having the potato salad leftovers from this for lunch. since it's mine now alone, i can enjoy it according to my original vision: by adding in the LD-50 of old bay seasoning

i am behind on blogging but this is one of the more important ones planned: data scientist code often only runs once. it's buggier than usual. yet the usual advice is to invest *less* in costly testing and review, "we only need this for the next week." and eventually, that blows up in a big bad way.

i take the point here (i have an ev and a home charger and a dense neighborhood with cheap pay chargers around), but also, when i count up the number of screenshots i see on here where the phone battery is somehow under 4%....

"Umarell", the special italian term for "retired guy who stands around construction sites with his hands behind his back and pipes up 'make sure you ____' a few times an hour" en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umarell

if anyone seeing this is part of today's lucky 10k: you have quintillions of these little spinny fellas handling energy in your cells. www.reddit.com/r/askscience...

Shout out to Matei Zaharia who noted at the time that even before the deletion meltdown, it was a quadratic time implementation of left padding. Like it was: def leftpad(in: str, n: int) -> int: out = in while len(out) < n: out = " " + out return out

Fifth day in a row of hitting 90 F, time to adapt

hold on sec lemme morph into @theslides.bsky.social real quick

having some of the other elementary schooler families over for a cookout tomorrow and i'm surprised at how much burgers are dominating hot dogs in the rsvps

#ReaderBot: Brian is halfway done with Samantha Harvey's "Orbital" and should finish in around 3 days. [Brian's Reading List]

Put off buying our very needed home insurance by sweeping the whole house instead. Dewey Cox needs to sweep his entire house before he adds on home insurance.

"'ELPDData' object has no attribute 'elpd_i'" but it's supposed to. somehow `pip install "arviz[preview]" --upgrade` isn't getting me past version 0.23. must be because i'm still using python 3.10.

(sharp inhale through gritted teeth)

being raised as a mentat without my knowledge to come into my incredible human computational and reference ability to achieve the apotheosis of human brainpower: being one of CHOAM’s three million accountants

When I read the first one of these to my kids I didn't have a lot of prep time and wound up on "Charles Bronson by way of Raphael on the Simpsons" for voicing Brash, and then kept it for the dozen sequels. Which does not seem like what the pros will do, but now we'll find out together.

#ReaderBot: Brian is a quarter through Gelman, Hill, and Vehtari's "Regression and Other Stories" and should finish in around 16 days. [Brian's Reading List]

Happy Ides of March, please enjoy one of my favorite Shakespearian monologues; Cassius’s republican incitement to Brutus to join the conspiracy against Caesar:

When you look at Pat/Bob, "One Battle After Another" is about your identity, and what having a kid does to it. The scene where he's holding the baby and Perfidia's family know: this baby's going to split him from the cause. The Comrade Josh scene where he literally can't establish his revo identity.

i saw a baby at a birthday party today. everyone's baby's hair grows in its own way. but this baby had col. lockjaw hair.

This explains a lot about why I have a huge list of hobby projects that I'm only slowly working through, yet I will never shell out for an automated coding tool. The projects are there to provide me resistance to flex against.

Once I had a free train pass from work to commute from Mountain View to Borregas on this route and I was super excited. And then I had my first trip which took 5x longer than driving

my kids are watching canadian math show "odd squad" on roku-tv-pbs behind me, and i turn around in my desk chair to see-- toni collette? is that actually tony collette?? for real??? oddsquad.fandom.com/wiki/The_San...

"Circlewave," Squarepusher www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-_J...

When you chose a school for your kids, you probably didn't realize you were choosing educational software, but that choice of software might be more consequential for your kid than the choice of school. moultano.wordpress.com/2026/03/12/o...

three years ago, the sf fed had a job open for, plausibly, a statistics role. on applying, they asked me for my high school and college transcripts, which i don't have. so i attached a text file that said "sorry, but here is a link to my dissertation." i did not get a callback. end of the line:

i understand this and there's no harm in trying, but the reason it won't work is because when a dem is in power, these elite can just defy and ride it out 20 months until they've empowered the gop. we're seeing this now because there's no other different gop these elite can hold out for, this is it.

to explain why i'm a "everyone pays income/payroll tax" guy while also being a "only millionaires pay a wealth tax" guy: first one is for funding the large ideal set of day-to-day operations; second one is an anti-corruption play to keep one billo from buying everyone www.semafor.com/article/03/1...

we're clearly past the point where "come see our movie, it's got easter eggs, come see the easter egg movie" is counterproductive. avatar 3 did 50% better than rise of skywalker and they are polar opposites on this.

This also happened to the other half of the sliding glass door. The guy who bought it from me says it surprise-shattered on him while walking it in from his van.

I had to live this for a year, where instead of a money budget it was "anti-rate-limit access tokens for storage system I/O bandwidth." A more accurate predictor of bandwidth needs was very doable (I built one!) but couldn't address "but what if we need more bandwidth later" anxieties.

not to blame every problem in the world on social media but i honestly think it's less of a problem that people are paying bell pepper prices for their poblanos than that they get an illicit thrill out of bragging about it

One angle that doesn't fit into this convo, but crucial to how things are now, is that the studios absolutely hated how Blockbuster monopolized their home video distribution, at a time where home video was a huge and growing profit center. The DMCA was written to forbid any Blockbuster Of Streaming.

This has definitely happened. Will Wilkinson, @wlknsn.xyz, was on it four years ago. This matters more than edpol, and edpol matters a lot. modelcitizen.substack.com/p/the-densit...

#ReaderBot: Brian is halfway done with Samantha Harvey's "Orbital" and should finish in around 3 days. [Brian's Reading List]

tapping the "people underestimate how many of our society's elites are motivated not by self-interest, but by sadism" sign

i have a nice thing to say about jurassic park: rebirth, which i am ten minutes in to. i like the literalization of pohl's "predict the traffic jam."

in succession's beachside scene with activist investor adrien brody, logan roy says "the volatility is priced in" and i've always wondered if brian cox knew what that meant or how it worked or if (probably) he didn't need to. now "did stephen root know who walugi was" is another one of those for me.

Turns out you don't have to drop a glass shower door to shatter it, or even bonk it on the ground. There's a way you can carry it so that even just taking a step down out of your house is enough for it to wobble, warp, and explode.

Alright. I see it. youraislopbores.me

bird bone gun: eXKCDistenZ xkcd.com/3216/

If your screenplay has a Subject Matter Expert, make sure they talk about some everyday object in terms of a surprise/atypical unit of measure. Like Ice Cube in Three Kings talking about the suitcases full of Saddam's gold in terms of the fabric material's tensile strength.

Today, full rewrites are discouraged because old code has fewer bugs* than new code. So either that's not true in Gastown (because you iron out bugs with epicycular spec amendments?), or we'll get more bugs. * Like most famously in the memory safety bug case: security.googleblog.com/2024/09/elim...

my UC students across the past several semesters, largely if not all: haven’t seen heyday simpsons, don’t know what any of my favorite movies are, rarely rarely rarely know who mitt romney is, don’t really know Seinfeld, but always know what FRIENDS is and watch it

when i sound sanguine about the usefulness of hallucinatory llm systems it's that "what bytes were written at block 12345" and "what bytes got sent over the radio" and "what color did the (row_i, col_i) ccd see" are also noisy guesses, which were bad-to-mid at first, and then turned out great. 1/

"You can't bet on death" means if you buy "Yes: Gov. Wilkins out by April" at $50, and now it's at $20 and you're nervous, you can go murder Wilkins and settle for a definite-$20 instead of a possible-$0. You can even buy some more "yes"es on the way to the capital and maybe get yourself $25.

My car alarm story: Years ago a guy down the street from me got a personalized car alarm, and one night it went off and a booming voice yelled "MARTIN HENDERSON! MARTIN HENDERSON!" for like two minutes. I'm pretty sure Martin realized his mistake fucking immediately; I never heard it a second time

The Fundamental Economic Numbers are supposed to be electorally important because they are felt in people's daily lives, not because people read about them in the newspaper, and i miss being confident in that

"THE MEAL COST WHATEVER TIME IT IS!"