matt sarnoff

numpy rhymes with “dumpy” and scipy is pronounced “skippy.” Fight me

I’m finding that I’ve been writing my comments in Canadian English (“colour”) but still using American English (“color”) in my code.

At least I haven’t been busted for saying “zee” instead of “zed” yet.

My top 4 Vancouver landmarks so far:

4. The giant drill bit off Grandview Highway next to the Canadian Tire

3. Dude Chilling Park

2. The ominous glowing red W looming over the city

1. The bigass pile of Yellow across the water from Canada Place

So now I can finally give an update…

We moved to Canada!
🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦🇨🇦

I’m in the Vancouver area, working on next-generation lidar systems at Lumotive. Looking forward to connecting with more hardware hackers and retro tech folks up here!

Testing Openvibe to see if this post shows up on both mastodon and bluesky

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/rolled-semi-spills-load-of-bees-at-the-i-5-and-i-405-interchange/

It’s the 10th anniversary of the Lynwood bee truck incident

When I worked at Apple (before Apple Park) I brought my parents to lunch at work. (IL4)

Visitors to Apple had to wear badges with their name and company. If they weren’t with a company, they would write “self.”

For my parents’ badges, I put “super.”

This is only funny if you know Objective-C.

There was a sign that said “We’re #1” and my son read it as “We’re Hashtag One.” Gen Alpha is doomed

USPS confirmation email showing phone number of (nul)lnu-llnull

Well that’s a new one

This cat’s name is Annie’s Shells and Cheese. She is a good cat.

YouTube video by drewtoothpaste CRUDBUMP: Fuck You If You Don't Like Christmas

youtu.be/5ysfQjKKi70?...

Not sure if it’s worth spending almost $1000… I mean, I could get like three burgers at Five Guys for the same price

It’s very curious. Unlike the original Pulsar which blanked the display until the button is pressed, the new one uses a reflective LCD display that’s daylight visible, but pressing the button lights up the LED digits like the original. Also it’s heavy af

Hamilton PSR watch with stainless steel finish showing time in seven-segment digits composed of discrete green LEDs

AHHHH THEY REBOOTED THE HAMILTON PULSAR AND NOW I WANT ONE

(Does anyone else just get really creeped out by Walmart in general? I have no problems in any other big stores, but something about Walmart just makes me want to leave as quickly as possible)

(Fred Meyer is like Walmart but without the deeply unsettling emotional aura)

I heard the Dead Kennedys’ Night of the Living Rednecks long before I moved to the PNW, which means every time I pass a Fred Meyer I think of that dude in the crowd who yells “Fred Meyer!!!!”

I haven’t done functional programming in a while (Standard ML and a tiny bit of Haskell) but I do really like it. Pattern matching, sum types, type inference… all fascinating stuff

Mentioning “keyPathsForValuesAffectingValueForKey” will send me into a full-on panic attack

I’ve got war stories for days

I guess I like the language for it for the same reasons I like Captain Beefheart’s music… It’s weird, but completely inaccessible to beginners. And AppKit undeniably sucks

A lot of the work I did was in the days before automatic reference counting (manual alloc/retain/release/autorelease) and THAT was awful

I worked in the era of “let’s make Mac apps look/animate like iOS apps” and it was hell on earth trying to get AppKit to things it was not designed for

lol that was my life for 8 years

The language and the runtime are pretty cool (introspection/reflection, self-documenting message names, observer/notifier/delegate patterns) but a lot of the Cocoa APIs are horrible, and bindings are inscrutable black magic fuckery

YouTube video by mightypotato Lawnmower Dreams

I am so happy that this video is still online after sixteen years youtu.be/9Yrt9qkBQ2Q?...

YouTube video by Nightwish - Topic Walking In The Air

It’s tiiiiiiiiiime! youtu.be/7UGwmqgC6ck?...

forbidden licorice chewing gum

(correction: Latin has no gender-neutral third person, so “graduate” might be more appropriate?)

Olaf from Frozen. Josh Gad graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in 2003.

Despite all the Nobel laureates and Turing Award winners, this is my college’s most famous alumnus

YouTube video by Yoshi's VGM Steam Gardens - Super Mario Odyssey OST

7 years later and still thinking about how the Wooded Kingdom music in Super Mario Odyssey goes way harder than it needed to

IT’S JUST A FOREST LEVEL KOJI, YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO GO OFF AND COMPOSE A SURF ROCK JAZZ FUSION MASTERPIECE

youtu.be/-rfoYSmx0rk?...

Three electric printing adding machines, a Monroe model 209-11-001 (1930s) flanked by two Burroughs P200 machines (1955 and 1961)

The Diehl may be a lost cause, but I have these three adding machines that I got running last year. They all mostly work but still need more cleaning. That 1930s Monroe is gonna look amazing once I get to it.

“Sometimes you just have to chuck it in the fuck it bucket and move on.”

Honestly I doubt I’ll be able to make any progress on getting this calculator working anytime soon. I’ll put it back together, put it away, and come back to it when my kids go off to college.

Some people dissolve the lubricants with kerosene, which seems absolutely bonkers to me