On 7 October 2023, Hamas launched coordinated attacks on Israel from Gaza on the 50th “aniversary” 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. This was fair enough, since I had a tremendous amount of other parts of the world to learn about . Now I realize that it’s not that complicated. Anyone who watches an hour or so of what it looks like to live in the West Bank, and another hour watching what Gaza is like today will understand that this is settler-colonialism and apartheid 1 2 3 4. And all the homies hate apartheid. ...

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’t seriously think that we can kill billions of animals every year “because it tastes good” 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. The latter is probably rather new in history. ...

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 “good.” 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 “standard” republican talking points and I won’t say much about them because I know that they are ghoulish and ghouls gonna ghoul. But I guess this is the best that the “conservative central casting” can come up with. ...

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. America has money because of theft, and I wanted to know what accounts for the UAE’s position, besides oil. I also wanted to investigate what to make of the fact that 60% of the people are south asian – ~40% Indian, 10% Pakistani, and 10% Bangladeshi. ...

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 “I can survive in this cruel world on my own terms and stand on my own two feet.” 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). I understand though that living alone can feel isolating and that living in an “alive” environment – one with the kind of liveliness that only other people can provide – absolutely is preferable in many situations. ...

I have been something like a “professional Python developer/programmer” 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. ...

Many beginner-to-intermediate Python programmers seriously underestimate Python’s power of juggling subprocesses. Using the subprocess and asyncio.subprocess modules can seriously strengthen and extend the power of “pure/depdendency-“free” standalone Python scripts, by delegating specialized work to more specialized tools and leaving Python as a ‘glue’ layer.” Let’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 “filesystem-object-store interfaces” that would allow applications to interact with object stores and filesystems in a unified way. golang does have a unified way of dealing with synchronous and asynchronous execution and the power and unreasonable effectiveness of rclone partly stems from golang’s concurrency design. Rclone is a tremendously powerful tool and the ability to make standalone “zero-dependency” Python scripts that invoke Rclone expands the kinds of “file management/organization” tasks that “zero-dependency” Python scripts can handle. As an aside, I use “zero-dependency” in quotes, because of course we have the dependency of the program being invoked in the subprocess. However that dependency can be much easier to package and deploy. Consider the following “zero-dependency” script that I run regularly on my home-server to verify that my postgresql database backups work properly, atleast insofar as I can restore a postgresql database containerized via podman and inspect/verify some expected states. Here is a summary of what this script does. ...

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. However that supermicro motherboard has a terrible “gotcha.” The IPMI out-of-band/remote management software has a nasty bug. I recently changed the admin password from the default “admin,” like any diligent sysadmin should (Yes I know that I should have changed it much sooner, but in my defense, the IPMI was only accessible on my local network). ...

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 ‘deregulation without growth.’ I think that is an accurate description of the economic consequences of Trump’s previous term and what is like to come in 2025, but incomplete. It is more like “cruel without meaning.” TLDR: When someone at a hedge fund says that they expect “deregulation without growth” it basically means “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.” ...

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. Mac users might. Processing/ingesting/transforming ~10 million rows per second is no joke. Sometimes being competent is just fun. Sometimes taking full advantage of living in the 21st century is a little fun. ...