• Jul 24, 2019

  • Smoked 8 beef plate ribs yesterday. Bought some maple syrup and honey to experiment with the wrap drizzle. Used to just do brown sugar, wanna compare the bark glaze with the syrups.
  • Honey was the winner.
  • Gonna do the other 2 racks thursday for softball.
  • Started to look for hawaii housing yesterday but jcriss had already booked. The hotel is $300/night. Searched for airbnbs nearby and there’s one right next door for $200/night. Booked it instead.
  • Placed fresh order.
  • Listened to joe rogan + sam harris in the background while working: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZA106wrMUe4.
  • Filed a claim for the equifax data breach. My data was part of the leak. $125 for compensation.
  • Settled funds for Remy’s 30th in big bear.
  • Cool site to find data breaches: https://haveibeenpwned.com/. Mine are 8tracks, dropbox, linkedin, eatstreet, exactis, ticketfly. I’m not worried about any. I don’t have password reuse accross any of those, nor do they contain particularly current or valuable data.
• Jul 22, 2019

  • Chores. Refilled jars. Laundry. Picked up chicken breast and beef ribs for smoking. Finally threw out the earring holder and reorganized the bedside table. Light grocery shopping.
  • Deactivated my fb account. Never used it, and it was starting to fill with spam. Don’t need any extra exposure if I’m getting no value in return.
  • Made homemade hummus. Used raw chickpeas and homemade roasted tahini. Delicious.
  • Started the next kombucha batch as well.
• Jul 21, 2019

  • Homemade oat’s milk and almond butter, both were bomb.
  • Amazon sold some $5k+ camera gear for $100 on prime day due to a pricing error. https://petapixel.com/2019/07/17/amazon-accidentally-sold-13000-camera-gear-for-100-on-prime-day.
  • 5 users – that’s usually all it takes to get a good distribution of the space for design.
  • Neuralink launch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-vbh3t7WVI.
  • FDA approval is the tough part.
  • Release end of 2020 (lol).
  • Implant that simulates the action potential, providing a neural interface.
  • Some say that the government played a pivotal role in the genesis of silicon valley. Meh. Tech innovation is gonna naturally create an epicenter somewhere. Maybe some of the american ideals (free speech, capitalist platforms, etc) helped accelerate it.
  • There were a few successful logins (un/pw) to my steam account which I haven’t used in 10+ years. Emails were sent to trackseventeen and gmail. I changed the pw.
  • Spinnaker is the CD platform at Netflix. Deployment, environments, staging, pipelines, etc. Allows red/black deploys, where the new (red) phases in and takes load until the old (black) lessens to offline.
  • Remember, Kayenta is the canary app at Netflix.
  • Even some of the art that netflix presents to you is personalized. Often, shows and movies have multiple images that can be thumbnailed in presentation. Based on your other tastes, machine learning on your account will personalize the one that resonates.
  • Flutter is a framework for developing mobile apps. It’s built by Google. It focuses mostly on UI. It’s crossplatform. It also supports native mobile/web/desktop.
  • React native and flutter are probably the two main competitors for crossplatform mobile development right now. Hot reloading and other common features.
  • Went to the natural history museum. Was nice. Saw lots of dinosaurs, mammals, and birds mostly.
  • Blockchains lol. Ledges that show every transaction, ever. In order to place the next block (make a transaction), you need your private/public key. This is associated with you wallet, of which someone can have many. Therefore, your anonymity is preserved (until you try to transfer back to USD or something else with an identifiable destination). A cryptographic hash is solved to record the transaction. It’s broadcasted to all nodes to compare and prevent fraudulent transactions. In order to successfully fake it out, you’d have to be faster than the rest of the entire network (which would make your fraudulent tail of the chain more trustworthy in the mathematical race). Nodes can be people(s) who dedicate their computer to mining. This incentivizes by giving a small amount of coin for uses the computing resources to solve the math problems for new transactions.
  • And a very good counterargument in a great article https://medium.com/@kaistinchcombe/decentralized-and-trustless-crypto-paradise-is-actually-a-medieval-hellhole-c1ca122efdec: “Let’s create a very long sequence of small files — each one containing a hash of the previous file, some new data, and the answer to a difficult math problem — and divide up some money every hour among anyone willing to certify and store those files for us on their computers. And then everyone keeps their records in a tamper-proof repository not owned by anyone.”
• Jul 17, 2019

  • Remember, single page applications send data back and forth asynchronously with the server (the URL doesn’t change as you interact with them, simply). Example: gmail. Multiple page apps will render a new template for each request.
  • “Grease the Groove” training (GtG) is very low weight, not to fatigue, many times a day, multiple set exercising. It is designed for neurological training of the movements, and has become quite popular.
  • Researched tax amendments.
  • Material IO is a cool project: https://material.io/develop/. Easy drop-in for design.
  • React-router is the library to manage routes in a react app: https://reacttraining.com/react-router/web/guides/quick-start.
  • create-react-app is a fantastic starting point for most SPAs. Nwb is an alternative that’s a bit more flexible. It can integrate with a serverside templating framework, like flask/jinja.
  • Remember, angular is two-way binding whereas react is one-way.
  • Coming from an extensive python background, writing functional application code mostly, I just want to note that web development is an extremely different software beast. Over the past few months, I’ve forced myself into beginner’s mind, and I must admit that it has been uncomfortable, and continues to be. But as always, these growing pains signify that you’re learning.
  • React’s jsx blend of html/js I still find weird. Take advantage of the existing languages. Why blend them? You create conflicts like class/className and onClick and such.
  • Vue comes with its own state management (vuex) and router, unlike react/angular. For those, it’s offered as a third-party package.
  • CRUD = cread read update delete. Administration of storage.
  • Bruh this template application is fantastic: https://github.com/briancappello/flask-react-spa. It’s basically the exact same stack as my supercontest, but slightly better.
  • “Gists” in github are snippets. It’s a scratchpad to share code or notes.
  • Bower is a package manager (under npm). I guess this is similar to something like sx-setuptools being under pip.
  • Github is great. It has an automated system that detects security vulnerabilities (like the lodash one), but then is also capable of autogenerated a PR with the fix: https://github.com/brianmahlstedt/supercontest/pull/52. Approved and merged.
  • Placed regular and fresh order to make homemade oat milk, tahini, hummus, and almond butter. I use these all regularly, but I’ve never tried the homemade versions which I hear are cheaper and much better.
  • Pumpkin no longer has the license for HATTS.
• Jul 16, 2019

  • FAANG = Facebook Apple Amazon Netflix Google.
  • Some good design principles always: precompute, caching, in-mem datastore, how will it scale?, index the db.
  • console.dir is similar to python dir(), you can pass it an object and it will tell you all the properties of that obj. A common use for this is console.dir(document), which gives you the whole DOM.
  • Finished the react tutorial: https://github.com/tyroprogrammer/learn-react-app. Took notes on gdoc.
  • Ducati Elettrico, “not far from starting production”
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  • The average stomach can stretch about 15%. Professional eaters can go up to 200%. It can tear.
• Jul 15, 2019

  • Prime day. Bought some things I’d been needing, jeans and socks.
  • Github sent me an email about a potentially risky dependency, which is an awesome feature they have. lodash < 4.17.13 has holes.
  • I do this already! https://medium.com/better-humans/replace-your-to-do-list-with-interstitial-journaling-to-increase-productivity-4e43109d15ef.
  • Lumen is the internal tool netflix built for dashboarding.
  • Insomnia (https://insomnia.rest/) is a tool that allows you to test APIs. Would be better as a webapp. Allows you to create requests and observe the response in an easy-to-consume-for-humans manner.
  • Purchase offer.
  • Morgan Stanley acquired Solium for 900m. Shareworks is their product now.
  • The oversubscription algorithm is not by request now, it’s by holdings. This is in my favor. It also means that your sale election is basically your max, not some hypothetically inflated number that you hope gets truncated properly.
  • It’s annoying that transmittal forms are required for former employees and those with paper certificates. Waste of infra, and incovenient.
  • While I am currently using blogger for this effort, I could easily add a wordpress docker image to my droplet. This could run mysql/php to serve a dashboard allowing me to write blog posts by logging into my bmahlstedt.com domain.
• Jul 11, 2019

  • Medium, one of the most popular publishing platforms on the Earth, sent me an ad today: “Humungus is a new publication about pop culture and masculinity. It’s for men, but not toxically masculine.” Are you kidding? Must every sentence about men be followed by a second sentence defending it?
  • Watched midsommar yesterday. Amazing. Also finished season 3 of stranger things.
  • Former tesla important brought secrets to china: https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/10/20689468/tesla-autopilot-trade-secret-theft-guangzhi-cao-xpeng-xiaopeng-motors-lawsuit-filing.
  • Main Python ML suite:
  • Scikit-learn, the actual learning. Has SVM, regression (of all kinds), classification, gradients, naive bayes, neural networks, clustering, signal analysis, PCA. No deep learning or reenforcement learning.
  • Numpy, for data structures. Arrays, matrices, etc. Low level.
  • Pandas, for operations on data. Wraps numpy. Handling of missing data, timeseries, merging data, etc. High level.
  • Matplotlib, for visualizing the data.
  • Sidenote: Scipy is the ecosystem around these, the umbrella. Numpy, matplotlib, and pandas are part of scipy.
  • Still annoying that tmux isn’t starting with my proper bash shell (coloring, aliases like ll, etc).
  • Gitpod is an awesome feature of github: https://www.gitpod.io/. It’s an online interpreter, giving you an environment like bash/python/whatever for testing.
  • MD/PW. Nothing to write down, but still lots of good reminders and triggers. I skim about 10 articles a day, and find it valuable.
  • Sam Harris has the good point that open discourse is fundamental to everything. Our ability to reason is the bedrock of progress. Anything that goes against open discourse is by definition limiting (in the best case), and violently wrong (in the worst case, like radical islam). Dogmatic points of view are the bases of all religion. They’re the bases of dictatorships like Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Stalin’s communism. Free speech and the pursuit of truth (science, evidence, and rationale) are paramount.
  • Chopra and Houston dropped a funny ball on this one lol: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nupB70anRrQ.