For fans of this there's another '70s-era LP similarly inspired by the novel: Bernard Szajner's "Visions of Dune" from 1979. It's proggy, synthy, psychedelic, and just a weird fun listen.

https://bernardszajner.bandcamp.com/album/visions-of-dune

Nice one. Another Dune-concept French progressive album from around the same time is Eros, by the band Dün: https://www.discogs.com/master/122007-D%C3%BCn-Eros

My whole life I've been doing stereograms by diverging, but I couldn't get the three images in the post (the pairs would get closer but never fully overlap), so I tried crossing based on your comment. It was way easier than diverging (obviously, since I couldn't do it otherwise), but it took me a few tries, because I think it's actually /too/ easy to cross your eyes compared to diverging - I was way overshooting when I crossed my eyes. The trick was to notice this, and then control the un-crossing until they lined up.

Hearing the evolutionary anthropologist Herman Pontzer talk about this was really eye-opening for me:

https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-podcast/examining-energy-evoluti...

"[Y]ou can think about all these processes as competing for calories over the course of the day. And normally, low priority things like having a really high inflammation response or having a high stress response, those get tamped down in a highly active population like we've all evolved in. But now, you move to these weird zoos that we've built ourselves, where you don't have to be active, food's available all over the place, energy supply is really easy. And now, these low priority activities which used to probably only happen very occasionally in the past, in the deep past, now are happening all the time, chronically, at these super high levels, and it's actually really bad for you."

That's a good read. But one of the processes competing for calories is the immune system.

> If you take somebody who is really sedentary and you get them exercising, what happens? Things like inflammation, which is your immune system being overactive, goes down. [Also cortisol level when under stress, and reproductive hormone levels, go down.]

So that puts a small hole in the "exercise helps the immune system clear up cancer" theory. Maybe it in fact stops the immune system causing cancer. Or maybe it does both things, since biology is messy and the immune system might have multiple energy budgets for all I know.

Oh wow, super useful link.

So in a way my simplified assumption was more or less right, my ego grew a little bit and i think that's a bad thing

> To see why, consider an important metric that tallies up how much room a system will need to store data. You start with the base of the number system, which is called the radix, and multiply it by the number of digits needed to represent some large number in that radix. For example, the number 100,000 in base 10 requires six digits. Its “radix economy” is therefore 10 × 6 = 60. In base 2, the same number requires 17 digits, so its radix economy is 2 × 17 = 34. And in base 3, it requires 11 digits, so its radix economy is 3 × 11 = 33. For large numbers, base 3 has a lower radix economy than any other integer base.

I thought that was interesting so I made (well, Claude 3.5 Sonnet made) a little visualization, plotting the radix efficiency of different bases against a range of numbers:

https://paulsmith.github.io/radix-efficiency/radix_effciency...

Base 4 is surprisingly competitive, but of course never better than base 2. Base 5 is the highest base that could stand at the pareto frontier, but just once and then never more.

DevOps predated microservices by a good bit. And DevOps was meant to reduce operational complexity, because the people who best knew how to run the software were the ones who made it. (DevOps also predated commoditization of the infra layer, we didn't know about Docker or k8s yet.) And they could use the direct experiential feedback loop of driving the car they had built to plow understanding right back into the next iteration. Or ideally anyway.

Most institutions failed to understand that devops is a practice of silo busting, not a team or a job title. The most devopsy thing you can do is treat IT service development and ownership like a product instead of a project. All you really have to do, though, is sit the developers next to the ops folks and let the law of proximate communication do the rest.

Institutions and institutional corporations generally can’t make the switch in mindset to multidisciplinary service teams, and established project managers will even fight it tooth and nail since it looks like a threat to their jobs.

Microservices are orthogonal. Architecturally they are just SOA, now with json/grpc instead of wsdl et al. Operationally and strategically they are slightly a better fit for service teams, but only at scale. Small and medium enterprises will experience inefficiency instead.

Conway’s Law is super applicable to understanding these dynamics.

Yes but in the end there was corporate capture and so that resulted in engineering teams like: dev teams create the SW but has no right, DevOps team that has no idea about what is doing the software or how to do dev btw but they have all the production rights...

This, this is the GOAT.

One of my favorite contemporary photographers, David Schalliol, has an “isolated buildings” series, and he uses a tilt shift lens to achieve parallel lines for the buildings, to striking effect.

http://davidschalliol.com/photography

I first learned about Sellafield when I tried to decipher what name Kraftwerk was saying in their song "Radio-Activity" (along with Hiroshima, Chernobyl, and Harrisburg (Three Mile Island)) https://youtu.be/X--F5b5IdqU?si=P6DoR6-VXUC1b50I

Those phrases, and more, were not in the original version of the song. They were added in the version of the song on the 1991 remix album “The Mix”. This changed the theme (but not the music itself) significantly from the original 1975 version, which did not contain any anti-nuclear propaganda, and instead was about literal radio, as in a medium for communication. I remember being slightly annoyed by the change as being very on-the-nose, and in effect disappearing the more interesting subject about the potential for radio as a medium for communication between people.

so they titled a song “Radioaktivität” but they blatantly skipped talking about radioactivity and only spoke about radio activity? I would have thought they’d be more subtle

It is subtle. 'Radio activity' is one word, the same word, in German.

Anti-nuclear sentiment was low, given that TMI and Chernobyl had not happened yet.

I had exactly the same experience and just skimmed the comments for a mention of this before posting..

Pretty cynical from my side.

But re: Kraftwerk: that tune is pretty good IMO! I like the original as well as the 90s remix and discovered both of them as a kid. The soothing ethereal synth melodies and the scary theme of the title go so well together, eerily.

Thanks I’ve just deciphered the cryptic word missing after almost 3 decades. My mind started to sing the tune right upon reading the word.

Not affiliated with the blog, but apparently Hugo generates an index.xml feed by default, so try this:

https://danangell.com/blog/index.xml

(I had the same question with a different site two days ago.)

Groovy, thank you!

It's worth noting you can let Nix manage Homebrew for you, too. I do this on my MBP on which I have nix-darwin running, not for regular Homebrew formulae but for casks for GUI apps.

In my configuration, I have this

  homebrew = {
    enable = true;
    onActivation = {
      autoUpdate = true;
      upgrade = true;
    };
    casks = [ "inkscape" <other gui apps ...> ];
  };

I achieve mostly the same on a non nix-darwin setup using vanilla home-manager:

  home.file."Brewfile" = {
    onChange = ''
      HOMEBREW_NO_AUTO_UPDATE=1 /usr/local/bin/brew bundle --file="$HOME/Brewfile" --cleanup --no-upgrade
    '';

    text = ''
      cask '1password'
      ...
    '';
  }

Yep, and we now have nix-homebrew, which installs homebrew for you as a flake input. Taps are also flake inputs so your apps versions get declaratively managed/locked too!

Here’s how I do it: https://github.com/dustinlyons/nixos-config/blob/main/flake....

Excellent point, thank you! I use that as well and intended to mention it and then I just forgot. Personally, I've been hesitant to turn on autoUpdate, have you found it to work well?