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.

It's been a week of very busy work. I've been digging some of the new AI coding tools, and man the stuff is pretty mind-blowing. My work this week involved grinding through a lot of complex refactoring, and it sure helped with the boilerplate.

What else: My trip with Erica back to Boston last weekend was very uneventful, compared to the way out. Perfectly smooth.

I tried to get in some cookbook cooking during the week. Last Sunday, I cooked Ana Sortun's recipe for tuna and fennel sarikopites (a phyllo-wrapped stuffed pastry, wound into a spiral shape) from her cookbook, Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean. Sortun describes first cooking this in the kitchen of Sari Abul-Jubein's restaurant, Casablanca. The owner was tickled to have a dish on the menu corresponding to his name. (I was curious what Abul-Jubein has been up to since Casablanca closed in 2012. Apparently he only managed a few years of retirement before going back to work as a real estate agent for another decade. Some people are bad at retiring.) Anyways, the sarikopites turned out great, and Erica really enjoyed working on it.

This weekend, Erica's selection of cooking project was challah, a recipe from Melissa Clark's Kid in the Kitchen.

It's a new year.

Trip to Texas over winter break went all right. Wonderful Christmas together. Fun time with the cousins. Took a trip to the Fort Worth Stockyards to see the longhorn cattle drive, went to the Crayola Experience (like the Lego Discovery Center but swap blocks for crayons) on Erica's birthday.

Transitions impend. The Biden administration limps along as the lamest of ducks. Biden commuting the death sentences of most of the federal death row was the most notable good bit. Leaving a few exceptions out (the surviving Boston Marathon Bomber, e.g.) was, well, I can understand the choice. I would have preferred a more unequivocal rejection of the death penalty. But if Biden thinks it should be reserved for a narrower set of cases and grants clemency consistent with that, it's a step in the right direction.

I finished watching The Magicians before that show departs from Netflix in a few days. I'm glad I finished that and ambivalent about having started. It was at least an interesting take on its source material. I read Seasonal Fears, the sequel to Seanan McGuire's Middlegame, another dip in the highly-specific alchemical conspiracy American road-trip novel genre. Was good. I also read Nostalgebraist's latest bit of web-fiction, The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen in which a mad prophet discovers the true meaning of Christmas. Like the author's other work, it's very interesting and well written.

Had a few quiet weeks while Erica was on her Cleveland trip. I got in a slightly belated anniversary celebration with Julie, we went to the 11th annual Julia Child dinner at Puritan & Company, which was a phenomenal meal.

After that, had a long weekend in Cleveland before the school year commenced. Went to the One World Day festival at the cultural gardens, took Erica to the Museum of Illusions (one of those "Instagram museums") at my mom's suggestion, had some good food, including at Michael's Diner (train station diner in the middle of Shaker Square and the last one standing among long-lived Shaker Square places that I have a great deal of nostalgia for) and the West Side Market Cafe (the Lake Erie Walleye sandwich was really quite good).

Erica was pretty excited about the return to school, though there are the usual ups and downs of the class shuffle. She's in the same class as George this year, though some of her other close friends aren't in the same class this time around.

Then after the short school week, we had another extra long weekend. I took Erica to the ICA Watershed yesterday to see Hew Locke's sculpture installation, "The Procession". Really cool exhibit, Julie had taken the chance to see it while I was away in Cleveland with Erica and arranged for me and Erica to see it after we got back. I also did some cooking yesterday, the veggie box this week was full of hot peppers and I got a bad case of pepper hands (note to self: don't skip the gloves next time). Today, I took Erica climbing. This evening we're going to dinner at Oleana to celebrate the start of the school year.

Two weeks ago, my parents were in town along with Melissa and Simon, and boy was I ever excited about Erica getting some time with her little cousin and Simon getting the chance to visit Boston. He's two-and-a-half so I don't expect he'll remember it per se, but he's old enough for the visit to make an impression. (And Simon has really learned so much, even just in the last few months. He's often quiet but surprisingly articulate when he wants to speak up, he seems to think carefully about what he wants to say.)

It was a good occasion to do some touristy things with the family. They arrived on Tuesday evening and we had a nice dinner out at Josephine. On Wednesday, we went to the aquarium, then took the ferry to Charlestown and saw the USS Constitution Museum. On Thursday, we went to the Institute for Contemporary Art and the Children's Museum, having ice cream pastry at Taiyaki NYC and stopping by Martin's Park before dinner. On Friday, we went to Petsi Pies for breakfast, then to the Franklin Park Zoo. Lots of great food and great times.

Then we all went to Sandy Island Camp for a week. The trip up went unusually quickly, and the week had pretty good weather (got caught out in the rain one evening, but the weather was good most days and the nights were generally not too hot). As usual, I read a lot of books:

Unsong by Scott Alexander - By the author of the extremely clever and insightful blogs Slate Star Codex and (its successor Substack) Astral Codex Ten, originally released as serial web fiction here (though the compiled book is a bit different on account of an editing pass and some mild rewrites). The protagonist, an aspiring Kabbalist (turned data-mining sweatshop worker after running afoul of intellectual property law) makes an unexpected discovery which sets off an apocalypse. If you like other absurdist speculative fiction by writers like Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett, this might be up your alley.

Flash Boys by Michael Lewis - Tells the story of IEX, a new (founded 2012) stock exchange that sought to thwart various forms of front running done by high-frequency traders. Pretty interesting.

The Bezzle by Cory Doctorow - Second in a series of detective novels about a forensic accountant, told in reverse chronological order. I'm enjoying this series.

Indespensible by Gautam Mukunda - The author is an acquaintance, so I took a bit too long to finally get around to reading his book. The book presents some very interesting case studies of various stand-out leaders (for good or ill) and their more typical counterparts. The biographical case studies are pretty interesting, but the model of "filtered" versus "unfiltered" leaders that ties things together seemed less well-constructed. In part because it needs to generalize from very few examples, but in part because there seems to be some back-construction of whether a leader is "filtered" or "unfiltered" (the latter being either an outsider or an insider who was somehow rejected by the system); in the case of leaders who basically forged their insider credentials, the classification depends on whether the deception was uncovered.

Translation State by Anne Leckie - In the same setting as Ancillary Justice. If that trilogy was hard military science fiction (i.e. mostly politics and tea: SPACE politics and SPACE tea), this one is hard diplomatic science fiction in the same setting. Happy to have more of that.

The Pains by John Sundman - This novella is a bit of an AU 1984. Had some interesting bits, though I liked some of Sundman's other books more.

The Penelopead by Margaret Atwood - Atwood's take on Penelope's side of the events of The Odyssey, with the twelve hanged maids as a haunting Greek chorus. Told with Atwood's particular dark humor regarding a certain sort of historical / mythopoetic perspective.

Last week, we took a family vacation to the Netherlands for Erica's April break, the first overseas flight that Erica will actually remember and the first international travel I planned for the family since before the pandemic.

( Details under the fold )

Overall, it was a wonderful trip. And it's nice to have the weekend to decompress before we're back to the routine on Monday.

There's been a cold going around, and the whole family has been under the weather this week.

I guess I can say that Julie's out at Jura (as of some time ago, the cause of all the chaos the last many weeks at this point), so she's looking for the next thing. That's about all I can say about it.

I can now say that I have had the opportunity to successfully defend myself (and my condo association) in court. I sure hope my work on that project is done now.

Next week, Julie is going to a BiotechBikers event in Girona, Spain. Seems like it will be quite a fun cycling trip.

Erica has become quite a skilled Ticket to Ride player, though she's still quite put out when I win.

I went out with Julie last night to Gufo, an Italian restaurant which has opened up in the old Loyal Nine space on Cambridge Street. Still sad that Loyal Nine is no longer with us, they were one of the town's greatest dining experiences all the way through the pandemic and only declined after. But I'm glad such a great space isn't staying vacant. The new place seems to have done some substantial renovations (extending the bar, adding a full-sized pizza oven to the cafe space, upgrading the covered porch (a thrown-together plywood-construction COVID era addition) with sturdier materials). Was really beautiful and the food was fantastic.

Writing this from the flight back. San Diego trip was pretty great, despite some chaos. Really enjoyed visits to museums and the zoo and the aquarium down at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute and some beautiful scenic spots. Generally lovely weather. The San Diego Zoo is pretty amazing, though that trip was with most of the kids (less baby) and at least five of six had some sort of emotional crisis at some point.

Sean and family got back into town mid-week for a late gift exchange. Unfortunately they fell ill with COVID the following evening, limiting the time visiting the people we'd come to San Diego specifically to visit. So it goes. They didn't get too sick and are recovering all right.

Anyways, I really enjoyed spending time with all of the nieces and nephews and meeting the new baby cousin, Nico. Owen and Mila have grown up so much, and the twins (who just turned four on this trip) have grown a lot and become so much more engaged and opinionated. They have a shared interest in "Paw Patol" and their playing and singing with their new toys was pretty cute.

I did get in a bit of reading and relaxing. Read "How Infrastructure Works", a new book by one of my Olin profs. And watched the anime adaptation of "Pluto" on Netflix, which was really good.

I've been on the tail end of a chain of colds for some time now. I feel pretty well today, but the last bit of residual congestion is still really annoying.

Thanksgiving break went well. The travel was pleasant, and it was great to see my parents and siblings. My nephew, Simon, is two now and talking quite a bit and seemed excited to see us. We all went to the children's museum and he had a blast.

I've been so, so busy at work and on the home-front, both with condo logistics (hassling people about getting snow removal figured out as winter disaster impends) and with the usual cleaning / organizing / planning for the household.

I know I had more to write but I'm too tired to recall.

I did get a post written on my essay blog (complexmeme_feed) the other week, about Effective Altruism. Maybe I'll get around to updating that more than once a year, or maybe not.

I keep not getting to writing. Erica's enjoying her weeks of climbing camp. Work's been productive, but very busy.

Last weekend, we went up to Maine to visit Erica's friend George and his parents, Adam and Stephanie. Went to a festival at the humane society, spent some time on the beach. Was a lot of fun.

Tomorrow, we're planning to take that train out to visit DJ and Mishy for the first time in years.

The following weekend I'll be heading up to Baltimore with Erica to visit Melissa and Elliott and Simon and my parents, and then I'll be handing Erica off for her end-of-summer trip.