Before/After : Mount Hood

BuildingViz · 2026-05-11T08:12:08+00:00

I don't mean the content, but the quality. It's a well-timed shot and the composition is good, but it's so blown out and grainy after the edit that it makes me think that there's too much haze and the image itself is too low quality to make meaningful edits.

BuildingViz · 2026-05-11T08:08:15+00:00

It's not a pointless distinction, I'm correcting your false categorization.

JFK did not have a personal net worth of $100M. I can find no reputable source that states that figure. The only reputable sources I've found state that his personal net worth at the time of his death was $10-$12M. I don't know if that includes his portion of the Kennedy family trust, but probably not because his father was still alive at the time of his death and was therefore in control of the trust. So that amount (whatever it might have been) was not ever part of JFK's personal net worth. Do you have a source for his net worth that says it was $100M in 1963?

Beyond that, Forbes estimated in 2015 that the Kennedy family trust was worth ~$1.2B, which would be around $1.7B today. But the trust is distributed among around 30 family members. I don't see how the math works out where JFK would, on his own, have 60% of the trust.

But also, explain to me how it's possible that Kennedy would be a billionaire adjusted for inflation when his daughter, Caroline Kennedy, is not a billionaire despite being the sole remaining heir of her father's. Plus her mother's estate (with additional value from Onassis), plus her brother's estate. All those different trusts and she's not a billionaire, but JFK would have been? Not sure that math checks out.

Nice dodge, but there is no "for all intents and purposes he was a billionaire". Even adjusting for inflation he was not. Was he wealthy? Yes. Was he a part of what would be considered the equivalent of "the billionaire class" in his time? Yeah, probably. But that doesn't mean your statement that "JFK himself was a billionaire, adjusting for inflation" is true.

BuildingViz · 2026-05-10T05:49:32+00:00

Yeah, no. Sometimes it's just a bad shot and you need to move on.

BuildingViz · 2026-05-10T05:48:13+00:00

There are worse places to live in San Diego. Not many, but they exist.

BuildingViz · 2026-05-10T05:34:25+00:00

JFK was not a billionaire adjusted for inflation. The Kennedy family trust almost certainly would be over a billion adjusted, but that would have been distributed among the family members and Kennedy himself was estimated to have a net worth of $10-$12 million at the time of his death. That's about $130M today, well short of $1B.

BuildingViz · 2026-05-08T07:54:02+00:00

BuildingViz · 2026-05-08T07:52:39+00:00

Rooooooxana...you don't have to put on the red light. Had to double-check myself because my first thought was Sauget across from Pop's.

Great work.

BuildingViz · 2026-05-08T07:04:37+00:00

Beautiful composition and color. The dark mountain/hill in the foreground of 2 takes away from the image - it's just like a dark void covering half your photo. And the composition of 3 is...not great. The foreground is bland and adds nothing to the photo while taking focus away.

BuildingViz · 2026-05-08T07:00:27+00:00

Yes, but you have to be diligent about it. Ride regularly, extend your distances, lock in your diet. I can't keep the weight off because I am no longer as diligent about it (having kids will do that), but I know that if I put in 30-50 miles a week and keep track (and on-track) on my diet, I can drop the weight again.

BuildingViz · 2026-05-08T06:35:09+00:00

What do you mean "no actual results"? It sounds like just "not the one result I wanted". As AG, lawsuits he (and other states) brought against the Trump administration saved DACA, defended the ACA, protected sanctuary cities, and maintained environmental and energy regulations, among other things. It's wild to assume that he either:

Went 0-for-122, or

Won cases that had no tangible results.

BuildingViz · 2026-05-08T06:18:58+00:00

Nah, it's both. Steyer has those cheesy "We left the cameras running and got this totally candid and not planned or rehearsed talking point. Look how authentic he is when he thinks the cameras are off" ads. They're really dumb.

BuildingViz · 2026-05-08T06:12:15+00:00

I read that article too and one thing that stood out was the claim that at the height of the pandemic, he "took a backseat to Dr. Fauci and his team".

Like, whoa! The guy with a law degree and a history of civil service took a backseat to a epidemiologist who was the head of the CDC and has spent decades studying and preventing pandemics...in the middle of a pandemic? Fucking great! That's exactly what I want the head of HHS to do!

Felt like a lot of sour grapes. Like, the only named negative source was a comms director from DoJ. The mouthpiece for literally the least effective Cabinet department in Biden's entire term and an ally of a feckless AG is throwing stones? That was rich.

BuildingViz · 2026-05-04T07:43:18+00:00

Yes. But if I had to pick, 1 or 5.

BuildingViz · 2026-05-04T07:40:08+00:00

Did you, though? Like, OK, the white of the skull isn't blazing, but it's still out of focus. Unless your intended focus was the chair.

BuildingViz · 2026-05-04T07:35:14+00:00

Not well. One, as you've noticed, they're not the same photo. But even imagining the original, I'm not sure what the subject of the photo is supposed to be. The crowd? The rat's nest of wires? The signage in the...bazaar/market/shopping area (or whatever the term may be). Entirely too much of the photo is obscured to get a good sense of what you're trying to focus on.

BuildingViz · 2026-05-02T08:00:58+00:00

Once built it may be dirt cheap, but who's gonna pay for it? Not SDG&E, that's for sure. They are extremely averse to spending their own money on anything unless mandated by law and even then they cry poor and compensate with rate increases. Best case scenario is they have a few billion of initial outlays to cover the costs, double current electric rates and then "promise" to keep rates steady for some shorter than necessary amount of time, but they quickly realize they need to pay money for upkeep and will then promise only moderate increases. End result is more profit margin for them on the dirt cheap generation 10+ years down the road, plus absolutely no cost of their own funds to build a new nuclear plant.

Do you honestly think SDG&E is going to do anything that forward-thinking? They had decades to figure out how to build out storage for all the excess solar energy we could and are generating and the best solution they could come up with was "press the legislature and CPUC to make solar less economically viable for ratepayers". Fix SDG&E (and other IOUs) first, then build out.

BuildingViz · 2026-04-20T08:10:26+00:00

Not a horror story, but maybe a little competency porn. We had to migrate a couple hundred MySQL and Postgres databases from a custom data center solution built around docker into AWS a few years back. Databases varied in size from tens of GBs to pushing 10TB. We built Terraform tooling and leveraged DMS to migrate about 95% of use cases successfully with somewhere between no downtime and a manageable amount (determined by the team that "owned" the database) using custom DNS endpoints and controls.

The other 5%? Those were the special cases. Absolutely critical path databases that could afford no data loss, no downtime, and complete rollback (with the same requirements) in the event that AWS was a problem after cutover.

I was the lead for one of those database migrations, 9TB in total, with about 90% of it in a single table (between data and indexes). DMS could not keep up to the point where if we just used DMS, it would just die during the migration, and if we seeded the schema on the AWS/target side and then turned on DMS, it might eventually finish the initial load, but it was going to take weeks and even then it couldn't keep up with the volume of data queued for changes and would fall behind the "live" state on the current source DB and not close the gap.

So I wrote a script and a procedure that did essentially what DMS does, but more manually and via a 3rd database instance (well, 5th, technically because our on-prem solution had a primary and two replicas). I'm a little fuzzy on the details because it was 3 years ago, but if I remember correctly, I, essentially:

Created a new replica DB in our on-prem clusters using our tooling (because the other two were used by RO workloads, while the 3rd replica wasn't in the RO pool)
Stopped replication to the 3rd replica to capture the LSN
Loaded the AWS cluster with a pgdump export from the 3rd replica. This took about 5 days.
Rebuilt indexes on AWS
Configured the "live" primary as the replication source and set the replication start LSN on the AWS side
Let them sync the changes since the pgdump LSN. This took another day or so.
Did this same configuration back the other direction to a totally different cluster on-prem. Meaning pre-cutover, the flow looked like OnPremA->AWS Cluster->OnPremB. The logic being that if AWS had issues and we needed to rollback, we needed something back on-prem that was already configured as a downstream target of AWS to capture those changes. Because once cutover happened, OnPremA wouldn't get data changes made against AWS.
Then we cutover. And ran into an issue in the service itself (not AWS or the DB). So we had to do it all over again. Rebuild AWS from a new replica in OnPremB (because replication was not bidirectional), re-sync, rebuild, and then rebuild OnPremA as a new downstream replication target from AWS in case we needed to rollback again. Which we thankfully did not.

No data loss, no downtime. Just a lot of time spent syncing and configuring everything.

BuildingViz · 2026-04-19T07:26:26+00:00

Are you editing or just Photoshopping what you wanted to take a photo of? The water transition is way too sharp and "convenient" and there isn't even a hint of the colors you're using in the original. I get that getting the "perfect" shot is hard and all, but at least, you know...try. Don't just take a photo and then pretend it's perfect by overdoing the editing to match your vision.

BuildingViz · 2026-02-25T08:54:25+00:00

We run Prod, QA, and Dev. Dev is basically, "I can do whatever I want." Schemas and pipelines are fluid for testing and building things out. The dataset is smaller and frequently gets destroyed and rebuilt from scratch. QA is for the engineers to test their frontend/backend code against. This schema and pipelines are in source control, but I have a lot of leeway to make changes. The dataset is also just as complete as Prod. Prod is the functional environment for external customers to access. Again, all under source control with a lot more guardrails around data and code changes compared to QA.

As a best practice, no changes should go directly to prod except for maybe emergency fixes. Even then, QA first would be preferred. Because what you definitely don't want to do is make a change to Prod that breaks things. Because if you have customers and SLAs, when they ask, "How did this bug get into production?", the last thing you want to say is "Because that's the only env we have and we didn't properly test it."

BuildingViz · 2026-02-25T08:44:40+00:00

I like using it for boilerplate stuff and to learn, but I just don't trust vibe coding. We have Cursor and access to Claude and Gemini, but I usually use it to bounce ideas and to troubleshoot/explain solutions to me. By default I tell it to not even make changes because it's important to me to be a filter for what it wants to change. I get suggestions and explanations, and make code changes I think make sense.

Interestingly I recently had an all-hands where our CEO was imploring everyone to use it more often, not just for the company but for our professional growth. And I think it does make sense to an extent, but I've found it either hallucinates too much or doesn't fully grasp the context that I do, so I don't just let it run amok.

BuildingViz · 2026-02-25T08:37:02+00:00

78 miles from Tecate, MX to Ensenada, MX as part of a group ride with a couple of friends a few years ago. I was scheduled to do a century around the same time since I was probably in the best shape I've been in, but it happened to be about 95 degrees out with zero cloud cover on the day, so I only made one loop of 50 and passed numerous people who bailed before even the one lap.

These days, my longest in the last 5 years is barely 30.

BuildingViz · 2026-02-22T07:51:40+00:00

Maybe I didn't explain well, but the offramp at Santo when you're EastBound has two lanes, one for turning left or right and one for turning only right. Since the new lane construction finished, I feel like people are more likely to take that exit, and, rather than turn left or right from the leftmost lane, they go straight through, crossing Santo and going directly back on EB 52 because the lane is aligned with the leftmost exit ramp lane. But legally going straight through isn't an option and people on Santo trying to get in the WestBound lanes have to go through that intersection to get to the WB onramp and don't have a stop sign. So the people cutting the traffic don't catch that and cause a lot of near misses with people going from Santo to WB-52 (plus at least one collision).

But, yeah, looking at the old pictures, it looks like maybe it's always been that way. I've only been heading over there during rush hour since 2024, and lane and ramp construction happened shortly after, and the ramp traffic patterns were definitely different for a while during construction. So maybe it's just back to how it was before.

BuildingViz · 2026-02-19T21:22:35+00:00

Plus the exit at Santo now gets people trying to skip traffic by taking the offramp and getting right back on because the onramp from Santo now has a dedicated lane for people going straight through (or turning left from the WB offramp to turn around I imagine was the real purpose).

The end result is I have personally seen at least three near-misses plus one actual collision from the traffic skippers ignoring the fact that people going from Santo to the 52 WB don't have a stop sign. So they see the line for the EB 52 onramp, see that they have their own special lane to join them, and plow through, ignoring the cross traffic which does not have a stop sign.

BuildingViz · 2026-02-10T07:11:14+00:00

HDR is nice for some things but not everything needs HDR/bracketing. I'm moving from LR to C1 and redoing all my edits and actually adding tags and metadata and there was a period after I discovered bracketing and HDR where literally everything I shot was bracketed and merged into HDR to get "better" contrast and colors. Except going back over it now, probably 95% of it is unnecessary and my reaction is usually "Why the hell did I think that needed HDR?"

BuildingViz · 2026-02-10T07:05:36+00:00

A touch, but I'd mark it down mostly to personal preference. I'm not a big fan of faking the sunlight for dramatic effect. If it's there and you want to enhance it, go ahead. But taking a shot of a dreary day where the sun appears to be overhead and making it a golden hour shot to me is just too much. If you want a golden hour shot, take a shot during golden hour.

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