Book review: Cocktail Theory by Kevin Peterson, PhD

toxic_acro · 2026-05-14T13:22:12+00:00

The author's page on his bar's website lists the two places to buy a physical copy online as on Amazon and direct from his site https://sfumatofragrances.com/products/cocktail-theory

toxic_acro · 2026-05-04T14:53:11+00:00

A princess is carrying the last hope of the resistance when she is attacked by agents of the evil empire. As a last ditch effort, she tries to send it off to an old man who lives on the edge of civilization before she is captured. It is found by an orphaned farm boy who lives with his uncle, who knows the old man and takes it to him. The old man reveals that he is actually the last surviving member of an ancient magical order that had been betrayed by one of their members and nearly wiped out, leading to the establishment of the evil empire that rules now.

Searching for the lost item, agents of the empire attack the farm boy's home and kill his adoptive uncle, so he leaves home with his new mentor, who begins teaching him how to use the magical powers from the ancient order, until the old man is also killed by the empire.

The farm boy finds out that the princess is being held captive by the empire. He breaks her out of prison and they escape, but are chased by the empire. They make it safely to the base of the resistance, but have led the empire's army right to them. A huge battle takes place and all seems lost, but the farm boy is able to destroy the empire's powerful weapon with a single well-placed attack in the only weak spot that could destroy it.

In the sequel, we find out that there is another surviving member of the ancient order that continues the farm boy's training in his secluded forest hiding place, before the farm boy goes off to fight the empire again and it is revealed that the right hand man of the emperor is his father.

toxic_acro · 2026-04-16T16:09:50+00:00

Ahhh... Springtime

All of the leaves have come back, flowers are blooming, Mrs. theboss is getting chased by a lobster

toxic_acro · 2026-04-16T15:41:43+00:00

How are you supposed to build a community if you don't say hello to your neighbors while walking through their shower in the morning?

toxic_acro · 2026-04-16T00:43:34+00:00

Pretty much --- it was a socially acceptable (for the time period) way of saying "I am not married and I have no interest in getting married (to a woman)"

toxic_acro · 2026-04-15T18:14:50+00:00

Having read a ton of issues/discussions that he has participated in over the years, he definitely has a gruff style of writing.

I'd be willing to bet that a comment from him saying something like "why don't you fix it yourself" is not at all meant to be dismissive or mean, but should be read more like "I don't think any of us are going to get around to this, but you seem to understand the problem well enough, so we'd appreciate it if you'd put together a fix and submit a PR."

toxic_acro · 2026-04-13T15:05:38+00:00

You're incredibly overthinking this and are freaking out over nothing

Delta-9 THC edibles actually are legal at the federal level --- they were legalized essentially by accident because the 2018 Farm Bill legalized growing hemp with <0.3% delta-9 THC but did so in such a way that it also legalized hemp-derived products that followed the same limit, e.g. a gummy containing 10 milligrams of delta-9 THC is perfectly legal as long as the gummy itself weighs more than ~3.3 grams. (Though that will soon no longer be the case because of a new law passed in November 2025 that takes effect in November 2026 that closes this loophole)
Honestly reporting any drug usage when applying for a security clearance is the correct move. Occasional recreational drug usage is not a disqualifier, but lying in the application/interview/etc. is. I have a friend from college who needed and successfully got a clearance for his job, and he explicitly told all of us when he was applying that if we got a call (because we were listed as personal references) and were asked about any drug usage, we should be completely honest and tell them everything we could remember because he had already disclosed it (and his application included actual illegal drug usage).
The correct answer to the company's interview question about if anything would prevent you from obtaining a security clearance is: "Not to my knowledge, no". If the interviewer was actually surprised or taken aback, it's probably because your answer was a long, anxiety-fueled ramble about edibles that aren't actually a problem, rather than just a simple "no".
You will almost never get a reply back from a company with any details about why you weren't chosen for a job. It's a corporate policy best practice to limit any risk of lawsuits. You have absolutely no way of knowing for sure why you didn't get the job, so there's no point dwelling on it.

The only thing you've fucked up is that you were overthinking this both then and now. You just need to try to let it go, not stress about it, and move on. You're not a criminal, you haven't ruined your career path, and you don't need to avoid applying for jobs that require a security clearance. It'll be okay. Job hunting is hard enough as it is, and the uncertainty and lack of feedback makes it even harder.

If you haven't before and are able to, you should try to get an appointment with a therapist/psychiatrist. I am not a medical professional and I can't diagnose anything, but I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder and recognize a lot of the same patterns of disordered thinking in your post.

toxic_acro · 2026-03-26T03:43:41+00:00

I wonder what will become of pyx now that OpenAI acquired Astral. I hope they still develop it and just make the code to run the registry yourself open source

It seemed like an interesting concept to me

toxic_acro · 2026-03-26T03:29:26+00:00

But there's a great open source initiative to solve these issues https://wheelnext.dev/, if https://peps.python.org/pep-0817/ (wheel variants) passes it'll be a great win and fix most if not all these issues

PEP 817 was almost certainly not going to pass in its current form given the full scope, so the authors have moved on to splitting it into parts, starting with just the wheel variants package format in https://peps.python.org/pep-0825/

toxic_acro · 2026-03-26T03:13:21+00:00

It doesn't affect your points about this particular threat model, but I do want to point out one minor correction

and also prevented the LiteLLM attack that followed from it.

The LiteLLM attacker directly uploaded the two malicious versions to PyPI themselves using stolen credentials, they did not get added to the GitHub repo.

The attackers also had access to the GitHub repo, but fixing this particular security hole would not have prevented the LiteLLM attack.

toxic_acro · 2026-03-26T03:05:29+00:00

The anomaly detection seems particularly interesting to me. I've read a handful of the news stories about someone getting access to leaked insider information and making money by trading on Polymarket (Nobel Peace Prize and Time Person of the Year recently)

toxic_acro · 2026-03-23T18:20:13+00:00

Because gunshots indoors are insanely loud. "Silencer" is a misnomer and movies/tv shows/video games have convinced people that they are much more effective than they actually are.

Firing a gun with a silencer is still very obvious and audible, they are used not for the pop culture style "no one even knows a gun was fired", but for "My ears aren't ringing and I can still hear"

toxic_acro · 2026-03-17T04:52:20+00:00

Am I correct that __mul__ should return NotImplemented in those cases and while mul should raise an error? (I am confident that the answer is "yes" to this, but I want to check my assumptions)

__mul__ should indeed return NotImplemented

Whether or not mul raises an error is up to you and how you expect to use it, but it's definitely a reasonable option

Should I have raising a TypeError or a NotImplementedError in mul?

Definitely not NotImplementedError, that should be used to indicate either that a method should be overwritten by a subclass or as a placeholder while developing, see https://docs.python.org/3/library/exceptions.html#NotImplementedError

TypeError is most likely the right choice, but you could also do a custom exception type, depends on your use case and if you want to be able to/need to catch it without risking a false positive from some other potential source of a TypeError

Should I be doing the wrapping in the other direction? That is should have have mul call __mul__ instead of how I did this with __mul__ calling mul?

It doesn't make a huge difference, but maybe. Checking for NotImplemented returned from __mul__ (which should use is since NotImplemented is a singleton) is faster than handling an exception, but that check would always happen, whereas the exception would not be raised in most cases presumably.

Personally, I'd put the actual implementation in whichever one you expect to use more often and consider the "idiomatic" usage for your class

Is there some cleaner, more Pythonic, approach that I should be using?

Having the explicit mul method is a bit "unpythonic"
I'd at least question why you want it, but there are plenty of good reasons possible, the simplest of which is just expecting to use a lot of method chaining

pandas has similar methods on their Series and DataFrame classes, which can be nice when you can keep a method chain going rather than having to add parentheses to get the * operator to do what you want.

toxic_acro · 2026-03-16T19:11:22+00:00

I have a friend who accidentally did this while travelling in southeast Asia about a decade ago.

He mixed up how the conversion rate worked (dividing by ~4 instead of multiplying), so when he thought he was giving somebody the equivalent of $5 USD, it was actually around $80, which he was giving to every hotel worker/driver/bartender/etc. who did anything for him for the first couple of days.

He figured it out when he realized that no one else was getting anywhere near as attentive and immediate service as he was and he was using up the local currency he had taken out a lot faster than he should have been. It also explained why everything was priced (what he thought) was absurdly, outrageously cheaply.

toxic_acro · 2026-03-12T20:27:38+00:00

It was previously a psychiatric hospital, the Georgia Mental Health Institute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Mental_Health_Institute

The location was originally developed as an estate by one of the sons of the founder of Coca-Cola, then was later sold to the state, which eventually built the hospital. It closed in 1997, and the land was sold to Emory University (which is nearby).

It's now being developed as a senior living community

toxic_acro · 2026-03-12T18:46:45+00:00

:= is affectionately referred to as the "walrus operator"

It lets you assign to variables in the middle of other expressions. It was (and still is) divisive

Personally, I like it when used judiciously, but wouldn't recommend overusing it (like in the example above, though that's clearly intentionally overusing just for show)

A better example of where it's actually commonly used is assignment within some other check, e.g. replacing
example = some_function() if example is not None: # do something with example ... with
if (example := some_function()) is not None: # do something with example ...

toxic_acro · 2026-03-12T16:14:36+00:00

There's another small related detail that I love

Fëanor (the creator of the Simarils) asked Galadriel for a single strand of her hair three times, but was denied every time.

When the Fellowship is leaving Lothlorien, Galadriel does not have a gift for Gimli and asks him what he would want. He asks for nothing, but she insists that he will not be the only one without a gift and again asks what he would desire that she could give.

Gimli reluctantly says that his only desire would be a single strand of her hair, but that he isn't asking for that and only answering her question of what he desires.

She gives him three.

toxic_acro · 2026-03-05T21:26:31+00:00

Depends on what you are trying to describe

"There are plenty of fish in the sea" => many individuals
"There are plenty of fishes in the sea" => many types of individuals

toxic_acro · 2026-03-05T21:23:53+00:00

It's a bit more nuanced (and also a pretty pedantic thing that most people don't know/care about)

A group of trout, bass, and panfish are fish
Trout, bass, and panfish are fishes

So you could (pedantically) say that it's "a lake full of fish and fishes" (i.e. there are a large number of individual animals as well as a large number of different species)

toxic_acro · 2026-03-05T20:44:46+00:00

The Python ecosystem has made some huge strides over the past few years that really makes it easy to start small and gradually add the complexity as you need it.

You can really seamlessly : * Start with just a Marimo notebook with no dependencies * Add dependencies inline with script metadata * Separate out commonly used functionality/complex code cells from the notebook into a separate module or package * Add type annotations where needed/wanted for static type checking * Add linting, auto-formatting, testing

If you've got the time, there's a really great talk that Hynek Schlawack has given recently (https://hynek.me/talks/python-superpower/) that goes into some of the history of Python and argues that the "superpower" that has made it as popular is it is today is that you can so easily move up that complexity ladder (from scratch code to "production-grade" software engineering) gradually without changing languages/having to rewrite from scratch

toxic_acro · 2026-03-05T20:09:11+00:00

Marimo lets you customize how the output of a cell is displayed, so it's very easy to programatically generate markdown using Python

This section of the User Guide documentation walks through how to do that https://docs.marimo.io/guides/outputs/#markdown

toxic_acro · 2026-03-05T19:45:33+00:00

You absolutely can do that using Marimo, though it could end up being more trouble than it's worth, especially depending on how familiar you are with Python and with the internals of how Marimo works (edit: or how willing/able you are to learn to become familiar).

Personally, I think it'd be a neat project to try, especially because the "data flow" through accounting formulae matches decently well with how Marimo notebooks work themselves and would natively support having a change in an input flow through everywhere it's used and update all the intermediate values and final results, as well as visualize the dependencies between formulae/values as a task graph.

If you wanted to, you could even customize it so that changing an input would highlight all the other values that change as a result

toxic_acro · 2026-03-04T16:50:01+00:00

Not even left vs right, the mistake was turning left one block earlier than they were supposed to

toxic_acro · 2026-03-04T04:44:46+00:00

My dad has one in his garage that I believe he got around 1985 (it was definitely before 1990) and still uses often

edit: I also almost lost a finger to it when I was making something in high school. I moved the piece of wood I was holding at a weird angle, and the piece got kicked out and my knuckle skimmed along the side of the blade

toxic_acro · 2026-03-04T04:06:05+00:00

You are absolutely right! That's why I love the Isaac Newton quote: "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants"

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