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....

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....

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....

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....

I have a “type” 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 “plot”, specific antagonist, interposonal conflict, or adversity-driven character development, instead relying on atmosphere, “vibes,” and representations of peace....

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’t work when a single zpool or vdev exceeds 10-20Tb, but no normal human being really needs that much data – anyone who claims they do is likely a data hoarder and is bad at organizing....

Recently I started working at a hedge fund . I will omit the precise one to avoid doxing myself and needing to have prefaces like “this reflects my views and not those of my employer…..” I will just say that it is one of the hedge funds listed in Wikipedia’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....

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....