Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 24, 2023

• Rlang ☛ qeML Example: Nonparametric Quantile Regression

  In this post, I will first introduce the concept of quantile regression (QR), a powerful technique that is rarely taught in stat courses. I’ll give an example from the quantreg package, and then will show how qeML can be used to do model-free QR estimation.

• Introduction to Delivery Performance Analytics

  Delivery Performance Analytics is a consulting service dedicated to continuously enhancing how organizations sustainably deliver better software-defined products faster, while increasing the workforce’s well-being, by combining a data analytics approach with a proficient multidisciplinary consulting team.

• Joachim Breitner: The Haskell Interlude Podcast

  It was pointed out to me that I have not blogged about this, so better now than never:

  Since 2021 I am – together with four other hosts – producing a regular podcast about Haskell, the Haskell Interlude. Roughly every two weeks two of us interview someone from the Haskell Community, and we chat for approximately an hour about how they came to Haskell, what they are doing with it, why they are doing it and what else is on their mind. Sometimes we talk to very famous people, like Simon Peyton Jones, and sometimes to people who maybe should be famous, but aren’t quite yet.

  For most episodes we also have a transcript, so you can read the interviews instead, if you prefer, and you should find the podcast on most podcast apps as well. I do not know how reliable these statistics are, but supposedly we regularly have around 1300 listeners. We don’t get much feedback, however, so if you like the show, or dislike it, or have feedback, let us know (for example on the Haskell Disourse, which has a thread for each episode).

• Rust

  • Federico Mena-Quintero: Librsvg will use Rust-only image decoders starting on 2.58.0

    Starting with version 2.58.0... [...]

    As you can imagine, this is the sort of change that gives me a bit of anxiety. Say whatever you want about memory-unsafe code in libpng and libjpeg-turbo, but they are tested and fuzzed all the way to hell, all the time. The Rust crates for decoding images have not been as heavily developed, and there is still plenty of interesting work to do there in terms of performance and support for the more exotic variants of those file formats. I think this is a good opportunity to find exactly what they might be lacking.

    Please test the main branch of librsvg, especially if you render documents which have <image> elements! The changes above are easy to roll back or to make optional if too much trouble appears.

• Web

  • Medevel ☛ Dark Reader Forces Dark Mode for All Websites on Surveillance Giant Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Compatible browsers

    Dark Reader is an impressive open-source MIT-licensed browser extension specifically developed to thoroughly analyze web pages. Dark Reader effectively generates a visually soothing dark mode that significantly alleviates eye fatigue for the user.