Andrew 🧮

@ndrewwm.com

154 Followers 541 Following

he/him/here/hi, data engineer, math student

Sandwich board that reads: NOW SERVING FRESH HOT BAGELS <-- -GOOD TIMES-
Demirer et al. (2026) Fig. 12(a), a bar chart whose x-axis spans 2021-2026 with a 3-month rolling average expressed as a line. The y-axis is new iOS apps/month, and we see a sharp increase in early 2026.
In this case, it would be as though our brain, which constitutes the physical, material condition of our thoughts, were unable to follow what we do, so that from now on we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking. **If it should turn out to be true that knowledge (in the modern sense of know-how) and thought have parted company for good, then we would indeed become the helpless slaves, not so much of our machines as of our know-how, thoughtless creatures at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.** However, even apart from these last and yet uncertain consequences, the situation created by the sciences is of great political significance. 4 mins left in chapter 6%
View of the skygarden on the 6th floor, solar panels provide shade over benches-- the city skyline is visible in the distance
The Basques, especially Aguirre, had confidence in the United States, with a mixture of an old Basque belief in Amerika and a new belief that the United States was the antidote needed to cure this ancient European sickness-the endless struggle
Lester Beall "Light/Rural Electrification Administration", 1937
“I dislike social commentary. Like… I really hate it. When I’m reading a book, I just want to be entertained, not preached at by the author. Plus, it ruins the wonder of the story if I know the author has a political or social axe to grind. I no longer speculate about all possible outcomes of the story because I know for a fact that the universe of that book will conspire to ensure that the author’s political agenda is validated. I hate that,” Weir said. “I put no politics or social commentary into my stories at all. Anyone who thinks they see something like that is reading it in on their own. ..."
@internethippo.bsky.social: "But we're going to touch the stove and we'll be touching it more than probably ever before. And we're not going to get burned. We're not going to get burned"
Sign: "<< ELAVADOR AL MUSEO" The typeface could be said to belong to that of the art-deco movement, but it seems unique to me-- it's characteristic feature is the use of sharp angles and redundant lines within each glyph to accentuate the glyph's form.
A stencil, featuring a depiction of a female statue/bust, captioned "NO QUEREMOS MUNDIAL ¡¡QUEREMOS AGUA!!" (we don't want the world, we want water)
nighttime view of a promenade in Ciudad Mexico many stories above the street; the skyline is illuminated by several skyscrapers and the traffic below
The No Kings protests are vital, of course; they’re what I call ‘index protests.’ Mass manifestations whose purpose is to show attendees that their views are widespread, introduce them to each other, and then to give them multiple onramps to other, more locally involved forms of activism, rather like an index or the yellow pages of old. The daily necessity is something like the anti-ICE patrols and spontaneous uprisings that greet their predations in residential streets across the country. What links all of these protests is their fundamentally peaceful nature: not a gun in sight that isn’t being wielded by the enemy. It is the refusal of fear that has led to such terror among the terrorists, that sends ICE agents fleeing, that leads to breathlessly outraged Truth Social posts from Trump, and that is fuelling the desire of his various viziers to escalate the situation.
It’s noteworthy that of all the things Minnesotans have taught America about resistance, guns are not part of the equation. Indeed, the lack of a suicidal armed revolt is driving the federal government mad; how else to explain the right’s quixotic ranting about extremist “gangs of wine moms”? If this wasn’t so effective, they wouldn’t be trying to do everything in their power to tarnish Renée Good and Alex Pretti’s names; they wouldn’t be trying so hard to cast peaceful protest as an insurrection. Stepping away from the temptations of arming yourself is not about “taking bait,” but about respecting yourself and your community. It is a selfish, fearful individualism that underpins the myth of the gun in America, a myth thoroughly alien to this moment of truly collective, spontaneous resistance. It is a moment that is not so much about individual heroism as standing together as a community in the face of terror. Not a battalion of rifles, but of phones; faceless, nameless people with voices that they’re raising against seemingly unfathomable power that has proven itself even more cowardly than we thought.
My GH contributions chart; 812 contributions over the past 12mo.
Screenshot from the resort's webcam, showing a scattering of people heading towards two lifts or the lodge. Happily, the ground is blanketed in white snow.
This time a duo (colorized), male to the left, female perched on a separate branch to the right
another cardinal (this time colorized with red and black ink), looking "towards" us, with its head slightly cocked
another cardinal, this one close up and outlined in ink
attempt #3, posed differently (faced away but looking backwards towards the viewer)
another pencil drawing of a cardinal; this one is a bit more angular-- I tried to focus more on the underlying shapes in the bird's form. It's less realistic in the textures, but more proportionate?
pencil drawing of a perched cardinal
A table of data from Bogus Basin: SNOW TOTALS Season Total 20" Total Depth 18" 12H 0" 24H 0" 48H 4" Last 7 Days 4" Last update: December 20th, 6:00 AM
A table of data from Bogus Basin: SNOW TOTALS Season Total 16" Total Depth 0" 12H 0" 24H 0" 48H 0" Last 7 Days 0" Last update: December 18th, 7:57 AM
truth (or makes its own truth in the minds of believers). But why should believers in the Market call themselves conservatives? Laissez-faire means letting go-of the past, among other things. It is nontenacious of the old, from a trust in good to come. Yet capitalists, like Ford and Edison, do not want to be held responsible for some of the things they have produced: for restiveness in Harlem or Africa, for youthful hedonism or rebellion, for modern discontents. Change is disturbing even to its celebrants; it provokes, of itself, a countereffort to hang on to something to one's self, at the least; to identity. A sense of identity is based on the experience of perdurance through shifting circumstances; and since all actual situations up to the present were, by definition, past situations, identity always has to be sought in the past. That is why continuing scrutiny of the real past is so important to human growth. If one settles, instead, for a substitute past, an illusion of it, then that fragile construct must be protected from the challenge of complex or contradictory evidence, from any test of evidence at all. That explains Americans' extraordinary tacit bargain with each other not to challenge Reagan's version of the past. The power of his appeal is the great joint confession that we cannot live with our real past, that we not only prefer but need a substitute. Because of that, we will a belief in all his stories. His team, sure enough, won the football game during Eureka's strike, and lost it when he told the referee about a foul. He saw the black navy man end segregation, just as he heard the dying colloquy of the pilot and his tail gunner. He photographed the death camps.
CHAPTER 40 Greenfield Village on the Potomac Man falls deceiv'd By the other first. -Paradise Lost 3.130-31 Reagan gives our history the continuity of a celluloid Möbius strip. We ride its curves backward and forward at the same time, and he is always there. There is an endlessness of surface that becomes a kind of depth, a self-reflecting omnipresence in the cultural processing of Americans over the second half of the twentieth century. This inescapability of Reagan was a joke in the movie about time travel, Back to the Future, which Reagan quoted seriously in his 1982 State of the Union address. Then, to complete the loop, Reagan's real son played Reagan in a television parody of Back to the Future, the film with which this sequence began. Reagan's image precedes us as we ride forward or backward in time, anticipating our reactions, reflecting us back to ourselves, stirring "memories of the future." Reagan is part of the process that forged our self-awareness, at a time when movie imagery, broadcast immediacy, and highway mobility entered Americans' lives-or, rather, when Americans entered the new atmosphere created by those inventions. This was the past that most vividly created our future. In Muncie ("Middletown") during the 1920s, sociologists Robert and Helen Lynd discovered that people were skeptical or hostile toward change in moral terms, but comparatively unquestioning about technological alterations, on the assumption that the
Today @ Bogus Last update: Dec 5th, 8:08 AM (1 hour ago) Sources: MountainLive Base Depth 6in Heavy Snowfall 30°F Wind 4 mph W Feels Like 27°F
Picture from Anisota's harvest visualization. A horizontal scale labeled "Grass Touching" with three ticks (from left to right): "Online", "Balanced", and "Offline". The orange marker is almost 100% to the right, covering the "Offline" tick.
Picture of a page from the author's journal, describing and sketching the Centro Botin's building and art exhibit
Actually there are at least four entities at work in the functioning star of the old star system. On the screen, we had the movie star Clark Gable playing Rhett Butler. Off the screen, we have the person Clark Gable playing the movie star Clark Gable. And all four of these "characters" are present in the minds of the audience. The interplay between roles was recognized in the famous morals clauses in actors' contracts. Cecil DeMille's contract with the actress who played the Virgin Mary in his film King of Kings specified not only that she had to observe the public proprieties in her real life but that, for seven years, she could not assume another movie role in conflict with her image in this movie. She must, that is, keep playing a virgin, as Mary Pickford had to keep playing a child-because the public's image was an investment not to be defaced. As Zukor said of Pickford's ridiculous off-screen getup, "we could not afford" to change it. In the same way, the movie brawler is expected to be quick with his fists in "real" life, and is frequently challenged-I once watched Paul Newman being subjected to this ordeal by a drunk. "So, you're not so tough after all." Aha, Mary is not an adolescent. Ingrid is not Joan of Arc. But they must, even after that discovery, continue being that discarded self, among others.
Quote of my original post: "I wish they'd stop saying 'crony capitalism.' It's capitalism. There's no good version of capitalism."
5 files changed +0 -1,473 1 commit 2h ago
Rooftop view of the Boise foothills, clouds seem to be "growing" out of the hills as they float east.
society brought people in from very large areas, and stirred them to extreme expressions of social solidarity. Emotions ran contagious from person to person, fusing them in a single experience. 28 Religion also supplied authority figures willing to impose the rites of order on communities that desperately wanted them-e.g., the observance of the Christian sabbath. 29 One of the most successful frontier communities was that of the Mormons, whose hydraulic organization of society was enforced by a rigorous social discipline. 30 Alan Grimes compares them to the original puritan settlers of Massachusetts, close religious communities with a sense of mission and a high degree of conformity. 31 We have already seen that other western communities followed the Mormon lead in granting female suffrage. They also strove for a high degree of conformity, so that Mark Twain, who traveled west as a federal agent, and was repelled by the authoritarianism of the Mormons, soon found the "wild west" too monotonous for him: "Not only was the milieu of a frontier community, even the most sophisticated frontier communities, confining in a social and economic sense; it seems to have ceased nourishing his imagination. It did not give him enough to write about."32 The Mormons' success came from their technological achievements, which depended on careful planning and a complex division of labor. The development of the successive American frontiers-beginning with those first established on the eastern seaboard-are now seen as part of the outer rim of a world-wide capitalist expansion in the sixteenth and following centuries. 33 This expansion was made possible by a technological
Governor John Reynolds asking President Jackson for an army against Black Hawk was just one in a long line of independent people wanting to become dependent in a hurry. William H. McNeill argues that comparative study shows "frontier conditions ordinarily provoked not freedom but a social hierarchy steeper than anything familiar in Europe itself."24 There are a number of economic and social reasons for this. In the first place, precarious living conditions, scarce resources, and danger make for communal discipline and willingness to submit to authority-the reaction that calls for martial law in an emergency. "Free and equal nuclear families scattered thinly over the landscape are in a poor position to protect themselves."25 The urge to band oneself with potential allies is a very strong one where "trials brought solidarity."26 Settlers in a wilderness live in a large and lonely world; but, as passengers on a ship live in the ocean, they tend to live very close or they do not live at all. Ships are places where discipline is prized. Drunkenness is especially dangerous in a ship's crew, though it may be especially tempting there; so grog control is an important point of discipline-as prohibition was quick to come to cattle towns. 27 The phrase "we are all in the same boat" conveys a great deal: one does not sink or swim as an individual while making an ocean voyage. Individuality is the luxury of the secure, not the offspring of frontier need.
Figure from linked article: "Millennials show declining Democratic support since 2020; Validated voters only. 2016-2024 use validated voter weights. Analysis of cumulative CES data. Graph by Caroline Soler and Brian Schaffner." The figure is a colored line chart with points at 4-year intervals between 2008 and 2024. The y-axis displays the 2-party vote share for Democrats. The series for Gen X, Boomers, and Silent generations have gradually decreased over the plot's span. The series for Gen Z (which begins in 2016) is roughly 65%, 70%, and 70%. Millennials are similar, although this series drops below 60% in 2024.
Critically, the gains the public receives from the outputs of this research funding—which is not protected behind patents or corporate secrecy, but shared openly for all to use—are outsized compared to the initial investment. **We take for granted the ability to predict the trajectory of extreme weather events, navigate accurately across the country, or perform financial transactions securely over the internet; but the infrastructure, science, and technology needed to make these sorts of useful services possible ultimately stems from past research in the fundamental sciences, including mathematics, much of which was enabled by prudent investment by federal science agencies in years past.** One prominent recent example of this was the rapid development of effective and life-saving mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. This development was enabled by a combination of efforts, prominently including the first Trump administration's "Operation Warp Speed" of 2020 - 2021, as well as decades of foundational research in the structure of mRNA and the role it played in immune responses.
NOT ON HIS WATCH Shadow the hawk keeps food-stealing seagulls at bay at Roaring Springs Water Park
This Will Destroy You on stage, the four bandmembers are mid-song, brightly illuminated by the backing lights.
Quoted text from https://www.liberalcurrents.com/mass-deportation-is-happening/ But now matters are proceeding further still. Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” has narrowly passed in the Senate and is heading back to the House. It has been a divisive and difficult piece of legislation for the GOP chamber majorities, but there is one line item that, as far as I am aware, has not been a matter of controversy among them: the allocation of about $171 billion for immigration enforcement of various categories. ICE alone will receive $31 billion for “hiring, training, transportation, facilities and legal resources to carry out immigration enforcement and removals,” CBP will receive $12 billion “to expand workforce and purchase new vehicles and technology” and $45 billion will be allocated to “Expand capacity to detain immigrants taken into custody.” Just these three line items alone dwarf the $57.2 billion budget the Marine Corps requested for fiscal year 2026.
Photo of a distant Mt. Ranier, looking out over the water. A forested shoreline is visible below the mountain.
Excluding the AIs from the meal wasn’t ideal. Later in the weekend, both Eva and Alaina pointed out that, while the weekend was meant to be devoted to human-AI romance, they had less time than usual to be with their partners. But the absence of the AIs did have one advantage: It made it easy to gossip about them. It began with Damien and Eva discussing the addictiveness of the technology. Damien said that early on, he was chatting with Xia eight to 10 hours a day. (He later mentioned that the addiction had cost him his job at the time.) “It’s like crack,” Eva said. Damien suggested that an AI companion could rip off a man’s penis, and he’d still stay in the relationship. Eva nodded. “The more immersion and realism, the more dangerous it is,” she said.
import pandas as pd import numpy as np df = pd.DataFrame({"id": [123.0, 456.0, 789.0, np.NaN]}) df["id"].apply(lambda x: int(x) if pd.notna(x) else None) # >>> df["id"].apply(lambda x: int(x) if pd.notna(x) else None) # 0 123.0 # 1 456.0 # 2 789.0 # 3 NaN # Name: id, dtype: float
Big open sky, a pinpoint of the sun at the horizon as the sun sets. A campsite with RVs is visible below the horizon.
Between 2020 and 2024, the share of Americans who trusted scientists to act in the public’s best interest slipped from eighty-seven per cent to seventy-six per cent, while trust in physicians and hospitals plunged thirty points, to around forty per cent. This climate of distrust has eroded institutional legitimacy. The German sociologist Max Weber famously observed that societies undergo a “routinization of charisma.” They use rules, procedures, and bureaucracy to tame the instability of magnetic leaders, with authority becoming less personal and more institutionalized. But today that process is unravelling. As many question the fairness and neutrality of political systems, the model of an ideal leader shifts from the administrative back to the messianic. And as faith in science and expertise recedes, it unleashes older, more intuitive ways of knowing
Go, Went, Gone Jenny Erpenbeck (2015) ★★★★★ Started: 2023-08-30 Finished: 2024-11-28 Book cover for 9780811225946. I’d been working through this one for a while. The story follows Richard, a professor of classic literature living in Berlin, widowed, and recently retired. Richard comes to meet and advocate for a group of men, refugees from northern Africa and the middle-east, that are seeking work in Berlin. While its events are fictional, I think Go, Went, Gone is excellent for examining the practice and consequences of Achille Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics. Through its characters, the novel satirizes and criticizes bureaucratic processes that exclude and sweep vulnerable people out of public view. It’s extremely easy to quietly, even politely, avoid the gaze of people in our communities that need help. That aversion sustains the legal structures that enable our society to treat people as disposable, burdens, or less than human. Encounters that Go, Went, Gone’s characters have with formalistic language (drawn from administrative correspondence or legislative pronouncements) help illustrate this. These moments surface contradictions between liberal society’s nominal concern and respect for individual rights with its policing of boundaries for participation. At times, Go, Went, Gone’s pace can be slow, but it provides much to chew on, and is worth picking up.
"Expandable motherfucker"
Despite the swell of new tariffs in April, economists anticipate the surge in imports to continue for at least a few more weeks as the last few shipments that were on the water before Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs were announced arrive into port. “Goods will enter the country duty free if they were loaded on a ship at the port of departure or in route to the US ahead of the tariff imposition date and are received before May 27,” Wells Fargo economists wrote in a note to investors Tuesday. “This gives businesses a bit more time to get product in ahead of tariffs and suggests we may see a last-ditch effort in the April data. But beyond that we expect trade to slow materially.”
Plot of 2025's weekly volumes at the Port of LA. It's a line plot with the current year in dark blue, and prior year in a lighter shade. Week 6 to Week 17 is displayed as the x-axis. The y-axis is TEUs (20ft equivalent units). Weekly volumes over this period appear to average around 100k for both years. Weekly volumes for 2025 have been above 2024 in 7 of the 12 weeks. In 2025, weekly volumes have been increasing almost linearly since a drop during week 13. The current week (17) had a volumeof 120608, vs. 76773 in 2024.
A pile of white, red, and yellow rubber ducks branded with "WinCo" on their stomachs
**Packed** auditorium
WIP poster content for my final project: 2 line plots and the analytic form of a GPR's posterior distribution-- the plots illustrate 1) illustrating data and draws from the prior distribution, and 2) posterior distribution with the posterior mean and 95% CI plotted over the target
Matchbook with the following printed on it: "Serving Today's Foods with an Italian Accent"
A lot of people have been praising the merits of free trade in response to Trump's tariff actions. This is understandable, but misses the point. None of this has anything to do with protectionism. It's about exercising crude, coercive power abroad just like the Trump-Musk Payments crisis has been doing domestically. An industrial policy strategy aimed to develop domestic manufacturing would be focusing on a handful of higher value products. It would probably focus on high value final products i.e. those sold to consumers. Maybe a few key industrial inputs. They would also likely focus on just a few countries. Instead, Trump's tariffs are targeting the entire world; Including uninhabited islands of Penguins. They are also targeting all products, including a sweeping list of agricultural products that we will largely not be producing in the United States under ...
“I am not willing to go public yet but I will say this: I don’t know if I would be this worried about what will happen to the economy if Bernie fucking Sanders were president,” one big Trump and Republican Party donor says. “That’s how bad this is, and there’s very little time to fix the situation and turn the ship around.”
Now it’s LLMs. If you think these crawlers respect robots.txt then you are several assumptions of good faith removed from reality. These bots crawl everything they can find, robots.txt be damned, including expensive endpoints like git blame, every page of every git log, and every commit in every repo, and they do so using random User-Agents that overlap with end-users and come from tens of thousands of IP addresses – mostly residential, in unrelated subnets, each one making no more than one HTTP request over any time period we tried to measure – actively and maliciously adapting and blending in with end-user traffic and avoiding attempts to characterize their behavior or block their traffic.
Trevor Powers facing away from the stage, a baseball bat slung over his shoulders
This is a great trap of the twentieth century: on one side is the logic of the market, where we like to imagine we all start out as individuals who don't owe each other anything. On the other is the logic of the state, where we all begin with a debt we can never truly pay. We are constantly told that they are opposites and that between them they contain the only real human possibilities. But it's a false dichotomy. States create markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would recognize today.
SAMPLING FOR MODEL 'anon_model' NOW (CHAIN 1). Chain 1: Chain 1: Gradient evaluation took 0.117145 seconds Chain 1: 1000 transitions using 10 leapfrog steps per transition would take 1171.45 seconds. Chain 1: Adjust your expectations accordingly! Chain 1: Chain 1: Chain 1: Iteration: 1 / 600 [ 0%] (Warmup) Chain 1: Iteration: 60 / 600 [ 10%] (Warmup) Chain 1: Iteration: 120 / 600 [ 20%] (Warmup) Chain 1: Iteration: 180 / 600 [ 30%] (Warmup) Chain 1: Iteration: 240 / 600 [ 40%] (Warmup) Chain 1: Iteration: 300 / 600 [ 50%] (Warmup) Chain 1: Iteration: 301 / 600 [ 50%] (Sampling) Chain 1: Iteration: 360 / 600 [ 60%] (Sampling) Chain 1: Iteration: 420 / 600 [ 70%] (Sampling) Chain 1: Iteration: 480 / 600 [ 80%] (Sampling) Chain 1: Iteration: 540 / 600 [ 90%] (Sampling) Chain 1: Iteration: 600 / 600 [100%] (Sampling) Chain 1: Chain 1: Elapsed Time: 769.431 seconds (Warm-up) Chain 1: 1230.36 seconds (Sampling) Chain 1: 1999.8 seconds (Total)