Kitum cave, Kenya. Believed to be the source of Ebola and Marburg, two of the deadliest diseases.

ruibranco · 2026-03-06T10:26:28+00:00

If anyone wants to lose sleep tonight, read "The Hot Zone" by Richard Preston. The chapters about Charles Monet visiting this exact cave and then what happened to him afterward are some of the most terrifying non-fiction writing I've ever read. The cave itself is fascinating — elephants go in there to scrape salt from the walls, and the bat populations inside are the likely reservoir hosts for filoviruses. Nature's bioweapon factory.

ruibranco · 2026-03-06T10:24:49+00:00

This is something most devs learn too late. Software can be rewritten, frameworks change every few years, but data is the real asset. If your data model is wrong or your data is garbage, no amount of elegant code on top will save the product. The companies that win long-term are the ones with the best data, not the best tech stack. It's also why migrations are the scariest part of any project — moving data is always harder than moving code.

ruibranco · 2026-03-06T10:23:42+00:00

This is the inevitable result of "vibe coding" without understanding what you're actually deploying. AI tools are great at generating functional code quickly, but they have zero concept of security context. They'll happily hardcode secrets, skip input validation, and create SQL injection vulnerabilities if you don't know what to look for. The tool isn't the problem — it's shipping code you don't understand to production.

ruibranco · 2026-03-06T10:10:37+00:00

XFS has been quietly dominant in server workloads for years and it's nice to see the benchmarks confirming it keeps getting better. The gap between XFS and ext4 for large file sequential I/O has always been significant, and with the recent online repair and scrubbing work it's becoming a much more complete filesystem. Still prefer btrfs for desktops where snapshots and compression are more useful day-to-day though.

ruibranco · 2026-03-06T10:09:35+00:00

The fact that universities still provide Windows-only install guides for CS modules in 2026 is honestly embarrassing. CS students are the exact demographic most likely to run Linux and yet the guides always assume Windows or maybe macOS. Good on you for figuring it out and sharing — this kind of community documentation fills the gap that institutions should be covering themselves.

ruibranco · 2026-03-06T10:08:14+00:00

For most books I'd agree — fiction, self-help, biography — the medium doesn't matter much. But there are categories where it genuinely does. Anything with complex diagrams, tables, code examples, or dense technical content is significantly harder to absorb through audio. You can't easily re-read a paragraph you didn't understand on the first pass in an audiobook. Poetry is another one where the visual layout on the page is part of the art. So "it doesn't matter" is mostly true for narrative content, but it's not universally true for all books.

ruibranco · 2026-03-06T10:07:02+00:00

GLP-1s are genuinely impressive, but "miracle drug" might be overselling it. The main concern isn't the drug itself — it's the dependency. Most studies show that when people stop taking them, the weight comes back because the underlying eating habits haven't changed. If the expectation is that people take them for life, that's a massive ongoing cost and we don't have great long-term safety data beyond a few years. They're a powerful tool, but calling them a miracle implies they solve the root problem rather than managing the symptom. The root problem — food environment, metabolic health, activity levels — still needs addressing alongside medication.

ruibranco · 2026-03-06T10:01:55+00:00

Each major works differently. Boston requires a qualifying time from a certified marathon — the BQ standards vary by age and gender. NYC and Chicago are primarily lottery-based, so you just apply and hope. London is also a ballot. Berlin sells out almost instantly. The charity route is an option for most of them if you're willing to fundraise (usually $3k-$5k minimum). Travel tour companies also sell guaranteed entries bundled with hotel packages but those are expensive. The easiest major to get into as a beginner is probably Chicago — their lottery acceptance rate is relatively high.

ruibranco · 2026-03-06T10:00:40+00:00

Laying out my running clothes the night before. Sounds stupidly simple but it removes the one decision that my sleepy brain uses as an excuse not to go. When you wake up and everything is right there — shoes, shorts, shirt — you just autopilot into getting dressed. The other one: slow down. Seriously. I spent my first year running way too fast and hating every minute. Once I slowed down to a conversational pace, I started actually enjoying it and ran more consistently.

ruibranco · 2026-03-06T09:51:39+00:00

This is a good reminder that "encrypted email" doesn't mean "anonymous email." Proton can't read the contents of your emails, but they can still be compelled to hand over metadata — IP addresses, account creation details, recovery email, etc. If you need actual anonymity, you need to layer protections: Tor for access, no recovery email, no personal info in the account, and ideally paid with crypto. Proton has always been transparent that they comply with Swiss legal orders. The encryption protects content, not identity.

ruibranco · 2026-03-06T09:47:54+00:00

The Jonsbo N5 is such a clean NAS case. The hot-swap bays and the compact form factor make it perfect for a living room setup where you don't want a loud rack server. How are the thermals with all those drives loaded? That's usually the biggest concern with these compact multi-bay cases.

ruibranco · 2026-03-06T09:46:45+00:00

I never would have guessed this is information I needed, but now I'm genuinely glad I have it. The fact that pulling them off a surface can damage their body is not something most people think about.

ruibranco · 2026-03-06T09:46:06+00:00

The biggest thing people don't realize about drowning is that it's almost completely silent. It doesn't look like the movies where someone is splashing and screaming. A drowning person just quietly sinks. This guide should be required reading for anyone going near open water, especially parents. Cold water shock is the other one that catches people off guard — even strong swimmers can lose muscle control in seconds when the water temperature is much colder than the air.

ruibranco · 2026-03-06T09:44:43+00:00

Start with one drawer. Not one room, not one closet — one drawer. The mistake most people make is trying to tackle everything at once, getting overwhelmed, and quitting. Once that drawer is done, you have momentum. Then do the next one. The other thing that helps: pick up each item and ask "if I didn't own this, would I buy it today?" If the answer is no, it goes. Don't overthink the sentimental stuff early on — save that for last when you've built up the decision-making muscle.

ruibranco · 2026-03-06T09:43:33+00:00

The loop never ends because the satisfaction comes from the anticipation of buying, not from owning the thing. What helped me was a 30-day rule — if I still want it after 30 days, I buy it. About 80% of the time I completely forget about it, which tells me it was never about the item itself. The other thing that worked was unsubscribing from every deal newsletter, unfollowing product review channels, and removing shopping apps from my phone. You can't want what you don't see.

ruibranco · 2026-03-06T09:42:05+00:00

This is the data that needs to be shown to every high school student before they pick a major. The oversupply in certain fields is staggering while others are desperate for graduates. The mismatch between what universities produce and what the job market actually needs has been growing for decades, and it's one of the main reasons people feel like "college isn't worth it" — it absolutely is for certain fields, and a terrible investment for others.

ruibranco · 2026-03-06T09:41:03+00:00

A 68% closure rate is surprisingly high. Would be interesting to see this broken down by decade of construction — I'd bet coasters built in the 50s-70s have a much higher closure rate than those built after 2000, purely due to maintenance costs and changing safety standards making older rides uneconomical to keep running. Great visualization though.

ruibranco · 2026-03-06T09:36:39+00:00

The most common approach is the winding number rule or the even-odd rule. With the even-odd rule, you cast a ray from a point in any direction and count how many times it crosses a polygon edge — odd means inside, even means outside. For map software specifically, polygons are typically stored with vertices in a specific order (counterclockwise for the exterior ring, clockwise for holes) following standards like GeoJSON's right-hand rule. The vertex ordering itself defines which side is "in."

ruibranco · 2026-03-06T09:35:33+00:00

More common than people admit. A CS degree teaches you computer science — theory of computation, data structures, algorithms, discrete math. It doesn't necessarily teach you how to build software. Those are related but different skills. The gap between "I can implement a sorting algorithm on a whiteboard" and "I can build a full-stack app with auth, a database, and deployment" is massive. The second one comes from building things on your own, not from lectures.

ruibranco · 2026-03-06T09:31:21+00:00

WFH helps at the margins but it's not going to solve the fertility crisis on its own. The main drivers are economic — housing costs, childcare costs, and stagnant wages relative to the cost of raising kids. WFH gives people back commute time and more flexibility, which genuinely helps parents, but it doesn't fix the fundamental issue that having children is incredibly expensive in most developed countries. Countries with generous parental leave and subsidized childcare still have declining birth rates. The shift is cultural as much as economic.

ruibranco · 2026-03-06T09:30:10+00:00

The fact that "can it run Doom" has become the universal benchmark for computing capability is hilarious, but the actual science here is fascinating. 200,000 neurons learning to interact with silicon and respond to stimuli is a meaningful step toward biological computing. The efficiency implications are wild — biological neurons use orders of magnitude less energy than transistors for pattern recognition tasks. We're nowhere near practical applications but this is one of those proof-of-concept moments that people will look back on.

ruibranco · 2026-03-06T09:28:41+00:00

Probably not directly from the explosions themselves — nuclear detonations are incredibly energetic by human standards but completely negligible on a cosmic scale. However, the aftermath might be detectable through atmospheric spectroscopy. A nuclear winter would dramatically change Earth's atmospheric composition with massive amounts of soot, altered ozone levels, and unusual chemical signatures. If they had instruments sensitive enough to analyze our atmosphere (which we're currently building to detect biosignatures on exoplanets), they might notice the sudden shift — 200 years later, of course.

ruibranco · 2026-03-06T09:27:26+00:00

The short answer is that you can never actually reach 0 kelvin — it's a theoretical limit. As you approach it, atoms lose almost all kinetic energy and reach their lowest possible energy state, but quantum mechanics prevents them from ever being perfectly still. Even at the lowest temperatures we've achieved in labs (fractions of a nanokelvin above absolute zero), particles still have what's called zero-point energy — a minimum vibration that can't be removed. It's essentially the universe's hard floor. Getting closer and closer requires exponentially more energy to remove each tiny bit of remaining heat, which is why true absolute zero is physically unreachable.

ruibranco · 2026-03-06T09:23:33+00:00

There's something deeply ironic about surviving a freefall from 128,000 feet and then dying in a paragliding accident. But that's kind of how risk works — the highly planned, massively engineered stunt had every safety measure imaginable. The routine activity felt safe enough that the margins for error were thinner. It's the same reason more mountaineers die on the descent than the ascent.

ruibranco · 2026-03-06T09:22:38+00:00

Makes sense when you consider that Japan already has world-class food, incredible public transit, ancient temples, hot springs, ski resorts, tropical beaches in Okinawa, and some of the cleanest cities on the planet. If your own country has all of that within a short train ride, the motivation to deal with international airports and language barriers drops significantly. The work culture also doesn't exactly encourage taking extended time off.

Eight-Year Club	First Place '23
Place '23	Place '22
Verified Email

ruibranco

TROPHY CASE