xk3's recent activity

  1. Comment on Cameras/software for watching roofs in ~tech

    xk3
    Link
    I've been pretty impressed with Reolink. Even their cheapest offerings at less than $50 have no monthly fee and can stream from WiFi to a remote server (FTP dropbox, or others), motion detection,...

    I've been pretty impressed with Reolink. Even their cheapest offerings at less than $50 have no monthly fee and can stream from WiFi to a remote server (FTP dropbox, or others), motion detection, notifications/alerts to email or phone number, etc.

    Wyze Labs has some that don't even require a power outlet but having wired power and Ethernet improves reliability a lot. Put a UPS on the modem and camera power so it can still upload even during a blackout

    3 votes

  2. Comment on Joe Edelman: "Is anything worth maximizing?", a talk about how tech platforms optimize for metrics in ~tech

    xk3
    Link
    This is a really refreshing take on things. It's not completely novel but I agree this was stimulating to watch.

    This is a really refreshing take on things. It's not completely novel but I agree this was stimulating to watch.

    1 vote

  3. Comment on She challenges one school book a week. She says she’ll never stop. (2023) in ~society

    xk3
    Link
    https://archive.ph/UsPMV

    A Washington Post analysis of thousands of challenges nationwide found that 60 percent of all challenges in the 2021-2022 school year came from 11 adults, each of whom objected to dozens — sometimes close to 100 — of books in their districts.

    https://archive.ph/UsPMV

    6 votes

  5. Comment on Life altering PostgreSQL patterns in ~comp

    xk3
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Huh... TIL. I always thought postgres views are mostly transparent to the query planner but that is not always the case:...

    Huh... TIL. I always thought postgres views are mostly transparent to the query planner but that is not always the case:

    dbt (a common tool in the Analytics Engineering community) often favors using views:

    Generally start with views for your models, and only change to another materialization when you notice performance problems.

    But this is mostly for OLAP workflows which run a handful of times per week where the performance difference might not matter or might not immediately be obvious.

    The speed difference between INT4 and UUID index lookup can be over an order of magnitude in really long and wide tables. Luckily they aren't usually that bad: https://ardentperf.com/2024/02/03/uuid-benchmark-war/

    However, I absolutely agree that UUIDs are pretty awful, even as external IDs: they aren't great for debugging as they are hard to visually compare (you might think they are the same but your glance only compared the first and last 2 chars, etc). You can't even double-click-select them because they have dashes. And users definitely prefer smaller IDs like "BOB123"

    3 votes

  6. Comment on Life altering PostgreSQL patterns in ~comp

    xk3
    Link Parent
    I think they meant when writing the select statement you are referencing individual values like "city.name" instead of "cities.name". I agree this shouldn't be dogmatic but it should be consistent...

    selecting individual records

    I think they meant when writing the select statement you are referencing individual values like "city.name" instead of "cities.name". I agree this shouldn't be dogmatic but it should be consistent (whenever possible) to minimize confusion. I've preferred to always use plurals and I never had second thoughts about "cities.name".

    But I agree, it's not a strong tip like the others are.

    6 votes

  9. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    xk3
    Link Parent
    Fascinating! Thanks for sharing. I love seeing small puzzles like this. I put together a Let's Split before and love QMK. Great idea checking for prior art

    Fascinating! Thanks for sharing. I love seeing small puzzles like this.

    I put together a Let's Split before and love QMK. Great idea checking for prior art

  10. Comment on The M train is now departing (2011) in ~arts

    xk3
    Link

    At www.mta.me, Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA's actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop. The visuals are based on Massimo Vignelli's 1972 diagram. (More info at this blog post.)

    In its first week of launch, mta.me was picked up by The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, Engadget, Gizmodo, Mashable, Creativity, Fast Company, Gawker, Wired, and more. Sound samples by Tim Kahn (Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License).

    2 votes

  12. Comment on What would your past self say about your current self? in ~life

    xk3
    Link
    I wrote a poem? nine years ago and my past self would approve of me using this chance to spam it here. I still agree with the words inside of it. I don't think I've changed much in the years--just...

    I wrote a poem? nine years ago and my past self would approve of me using this chance to spam it here. I still agree with the words inside of it. I don't think I've changed much in the years--just incrementally slightly more sophisticated.

    I

      if I own this moment
then I die with each passing second

:replaced and rebuilt and replaced
:line upon line,
(each thought)
:precept upon precept,

  do I live my own life?
               owing to all past creatures who have inherited these temple walls?
             (for these are past creatures)

consciousness, my essence in being,
               as childhood or just yesterdays;
a function of time?
                   which moments before were very real, but are now lost in the eternities.

yet,
things move on procedurally, yet not quite
      almost procedurally; if not accidentally
:our thoughts are woven through time.

    II

            am i?
     right to be jealous of future or past selves:

a grain-seed of the field of harvest (a future)
a harvest-field of the seed of grain (a past)
can this jealousy be justified?

        are We?
       our memories, our anticipations
        or
         do We only keep these children of thoughts to serve us evidence that We exist

(do they own us or We, them?)

each moment is a fragment
:a piece, but each a separate, eternal, frame
(not unlike a sequence of animations; a sham)
from life to death: an illusion that We move and are alive.

then what are We?
          are We just a frame or are We the whole being?

    III

    each glimpse is a fleeting moment:
hopes, miseries, desires,
sensations, thoughts, emotions.

We fail to embrace
        to escape this consequessence of macro-organism. 

waking, sleeping, driven by our never-satisfied desire to attain an un(objet petit a)obtainable; 
whether or not similarly equal or equivalently possible: never a constructed part of transition, translation. 
lifetimes spent, generations without pause
each repeating the same magnificent story 
     over and over
     again and again
running without breath: this is our present bias. 

each glimpse is a fleeting moment
:driven onward by time;
hopes, miseries, desires, sensations, thoughts, emotions;
each new complexity adding to our heaped understanding of the human condition
:there is no escape until We are lost:
                    until We change.

    IV

    it has been said that people change.
                                     and indeed they do.
but by what definition?

is our definition dynamic?
   can definition be dynamic?

are we the whole system
      or a single frame?

each day we grow and change
         but when we change
              are we "us"?

are we the whole 
or a single part?

if we were the whole,
then our change is contradiction.
I'm not against change
    I'm against contradiction:
   some dimensionless physical constant for which we only hope

so I argue
We are one frame:
each day lost and born anew;
  not who we were yesterday,
    not who we are tomorrow,
      but who we are today.

I am who I am today.
to this conclusion I must now answer:

    V

    I own this moment,
  owing to all past self
:to fulfill their dreams
and so
      I trust a future self:
to fulfill my dreams: owing.

I own this moment: I control it
but not my past, 
for though I am responsible for my past,
I can't change or control it.

    our ego justified by willpower
envy may be justified, but does it teach? 
                   no: for even this shall pass with frame.
Our resolve? to be actively content. 

the future of my moment will also come and pass away
&my moment is wasted if I take it against 
     anything uninteresting 
           or trite.

We own our memories, our anticipations, but they also drive us and control us.

We are one loose frame: dangling 
           free, but without anchor
               from our desire for continuity We latch onto our memories 
               from our desire for universal consistency We anticipate unity 

We may be only a frame, but remember: We decide what to forget.
                                                what is right, or what is illusion.
    2 votes

  13. Comment on Introductions | March 2025 in ~talk

    xk3
    Link
    How long have you been on Tildes? How did you find out about us? Looks like my oldest post is July 2023 so about $ timecalc 'now - 2023-07-10' 621 days, 20 hours, 6 minutes, 24 seconds, 378006...

    How long have you been on Tildes? How did you find out about us?

    Looks like my oldest post is July 2023 so about

    $ timecalc 'now - 2023-07-10'
621 days, 20 hours, 6 minutes, 24 seconds, 378006 microseconds
$ insect '621days to years'
1.70024 year

    about 2 years...

    How did you choose your username?

    xk was too short

    What are your interests?

    I'm interested in offline tools to work with and organize data (/r/selfhosted, /r/datahoarder, but also /r/dataengineering). I spent a lot of my free time over the past few years adding to this "library" project--whenever I used an ad-hoc script more than a couple times I'd figure out a way to add that as a subcommand.

    I've been a Linux fanboy ever since my older brother brought home a KNOPPIX 3 CD

    Recently, I discovered the Queen Mary 2 and have been daydreaming an 8-day transatlantic from New York to the UK even though I know it is detrimental to the environment, mostly 70+ year old co-passengers, and not even that luxurious of a voyage--it still has some marginally diminishing mystique as it occupies my headspace these last couple days. I've never been on a big boat except the ferry to Mackinac Island.

    A/S/L (age/(gender|pronouns|identifier)/location)

    30/M/Central Illinois (thinking about moving to a bigger city like Peoria or Bloomington but I already live in a really great small town--I'm torn)

    What do you do? This could be in your spare time, for work, your passions.

    It would be really awesome to have a job that requires me to investigate some "small" data (eg. Excel, CSV, JSON, etc) to really flesh out the plot and eda library subcommands.

    I also like working with GIS data (spatial data engineering) and doing exploratory analysis or scaling up existing processes.

    Right now I'm r/PovertyFIRE retired but still doing consulting gigs when the opportunity presents itself. I keep applying to interesting jobs too but haven't had much success with that so just trying to make the most out of every day and building out my own life purpose :-)

    Do you want other users to PM/DM you from this thread?

    Sure, I've never been PM'd

    Give us a fun fact

    Only 1% of the corn grown in the USA is sweet corn (the corn you eat). The other 99% of corn grown in the USA is field corn which is fairly inedible. This field corn is also what they use for non-edible corn products: ethanol, paint, cosmetics, etc.

    6 votes

  14. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    xk3
    (edited )
    Link
    The past couple days I've been playing around with cookies and I made a little cookie testing site: https://unli.xyz/cookietest.html And I was wondering why the cookieDisplay wasn't showing up in...

    The past couple days I've been playing around with cookies and I made a little cookie testing site: https://unli.xyz/cookietest.html

    And I was wondering why the cookieDisplay wasn't showing up in Firefox but not in Chromium and it was because of my I don't care about cookies addon which was hiding that div. So that gave me a silent chuckle and only took about 30 seconds to figure out (I renamed cookieDisplay to c: that's good enough for me).

    This next part is more vexing... I'm trying to use the site to check that cookies are maintained across page loads:

    python -m library.lb text --selenium --cookies-from-browser firefox https://unli.xyz/cookietest.html?cookieValue=t https://unli.xyz/cookietest.html?cookieValue=test2 https://unli.xyz/cookietest.html?cookieValue -vv # --manual

    https://github.com/chapmanjacobd/library/commit/d9d2488081f6844bcbf7d565d6ad40a871213985

    But the site is behaving differently inside of selenium and outside--it's almost like it can't read the cookie once I set it after the first page load. It's probably something simple but the solution is eluding me for the past 45 mins... I'll take a short break.

    1 vote

  15. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    xk3
    Link Parent
    It might seem a bit scary at first but the fish-shell codebase is fun to mess around in. Cargo makes it very accessible to get compiling and not worry too much about breaking stuff. Here are some...

    It might seem a bit scary at first but the fish-shell codebase is fun to mess around in. Cargo makes it very accessible to get compiling and not worry too much about breaking stuff.

    Here are some interesting Go and Rust projects sorted by least number of GitHub stars

    2 votes

  16. Comment on "EPIC 2014" / Googlezon - an alternative history of media evolution in ~movies

    xk3
    Link
    The video released by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson in 2004: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt3TmUW90B8 A very similar and slightly more interesting version, perhaps released in 2005?...

    The video released by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson in 2004:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bt3TmUW90B8

    A very similar and slightly more interesting version, perhaps released in 2005?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVfBuw1hCsw

    Pretty eerie... it's interesting to see how the predictions mostly turned out true except that companies don't need to merge for industries to fall apart.

    I guess this is more speculative fiction than historical "content" but the Wikipedia entry is essentially historical writing--not sure if this is the right Tildes topic

    2 votes

  20. Comment on Forgiveness as a political necessity (2020) in ~society

    xk3
    (edited )
    Link
    I found this article while I was thinking about how to help my Trump-can-do-no-wrong parents. They are totally unfazed in these past few months--if anything their conviction is stronger now than...

    I found this article while I was thinking about how to help my Trump-can-do-no-wrong parents. They are totally unfazed in these past few months--if anything their conviction is stronger now than ever.

    A Man is to be cheated into Passion, but to be reason’d into Truth

    • John Dryden, 1682

    Reasoning will never make a man correct an ill opinion, which by reasoning he never acquired

    • Jonathan Swift, 1721

    This quote helped me get into the state of mind where I decided to map out the emotions that link with political ideologies. These words are sometimes used (and misused) by political parties. It may help to think about this like a blank canvas that you are filling in with a very fuzzy picture about the world:

    Conservatism

    Driving Emotions: Loyalty, Forgiveness?, Apathy?

    In many ways the conservative mood is the preservation of the status quo. This is probably the most common / baseline political feeling for those who didn't have another dominant mood during their childhood. This could be being Democrat because your favorite parent was Democrat, etc.

    Republicanism

    Driving Emotions: Pride, Fear

    Liberalism

    Driving Emotions: Guilt, Shame

    Libertarianism

    Driving Emotions: Trauma, Distrust

    Leftism

    Driving Emotions: Sympathy, Anger

    Populism

    Driving Emotions: Resentment, Hope

    Of course, everyone experiences different emotions at some point in their life but I'm thinking in more of a overarching/archetyping social milieu dominant mood. Logic is not the driving force of political ideology. If it was then it would be a science: largely undisputed. The more that an ideology is tied to their identity, the more emotional reasons people need to unfix themselves. If you only provide logical technicalities their brain will only fight harder to shore up their worldview.

    More specifically, I found this article while thinking about the potentially multi-generational cycle of these emotions and thinking about what comes after populism. I invite criticism and discussion about any of these ideas and any I have not touched on but which are present in the above article.

    2 votes