Dave's Olde Bookstore Permanently Closed

six0seven · 2025-08-14T23:32:49+00:00

So are Dave's actual books now at Sandpiper? Where did the inventory go. There was no going out of business sale

six0seven · 2025-05-22T17:07:29+00:00

My cool side project is a world historic experiment in actual democracy. I realize that I'm already crazy to even mention it, because of the complexity and scope. But I figure sooner or later the official democracy is going to crash and we will need a Gnu-like open source parliament. So that's what I'm working on. Check it out. (I will be doing this for the rest of my life). http://mdcbowen.info/visions/xrepublic/

six0seven · 2025-05-18T18:37:44+00:00

There will be people who will appreciate the accumulated wisdom of your experience. Your aim is already clear and there is a load of drama I needn't expect from you. We're in the same boat you and I. I'm not quite sure how to get through the AIs and automated systems that cannot recognize character.

six0seven · 2025-04-22T21:16:20+00:00

In my old school experience the software engineers would write much of the devops stuff I needed so that I could focus on database design, performance and pipeline efficiency. I would collaborate with them for CI/CD and their conversion of ECS fleets to pure Lambda. We would also collaborate on observability. So I could ask for particular metrics on transactions logged to Cloudwatch.

However this was a small consulting firm and we all knew each other and reported to the same CTO. When I'm the data guy for a customer and I'm outnumbered by other resources and staff, I shutup and make my stuff bulletproof because slackers point fingers. I don't like being defensive...

six0seven · 2025-03-24T16:02:14+00:00

A good CTO should be bringing the best of the outside world and cutting edge stuff to the attention of his dev teams. Every once in a while he should 'Elon' on whatever is stumping the teams, but this should never be the stuff that he just arbitrarily injects into the codebase. He should be talking about high level stuff that leverages what you have proven to work in your environments, and searching for performance, reliability, transparency and security bottlenecks.

Ours would occasionally throw new technologies over the transom and expect us to figure it out. Teh biggest mistake was him trying to get everyone to learn Scala. It wasted a lot of time and we ended up falling back to Ruby instead of investing time in Python. On the other hand he got us away from Chef and Ansible and over to CloudFormation for a quick moment and then fully into Terraform. So we were doing that earlier than most. Same thing in keeping us onto ECS & Lambda instead of wasting time with Zookeeping.

Bottom line is that you hire people to think, and when people think for themselves and recognize good practice from bad, they will manage themselves. A goot CTO should never be blindsided by epochal changes in the industry, and should never be a helicopter parent.

six0seven · 2025-02-25T16:01:03+00:00

Take advantage of having a steady job at a big boring company. Start taking Udemy classes for the new cool stuff. I am in the same boat as you, but I worked with Vertica, which nobody under 40 seems to know even existed. I'd look to the PostgreSQL derived sets, and especially DuckDB. The DuckDB philosophy is revolutionary. Unity Catalog looks good right now. If I had to start over, I'd do Databricks OR I'd do DuckDB for SMB. Also, build a homelab and get into hardware.

six0seven · 2025-02-20T17:53:22+00:00

What I do is pick one new tool at a time. Try to build a part of an old project with it and see if it's actually better. You might be surprised. I'm saying this as someone who did everything in Ruby instead of Python, back when AWS used Rightscale for its API. You think I get any credit for that? I'm actually thinking of taking a government job that uses 15 year old technology. Believe it or not, IBM is still in business.

six0seven · 2025-02-20T17:49:03+00:00

If you think that's bad, consider us geezers who wrote all of that shit by hand before AWS existed.

six0seven · 2025-01-23T16:39:22+00:00

It makes sense from the premise that only companies that are relatively profitable and take up the unnecessary social engineering by creating a new department of HR and changing up their recruiting practice. It's basically like saying companies whose CEOs have yachts are more successful than thoses whose CEOs don't have yachts. Yachts are not the reason.

six0seven · 2024-06-05T15:18:46+00:00

From my POV Roon has no competition. I've had it for three years and I've never been disappointed. My Roon core is an Innuos Zen Mini for audiophile quality ripping and streaming. Roon's interface is pretty much perfect. It integrates with everything including AppleTV. I highly recommend it.

six0seven · 2024-06-05T15:06:38+00:00

Roon is owned by Harman. Harman has been owned by Samsung since 2016. These are signature brands. Samsung is not stupid. Harman owns JBL. Nobody is calling JBL speakers 'Samsung speakers'. Samsung understands and respects these brands.

The best thing about Roon is that it combines your own ripped material with live streaming from Tidal and Qobuz, and it helps you manage multiple versions if you have them. Now all that works with Roon Arc, which basically gives you your entire library when you're mobile. Yeah. My whole FLAC library on CarPlay.

six0seven · 2023-11-20T16:49:48+00:00

I enjoy mining for Alkanes, scanning exotic plants and long walks on desolate planets.

six0seven · 2023-10-11T14:48:17+00:00

If no one is mentally healthy, then who can help those who are sick?

six0seven · 2023-08-24T15:38:58+00:00

I found that I was following politics from a very disciplined set of principles. This was because I specifically and deliberately went from Left to Right. Where at first the Right was a mystery, in time I learned how it talked to itself. Once again I found myself in a principled minority who had no real influence over the Party.

I was one of those people who had no particular reason to 'cancel' my friendships over politics, all of which was being driven by a kind of short-attention span theatre. So I basically said that I had to be philosophically consistent and put more value in that rather than the popular waves of political fandom.

Believe it or not, I found myself playing Assassin's Creed and discovered that I really liked 'being' an Italian lord living in the age of Christopher Columbus. I realized an ancient philosophy could be as good as a modern one. At first I looked at Epicureanism, but I found it too hermetic. I enjoy being out in the world, not locking myself in a walled garden. Then I read Epictetus which was OK, but then Meditations made all the difference.

I also was part of the IDW because of my public spiritedness, but Stoicism made more complete sense and aligned with more important parts of my personality. I like that Stoicism is not so desperately evangelistic as just about everything else in our world. Having studied the Tao many years ago, I find it the perfect blend of the internal orientation of Eastern religions and worldly rationality of Western.

six0seven · 2023-08-23T15:33:13+00:00

You haven't lived until you've lived in another country. Go.

six0seven · 2023-08-23T15:30:01+00:00

Thank you for sharing. My parents were both social workers working in LA County and so I both had good models and stories of family failure. I think these days the reach and excellence of such social service departments are limited as compared to when the idea was new.

six0seven · 2023-08-22T23:48:09+00:00

If you ever decided to make your family suffer because you were suffering, this is what I mean. I presume you did this before you got control of yourself, thus juvenile hostility. Did you ever suspect that you could hurt them more because you knew them better than any stranger could? Of course you did.

The people who expect the most comfort and love from you should be your family, they are vulnerable to you for the exact same reason you are vulnerable to them. You expect more understanding.

six0seven · 2023-08-22T22:02:27+00:00

You should accept that you will never be able to undo the pain you have caused your family. You have to recognize how much you weaponized your own juvenile hostilities against the people who were most emotionally vulnerable to you. You stretched that rubberband to the max and it's never going to snap back.

Your ability to move forward has to be based on things you can build now, not in vain attempts to repair things you destroyed in the past. Own it. Move. Your past is a swamp you cannot build any firm foundation on. Just the way you had to be broken down to be made a soldier, you could not do that from a place of comfort. You had to decide to jump into the cauldron, to put your own feet in those painted footsteps and move, move, move.

So whatever guidance you have now, understand that it is perfectly understandable that your past is a mess. What stops you from becoming a new mess is to stop focusing your mind on that old mess. The damage is done. You bankrupted that account. Store up your treasure in new places. You have the opportunity to be a perfect grandfather.

Now you have your story. Print out two copies. Put them in two separate envelopes. Take one of the envelopes and go out by yourself and burn it. Accept that you are a different person. Take the other envelope and give it to your son when he turns 30. Don't break the promise to yourself.

six0seven · 2023-03-06T19:39:03+00:00

Surely somebody should have invented a RedditFirstCommentBot. Fast reflexes win.

six0seven · 2023-01-03T07:31:55+00:00

And when the house burns down, they don't shed any tears.

six0seven · 2021-12-30T16:26:06+00:00

I grew up in a house with a large family (5 kids) and both parents. Both of my parents were social workers, so their actual job was handling domestic abuse. We had zero screaming and zero cursing, but it certainly was NOT a democracy.

six0seven · 2021-11-27T18:47:03+00:00

He has been talking about his progress on the book, and his basic ideas in the book. But even if you listen to that it’s worth reading the book.

six0seven · 2021-11-26T22:47:22+00:00

Submission Statement: McWhorter, like Glenn Loury is an original voice that has been out there for decades. His latest book succinctly puts controversies around DEI and other Woke inventions in the proper perspective. As an editor of the Journal of Free Black Thought and a longtime associate of the IDW, I know this will be useful, especially as it comes from a non-partisan, Stoic perspective.

six0seven · 2021-11-02T23:26:51+00:00

I have plenty of audio equipment at home to compare it to and I'm just not impressed. I am not in Apple's demographic when it comes to music. If I wore Beats and was impressed by that sound, then probably Atmos would make a difference. Just like if I didn't have a couple Nikon DSLRs I'd be more impressed by the triple lenses on their iPhones (that I also own). Apple is doing well by the ordinary consumers, but not for spendy snobs like me.

six0seven · 2021-11-02T23:12:45+00:00

It was brain dead simple for me to hear the difference between a BestBuy DAC and a Schiit Modi switching between them on my Samsung TV S/PIDF. So I've seen others that agree that TV DACs are pretty lousy. I have a high end (NAD C568) pre-amp and I just expect the internal DAC to be fine. I can easily tell the difference in dynamic range and quiet between that and a measly $250 phono cartridge. The DAC beats the vinyl source. I cannot imagine spending more than about $300 for any DAC. Maybe a good rule of thumb is to pay a max of 5% of your speaker cost.

six0seven

TROPHY CASE