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Week #5 of Curiosity

week: 2026-10-05 to 2026-10-12

Setting up nvim from scratch

I have been trying to set up my nvim from scratch because last time I just copied my friend’s config, and the kind of person that I am, it made me feel guilty.

Tabs vs spaces

Something that amazed me is tabs vs spaces. It turns out TAB inserts just one [TAB] character but makes it look like it has moved a certain distance on the screen.


    vim.opt.expandtab = true -- TAB inserts spaces instead of one [TAB]
    vim.opt.tabstop = 4      -- the 4 spaces come from here
    vim.opt.shiftwidth = 4   -- auto indentation, >> and <<

Why a plugin manager?

Why do I need one? That was the question I asked. Turns out without one, I have to git clone the plugin into a folder, tell nvim where it is, and git pull on each update, which gets tedious. Therefore, lazy.

Language servers

Neovim doesn’t understand any language on its own, but it needs something to show errors for the dev’s convenience. For that reason, a language server runs in the background that looks for errors, types, definitions and autocorrect, and talks to nvim via LSP.

For other languages, I used lspconfig instead of writing this by hand:


    vim.lsp.config("rust_analyzer", {
      cmd = { "rust-analyzer" },
      filetypes = { "rust" },
      root_markers = { "Cargo.toml" },
    })

Mason installs the servers.

gd

Default gd in nvim searches for the declaration. It moves to the top of the function, then a line above it, and starts searching down. I mapped it to jump to the declaration.

The leader key bug

I was moving my keymaps to a keymaps.lua file and leader suddenly stopped working. It fell back to \. That’s because mapleader is \ by default, and my init.lua looked like this:


    require("config.keymaps")

    vim.g.mapleader = " "

I stumbled upon something today that caught my attention. I was trying to create a dotfiles folder, but everything was linked to ~/.config. That’s how I learned about symlinks: files that just point to where the actual file lives.

To actually understand it, I ran 2 experiments.

Experiment I


    mkdir ~/symtest && cd ~/symtest
    echo "hello" > note.txt
    ln -s note.txt link.txt
    ls -l
    echo link.txt

echo link.txt gives “hello”. link.txt → note.txt. That’s a symlink.

Experiment II


    echo "world" >> link.txt   # goes to link.txt, sees note.txt, and edits it
    cat note.txt               # gives "world"
    echo "hello" >> link.txt
    echo "hello" >> link.txt   # "world\nhello"

If we remove note.txt, cat link.txt throws an error.

Why did my 3-year-old codebase break without me touching it?

Spotify stopped sending the popularity field, but old rspotify required it. It broke because, while deserializing, serde requires every required field to have a value. It was fixed by upgrading rspotify, whose newer version made it an Option.

Pagination

I needed to download 2688 songs from Spotify, but client.playlist() returned 100 songs and stopped. That’s because Spotify only sends 100 songs at a time.

With client.playlist_items(), I was able to fetch all 2688, because rspotify runs a loop that keeps refilling the stream instead of stopping at 100. Each response has a next field:


    "next": "https://api.spotify.com/v1/playlists/7fGZ.../items?offset=100&limit=100"

It checks whether next is null. If it isn’t, it calculates the next offset. yield returns a value and pauses until next() is called again.

Try my Spotify downloader at yuck_premium.

Tensor

A grid of numbers with a dimension.

  • 5 is a 0-dimensional Tensor
  • [1, 2] is a 1-dimensional Tensor -> Embedding
  • [[1, 2], [3, 4]] is a 2-dimensional Tensor

Quote of the week

Follow your heart" is a marketing slogan, not life advice. Your heart wants tacos at midnight and drunk texts your ex. Try following your mind for once.

Music This week