Author: David Faden
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Infrastructure costs
Not sure if I’ll ever do anything with these, but a few references on US infrastructure costs: I heard about these by following references from this post: https://bsky.app/profile/scottlincicome.bsky.social/post/3mzstu26ie22o pointing to https://nicholasbagley.com/assets/papers/costs-of-federal-permitting.pdf… I was going to say I’m not sure if I trust the conclusions there, but really I’ve not really read it carefully enough (or…
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Tea: Hummingbird Sage, Yerba Buena, Douglas-fir
For the Santa Clara Valley CNPS potluck, I decided to try making a few teas based on native plants, two from my own garden, Hummingbird Sage (Salvia spathacea) and Yerba Buena (Clinopodium douglasii), plus some packaged Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) tea that was a gift. Hummingbird Sage (Salvia spathacea) I tried to follow the suggestions from…
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Python dict key ordering
Due to dicts preserving the order of key insertion, they’re another example of objects that may have == True but with other methods yielding different values: How does Python implement remembering key insertion order? Raymond Hettinger’s 2017 talk Modern Python Dictionaries A confluence of a dozen great ideas talks about how the ordering is a…
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equal unequal Counters
As demonstrated above, collections.Counter.most_common orders elements with equal counts in order of first appearance: “Elements with equal counts are ordered in the order first encountered”. But == looks at set equality. Handy for checking for palindromes without doing a sort (and so hopefully O(n) vs O(n log n)): Counter(s) == Counter(t). Just slightly disconcerting to…
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__builtin_popcountg
Looking at https://en.cppreference.com/cpp/utility/bitset/count, I was intrigued to see popcount mentioned in the “See also” section. Handy. That made me curious to see how the stdlibs choose to implement it. Here it is for Clang: libcxx/include/__bit/popcount.h For gcc: libstdc++-v3/include/std/bit So, there’s at least one configuration where they end up both calling something called __builtin_popcountg. What are…
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Progressive rescaling does make a difference
My dad learned calculus from this book: Practical mathematics, theory and practice with applications to industrial business and military problems. I wanted to include a photo of the title page from his copy of it in a little biography we’re working on for him, but I ended up with jaggies when using my scaleimage tool.…
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Still life
A moment of peace and joy. Finishing up a good book. Appreciating the soft light. A pile of grapes. Brewing coffee. A hug. Mesmerized by ripples. Mesmerized by steam. One command to strip audio and metadata and resize: Last night we kayaked on Tomales Bay with a guided tour with Blue Waters Kayaking. The recent…
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Santa Clara precincts, an appreciation
Thanks to a quick, gracious reply from the GIS Mapping team at County of Santa Clara – Registrar of Voters, I have a shapefile with the precincts for Santa Clara County. You can ask for it too. I’m struck by the beauty of it: A combination of artificial and natural, driven by people’s choices —…
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“Do not panic”: -stable maintainer on LLM security impact
Greg Kroah-Hartman, “Fellow at the Linux Foundation… responsible for the Linux kernel stable releases… maintainer of a variety of different kernel subsystems (USB, char/misc, tty/serial, driver core, staging, etc.)”, has a couple of interesting talks on the impact of LLMs on security: Linux in the Land of LLMs (August 11, 2026) and Kernel Recipes 2026…
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Where is zip?
Download a copy of CPython’s source: Where is zip implemented? Looks promising! This looks like a good start point — defining it along with the other builtins inside _PyBuiltin_Init in Python/bltinmodule.c: where _PyBuiltin_Init gets called in Python/pylifecycle.c here: where pycore_init_builtins called in Python/pylifecycle.c here: where pycore_interp_init gets called in Python/pylifecycle.c here: where new_interpreter gets called…