miscellanea

• Power Stone is a really good song.
• Railcards are batshit. The 16-25 Railcard has a minimum fare restriction of £12 if travelling on a non-Advance fare before 10am on a weekday that isn't public holidays or in that isn't in July or August. but apparently some ticketing sites will sell you these invalid tickets, because fuck you, I guess?
• British passport applications are painfully complex, but someone managed to encode some of the rules of Britishness in Haskell.
• AI is actively stripping away our humanity, by making us less able to reason for ourselves. the purveyors of AI-powered technology want us to let our existing skills atrophy and to not bother developing new ones, so we're all dependent on their technology. that can only happen if we let it. there's an excellent piece by an engineer who quit Google for that very reason, and it's worth a read.
• in the same vein, Don't Get Distracted is another great piece about ethics in technology.

musings

• walking would be more comfortable with much better shoes. I need to replace the insoles of my hiking boots
• I’d like to build a more powerful filtering algorithm for house hunting. I’m considering buying a place soon, and I’d like strong transport links, near green space in inner London. Zoopla and Rightmove yield over 1K results which I can’t sift through manually. new project idea? 👀

misadventures

• spent this work week trying to diagnose slow Airflow DAG execution.
  • I initially thought it was a problem with network throttling, but it turned out to be a database problem. my code initially ran faster locally because I'm relatively over-resourced and used empty databases. adding indexes and using bulk inserts sped my Airflow tasks up by an order of magnitude.
• this has made me realise how little I know about how MongoDB works internally, and how frustrating a lack of observability and profiling tools can be. those will likely be my focus for the next quarter
• Amazon's Business Support+ tier is pretty useful, sat with me on Wednesday and helped with my investigation by ruling out Fargate and DocumentDB throttling
• had a catchup with Josie on Monday. was really good to speak to her and find out what she's up to.
• codebar Festival CfP launched on Tuesday. I should probably bring my personal computing talk there, or do a session on homelabbing
• on Wednesday evening, picked up some more tube posters with Hugh, and spent some time around his evening after work. Ellie made us all spinach pasta that was truly delicious. I need to order another folio for the posters, which will set me back quite a bit
• on Thursday, had steak and ice cream for lunch at Flat Iron in Borough. I did my set in the evening, but it wasn’t as tight as I had hoped for and some jokes didn't land. I even had a comedy bad dream 😔
• spent Friday planning for Christmas dinner at Felix’s, and deciding on what to bring. decided on white chocolate and walnut brownies, with coffee ice-cream. also finished up Humans, with the final series moving at a much slower pace than the first two, but with incredibly strong writing nevertheless.
• on Saturday, went to Lidl, picked up a bunch of ingredients and did my baking. made my way to Felix's for the evening (and in fact I was on time!), and got to see many people I haven't seen for years
  • I'll probably stick the recipes on here soon-ish, but I didn't get many good photos of them.
  • if I had an ultrasonic bath, I could probably make really fast vanilla extract, similar to how you can age alcohol really quickly
  • the ice-cream I made didn't freeze for long enough, and so I resorted to distributing them as milkshake shots
• on Sunday, spent a lot of time recovering from Christmas dinner
  • went to Stepney City Farm, saw the animals and had lunch with Felix, Alex and Eris. it was a lovely day out, and quite a pleasant surprise in the middle of Tower Hamlets.
  • visited Iris' uncle and mum in the evening, tried some really nice cheese. I need to get back in the cheese game, pairing with nice crackers and wines. I should really go on a picnic in the spring, I think. had some patatas bravas with chicken for dinner
  • bought C3 coach tickets on my way home.