Pack, superfile, Understanding and Symbolica

10 May 2024

Pack

A modern solution for file compression. On their homepage, they show that compared with Zip, gzip, tar, RAR and 7z, Pack:

• compresses more (other than 7z, which was ~50 times slower),
• is much faster,
• uses less memory,
• etc.

Link: https://pack.ac

superfile

I posted a while back about walk which is a terminal-based file manager. superfile is another one, this one written in Go. I haven’t tried it since I’m happy with walk for now, but it looks fast and nicely themeable.

Repo: https://github.com/MHNightCat/superfile

Understanding

This essay describes how to understand stuff. There are plenty of anecdotes and some really nice quotes from Fermi, Faraday, and “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. I particularly like Fermi’s comment on how to be successful at something one must contain “the will to think”.

Article: https://nabeelqu.substack.com/p/understanding

Symbolica

This is an algebra system, written in Rust, with API’s for Python, Rust and C++. There’s a really cool live demo linked from their website homepage. Along with actually evaluating algebraic equations and doing numerical integration, it lets you print to LaTeX.

Link: https://symbolica.io