I found out my crimson-bellied conure is laying an egg today! She's nesting in some towels now, chirping away while she works on laying it.
Having an egg is relatively hard on parrots. I've given her lots of food and warmth to prepare. She is comically hungry -- she's usually not such a big eater, but she's happy today to be scarfing down her apple slices, fruit pellets, and safflower seeds.
She usually sleeps at the bottom of her cage, beneath a towel I put down for her. It's already unusual for parrots! But tonight she has made quite a nest with her towel: It's folded in half like usual, but she has nuzzled her way between the fold, so she has the towel underneath and on top of her. It's super cute.
I'm treating her with delicacy but she is determined to be a wild child of a bird. She's still flying around during the day and moving around plenty. I don't think I would be so confident if I had an egg like that inside me.
She has a stone perch that she likes to nibble on when she's working on an egg. I've wondered if it is some innate need to nourish herself with calcium, or if it's stress relief :)
So that's my night. Sitting outside of the metaphorical delivery ward with a metaphorical cigar, making sure she lays this egg that isn't even fertile to begin with! Birds :)
I had a great euphoric epiphany feeling today. Doesn't come along too often, will celebrate with a nice glass of wine :)
Am doing data engineering for some big data (yeah, big enough) and thinking about efficiency of data enrichment. There's this classic trilemma with data enrichment where you can have good write efficiency, good read efficiency and/or good storage cost, pick two.
E.g. you have a 1TB table and you want to add a column that, say, will take 1GB to store.
You can create a new table that is 1.1TB and then delete the old table, but this is both write-inefficient and often breaks how normal data lake orchestration works.
You can create a new wide table that is 1.1TB and keep it along side the old table, but this is both write-inefficient and expensive to store.
You can create a narrow companion table that has just a join key and 1GB of data. This is efficient to write and store, but inefficient to query when you force all users to do joins on read.
And I've come up with a cunning forth way where you write a narrow table and read a wide table so its literally best of all worlds! Kinda staggering :) Still on a high.
Might actually be a conference paper, which is new territory for me. Lets see :)
Surströmming, the Swedish can of fermented fish, is strongly recommended to be punctured while submerged in tap water. It is not pasteurized and is actively fermenting in storage, and the content will spray around if opened under atmospheric conditions.
When transported on cargo flights, they are double packed as cans in a barrel in a crate, and considered UN classified "miscellaneous dangerous goods" with identification number UN3334 "Aviation regulated liquid, n.o.s." with accompanying scary(albeit monochromatic) warning stickers, if at all accepted. When transported on ocean going vessels, they are often required to be in its own shipping container, again double packaged and correctly labeled.
I’m reading Domain Driven Development and learning why so many of my projects have been tough to maintain.
I also recently learned that you can get ancient coins for very little money if you don’t care about resale value or need them to be in pristine condition. I bought some coins from kingdoms that I’d never heard of. Many are thousands of years old! It’s fun holding a piece of history like that.
Reading up on the history of information management, and the real killer app for paper was double-entry bookkeeping, which made Venice rich and contributed to starting the Renaissance.
I was reminded of the US Constitution's 10th amendment and reading some of the history around it.
> The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Very relevant to what's going on today with National Guard and ICE deployments.
Also related and worth a read, I think, is the Supreme Court case Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579 (1952). The content of the dispute is different, as it involves the President seizing private property, but it is (one of?) the seminal cases regarding the scope of presidential powers. Justice Jackson’s concurring opinion is, at least for now, considered the best articulation of when the President may take unilateral action.
Learned about superheterodyne receivers. Recently I've been studying up on RF technology, happened to come across superheterodyne receivers a short while ago, decided to research them today, saw that Technology Connections had a video on them, watched it, and felt reasonably enlightened.
I don't know about AI antennas, but smart antennas[1] are a things since more than 15 years. Basically they are array of antennas that can change via software the directivity (mainly used in radar systems) or increase/reduce power transmission and direction (this is used in 5G cell).
I found out today that the location header of an HTTP redirect can be a tel:+ URI and phone's will actually ask you whether you want to call that number.
Been working on sheet cutting optimization for https://measuretocut.com today and it sent me straight down the cutting‑stock / 2D bin‑packing rabbit hole. What started as “wouldn’t it be nice if the site could tell you how to cut your wood sheets optimally?” turned into reading about NP‑hard problems and flipping through old operations research papers like I was cramming for an exam.
The funny part is how far the mathematical version of the problem is from what measuretocut.com actually needs to output. In reality you have kerf, ugly offcuts, and the fact that nobody wants a cutting diagram that looks like a circuit board. We really have to take into consideration a 2nd optimization, it needs to be an output that a person in a shop can glance at and immediately understand.
I'm building in robotics. Setting up a new 3d camera today. I found that the 10m active USB C cable that I bought transfers power in both directions, but only transfers data in one direction, it turns out to be some weird video USB variant. Next I needed to plug a gripper into a modbus controller. That uses an M8 8-pole 20cm cable. The controller manufacturer recently decided to switch from male to female connector, so now the cable needs to be male-male. After searching online for hours, I believe that is impossible to find as everyone only sells male-female cables.
I'm continuously surprised by how difficult it is to plug things together and how non-descriptive cable "standards" are about the actual capabilities of cables and connectors.
When you use a microscope to magnify something, the objective (magnifying lens) is literally taking the Fourier transform of the image. The optical system recovers up to a limiting frequency, determining the spatial resolution of the image.
I've been exploring the origins of the 'relational turn' in psychoanalysis that began after WWII and ramped up in the 1970s. Psychoanalysis got vastly more interesting after Freud and I had no idea!
I'm exploring writing a point and click adventure, and I've found out that they're basically just hierarchical state machines with a pretty UI. This is useful because it simplifies a lot of things.
The downside is that now I'm wondering if I could write one in SQL.
That running and taking cold showers really do make me more focused! And that i will have to be the one that fixes my life and builds my future. Deep, i know
That lodash-es doesn’t ESM lodash/fp, which means there is no straightforward way of using it with Vite after version 5. God help me.
I don’t even want to use it, I just want to get legacy code building on a modern version of Vite without rewriting a couple thousand lines of code. Aaaargh
Another fun fact - lodash/fp doesn't deduplicate with lodash when bundled. For a couple of months I was wondering why our app had bundled two copies of lodash. I dismissed it as a measurement artifact at first. It took so long to realize there was actually two copies of lodash and it was because one developer on our team had a preference for fp syntax.
I'm looking into rennovating a massive agricultural machine shed ~ two stories high in the middle built some 80+ years ago using sections of spur pipeline as central upright poles to hold up some beefy jarrah trusses.
The "verandah" wings flaring out from there were bulit from flimsier timber that's rotting and the iron sheet walls are starting to peel away.
The posts are of interest as they have old markings and water fittings, tee pieces, etc.
It's not far from one of the original steam powered pumping stations that moved water through the main line.
Published an edit today (post dated in Nov. but I've rewritten it 5x now) on my tutorial to use llama3.2:3b to generate fine tuning data to train tinyllama1.1b https://seanneilan.com/posts/fine-tuning-local-llm/ It took a while to figure out that when I made llama3.2 generate json, it didn't have enough horsepower to generate training data that was varied enough to successfully fine tune llama1.1b! Figured that out :) Something you never learn with the bigger models. Every token costs something even if it's a little bit.
I am cleaning up some pointer arithmetic stuff for multi-dimensional C style arrays. I managed to replace the code with a std::inner_product minus a std::accumulate (to accomodate for the fact that the upper array bound is exclusive, ie one-past-the-end).
I found out I can automate my 5,12kWh house battery through local-only RS485 connection, and directly setting registers using ModbusTCP from Home Assistant. I then drafted an automation with hysteresis and damping that tries to aim for Net-Zero export/import (pv surplus/grid). It appears to work!
What brand/make of battery is that? I'm tentatively interested in home battery storage, but definitely not interested in shit that requires an app, an internet connection, and shitty saas spyware...
I found out that the adhesives I've encountered from time to time that remain tacky and easily moved or removed are called "non-hardening" adhesives. This was after using E8000 glue for a headphone repair today.
I've read the adverserial attack paper, and I'm currently implementing a captcha based on images that have masks on them so that any LLM agent with a visual model will classify it wrong.
The idea is to use something like a slider that shows different images combined with a memory task, like "find out the pair of images" and then offer maybe a text input field where the user has to write 1,2,3 or something similar with the image numbers to pass the captcha.
The tldr is that I'm abusing the famous panda image that's classified as a gibbon as a technique to build a bot captcha.
I've been trying to research drone navigation tech from what we have learned so far from the russian/ukraine war. I'm very much not a hardware guy but software by itself has been feeling kind of useless or even crueler than usual.
Having an egg is relatively hard on parrots. I've given her lots of food and warmth to prepare. She is comically hungry -- she's usually not such a big eater, but she's happy today to be scarfing down her apple slices, fruit pellets, and safflower seeds.
She usually sleeps at the bottom of her cage, beneath a towel I put down for her. It's already unusual for parrots! But tonight she has made quite a nest with her towel: It's folded in half like usual, but she has nuzzled her way between the fold, so she has the towel underneath and on top of her. It's super cute.
I'm treating her with delicacy but she is determined to be a wild child of a bird. She's still flying around during the day and moving around plenty. I don't think I would be so confident if I had an egg like that inside me.
She has a stone perch that she likes to nibble on when she's working on an egg. I've wondered if it is some innate need to nourish herself with calcium, or if it's stress relief :)
So that's my night. Sitting outside of the metaphorical delivery ward with a metaphorical cigar, making sure she lays this egg that isn't even fertile to begin with! Birds :)
Am doing data engineering for some big data (yeah, big enough) and thinking about efficiency of data enrichment. There's this classic trilemma with data enrichment where you can have good write efficiency, good read efficiency and/or good storage cost, pick two.
E.g. you have a 1TB table and you want to add a column that, say, will take 1GB to store.
You can create a new table that is 1.1TB and then delete the old table, but this is both write-inefficient and often breaks how normal data lake orchestration works.
You can create a new wide table that is 1.1TB and keep it along side the old table, but this is both write-inefficient and expensive to store.
You can create a narrow companion table that has just a join key and 1GB of data. This is efficient to write and store, but inefficient to query when you force all users to do joins on read.
And I've come up with a cunning forth way where you write a narrow table and read a wide table so its literally best of all worlds! Kinda staggering :) Still on a high.
Might actually be a conference paper, which is new territory for me. Lets see :)
/off dancing
When transported on cargo flights, they are double packed as cans in a barrel in a crate, and considered UN classified "miscellaneous dangerous goods" with identification number UN3334 "Aviation regulated liquid, n.o.s." with accompanying scary(albeit monochromatic) warning stickers, if at all accepted. When transported on ocean going vessels, they are often required to be in its own shipping container, again double packaged and correctly labeled.
I also recently learned that you can get ancient coins for very little money if you don’t care about resale value or need them to be in pristine condition. I bought some coins from kingdoms that I’d never heard of. Many are thousands of years old! It’s fun holding a piece of history like that.
> The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Very relevant to what's going on today with National Guard and ICE deployments.
https://www.axios.com/2026/01/14/10th-amendment-ice-trump-il... (or please google whatever source you find reliable about the topic)
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_antenna
The funny part is how far the mathematical version of the problem is from what measuretocut.com actually needs to output. In reality you have kerf, ugly offcuts, and the fact that nobody wants a cutting diagram that looks like a circuit board. We really have to take into consideration a 2nd optimization, it needs to be an output that a person in a shop can glance at and immediately understand.
I'm continuously surprised by how difficult it is to plug things together and how non-descriptive cable "standards" are about the actual capabilities of cables and connectors.
The downside is that now I'm wondering if I could write one in SQL.
I don’t even want to use it, I just want to get legacy code building on a modern version of Vite without rewriting a couple thousand lines of code. Aaaargh
Most of my career has been JS and TS and I have no idea what this means.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldfields_Water_Supply_Scheme
I'm looking into rennovating a massive agricultural machine shed ~ two stories high in the middle built some 80+ years ago using sections of spur pipeline as central upright poles to hold up some beefy jarrah trusses.
The "verandah" wings flaring out from there were bulit from flimsier timber that's rotting and the iron sheet walls are starting to peel away.
The posts are of interest as they have old markings and water fittings, tee pieces, etc.
It's not far from one of the original steam powered pumping stations that moved water through the main line.
We shouldn't feel bad, Guide van Rossum was there once too!
https://x.com/gvanrossum/status/1379893622145871873
Hoping they do it for April 1st one year.
The idea is to use something like a slider that shows different images combined with a memory task, like "find out the pair of images" and then offer maybe a text input field where the user has to write 1,2,3 or something similar with the image numbers to pass the captcha.
The tldr is that I'm abusing the famous panda image that's classified as a gibbon as a technique to build a bot captcha.