sidcode.github.io / cyber-physical.space (2021-) / siddhantsci.org (2012-2016)

Wit-but-why wryte wordy websites when world wants wondrous withdrawal?

Am I being worldly or wise? Wilfully wordy for sure! Here’s why-

Because I’m too cool for Instagram’s instant gratification goop and too languid lazy for long-form letters. Also, simply because I can. Like most martial arts, productivity porn, and Thanos- I enjoy when it’s perfectly balanced, as all things should be.

It’s hard to stop typing the above amidst the flow of insipid ideas. But the hardest choices require the strongest wills, so I’ll stop with the Thanos references and get back to the point of the site. Note, there is none (like most things dualist and monist - see Taijitu)

I, like many of my prolific peers born in 1994, am a younger brother of the Internet (or internet for pesky pedants). This site is my jab at using the internet like it was meant- like experiencing an elder sibling with all their (in)finite wisdom and quirks. I am impacted by the connected consciousness galaxy brain of the internet everyday. The current domain name comes from my existence in cyber and physical spaces in equal measure (and probably my research on Cyber-Physical Systems). I also chose it because I got it for fairly cheap at …wait for it… Namecheap.

Everyone is welcome here - friends, foes, family, students, stalkers, secret service spies, rogue robots…

The immutable TODO list of this site’s content and design(not for accountability, just for ego-massaging the natural notetaking narcissist in me) -

Content- crafty creations captivate connectomes

• Add a podcasts and audiobooks page / article / category where i review, reflect, rationalize, rant, regret, and ramble about them.
• Add a page for Cyber-Physical Spaces and how it relates to my life’s lovely lore.
• Merge About me and Stuff I’ve done pages. It’s a feature of fundamental first-principles systems - what it is, is what it does.
• Add backdated, present, and future dated posts - think Tenet’s time turnstiles (drafts underway behind the scenes). My name means tenet, by the way.
• Add a Design section for the site. Jeet Kune Do the site design from the best sites on the web - gwern, danluu, ssc, (derek)sivers, debarghyadas, peternorvig… (this list will continue to grow).

Design- snazzy schticks; story sticks;

• Load images and sizeable spiffy stuff from a git submodule (Github Pages have a 1GB limit). Jeet Kune Do professes that having no limitation is a limitation. So, we live with that.
• Fix home page UX. It should be a balance of narcissism and value to the world.
• Make description/summary appear for each article. Everyone loves TL;DRs.
• Add tools for popups, jupyter-plugin, video linker and citations/references¹. Basically, be a cheap ripoff of gwern.net.
• MATH - Make All Think Harder. \(e=mc^2\). Also when \(a \ne 0\), there are two solutions to
  $$ax^2 + bx + c = 0$$
  and they are
  $$x = {-b \pm \sqrt{b^2-4ac} \over 2a}.$$
• Somehow balance the feature bloat with minimalism. Never forget Perfectly Balanced and DFTBA.
• Commenting capability created (06/02/21) with Remarkbox. PSA- Read your daily hacker news. It blows your mind at the tiny cost of debilitating imposters syndrome.
• Prototype Python Pelican plugins properly - profit while at it!

Reproducing the site - TL;DR

This is it. Everything you need to clone this site is here.

The master branch was renamed to main so Google and friends won’t crawl its contents.

How to build this website

You need pip, the Python package manager: ⊕…so Sid doesn’t forget. This is pretty straightforward. You need pipOkay, no, you don’t technically need Pip, you can install all the Python .py files by hand, of course. And you’ll have to when pip inevitably stops working in ~2028 because the world has moved on to the next great thing., the Python package manager:

1. pip install Markdown
2. pip install typogrify
3. pip install "pelican[markdown]"
4. That’s it! You can now run make devserver from the root directory and navigate to localhost:8000.

About the website

When someone else’s theme and code is used in FOSS, it’s customary to brag about explain the technology used to create and serve the site. I have no idea who actually reads these summaries, but for posterity’s sake…

My goal was to create the fastest-possible website using the brain-dead easiest technical solutions, as I would advise anyone. †Polite cough. I would actually advise them to use hakyll and become a wannabe gwern.net.

The website is hosted by Github Pages.†Why not AWS? That question deserves a standalone article. The short answer: #StudentLifeforLife.

Lastly, everything is checked into git with my usual level of detail (and a helpful serving of wackiness).

(Are you a proud member of the 0.001% who use feed readers? sidcode.github.io has an Atom feed available here, but your reader should automatically discover the feed on any letters page.)

Thanks to the following giants with huge deltoids atop which I stand

This website is a static site created by Pelican, a Python static site generator. I added a few custom Python extensions to bend the Jinja2 templating engine to my will.

Eric Lawler created the theme —both the desktop and mobile variants. The basis for the theme is Dave Liepmann’s Edward Tufte CSS, which powers the lovely serifed font and gorgeous margin notes you see throughout the site. The code highlighting theme is Solarized Dark. All this will change as I modify the site to my taste. Till then, thanks Eric!

Major thanks to Jody Frankowski’s Blue Penguin theme (which, itself, was based on pelican-mockingbird) and Claudio Walser’s FH5CO marble theme as guides to figure out how to use some of Pelican’s less-documented areas for advanced themes.