawa anpa tan sijelo anpa mi, li tawa insa pi poki noka mi. noka mi li kama telo mute. len noka mi li kama telo mute. mi tawa la len noka mi li kalama: "mu mu mu." noka mi li pilin telo li pilin nasa li pilin ike mute.
mi pini tawa lon tenpo lili lon tomo. mi weka e poki noka e len noka. len noka li lon luka mi. luka mi li weka e telo tan len noka. telo mute li weka. mi pana sin e len noka e poki noka tawa noka mi. len noka mi li awen pilin telo. mi awen tawa.
tenpo lili la, len noka li kama telo mute sin. mi tawa la, len noka li kalama: "mu mu mu." mi pini tawa sin. mi weka e poki noka e len noka. luka mi li weka e telo tan len. mi awen tawa.
mi tawa lili. mi kama telo. mi pini tawa. mi weka sin e len. mi weka sin e telo tan len.
pimeja li kama. mi tawa tomo lape. tenpo suno ni li ike mute tawa mi. mi pilin ike mute. mi pilin e ni: "ken la, mi wile ala tawa lon tenpo suno pi telo sewi. jan li wile tawa la tenpo pi telo sewi li tenpo ike. sewi o, sina o weka e telo sewi."
tenpo suno sin li open. mi open tawa. telo sewi li tawa anpa. len noka mi li kama telo. len noka li kalama: "mu mu mu." taso, mi pini ala tawa. mi pilin nasa. mi awen tawa.
mi tawa la, pilin telo li weka tan mi. mi lukin e ma e kasi e tomo e sewi. ali li sewi lukin. kute mute li lon. kon li pona. mi pilin e ni: "ni li ike ala a. telo sewi mute li lon. len mi li telo mute. taso, mi pilin ike ala."
nasin li awen ike tan telo sewi. tenpo la, mi toki insa e ni: "mi lukin pona ala li tawa pona ala la mi ken moli lon nasin ni." ni li tan telo sewi. taso, telo sewi li ike ala. telo sewi li telo sewi. telo sewi li pona e ijo mute li ike e ijo mute. ijo ali li sama ni. mi awen tawa.
toki wawa li kama lon lawa mi:
"mi wile ala pilin ike. telo sewi li lon la, ijo tu li ken:
nanpa wan la, telo mute li lon sijelo mi, mi pilin ike mute.
nanpa tu la, telo mute li lon sijelo mi, mi pilin pi ike ala.
mi tawa la mi pilin telo. ni li lon. taso, pilin mi li ken pona li ken ike. mi lawa e pilin mi."
tenpo suno tu la telo sewi li awen tawa anpa. tenpo suno tu li pini la, telo sewi li pini li kama ala.
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