/ Recent content on Equanimity Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us /posts/about/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/about/ Some ramblings in my personal corner of the internet because I will be damned if I need Facebook or Twitter to write down random ideas. /posts/i_dont_have_an_accent_is_a_self_report/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/i_dont_have_an_accent_is_a_self_report/ When I was young, I sometimes used to say &ldquo;I don&rsquo;t have an accent.&rdquo; Now I realize that such a statement is tantamount to saying that &ldquo;I haven&rsquo;t observed/experienced/fully internalized the breadth and extent of language x.&rdquo; I somewhat internalized my gringo accent when learning to speak Spanish, but I think it was really took moving to New York City to learn the degree to which I will probably never speak Spanish like someone who grew up in Mexico or Cuba or Colombia. /posts/us_supreme_court_cases/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/us_supreme_court_cases/ At the end of the day, there are no rules. The &ldquo;law&rdquo; and &ldquo;justice&rdquo; in this country are all in support of empire and capital. Buck v. Bell (1927) The court ruled that the state has the &ldquo;right&rdquo; to control the &ldquo;genetic stock&rdquo;, roughly speaking of a place/people. More accurately, &ldquo;we will do it; shut up about it or we will kill you too.&rdquo; We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. /posts/complex_functions_gallery/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/complex_functions_gallery/ My first course in complex analysis involved almost no pictures. This is the first post in a series dedicated to distilling a few neat properties of analytic and meromorphic functions by letting pictures and videos do as much heavy lifting as possible. A survey of complex functions We begin with the identity function $f(z) = z$. This form of domain coloring is essentially a kind of polar coordinates where the &ldquo;base color/shade&rdquo; is an angular coordinate and the &ldquo;darkness&rdquo; is the distance from the origin. /posts/favorite_cartoons/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/favorite_cartoons/ Imperialism Who Is That You All Are Going to Whip, Mr. Legree by Robert Minor This one always makes me laugh. Even when I know it is coming and I try to not laugh. As far as I can tell (and it is somewhat difficult), it was drawn by Robert Minor for the Daily Worker . I don&rsquo;t know why the main place I can find it is the Marxist library . /posts/ide_vs_text_editor_distinction/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/ide_vs_text_editor_distinction/ TLDR: The way I determine whether a &ldquo;text editing tool&rdquo;/&ldquo;thing I use to write software&rdquo; is a text editor or an IDE is as follows: If it requires more than one second to open/fully start, it is an IDE; if it opens in less than one second, it is a text editor. Examples GNU Nano , and out of the box/vanilla (neo )vim are absolutely text editors because they completely start/open in less than one second. /posts/indigenous_peoples_history_of_us_review/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/indigenous_peoples_history_of_us_review/ A review of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz&rsquo;s An Indigenous Peoples&rsquo; History of the United States TLDR: This book was an absolute banger that I don&rsquo;t think 98% of Americans have the heart to read. To be clear, any literate and educated adult who wants to seriously engage with the history and trajectory of the United States in the scheme of the past 5000 years of history must understand and internalize these lenses. In atleast one lens &ldquo;Everything in US history is about the land &ndash; who oversaw and cultivated it, fished its waters, maintained its wildlife; who invaded and stole it; how it became a commodity broken into peices to be bought and sold on the market&rdquo;1. /posts/hypothesis_on_why_islam_frowns_upon_drinking_alcohol/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/hypothesis_on_why_islam_frowns_upon_drinking_alcohol/ Today I was walking through some of the deserts roughly 1 hour south of Dubai. This was my first time in a desert and I wanted to know what it feels like to walk for a while with no water in sight. As I got to the top of a sand hill and felt how powerful the sun really is in a desert, the following hit me: Drinking alcohol frequently leads to dehydration, which can be a death sentence in the desert, or atleast divert limited water from more important uses. /posts/hikikomari/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/hikikomari/ Hikikomari Kyuuketsuki no Monmon is my favorite anime of Fall 2023. The Jujutsu Kaisen Shibuya arc had some good scenes this season, but is kinda settling into not having much of a plot, pushing it further into just some teenage power fantasy. The Tokyo Revengers Tenjiku arc is&hellip;fine but I am just getting a bit sick of Takemishi&rsquo;s main redeeming quality being limited to having unlimited HP. The geniuses at MyAnimeList convinced me to check this out from an email describing this show as &ldquo;Clumsy Vampires, Pervy Maids, and Politics Galore! /posts/resource_curse_india/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/resource_curse_india/ This is the first of many posts that react to/discuss the History of the Indian People and Culture series. I plan to write roughly one every hundred pages or so, mainly to make sure I understand the claims in the series. The first few chapters of Volume One were rather dull, insofar as we mainly focussed on the scope of the series, dicussed which sources were most valuable and worth considering, and described the geography, flora, and fauna of India. /posts/how_much_computer_does_a_man_need/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/how_much_computer_does_a_man_need/ Summary I think that I, a technically skilled modern man, &ldquo;need&rdquo; ~$2000 of computer over 4 devices. I can walk around those machines before the sun sets. Server I bought the core setup consisting of a Supermicro X10SLL-F motherboard , an Intel Xeon E3-1271 v3 cpu , a used 480GB Samsung SM883 SSD with only 2% of its rated TBW (so very lightly used), and two 8Gb Kingston 1600Mhz unbuffered DDR3 ECC RAM sticks for a total of $100 from a local computer parts reseller. /posts/how_to_select_travel_partners/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/how_to_select_travel_partners/ TLDR: When selecting adults with whom you will travel, only consider those whose reasons for travel align with yours. Different people have different reasons for traveling, especially internationally. Some travel for work. Some travel to see family. Some travel to see history, art, music, and cultures. Some travel to relax/be pampered. In many cases, fulfilling one of those comes at the expense of others. Those reasons for travel will affect one&rsquo;s choice of habitation, day-to-day activities, price tolerances, basic &ldquo;expectations. /posts/html_is_a_lisp/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/html_is_a_lisp/ HTML is a verbose lisp &ndash; and that&rsquo;s great but awful Therefore is JSX basically a shitty LISP embedded in JS? To bridge the gap between &ldquo;LISP&rdquo; for data and &ldquo;not LISP&rdquo; for the programming (Javascript). But for a LISP to work, especially in a setting as dynamic as that of Clojure or HTML, one needs to understand the structure of the domain (libraries/frameworks vs DOM). And that&hellip;requires work. It&rsquo;s all for the best, but it requires lots of work, presumably by lots of people. /posts/things_i_wish_my_teachers_just_told_me/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/things_i_wish_my_teachers_just_told_me/ Why should we study languages We study languages to conquer brown people, pit them against eachother, and order slaves around We study other languages because there are ideas that can be captured with one word or phrase in one language but require a paragraph or a book to describe in another language. We study other languages to interact with the most intimate and formulated thoughts of a people. Why should we study mathematics We study mathematics to develop more systematic and precise ways of killing brown people and stealing. /posts/all_the_homies_love_usbc/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/all_the_homies_love_usbc/ I have reached a critical mass with respect to how useful and cool USB-C can be. Here are a few of the devices/gadgets in my life that can all charge from the same cable: My ThinkPad T495s My work Macbook Air My Samsung Galexy S22+ My wireless headphones My wireless mechanical keyboard My 8bitDo controllers There are only a couple of devices in my life that require something else. My work iPhone requires a lightning cable. /posts/israel_uk_rights/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/israel_uk_rights/ At some point, I will write an essay on how the &lsquo;West&rsquo; weaponizes &lsquo;rights&rsquo; to subjugate the world&rsquo;s people and how they honestly believe that all of the resources of the world belong to them. But the following is honestly what I hear whenever I hear the common refrain from the United States regarding its 51st state. For the 10 year olds reading this, I never drop the hard R unless I am using a direct quote to make a point about history. /posts/home_server_levels/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/home_server_levels/ One thing I enjoy about runing a home server is that there are so many levels of &ldquo;hygeine.&rdquo; These levels range from &ldquo;running everything as root with no SSH hardening and asking to get hacked&rdquo; to &ldquo;locked down with 97% of the security measures of a large tech company&rdquo; and everything in between. Here are a few levels I have traversed: Dedicated users for each service (or a dedicated kubernetes user if you go that route) SSH and firewall hardening to do things like forbid password-based authentication, only allow connections from specific IP addresses or interfaces, forcing the use of modern cryptographic algorithms and key-exchange mechanisms, even forcing all outbound traffic to go through a proxy that enforces rules/standards. /posts/why_i_like_mother_india/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/why_i_like_mother_india/ Mother India (1957) is a 10/10 movie that I will likely watch atleast a couple more times. Here are a few reasons. I have imagined myself as a young person during a famine many times throughout my life. Before watching this movie, I had never imagined myself as a mother during a famine. I look at a list of famines in Indian history and think I cannot imagine the strength Indian women have shown time and time again during the most difficult of physical/material circumstances. /posts/my_first_home_server_self_destruction/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/my_first_home_server_self_destruction/ On Christmas Eve 2024-12-24, I mistakenly nuked my home server, the night before I was leaving the country for a month-long vacation to India. I bought a used 1.92Tb SSD to be one of two drives used to store my media, because my single mirror vdev was reaching 70% capacity. The plan was to buy the second drive when I returned so that I can create a separate ZFS zpool with a single mirror vdev. /posts/i_weep_for_palestine/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/i_weep_for_palestine/ On 7 October 2023, Hamas launched coordinated attacks on Israel from Gaza on the 50th &ldquo;aniversary&rdquo; of the Yom Kippur War. Israel is cutting off water, electricity, food, medicine, etc. to the Gazans (who basically live in an open-air prison) and indiscriminately bombing Gaza. It is a horrifying shit show and we will understand the full scope of the hellscape in the coming days and months. I spent some time as a 14-15 year old reading about reading about the nature of wars between Israelis and Palestinians, but was always daunted by the seeming need to parse through 2000 years of history to seriously justify having much of an opinion. /posts/notes_on_factory_farming/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/notes_on_factory_farming/ I have thought about this reddit post on r/DataIsBeautiful a fair amount. [OC] Visualization of livestock being slaughtered in the US. (2020 - Annual average) I first tried visualizing this with graphs and bars, but for me Minecraft showed the scale a lot better. byu/datekram indataisbeautiful We can&rsquo;t seriously think that we can kill billions of animals every year &ldquo;because it tastes good&rdquo; and never face any consequence, right?? Right? Also a difference in scale is a difference in kind; eating meat is different from eating meat every day with every meal for decades. /posts/2023-09-27-gop_primary_debate_reaction/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/2023-09-27-gop_primary_debate_reaction/ On 27 September 2023, the Republicans held the 2nd presidential primary debate of this election cycle. Obviously these republicans are ghouls and none of them are &ldquo;good.&rdquo; Obviously they are just being debate lords and have no interest in using the dialectic as a methodology for arriving at a higher order truth. 99% percent of the horrible things said in this debate are &ldquo;standard&rdquo; republican talking points and I won&rsquo;t say much about them because I know that they are ghoulish and ghouls gonna ghoul. /posts/thoughts_on_dubai/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/thoughts_on_dubai/ I visited Dubai for one week in October 2024. I joined my dad, who was working as an engineer with Emirates Airlines. My dad has been here on and off for maybe 20% of the past year or two. I came here because I wanted to understand the material, historical, and cultural conditions under which the United Arab Emirates became the richest country in Western Asia, such that it currently has a per-capita GDP exceeding that of the United States of America. /posts/on_living_alone/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/on_living_alone/ I have lived alone in a one-bedroom apartment in New York City for many years now. Such a living arrangement fits my personality and sensibilities. Living alone for many years has instilled a certain type of confidence that &ldquo;I can survive in this cruel world on my own terms and stand on my own two feet.&rdquo; I will never live with people who make me feel alone due to having no other options or due to the fear that I would fall flat on my face by moving out and living on my own (even until I arrange for alternate living conditions). /posts/python_the_best_parts/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/python_the_best_parts/ I have been something like a &ldquo;professional Python developer/programmer&rdquo; for ~5 years. I write in whatever languages I need to use and make the given task easiest, but I have been paid some good money to write a decent amount of Python. During this time, I have designed, written, rewritten, tested, deployed, debugged, and deprecated production Python applications that do real work for real people in the real world. In this post, I describe a few qualities that make Python pretty neat. /posts/python_plus_subprocesses_equals_power/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/python_plus_subprocesses_equals_power/ Many beginner-to-intermediate Python programmers seriously underestimate Python&rsquo;s power of juggling subprocesses. Using the subprocess and asyncio.subprocess modules can seriously strengthen and extend the power of &ldquo;pure/depdendency-&ldquo;free&rdquo; standalone Python scripts, by delegating specialized work to more specialized tools and leaving Python as a &lsquo;glue&rsquo; layer.&rdquo; Let&rsquo;s see a few examples. Rclone and standard-library only Python are shockingly powerful together The fact that Python suffers greatly from the blue-function-red-function problem contributes to the lack of good &ldquo;filesystem-object-store interfaces&rdquo; that would allow applications to interact with object stores and filesystems in a unified way. /posts/supermicro_strike1_silent_password_truncation/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/supermicro_strike1_silent_password_truncation/ I have been running a home server for a couple of years now. It is extremely useful for me. It is also one of my favorite personal hobbies. The glue of that home server is a Supermicro X10SLL-F motherboard . So far, that motherboard has performed wonderfully without missing a beat. Day-to-day, my only gripe with it is that the power draw is slightly higher than I would like, but I can live with a few extra watts. /posts/trump_deregulation_without_growth/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/trump_deregulation_without_growth/ I work at an unreasonably large hedge fund. When discussing the trading/gambling implications of the upcoming Donald Trump 2024-2028 American presidential term, I heard the phrase &lsquo;deregulation without growth.&rsquo; I think that is an accurate description of the economic consequences of Trump&rsquo;s previous term and what is like to come in 2025, but incomplete. It is more like &ldquo;cruel without meaning.&rdquo; TLDR: When someone at a hedge fund says that they expect &ldquo;deregulation without growth&rdquo; it basically means &ldquo;no market fundamentals will change; there will be no major changes to productive capacity, but we will be able to siphon off more money from productive means than we did last year. /us_wars_timeline/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /us_wars_timeline/ <!doctype html> Timeline /posts/using_all_of_my_cpu_cores_is_so_satisfying/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/using_all_of_my_cpu_cores_is_so_satisfying/ Most people have very little control over all of the power of the computers in their hands every day. But being able to fully control this power for my uses is extremely satisfying. I feel like I control some of the means of production. Even most junior/mid-level engineers cannot control their computer like this. Not to be mean, but those are some skill issues. Those who run Windows have no hope of ever fully controlling their own machine. /posts/iyashikei/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/iyashikei/ I have a &ldquo;type&rdquo; of anime that I like. Broadly, I especially enjoy iyashikei (癒し系) anime and especially leaning into yuri (百合). Or rather, I believe that Iyashikei most accurately describes the kind of anime that I most enjoy and watch most frequently. Roughly speaking, I would define Iyashikei/my type of anime as that which does not have a &ldquo;plot&rdquo;, specific antagonist, interposonal conflict, or adversity-driven character development, instead relying on atmosphere, &ldquo;vibes,&rdquo; and representations of peace. /posts/all_the_homies_like_zfs_mirror_vdevs/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/all_the_homies_like_zfs_mirror_vdevs/ For my personal homelab/home server, I prefer to use ZFS Zpools each with a single mirror Vdev. Currently I use 1 zpool with 1 3-way mirror vdev, but when my media (mainly movies and TV shows) grows beyond 500Gb, I will likely make a separate media zpool with a 2-way mirror vdev. This approach probably doesn&rsquo;t work when a single zpool or vdev exceeds 10-20Tb, but no normal human being really needs that much data &ndash; anyone who claims they do is likely a data hoarder and is bad at organizing. /posts/why_i_work_at_a_hedge_fund/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/why_i_work_at_a_hedge_fund/ Recently I started working at a hedge fund . I will omit the precise one to avoid doxing myself and needing to have prefaces like &ldquo;this reflects my views and not those of my employer&hellip;..&rdquo; I will just say that it is one of the hedge funds listed in Wikipedia&rsquo;s non-exhaustive list of notable hedge funds as of April 2024 . Capitalism forces us to behave most unlike our true selves in order to survive. /posts/yall_need_to_use_space_more_effeciently/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/yall_need_to_use_space_more_effeciently/ TLDR: All of my desktop/laptop computers should be able to run using boot drives &lt;= 128Gb and I hope that never changes. I refuse to use any personal computer that requires more than 64Gb for its core functionality. I sometimes hear people complain about 64-128Gb not being &ldquo;enough&rdquo; for their needs. This is especially true in the Apple and Windows ecosystems. Technically, Windows 11 recommends atleast 64Gb for installation and it is very likely that the next version of Windows will require 128Gb. /posts/you_should_shut_down_your_computers_regularly/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/you_should_shut_down_your_computers_regularly/ Modern sleep/suspend/hibernate is a real testament to engineering. It is incredibly cool that we can put computers in states that use as much power in a full day as a lightbulb uses in 5 minutes. My laptop and workstation have had uptimes of weeks. My server has had an uptime of a couple of months. Servers at work have years of ongoing uptime! But even though we can get away with never shutting down laptops, desktops, and servers, I claim that it is a very good idea to shut down (or atleast reboot) all computers atleast once per week.