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....

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....

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....

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....

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....