This was essentially a holiday week, spent based in Morciano di Leuca, a small town at the heel of the Italian boot. This turned out to be a reasonably effective way to temper the heatwave sweeping Europe (with the ocean breeze and salt water), though it wasn’t directly planned this way. I mostly managed to wrap up some reading projects, bulk up my running volume a bit, and experiment with how LLMs have improved the text-to-speech landscape. I did also manage to make a little progress on Rheo on the 9-hour train back up on Friday (from Lecce to Reggio Emilia).
I wrapped up note-taking for Karatani’s Transcritique (about which I wrote a little last week). Suffice it to say that this book has firmed up many convictions that were already starting to form about Marx and his critique in Capital, but for which I didn’t yet have external anchors. I now need to cast a net out to find what has been written in Karatani’s wake (in English), as the book is almost thirty-five years old at this stage (originally published as essays in 1993, translated into English in 2003).
I also read the first half or so of Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving—although the copy I have is in Italian, and therefore is titled L’arte d’amare. I packed this book after finding it in my wife’s parents’ bookshelf as a precaution, as I don’t like taking my reMarkables to the beach, and ended up flipping through the first 50 or 60 pages. I don’t imagine that this book will be essential to my next chapter, but it broadly sits in the literature I’m treating (Marxism, psychoanalysis; and therefore the Frankfurt School), and I may yet finish it and/or return to it.
I only spent one decent session coding, but did manage to update the Typst version that Rheo vendors to the latest 0.15.0 release. Crucially—for my dissertation, among other projects—this Typst release compiles math expressions to MathML, a markup language for math that browsers support. The workaround up until this point has been to wrap every math expression in a frame element, which converts the expression to an inline SVG; which often leads to styling anomalies, as CSS can’t target SVG in the same way it can DOM elements. I’m yet to really confirm how the new version feels as part of Rheo.
I also started working on a PR to make use of Typst 0.15.0′s experimental bundle target as the mechanism through which Rheo compiles spines. This will change a few things about Rheo’s compilation, but most importantly it should allow us to finally shed the way of doing relative linking that’s existed since 0.1.0 (using #link("./file.typ)[]) in favor of a variation on the native @ref syntax. The current #link syntax is brittle in a number of ways: I just hadn’t yet got around to scoping/implementing a more native reference syntax. I’m hopeful that the bundle target will allow us to provide this syntax essentially for free, i.e. without having to implement much in the way of an additional parsing phase.
I re-read the Typst tutorial, and also spent an afternoon (once back from Puglia) studying improvements to my take-home assignment from a few weeks ago with Claude. This was a super effective review/study technique, and I think furnished me with the beginnings of a more intuitive perspective on Typst’s API design, as well as the specs for PDF and HTML forms.
I took the holiday opportunity to experiment with these. I originally tried ElevenReader (at an LLM’s suggestion). After an hour of two listening, however, I got frustrated with how it would get stuck in footnotes or citational paraphernalia, as the parser for the PDFs I uploaded didn’t do a particularly good job of navigating the page structure.
At another LLM’s suggestion, I switched to Paper2Audio, which I am finding much more congenial. I had originally wanted to listen to Tommaso Astarita’s Between Salt Water and Holy Water: A History of Southern Italy: but the free version of Paper2Audio puts a limit on the number of pages in the PDF you can transcribe to audio, so I settled on Joseph Weizenbaum’s Computer Power and Human Reason.
I’ve been meaning to read Weizenbaum in full for a while, but I’ve never quite found the time. Because I have a heap of dense and theoretical reading to do for my PhD, I usually prioritize this when I’m with my reMarkables. The attention required for audiobooks is of a different nature, however, and it turned out that Weizenbaum’s style of writing is just about right for what I can cognize via audio at the moment. I listened through about 50% of the book, mostly while running.