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Joseph Heller methinks, but probably not too far away in embedding space!

Also had to remember not to drag people out of cars and drive off with them when walking felt too slow in real life!

My aero engineering friend from university winds me up every time I see him saying that pi = 22/7 - I finally stopped getting angry, checked and it’s pretty good! I’m still glad he didn’t decide to design planes after he graduated though!

The domain name and the story seem a bit incongruous...

I had one due to a bulging disc in my neck and some pins and needles - it was fascinating, but I still remember them turning on the audio and letting me listen to my nerves trying to flex various muscles! My biceps sounded like a bit like white noise (good), while my triceps sounded like a plastic bag flapping outside a car window (bad!) The way they explained it some subset of my tricep nerves were firing harder to try and compensate for the ones affected by the disc bulge - but they couldn’t keep up the firing rate by themselves. Really interesting and somewhat explained my mediocre push-up performance!

You can throw python threads at it, but if each request traverses the big old datastructure using python code and serialises a result then you’re stuck with only one live thread at a time (due to the GIL). In Java it’s so much easier especially if the datastructure is read only or is updated periodically in an atomic fashion. Every attempt to do something like this in python has led me to having to abandon nice pythonic datastructures, fiddle around with shared memory binary formats, before sighing and reaching for java! Especially annoying if the service makes use of handy libraries like numpy/pandas/scipy etc!

Historically I’ve written several services that load up some big datastructure (10s or 100s of GB), then expose an HTTP API on top of it. Every time I’ve done a quick implementation in Python of a service that then became popular (within a firm, so 100s or 1000s of clients) I’ve often ended up having to rewrite in Java so I can throw more threads at servicing the requests (often CPU heavy). I may have missed something but I couldn’t figure out how to get the multi-threaded performance out of Python but of course no-GIL looks interesting for this!

Same for me on Firefox, though Chromium and Safari seem to work

There’s also a python api for getting the transcript from a given youtube video id so you can script the whole thing

I’ve had some pretty remarkable results pasting lecture transcripts from youtube into gpt4 and getting well formatted/relevant markdown summaries from meandering and mis-transcribed content! Needs chunking up but surprisingly effective. It can even generate youtube urls with the right timestamps if you ask it nicely

Not super related but a pleasantly surprising linux /dev trick I discovered yesterday was piping “hello” to /dev/udp/<ip>/<port> in order to check connectivity between two machines (the other was listening using nc)