SystemHalted — Palak Mathur on software engineering, leadership, and Emacs
Recent posts
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Diagrams as Text
An image model returns finished pixels; a language model returns text. SVG, Mermaid, DOT, and PlantUML store a picture as text, so a language model can draw one, allowing you to edit what it draws.
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Devanagari in Unicode
This post looks at how Devanagari actually works in Unicode
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Semantic Networks as Search Spaces
A short note on semantic networks, generate-and-test search, and why explicit state representation matters in knowledge-based AI.
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My Naming Philosophy
The rules I follow when naming variables, API fields, and schema elements. Most of it is borrowed from Kent Beck, Strunk, and Russ Cox; the rest is how I read their rules when the thing being named is a variable rather than a design.
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Removing a Package and Purging Its Traces
Removing Ghostty from Ubuntu turned into a walkthrough of the Debian package lifecycle - apt remove, the ii and rc states in dpkg, apt purge, and the per-user files no package manager will clean for you.
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Running Ghostty on a 2012 GPU
I tried Ghostty after ghostel.el made coding agents usable inside Emacs. On my ThinkPad T430's Ivy Bridge GPU it would not open — Mesa stops at OpenGL 4.2 and Ghostty needs 4.3. The debugging steps, a look at Mesa's drivers, and why I removed it.
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Switching to WezTerm
I switched to WezTerm on a 2012 ThinkPad T430 because it felt faster than GNOME Terminal and copy-paste was simpler. Benchmarks on the same machine show where that impression holds up, followed by the full Lua setup.
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Review: Software Malpractice in the Age of AI
A review of Danny Tobey's argument that AI makes software malpractice harder to avoid, and why responsibility in software cannot be modeled exactly like medical malpractice.