The running theme this week is that I ought to get organized again. Over the last few weeks, I have experimented a bit writing in Typst rather than LaTeX, and it has been a delight. A document builds in an instant! This gives a much faster feedback loop than TeX, and this makes writing much more enjoyable.

I have been using Forester, which builds atop LaTeX, for a couple of years now. In that time, I have dabbled with some extensions to Forester that met my needs, but none

1. Are maintainable enough to merge upstream, or
2. that are large enough for me to feel equipped for a Typst rewrite

of the tool

So this last week, I am experimenting with the reality that I might not even need to write the tool myself.

This resulted in the creation of Helianthus, which I am now using to keep my notes and build my personal website.

I am currently in the process of porting over my old notes, my recent Typst notes, and writing up more on the dependent parser combinators in Lambek${\begin{array}{}\end{array}}^{𝙳}$.

I was reading Jon Sterling’s Research Group Manual. One thing he suggest is that everyone in his students write weeknotes, published in an RSS feed, which he reads before any meetings. He further suggests the everyone should subscribe to each other’s RSS feeds. Should anyone be interested in participating in this process, here is my feed. I would also love to read any other RSS-published notes that anyone else may take, with the selfish goal of being able to intergrate them throughout the rest of my notetaking system.

This kind of collaborative knowledge sharing is what I’d hoped to get off of the ground with the lab’s Forest, but I think there may have been too much friction for that to get off of the ground. Even using Forester myself, I often wouldn’t want to go through the extra effort of polishing my notes for the lab’s Forest, nor did I have much faith that other’s would be reading it. Rather than an external system that needs much buy-in from the rest of the group, I think that a passive system like this has a higher likelihood of benefitting us.

I am not aiming to ask anyone to change whatever method might work best for them, this is soley an open request for anyone who may be interested. I also am not asking anyone to necessarily ever read them.

Max seems to prefer Zulip, I could also wire up a hacky Zulip bot (for which people should probably turn notifications off) for relaying notes periodically.

I spent some time this week learning about monoid object and their modules. After seeing Max and Eric talk about modules for monads, I wanted to figure out if similar ideas had any connection to my parser combinators.

The first question I wanted to figure out was: what are the monoid objects for the Day monoidal structure? And secondly: what are the modules of these monoid objects?

(For my own sake, I still need to write these observations up in their own notes)

I was surprised to learn that the monoid objects in Lambek${\begin{array}{}\end{array}}^{𝙳}$ are just monoids with a monoid homomorphism into the alphabet, which is underwhelming.