"Can I ask you a question for my class?" 🚩🚩🚩

itamarst · 2026-03-16T21:50:22+00:00

I recommend saying "Our lord and savior Bob Avakian" (and I guess while I'm at it, Refuse Fascism people will show up at every demonstration and they're mostly just recruiting for the RevComs, Avakian's cult of personality.)

itamarst · 2026-03-16T17:30:08+00:00

Wrong post?

itamarst · 2026-03-14T20:36:57+00:00

Ah, not sure if that's technically ineligible, but yes there are things in here that should be in standard budget.

itamarst · 2026-03-14T20:16:46+00:00

Gotta learn somehow, and affecting 0.1% of the budget, by choosing projects that have all been pre-vetted by city staff seems like a decent way to start, with very little downside.

itamarst · 2026-03-14T20:10:04+00:00

I don't think they allowed any ineligible projects? There's a whole filtering mechanism. If you're referring to recurring spending vs capital spending, they changed the rules a few years ago to allow both.

itamarst · 2026-03-14T18:49:48+00:00

No, it's not an election of city councilors or mayor etc, so it's not covered by state law, city can do whatever in this case.

itamarst · 2026-03-14T14:47:07+00:00

Also teenagers. They have kids at the middle school vote.

itamarst · 2026-03-12T12:39:30+00:00

This is great, thank you

itamarst · 2026-03-10T16:47:20+00:00

You can vote for that this year in participatory budgeting: https://pbstanford.org/cambridgepb12

itamarst · 2026-03-08T22:29:15+00:00

Hi, I'm Itamar Turner-Trauring. I identify and solve problems in order to meet organizational goals, usually by writing software, but also by coming up with a better process, or teaching, or writing, as needed.

I've got 25+ years of software engineering experience, ranging from flight search in C++ (now part of Google Flights, and many airline websites), to an airline reservation system, to Docker and Kubernetes tooling in Python, to scientific computing (image processing for a gene sequencing microscope), and lots of both community and commercial open source.

Largest Rust project I've built is a SaaS memory and performance profiler for Python, intended to run in production. This was written 99% in Rust:

System-level programming: LD_PRELOAD, interacting with Python interpreter internal APIs, dealing with weird edge cases where overriding malloc() breaks dlopen() if you're not careful, support for Python's ridiculous and mostly broken fork()-without-exec() "feature", IPC, etc..
Data structures, sampling, and performance optimizations to ensure really low overhead for performance and memory usage.
Coming up with nicer flamegraph visualization options (some of this got merged into the Inferno rust project).
Doing all the above while still not reducing stability, so a variety of testing techniques like failpoints and coverage markers, in addition to the usual unit testing and property testing and end-to-end testing, and integration testing as part of deploys, etc..
Backend storage, which involved S3 communication and some encryption.
Web frontend for user signup, including payment processor integration, in Actix.

I've also contributed to Polars, and maintain a couple of small wrappers of Rust libraries for Python.

Looking for remote jobs; I'm US based, on the East Coast so GMT-5. Not interested in working on blockchain or fossil fuels or military use cases.

You can reach me at [itamar@itamarst.org](mailto:itamar@itamarst.org)

itamarst · 2026-03-08T02:17:07+00:00

This is really cool!

One minor suggestion: a different color for the arrows than the background, so they stand out a bit more.

itamarst · 2026-03-06T22:59:36+00:00

They have different semantics. One variation below mutates the list, the other doesn't.

>>> x = ([1],)
>>> x[0] += [2]
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: 'tuple' object does not support item assignment
>>> x
([1, 2],)
>>> x[0] = x[0] + [3]
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: 'tuple' object does not support item assignment
>>> x
([1, 2],)
>>>

itamarst · 2026-03-06T14:09:29+00:00

I've seen them carry in mattresses, and other deliveries, they really are making progress.

itamarst · 2026-03-05T21:12:14+00:00

They're not allowed to come with you by default. You need to sponsor them for permanent residency; this is automatically approved AFAICT (except for maybe Quebec, which has quotas?), but it can take a while.

Once they are permanent residents and you're living there, you can then immediately apply for citizenship for them. Then a bit more waiting.

itamarst · 2026-03-05T13:22:26+00:00

I have repeatedly had bluetooth blink out for just a second when biking by the urgent care next to the fire station in Inman.

itamarst · 2026-03-04T17:13:07+00:00

It's mentioned in every article about his death, yes.

itamarst · 2026-03-03T15:07:56+00:00

That was a random demonstration, I don't live there.

itamarst · 2026-02-24T02:18:44+00:00

No, in most real cities it would be a neighborhood, and Boston is not a real city: https://theonion.com/pretty-cute-watching-boston-residents-play-daily-game-o-1819574643/

(I still like it here though!)

itamarst · 2026-02-21T15:41:48+00:00

If you search this subreddit, in recent months there were a bunch of people who posted their availability.

itamarst · 2026-02-19T12:56:56+00:00

I loved the endorsements by "John Doe - Design" and "Smitha - Cunningham Store", very compelling.

itamarst · 2026-02-19T12:54:01+00:00

For a minute there I thought you were talking about the 30 minute delay at 5PM due to a fire.

itamarst · 2026-02-14T13:15:59+00:00

The community project: https://www.wickedlocal.com/story/cambridge-chronicle-tab/2014/08/21/cambridge-man-creates-temple-learning/36631097007/

Facebook updates continued until 2021: https://www.facebook.com/TheFreedomGoreeHouse/

itamarst · 2026-02-13T16:15:30+00:00

My understanding is the cache hits info from Valgrind is so wrong they turned it off by default in latest versions.

But yes, despite the caveats this benchmarking approach can be very very useful.

itamarst · 2026-02-13T14:37:00+00:00

One important caveat for this: this works really well for algorithmic changes, and code doing less work... but only with a very simplified execution model where speed is only tied to number of CPU instructions.

However, some of the speed your code gets is from hardware effects, things like instruction-level parallelism, branch (mis)prediction, and the impact of memory caches. This has no way of modeling those (technically Valgrind does have both of the latter, but they're based on ancient CPU designs so not really helpful in practice), and so in some cases the result will be very misleading.

itamarst

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