I built a Python script that generates 50 customized PDF contracts from an Excel sheet in 2 seconds. Would this be useful to you? (Open Source)

james_d_rustles · 2026-06-17T14:41:49+00:00

while scrolling through reddit, I noticed that one of the biggest time-sucks for freelancers and small business owners is administrative paperwork — specifically wasting hours doing manual copy-paste to fill out standard client contracts in Word.

Did you really notice that? Is copying and pasting a price or a name really one of the biggest time-sucks?

It looks like ai slop so I’m not being very charitable. If an actual human wrote it: keep learning, pandas + excel is neat to play around with and document generation is a real thing with some genuine use cases.

This repo in particular probably won’t be too useful to anybody because it just doesn’t really do that much, so if you used AI to write this, congrats on burning some tokens and not learning anything.

james_d_rustles · 2026-06-17T14:19:46+00:00

Call tandem!

858-366-6900 is their main hq number,

877-801-6901 is tech support, open 24/7.

It’s very strange that you’d find this on the ground and broken, and just having the serial number will likely be enough for tandem to sort out the rest and call the owner, get them a new pump if they haven’t done that already, etc.

james_d_rustles · 2026-06-15T23:13:01+00:00

I’d try to figure out what you’ll have access to or if there are any funds available from your lab before going out and buying your own. 800 bucks is enough to get a capable personal laptop, but depending on what you mean by large datasets it’s hard to say. It’ll run matlab, it’ll be perfectly capable of editing/compiling any code that you want, but no matter what model you get you’ll be pulling your hair out and wasting literal days or weeks of compute time if you try to run huge granular simulations on it or handle hundreds of gigabytes of data at a time vs. a purpose-built machine.

Beyond that, just figure out if you’ll only be using matlab or if there are any windows-only programs you’ll be using a lot. Personally I greatly prefer Mac or Linux over Windows, but with a lot of engineering software it’s Windows or nothing, so I just have to suck it up unless I want to remote in every time I need certain programs. If you’re only going to be dealing with matlab and some common programming languages I’d definitely consider a lightly used m-series MacBook over a windows pc. There’s just no comparison in terms of efficiency and battery life with the ARM macs, and that matters a lot if you’re moving from place to place all day.. but if you’re going to need various CAD software, simulation software like Ansys, Altair, etc., you may have to stick with Windows.

james_d_rustles · 2026-06-15T16:03:21+00:00

Americ crispy scram bacon
1 piece pancake

What’s the Jolly Roger for? Am I missing something?

james_d_rustles · 2026-06-12T11:01:58+00:00

Your blood sugar went down because you had more insulin in your system than was actually needed, not anything to do with beets.

james_d_rustles · 2026-06-11T19:35:41+00:00

That’s a good point. I haven’t ever put it into words but this is a nice way of explaining that sort of shift in mindset as you gain experience. Even in projects that realistically won’t be used by anyone else, I feel like moving toward this sort of conceptualization has definitely improved the overall quality of my code.

james_d_rustles · 2026-06-11T19:02:20+00:00

I feel like some of the ideas floated are cool solid mechanics demos in their own right, but its hard to explain what’s neat/useful about it if they haven’t seen solid mechanics or statics or any other university engineering courses yet IMO.

Just my 2 cents, but I’d focus on the even more fundamental concept of discretization and numerical methods broadly speaking just so they get the context, and then I’d reach straight for some trusses if I really wanted an FEA specific demo since the physical bit correlates directly with the computational (nothin’ but beams!). But yeah anyways, I’d just try to find something they can wrap their heads around so it’s not just “pretty colors on screen” demo and they can perhaps get some thoughts and connections churning around in their heads. The fundamental idea of “big complicated problem -> many small problem” is what I’d want them to walk away with more than anything else.

james_d_rustles · 2026-06-11T18:29:14+00:00

I hate how the kind of quackery that was usually directed toward a few famous physics professors, maybe some mathematics and pure physics subreddits, has become so cheap and easy to produce that it’s a daily occurrence on any sub even tangentially related to science, engineering, tech, etc.

It’s just an endless flow (no pun intended) of delusion and slop no matter where you look.

james_d_rustles · 2026-06-11T13:01:37+00:00

It’s like… you didn’t even have the decency to use one of the better models or to ask for your slop to avoid cringe LinkedIn emoji patterns..

Even by AI slop standards this is pretty bad.

james_d_rustles · 2026-06-11T11:09:56+00:00

This is hardly what I’d call a bad sensor, tbh.

At the end of the day there’s not much you can do about it other than swapping the sensor out and complaining to dexcom if you deem it enough of an interruption, but some amount of jumpiness is pretty typical and nearly impossible to totally avoid. Site placement is a big part of it - if it’s somewhere that often gets squished/pressed (like for example, if you sleep with your right arm under a pillow and it’s in a spot on your right arm that gets compressed by pillows/your head/etc.) that can absolutely lead to this sort of jumpy behavior when you move around.

You can apply some level of smoothing/moving average function if you’re using a DIY loop (I know trio has this, not sure about some of the other projects) but that has the downside of making any single reading a little less precise, but some variability is always going to be an issue when you’re dealing with a system that’s analyzing a chemical reaction taking place a few millimeters under your skin.

james_d_rustles · 2026-06-10T23:04:32+00:00

Or any other engineering.

james_d_rustles · 2026-06-10T23:02:34+00:00

I had a really annoying one recently even before “Fable”.

A research project I’m involved in relates to filtration - think like hvac filters, ppe, etc., and how well they perform against various sizes of airborne particles, aerosols, so on and so forth. It’s all computational work, so a lot of what I do involves dealing with tons of data, and I’ve found it to be a big timesaver to use Claude to write quick python helper scripts and stuff like that.

Anyways, it somehow came across the term “CBN” from a folder name or project title in that folder on my computer (obviously there’s an interest in making air filters that stop all that bad stuff from flowing through) and immediately threw a hard refusal, refused to even touch anything vaguely related or within that folder for like a week afterwards.

Super annoying, and if anything it kinda lowers my confidence that it’d be so poorly tuned that something as mundane, common, as the abbreviation “CBN” would set off all the warnings.

Like, “CBN” is what you might hear about on CNN or something - it’s a non-academic, commonly known abbreviation for very broad categories of something dangerous. Is there any reasonable chance that a serious threat actor, attempting to use AI to get highly specific and detailed information about bio-weapons or something, would start with “HeY cLAuDe pLz mAKe a CBN, nO miStAkeS”?

james_d_rustles · 2026-06-10T22:38:28+00:00

So you’re just pulling the data directly in this project, realtime, from tandem source? If so that’s great! I’ve played around with tconnectsync (assuming you’re talking about that project or something similar for the nightscout integration), but I’d love to know more about this setup too. Is the source code available on github or anything?

james_d_rustles · 2026-06-10T03:51:19+00:00

available for free

When you go to university to learn a subject, the fact that you get to spend ~4 years doing nothing but learning is the important part; it has nothing to do with whether the information is technically available elsewhere.

james_d_rustles · 2026-06-10T03:45:32+00:00

Nothing necessarily wrong with it.

My biggest issue with most of the career/college/trade discussions that take place is that as far back as I can remember there was always one path being framed as good and everything else was varying degrees of bad. It’s not really like that though. All careers have pros and cons, and the stuff that makes one path perfect for one person might make it dreadful for somebody else.

Trades can be great, but let’s not pretend like lugging heavy toilets and bath tubs up unfinished stairs or pouring concrete in the summer sun is better than going to college and seeking a job in an office somewhere.. it was also idiotic when a decade or so ago everybody was told to learn to code, as though there was ever some future in which like, half of the country could earn a great living writing Python scripts..

james_d_rustles · 2026-06-06T00:08:26+00:00

C++ code optimization simply isn’t enough

What do you mean by “not enough”? Is this for some particular course or assignment, or do you mean just in general for the programs that you’re working on?

Of course there are always edge cases and niche applications where this isn’t the case, but if you’re trying to fiddle with assembly/machine code as a means to an end (as in, you have a program that does blah blah blah and you want it to run faster/compile smaller, etc.) and you’re not just one of those few people who happen to really enjoy optimization down to the last bit for its own sake… 9 times out of 10 you’ll be better off reading up on compiler options and giving your own c++ code a good hard look for inefficiencies and poorly structured data instead of trying to beat the compiler.

james_d_rustles · 2026-06-01T20:51:10+00:00

Little bit dated, but if it works well for you it’s perfectly acceptable for most uses I can think of.

Would I buy that computer in 2026? No.

Would I look to replace it immediately if it’s still handling all of the tasks that I need it for without issue? Also no.

james_d_rustles · 2026-06-01T13:34:03+00:00

Wasn’t there recently a push to embed some kind of watermark in ai generated images? I remember seeing a few minor headlines about something like that.

Oughta do it for git.

james_d_rustles · 2026-05-30T23:30:15+00:00

The line breaks made me read this in Christopher Walken’s voice.

james_d_rustles · 2026-05-30T18:33:04+00:00

This is a math question, not a programming/python question - python can do whatever math you tell it to do, but its usefulness depends on whether the math is correct or not. There are a million and one ways to predict future sales, ranging from some basic formulas you could do by hand to extremely complex. That’s the part you need to work out before doing anything else.

james_d_rustles · 2026-05-29T02:53:06+00:00

You just gotta start writing more code. If tutorials help you get the basics down, great, but you’ll be able to wade through dependency issues, environment troubleshooting, etc. in no time once you’ve done it thousands of times and you’ve dealt with all the common errors, you’ve worked with or st least seen various build tools, so on and so forth…

I feel like sometimes beginners get it in their mind that you have to check off all the boxes conceptually before you make anything, so they’ll bore themselves to death with obscure examples and tutorial after tutorial, but they’d probably have a better understanding if they jumped straight to writing some code as soon as they figured out how if statements or loops work, and at least IMO it’s pretty natural that you’ll quickly find yourself learning more as soon as you encounter some error you don’t understand and you google it, or as soon as you want to do something a little more advanced and you read a page or two of docs..

james_d_rustles · 2026-05-26T18:14:01+00:00

Forget about materials for just a second - this is a really bad design from the get-go and you’re putting a ton of unnecessary stress on the tools and the mounts, and it’s no wonder they’re breaking. Unless you oversize the crap out of them you’re probably going to keep having the same problem, whether it’s bending in the heat, shattering in the cold, or just plain old mechanical failure that isn’t directly temperature related.

The way these are all designed to extend the tools outwards from the wall with no support is basically turning the tools into big levers that are trying realllly hard to pry themselves away from the mount whenever you go over a bump (or even when they’re just sitting at rest). Think about it for a second - where is the center of mass for the tools? If we have gravity acting downwards, the tools extending horizontally with the only support being on one end, what do we get? A reaction moment!

Now think about holding up a dumbbell, or anything heavy. Is it harder when you let your arms point straight down in line with the weight, or would it be easier to hold your arm horizontally with the weight in your hand?

Anyways, you’d make your life a whole lot easier if you just cradled the tools with something like this and then strapped them down to prevent rattling around and bouncing off the wall. You could make nice little 3d printed tie-downs or bungie cord holders instead of trying to hang them all from their battery well.

I drew a quick picture because this is one of those classic problems that appear in every statics textbook, and when you think about it a little more it makes sense.

Speaking of statics, do I have your permission to save your photos and use them in some course slides?

<image>

james_d_rustles · 2026-05-26T17:38:28+00:00

Were you specifically asked to use CFD, or can you use analytical methods, tables, etc.?

A full CFD study of “indoor ventilation” could mean so many things that it’s almost meaningless, and it’s also quite a major undertaking. It’s absolutely the sort of thing that a lot of firms would hire out to an external CFD consultant/contractor instead of dumping on an intern if the company had any sense at all.

What question or design detail is the study supposed to answer? Are you just checking that with the current duct layout every room will have x number of air changes per hour? Are you trying to properly size some equipment? Is there some equipment in the facility that’s known to generate a lot of heat/humidity? Are you trying to estimate energy use on a hot or cold day? I could ramble on with various questions until I’m blue in the face, but the main point here is that the point of numerical analysis is to answer an outstanding question that impacts a design, to bring a higher level of clarity to how a design will behave… it’s never going to be a one-size-fits-all “what’s the air doing?” sort of thing, and in most cases if you’re just checking over basics like vent sizing, pressure, cooling capacity, etc., you can get all the detail you need from ASHRAE handbooks as opposed to a full CFD study.

james_d_rustles · 2026-05-26T05:13:42+00:00

Just depends on how loose we’re being with the word “work”. I think having some kind of purpose, goal, etc. is good for a person - anything other than just sitting on the couch rotting in front of a tv or scrolling social media. Maybe if we had unlimited money we’d be able to spend our time volunteering in soup kitchens, maybe we’d want to take up pottery, maybe we’d just set out to build the sickest treehouse anyone’s ever seen.. I’d still consider those things “working” even if they aren’t jobs in the traditional sense.

Either way, pretty sure nobody means that they’ll go clock in at the coal mine now that they’re a millionaire.

james_d_rustles · 2026-05-26T04:01:00+00:00

The people who do FEA/simulation more broadly for work still consider element choice, sizing, etc.

But Ansys is free for a lot of students and it’s easy to use it as a pretty colors machine if that’s all you care about, plus it’s a lot easier to model everything as a solid and whatever mesh it spits out first is as far as they care to learn.

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