> #software-engineering

I made a repo for tectonic that publishes it to pypi. I mentioned tectonic in my last note.

So, if you ever want to compile a tex file again, all you need to do is run uvx tecto somefile.tex!

Since astral has now officially announced the beta of ty, i’d like to share my current setup of amazing and fast tools:

• uv is for managing python dependencies and python itself. Rigorous environment locks included, which you absolutely need. Can also do versioning, building and publishing.
• pixi is for when you need to have conda dependencies. It uses uv under the hood for pypi deps, which is why I try to add everything as a pypi dependency (pixi add --pypi x).
• ruff is a linter. I don’t want to see any of you manually formatting code, inserting spaces and the like. Just use ruff.
• ty (now officially in beta) is a static type checker. It’ll tell you things like when you return or pass the wrong type, which will probably make your code malfunction. You can use it as a full language server, so it’ll also tell you diagnostics, give (non-AI) code completions for known symbols, and show docstrings.

All of these are built in rust and just generally nice to use.

Honorable mention to loguru for being a logger that I actually can remember how to use (from loguru import logger; logger.info('hello')).

Intent-based advertising means capturing and converting a user based on something they intend to do or to acquire. It doesn’t work for every product, because often potential users are not aware of the problem and don’t go out looking and intending to do something about it. Anthropic uses an interesting intent to advertise Claude (per twitter), namely that they bid on searches for stack traces.

So if someone searches for a stack trace with no results, they are served a Claude ad (which is, admittedly, very good at solving those!). It’s a genius way of indirect intent-based ads. Those ads are probably very cheap as well (for now), because the price is determined by your competition on those keywords (it’s a bidding process, albeit with one entity simulatenously owning the marketplace and supply).