What programming/technical projects have you been working on?

I want to talk about something I ended up doing in the Tildes code yesterday, because—at least, in my opinion—I think it's fascinating. It's some combination of amazing and terrifying, and kind of broke my mental model of the relationship between the application and the database. Bear with me for a bit, I'm going to continue being vague and explain how I got there first:

On Tildes, when something has a unique ID, it's usually displayed in an alphanumeric way, which makes them shorter and looks better in urls. For example, this topic's ID is "ioq", which you can see in the url (.../~comp/ioq/...) as well as in the short link in the sidebar: https://tild.es/ioq. The ID isn't actually stored that way though, it's stored as a normal number and just converted to that format for display purposes. So when I need to take something I'm looking at on the site and look it up in the database, I always need to convert the alphanumeric ID back. The way I usually do this is to open a Python session and run a couple of commands, the same function used in the site code when I need to do that conversion:

>>> from tildes.lib.id import id36_to_id
>>> id36_to_id("ioq")
24218

("id36" is a short form of "base-36 ID", with the 36 being the 26 letters + 10 digits each character can be)

After doing that, I know the integer ID is 24218, and I can go to the database and do my select/update/whatever with WHERE topic_id = 24218. This is obviously pretty trivial overall, but it's a bit annoying to need to do whenever this situation comes up, so I wanted a way to just be able to do it in the database, like WHERE topic_id = id36_to_id('ioq').

You can add custom functions like that, and I've already written some to implement trigger behavior. The "native" languages for PostgreSQL are fairly clunky though, and I can hardly write anything in them without constantly looking things up in the documentation. So even though this is a simple function, I didn't really want to rewrite it into one of those languages and need to remember to update it if I ever touch the Python function.

I remembered that PostgreSQL supports writing functions in some flavor of Python, but I had never really looked into it before. I decided to try playing around with that a little and had the thought of, "I've already written this function in Python, can I just... import it, instead of copy-pasting it into a PostgreSQL function?" And it turns out that you can! I just had to set the PYTHONPATH environment variable appropriately in PostgreSQL to point to the application's virtualenv, and now the id36_to_id PostgreSQL function is this:

CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION id36_to_id(id36 TEXT) RETURNS INTEGER AS $$
    from tildes.lib.id import id36_to_id
    return id36_to_id(id36)
$$ IMMUTABLE LANGUAGE plpython3u;

It just calls the application's function. This is obviously a really simplistic example of what you can do with it, but the upshot is that... all of the application's Python code (and all of the libraries it uses) can be available for use in the database itself. This is something that I never realized was even possible, and it's super interesting to me. Like I said, it's kind of ruined my mental concept of how an application needs to do certain things with its database.

There's definitely danger to it too, and I have no idea how much I'll end up actually using it, but it's making me think about some new possibilities.

I recently switched teams at work, and I now work on GeckoView, which is Mozilla's next generation embedding solution for building Gecko-based browsers on Android. It is the embedding technology underlying the new Firefox Preview (codenamed "Fenix").

I’m learning machine learning and using that to make my off road robot autonomous. The robot is called Rover and is all 3D printed from my own design. CC0 open source of course. I’ve got an NVIDIA Jetson Xavier and my goal is to build an open source camera-based autonomy system for it. I’ve got a video showing it off below which includes some shots of my first foray in to training machine learning models for this robot. I took google’s pixel wise segmentation algorithm DeepLab and trained it to recognize “trail” and “not trail” on some images of a forest trail I took. Since this video I’ve ordered a four camera array of 13 megapixel cameras with hardware synchronize shutters made to go directly in to the Xavier’s camera inputs. I’ve also made a pipeline so I can go from photographs of the world to a 3D model of the world to simulation in that model for reinforcement learning in photorealistic environment. That uses COLMAP and Habitat-Sim.

Here’s the video:
https://youtu.be/BSRa2zZ6CtQ

Bonus photo album of the robot and the 3D printed dual stage planetary gearboxes. So far those same gearboxes have lasted almost a year with no signs of wear!
https://imgur.com/gallery/GqXD2Zj

I've been working on <redacted>.

I joke. Kinda.

What I can say is that my recent projects have me doing Data Science on pretty large databases. Usually focused exclusively on the security side of the house. Using the prior events that we track to inform the validation process for the future content we create has been most of my last two weeks. Kind of building it from the ground up, so it's been a wild ride.

One of the coolest things I unlocked is so, uh, application specific that it barely makes sense to relay. I figured out how to call the API of the application I'm working with to return the data that can inform my validating process. The cool thing is it will inform all my validating process I want to build out. The scary thing is could theoretically break the entire system the company uses for that data if I'm not careful, because I have to go after that data on the live environment, which is spooky as all hell.

none. my shits all fucked up, and there's still a lot happening to me while i'm trying to deal with a lot. it makes me really sad somedays because it feels like it's a part of myself that i'm losing. the last few things i did was just some bash scripts for stuff i needed or wanted, like a little radio player that used mplayer/jq to keep track of internet/pirate radios and play them. or like updating my dotfiles/gentoo-config repos