Sam's L33t Journal

I went to PyCon in Pittsburgh last weekend, once again traveling on my own dime and time, per the new way of things at Google. At least they comped me one of their sponsor passes for reg.

Cory Doctorow did the opening keynote, on his theory of the current malaise in the tech industry. Which was quite an opening to the conference: We'd like to thank our sponsors and now here's Cory Doctorow to rip them a new one. I'm a big fan of Doctorow, and think he has a lot of insight. I really do think tech companies have gotten themselves to a point in consolidation-friendly and competition-unfriendly political environment where not only are things getting shittier for users and other stakeholders, the companies have also really painted themselves into a corner and are suffering from stagnation (even in an environment where there's some really amazing development in technical capabilities). Doctorow highlights Jay Saurik's phrase about how the DMCA (and similar laws promulgated by treaty agreements and free-trade deals) prohibiting the circumvention of digital locks makes a de facto crime of "Felony Contempt of Business Model". Doctorow's suggestion that countries should retaliate against tariffs with IP liberalization instead of retaliatory tariffs (i.e. making it possible for their entrepreneurs and firms to compete with US big tech instead of just revenge-taxing their own consumers) is certainly an intriguing possibility!

I think the world Doctorow envisions would be so much better for a lot of people, including software engineers specifically. For those at startups, sure, you could actually get your "compete with the big players" start-up funded, for one thing. But also for those at big companies, which could actually compete with their rivals, instead of just carving out separate fiefdoms and taking occasional all-in/all-out-double-time shots at someone else's crown.

I got to spend a lot of time with my colleagues, especially meeting members of the new Python Team and catching up with members of the former one, many of whom seem to have settled into some really cool Python work at Meta (working on Instagram's high-performance CPython fork or the Rust implementation of their Python type-checker). It's so heartening to see people who enjoyed working with you and are happy to see you and would enjoy to work with you again. (Not that I don't get that on my current team, it's just very reduced.) And I ran into Itamar, a colleague back from my ITA days, and Allen Downey, my CS professor from Olin. Spent most of my time at the convention center, but got to take in a bit of local color. Ate some big sandwiches at Primanti's anyways.

I spent Friday morning in conversation with Cory Doctorow at the PSF lounge in the expo hall, wandered the expo floor, caught talks on new Python features that I hadn't read up on before (e.g. template strings, the effort to escape once and for all from the Global Interpreter Lock), heard about people's fascinating projects. All the talks will be posted to their YouTube channel over the next week or two. The Python community really is a pointedly liberal and activist one, too, there's a real insistence on "Python is for everyone". Python really did carve out a unique niche in its balance of usability and "batteries included" power.

After getting back: This week has been pretty busy with a lot of city and school events. This evening was Somerville's Slice of the City pizza-party get-together for our neighborhood. Tomorrow morning, Erica's class is participating in the Argenziano Wax Museum, an event where the third graders portray people from history (this year focusing on figures from the American Revolution). Tomorrow evening is Argenziano Heritage Night, a big cultural festival at the school that Erica looks forward to every year.

Julie was in NYC this weekend for a bike ride event with her dad and Kristin and Emilia. I had a beautiful weekend at home with Erica. I belatedly realized that it was the weekend of Somerville Open Studios, and we wound up exploring several art galleries tucked into the Milk Row neighborhood on our way back from climbing on Saturday. On Sunday, we went to see the open house at the Friend Museum (i.e the home of Martha Friend; the exterior alone is a notable Somerville landmark). We caught a few more gallery and outdoor showings on our way back. Other highlights of our weekend included the art of Lexi Havlin, Kelly Ann Clark McCormack, and Akira Fujita. The scale of the event is really impressive, with over 120 places in the city participating.

The city is so beautiful in the spring. The moment that stands out most in my memory was standing under some overhanging wisteria that a whole crew of carpenter bees was busily foraging with an audible buzz.

There was some scattered rain this weekend, but the bits between were beautiful. We mostly managed to avoid getting caught out in it.

We did a lot of art activities at home, too: The big project was egg-decorating, from the Easter basket Mary got for Erica. Erica made a cord bracelet, and built some Lego.

After finishing Death's Door, I've started playing Spiritfarer . Which I guess takes a completely different take (in terms of game mechanics and whole general vibe) on exactly the same topic.

Last week was a stressful week, and it was capped off by layoffs hitting my immediate area of the Goog. The layoffs were maximum chaos style, insta-cutoff, no transitions, total surprise for us but also several levels up the management chain. I'm still employed, but my team, which had gone from twelve active engineers at the start of last year to six by the end (not due to layoffs, just attrition, but organizational factors were in play), is now further down to four (with three active because one is on leave). I'd already thought things were pretty reduced, but now they're downright osseous (as in "cut to the ____" or worse, "we're _____"). I don't have a foot out the door, but at this point I feel like I ought to have both eyes out the window. I updated my resume, which I hadn't done for a long time.

This weekend was a pretty good break, at least. Did some cooking. I took Erica to see the latest special exhibit at the MFA ("Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits"). I've been enjoying playing Death's Door, a humorously spooky indie adventure game which in aesthetic seems somewhere between the newer 2D Zelda games, Persona, and Dark Souls.

Solo-parenting tonight and tomorrow because Julie is making a day-trip to the land of finance. Busy busy.

This week is Erica's school break, and I took Erica to Cleveland to visit my parents while Julie gets a focus week back at home. Had the Monday holiday off, but the rest of the week was "working from elsewhere" for me.

Last Sunday, our travel day, was very snowy overnight and rain and heavy clouds all day in Boston. Bad weather in Cleveland, too. As a result, our 10AM flight became a 4PM flight. Erica had bought a matching sweater-and-sweatpants set with her allowance at Target on Sunday which she wanted especially for the trip, she definitely got the most use out of her airport loungewear. Still, overall it was a reasonably pleasant travel day. And it was in a way lucky that we had to wear boots in the morning to wade to our airport ride, and thus had to have our boots and couldn't neglect to pack them. It's been snowy all week here, so we've been wading through snow all week.

There was another brief delay in our flight as the plane had to do an abrupt go-around before landing on the second attempt. It was a pretty dramatic maneuver, and someone a few rows back form us was overcome by motion sickness and lost their lunch. But of course it could've been worse.

On Monday, we got to catch up with Dan and Anne and Isaac and baby Naomi, who has doubled in size since I last saw her and become extremely engaged and vocal. I also got to catch up with Markos Monday evening, played a bit of kitchen table Magic. Took me back, though I kept embarrassingly misreading the cards.

On Tuesday evening, we went to a concert at CIM featuring Olga and Daniel Kaler with Michelle Bushkova. Was really great. Had to duck out at intermission because of kid bedtime (but had thought that might be the case).

On Wednesday evening, we saw a "Picasso and Paper" special exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

On Thursday evening, we went out to dinner at Tita Flora's, a Filipino restaurant which was really good.

Friday evening, had a nice Shabbat dinner at home and my Uncle Jonathan came over.

And of course Erica has been up to all sorts of activities with my parents during my workdays.

For lunch, I made excursions to a bunch of places nearby, mostly on Larchmere. I did get to Michael's Diner in Shaker Square, which I love (it's a wonderful, classic train-station diner). But Shaker Square does seem, as always, a bit cursed. A new cafe will be opening in the again-vacant cafe spot soon, at least. Brandon Chrostowski's restaurants Edwins Restaurant and Edwins Too closed on Monday, relocating to the former Nighttown jazz club space. Didn't get to go there again, but fancy for a random weekday, but at least I did get to go a few times. Lovely memories. I'm sure they will make the most of the Nighttown space, too, it's a great space. I did go to the other Edwins restaurant in the area, their bakery and deli venture, which as far as I know is staying put. Had an excellent pastrami on rye. The restaurants are all run by Chrostowski's nonprofit, which has a mission of helping former prisoners with reentry support and job training in the hospitality industry.

Hopefully tomorrow's return trip will go smoothly. Weather will be better this time at least.

It's hard to feel like I'm ever going to rest and recover. Julie was pretty busy this week. The weekend was a little better.

Saturday, I got out to play a bit of Ingress in beautiful weather, wrapping up an in-game event celebrating 12 years since the game was released. I still really like the game's ability to give me random reasons to visit places I wouldn't otherwise. This time, I ended up at Bell Rock Memorial Park in Malden.

Today, I went to the art museum in the morning and wandered the galleries with Julie while Erica had her art lesson. In the afternoon I took Erica climbing and cooked dinner.

I just finished reading Erica The Boxcar Children, which was enjoyable, but also one of the most edges-sanded-off things I've ever read.

Erica's wanted to play Splendor a bunch this week, and she's getting quite good at the game, but is frustrated that she can't win consistently. (Played six games this week, and she managed to win one, but most of the others were quite close, including a tied-at-15 game where I won by having one fewer development cards, basically the closest score possible short of an actual tie.)

I've been enjoying the new Magic set, Foundations, a core set of sorts that will be in Standard (the "just recent sets" variant of the game) for an extended time. It seems like the game will be changing quite a bit in the coming year, and not just for that reason. More about that later maybe if I get to writing about it.

Well, I got in a few days of regular writing before I dipped beneath the waves again.

Today is Halloween, and it's not even the scariest day in the next week. I really do want the madness to end. 2017-2020 was objectively nuts, and that was before the realignment within the Republican Party had really completed and Trump was still being arm-twisted into hiring people to important questions who resisted his dumbest ideas (a major restraint for someone so bad at in-person confrontation). Stuff like this is going to be hilarious if he loses (Four Seasons all over again), but for now I just can't deal with the fact that it's so close.

Took Erica trick-or-treating and she had a good time time, except for encountering someone in one of those stilt ghost costumes that she found completely terrifying. The weather was warm today, high of almost 80, so the evening was summery.

Work is very busy, and once again one of my more senior colleagues is changing teams. Too much churn this year.

I'm going to try to write more, in the about-my-day journaling style I used to do. Will I be able to keep up with it? Who knows.

Yesterday, I took Erica to her art lesson at the MFA and then to "Somerstreets: Monster Mash", the annual Halloween street festival in my neighborhood. Before the art lesson, we made a brief stop at the current special exhibit, on the art of Georgia O'Keeffe and Henry Moore.

The day went well (mostly), but after Erica got to bed, she woke up seriously sick to her stomach. Must've been a quick stomach bug, she felt much improved by morning, but today was a sick day at home. In the afternoon, I watched Paddington with Erica and we played a game of DaVinci's Challenge. She also did some art with beads and clay.

Erica is really enjoying listening to audio books, both before bed and during the day. She's been working through the whole Anne of Green Gables series. If you have any favorite audio books that would work for someone her age, definitely keeping an eye out for recommendations.

What's new, people!

Things have been busy, busy on the parenting front. Last week Julie had a series of late nights, followed by being out of town Friday to Sunday for a wedding, so it was a solo weekend for me and Erica. Saturday, I took her to her first of the fall session of swim lessons at the Somerville Y. In the afternoon, there was the Union Square Fluff Festival. It was wet this year, but not as rainy as last year when they pushed the festival off from a rainy Saturday to a forecast-less-rainy but ultimately even rainier Sunday. (Of course, since they kept to the schedule this year, Sunday was clear.)

(And then a picture of Erica at one of the carnival games at the festival ended up in a little photo insert on the front of the Metro section of the Globe. It was a good photo.)

Sunday morning, Erica convinced me to take her to Target for craft (slime) supplies, and we ran into acquaintances along the way, baby Ruthie and her dad, Zeke. Sunday afternoon, we went climbing.

Yesterday evening, Erica was at George's house after school (once again trading off days with their family, this time Monday/Tuesday). So I got to go out to dinner with Julie and have the moules frites at Juliet. Which I'd been really wanting since I saw that on the menu, it was as good as I anticipated.

Today, I ran into our old housemate, Josh, on the way home from work. He seems well.

Maybe I'll do a little media posting, haven't gotten to that in ages:

Many weeks ago, I finished watching A Place Further Than the Universe an anime with the "four cute girls doing cute things" formula where here "cute thing" is "expedition to Antarctica". It's a calm story, not a survival thriller, it's "more about the journey" perspective is focused enough that it takes the characters nine out of twelve episodes to even get to Antarctica. It's not such a stand-out, but good if you're in the mood for a fairly lighthearted, character-driven story about making new friends and achieving (possibly first finding) your idiosyncratic dreams together.

I'm almost done reading S by JJ Abrams and Doug Dorst. This very strange book is a false document novel that takes the form of the book Ship of Theseus by (fictional) author VM Straka in (and about) which the two protagonists of S are communicating in marginalia and inserts. So we have a story within Ship of Theseus (that is, physically contained within the covers of the book) in which Ship of Theseus is a story-within-the-story (about the book) and also story-within-the-story-within-the-story (about the book's covert meanings and messages). It's creative, quite difficult to read, and gets away reasonably well defying the advice of never trying to render verbatim the contents of a work of purportedly great literature that exists in the setting that you, as an author, are actually writing. I'm pretty sure that once I finish that last chapter I'm going to seek out a lot of deep-dive video essays digging into this one.

I also just recently started watching Scavengers Reign. That is an absolutely brilliant sci-fi animated series, originally a Max exclusive, now on Netflix. The animation is just gorgeous, and I'm enjoying the characters in the story. The show takes the alien biology of the world the protagonists are stranded on into sometimes magical-realism territory, but the alien ecology is the real hard sci-fi star of the show. The setting is just full of complicated webs of relationships between planet Vesta's various organisms and their environment, it's awe-inspiring and beautiful and fascinating.

I've been so long without writing and don't know where to begin.

The last few weeks have been day-camp weeks for Erica, with two weeks of arts camp at Parts and Crafts on either side of one week of climbing camp at Boston Bouldering. Erica had a lot of fun with both.

Last weekend, I took Erica to Baltimore for a weekend visiting my sister and meeting up with my parents. Now she's off with my parents at Cascade of Music & Dance, then back to Cleveland for more grandparent time. I'll go there to pick her up after.

Baltimore trip was a ton of fun. Erica really loves spending time with her cousin Simon. We went to Chesapeake and Allegheny Live Steamers at Leakin Park (an adorable little 1/8-scale model rail that the kids can ride), spent some time at the pool, and took the water taxi shuttle across the harbor.

I flew Southwest to Baltimore, which was perfectly on time on the way there (despite warnings of bad weather) and then an hour delayed on the way back. Still was pretty nice. I'm always struck by Southwest's odd efficiencies. For example, their snack choice was these onion-and-monkfruit pretzels, which is a distinctly less middle-of-the-road choice than I'd expect for a one-option snack (compare, for example, with Delta's Biscoff cookies). Southwest does kind of have a bit of a "you'll do things our weird way and like it" attitude.

I enjoyed watching some of the Olympics coverage with Erica over the past weeks. The Tahiti surfing was especially spectacular.

I've also been enjoying the new Magic: the Gathering set, Bloomborrow. Set in a world of critters, it's a bit Magic meets Redwall (presumably also Whitewall, Bluewall, Blackwall, and Greenwall). The delayed rotation of the most-recent-sets Standard format has freshened the experience up a bit, though I still feel like the wider window on Standard makes it less fresh than it could be.

Julie's been extremely busy with newcorp stuff, but seems like something is getting off the ground.

I finished reading Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow on the trip. Thought it was pretty good, though I felt it had a bit of a period-piece-syndrome in the early parts (i.e. like it was trying to crowbar-in 80s references a bit too hard for realism). But I really liked the surrealism of some of the later bits. Overall a good novel, an interesting story.

Friday was Take Your Child to Work Day at Google, which Erica has been asking about for months, even before that was planned. So she was thrilled to go, and enjoyed the activities they planned for the day. Friday night we had dinner at the home of a potential collaborator for Julie's next business venture, it was nice to meet them and a lovely meal.

This weekend was packed with activities. Erica had her art lesson, she attended her friend George's birthday party, we went climbing. There was a Nepali Cultural Festival in Union Square Sunday evening, which was fun. I'm solo-parenting again, Julie is out of town Saturday for Monday for another conference, returning Wednesday.

In the news, it's pretty wild seeing Trump supporters in an absolute twist over Trump's criminal conviction. (Also, yeah, I called it!) The levels of cope are through the roof. I expect my anti-contrarianism will continue to serve me well here, since lots of people (including Trump) will want to spin this one as (or paranoidly worry that it will be) somehow good for Trump. No, bad things are actually bad, and being convicted of crimes is not, overall, a winning political strategy.

It's especially funny to see Trump supporters put forward the suggestion that the reason Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden only faced Republicans (Comey and Hur respectively) trying to put "there's no case" in the most negative possible terms is that Republicans were just too polite. Of course not! Also, basically all Democrats I've met are completely willing to bite the bullet that top politicians should face trial for any crime they've committed, where there's actual evidence that there was a crime that could plausibly prove that to a jury.