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      1 ---
      2 title: "Weeknote for 2025-W20"
      3 description: "Primers on WASM and R typography"
      4 date: 2025-05-14T20:14:13-07:00
      5 draft: false
      6 categories:
      7 - Weeknotes
      8 tags:
      9 - R
     10 ---
     11 
     12 I broke my streak of “weeknotes”[^weeknote] and missed last week’s update. Many
     13 people will describe their lives as “busy” when pressed---I’m no
     14 different---but I was juggling a few extra responsibility and chose to let this
     15 one slide. If you’re gonna drop a ball, make sure it’s made of rubber, right?
     16 
     17 ## An easy to follow WASM primer
     18 
     19 I harbor some ambivalence about WebAssembly, like many of the technologies
     20 underpinning the “modern web”. On the one hand, it’s amazing what we can do in
     21 browsers now, and the me that was updating an official university website by
     22 hand-coding HTML in 1999 would be amazed by it all. On the other, it breaks my
     23 heart to know that so many CPU cycles are being wasted on surveillance and
     24 advertising, or running apps “in the cloud” that could be replaced more
     25 economically by lightweight native applications. This isn’t a novel complaint
     26 in 2025, and I suppose anyone reading this has heard it all before.
     27 
     28 Still, I’ve wanted to know more about how WASM actually works, and this is a
     29 terrific primer. I doubt I’ll find myself writing a module in C, but if I ever
     30 have an excuse to do so this is where I’ll start.
     31 
     32 [ragman---Web Assembly Primer](https://www.ragman.net/musings/wasm-primer/)
     33 
     34 ## Getting text right in R graphics
     35 
     36 [It’s been a while]({{< ref "/posts/tufte-plot/" >}}) since I obsessed over a
     37 typeface in an R graphic, but this primer recently published by the Tidyverse
     38 team is a satisfying deep-dive on the topic. [This older post on plot
     39 scaling](https://www.tidyverse.org/blog/2020/08/taking-control-of-plot-scaling/)
     40 from the same blog is an excellent companion if you want to make figures that
     41 look good for print and digital displays. Both lean on the [{ragg}
     42 package](https://ragg.r-lib.org/), which I don’t currently use but feel like I
     43 should.
     44 
     45 [Thomas Lin Pedersen---Fonts in
     46 R](https://www.tidyverse.org/blog/2025/05/fonts-in-r/)
     47 
     48 [^weeknote]: I know that these aren’t _proper_ weeknotes in the indie web
     49     tradition.