wes @wes@qoto.org

@alexandria I was a happy Qubes user for about a year. Ultimately it was limited laptop hardware support that caused me to move on. I also came to realize that my threat model didn’t require the isolation, and those features ended up getting in the way of my workflow. However, it is the most ergonomic multi level secure system I have ever used.

@2ck I credit Groove Salad for getting me through my undergraduate years.

@svmihar sqllite is my secret weapon. It is a versatile and ergonomic data processing tool, and I use it almost daily professionally.

@soundofsun The last time I saw Social Distortion play was in Orange County probably a decade ago. Mike Ness broke his arm the week before and was unable to play guitar. The show was still great!

For the last few months, I have been using the Metaflow framework to orchestrate my personal data projects. I made some modifications to the recommended infrastructure design to meet my own requirements, e.g. cost reduction, complexity reduction, and use of Terraform. I also tried to bake in some AWS best-practices from lessons learned professionally.

https://wtanner.github.io/metaflow/terraform/2020/08/02/personal-metaflow.html

@Lwasserman @freemo It is true that emacs has a learning curve. However, I’ll say that if you set up spacemacs, you will have most of the functionality you are looking for:

Export to pdf (and other formats), a literate programming environment with org mode / Babel which supports many popular programming languages, and org-roam (https://www.orgroam.com/) for note taking including daily notes that you can cross reference with agendas and todos and all the other org features.

The simplest literate programming environment I’ve used is Jupyter notebooks. The web server part is simply a way to serve a document user interface, and it is very simple to run locally. There are a number of languages supported. Probably the next easiest is matlab, but that is more specialized.

@holot @shebang https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sK5i-N34im8 I found this to be one of the more approachable introductions to containers in under an hour.

There is also this project, where “docker“ is implemented in a low line-count bash script https://github.com/p8952/bocker

@fishbowl This is neat. I had never heard of this project, or invidious. The interesting part to me is that it manages to bypass the YouTube API entirely, access to which requires divulging PII. The only tool in this category that I am familiar with is youtube-dl https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl A major difference is that youtube-dl exposes a command line user interface. It also supports a massive number of other video sources.

I really like the idea of these tools, and not just for the privacy gain. It allows for innovation in user experience on top of an existing video product, which tends to be for 2-sigma of the population and not extensible. YouTube exposes good APIs (pretty much everything available on the site can be done via the API), but not all platforms do.

@proto_azure Electrical engineering attracted me because it touched so many foundational areas of mathematics, physics and chemistry. It is also a very diverse field of study, so I believe it is well matched for the curious. In my career I have had the privilege of designing a high precision oscillator, anti-jam communication protocols, RF circuit design, signal processing work for 4G cellular modems, integration of satellite and aircraft flight hardware, and many other projects, and I probably wrote over 100e3 lines of matlab code.

I have since moved on to other careers, but the foundations of that education and career experience are still paying dividends.

Fanciful energy source claims are fascinating to me: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/neutrino-energy-group-neutrino-energy-203000552.html most of the material on the company website is really bizarre. I am unable to tell if it is an investment scam, delusion, or an elaborate practical joke.