I’ve been following Darren Wilkinson’s work for a long time now, and even if I’m not really interested in Scala I keep checking his blog and GitHub from time to time. He just released a course on functional programming for scientific computing, available at GH. Go check his blog to learn more: An introduction to functional programming for scalable statistical computing and machine learning.

The GIL is a major obstacle to concurrency. For scientific computing tasks, this lack of concurrency is often a bigger issue than speed of executing Python code, since most of the processor cycles are spent in optimized CPU or GPU kernels. The GIL introduces a global bottleneck that can prevent other threads from making progress if they call any Python code. There are existing ways to enable parallelism in CPython today, but those techniques come with significant limitations (see Alternatives). — PEP 703 – Making the Global Interpreter Lock Optional in CPython

♪ Sheri Weldon · A Taste Of Honey

I just made my GH biostats public, just so you know how I like playing with translating R code to other languages, without any hope of finishing this new side project anytime soon. Details in this longer blog post. Want some crazy plots? Go to the figs directory in each language and compare the output. Be aware this is highly work-in-progress, as advertised on the GH repo, and there are many bugs lying around. Anyway, no more raw Matplotlib for me, I felt in love with plotnine.

Best way to learn about recent (non-breaking) changes in ggplot2 is to rerun your old R code. Now I know that :

Using `size` aesthetic for lines was deprecated in ggplot2 3.4.0. Please use `linewidth` instead.
The `<scale>` argument of `guides()` cannot be `FALSE`. Use "none" instead as of ggplot2 3.3.4.

Other than that, I found that the theme_minimal() is as good as the hrbrthemes:theme_ipsum. Less dependencies, clear and elegant graphical output.

Listening to the last album from Tindersticks, Stars at Noon. Great artwork, as always. Now I need to buy their Past Imperfect compilation, which featured a limited edition box set comes with a double LP of Live at Glasgow City Halls, 5th October 2008.

Users who want to block all such external mediaanalysisd look-ups can do so using a software firewall to block outgoing connections to Apple’s servers by that process through port 443. That may well disable other macOS features. — Is Apple checking images we view in the Finder?

Twenty years-old stuff that are still lying around, even though I wear the ring most of the time.

Secure Ubuntu 18.04 server setup: Never tried to use an encrypted LVM volume unlockable via SSH. It looks like an interesting approach:

Applying encryption is fast when it is done upon creation: since the initial contents of the partition are ignored, they are not encrypted; only new data will be encrypted as it is written. — Ubuntu LVM Encryption

♪ Massive Attack · Inertia Creeps