Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

From the archives of my blog but still very relevant: "pytz: The Fastest Footgun in the West", about why you probably shouldn't be using pytz:

https://blog.ganssle.io/articles/2018/03/pytz-fastest-footgun.html

Has anyone got a list of questions I can ask a potential fitness trainer to ascertain whether or not they are likely to be in one of the more science-based fitness camps?

Every time I try to read a book on fitness, it’s all, “The one simple trick to get ripped abs with zero effort!” I want a fitness coach with a pragmatic, skeptical point of view.

So, basically this permanent sign is advertising that all the sushi comes with math homework?

Ooh, nifty:

Saving memory with Pandas 1.3’s new string dtype
https://pythonspeed.com/articles/pandas-string-dtype-memory/

Bryan Caplan makes a very compelling point that if you think first-hand accounts are not credible, you should find the news even less credible: https://www.econlib.org/first-hand-experience-is-less-biased-than-news/

I think the second two points are doing most of the work there.

I tend to agree with his assessment, but I think he’s discounting (or missing) several things working in the other direction:

1. Institutional and reputational forces. If news consumers care about truth or if the culture among journalists is to value truth, news organizations have incentives to work against these biases.

2. “Reliable” is ill-defined here. If most people’s threat model is “someone might lie to me, have been deceived or be wrong”, in theory news organizations may be more trustworthy - they are much more likely to simply be wrong than to lie, and they can and often do hire fact checkers to follow up more deeply into a story than any random person would.

3. People may be aware that “shows up frequently in the news” is only weakly correlated with “happens a lot”, and may already strongly discount this factor. Reading an accurate account of a very unlikely thing is not really wrong, and it’s unclear how it compares to a dubious account of a relatively common thing in terms of pragmatic value.

For anyone who missed the reply chain, I figured this out: https://qoto.org/@pganssle/106794915957856274

Anyone have an idea what I’m doing wrong here?

https://gist.github.com/pganssle/31a899ea34d2ecff77034b25e077b600

I can’t seem to get a minimal docker-compose configuration to expose nginx outside of the container.

(Note, replace _ with / in the file names of the gist).

Do you have a website for your family? Any interest in sharing it with me?

Looking to set something up, and I’d be interested in seeing other examples of the genre.

Anyone in #SLC have ideas for fun and relatively unique things to do with a 3 year old (and a 1 month old) in the Salt Lake City area? (Let’s say no more than a 1 hour drive away)

Burp cloth? Who is burp cloth? I am pocket square!

#dadlife

Unfortunate name for a children’s juice, I’d say: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiamine_deficiency

Self-hosting crowd:

Is there any relatively “out of the box” solution for self-hosting services like @nextcloud, Pixelfed, etc on a local server (possibly an RPi)?

Ideally I’d store the configuration for it in a git repo or something so that I can easily re-deploy it to a new machine without much fuss.

Even a collection of ansible playbooks with a relatively good provenance would be acceptable I think.