Tobin Baker

database, concurrency nerd

I barely speak for myself, let alone my employer

that said, fuck authoritarians

Location: Cascadia

Last Notes

2026-07-31 00:34:46 UTC

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the CDC's initial anti-masking guidance and subsequent reversal (within a couple weeks) was definitely not based on new scientific evidence coming to light

2026-06-12 23:56:41 UTC

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the precise relationship between abstract "observable" operator eigenstates/eigenvalues and actual lab measurements still baffles me

2026-06-12 19:55:46 UTC

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really dumb question: presumably measuring a neutrino's mass (however that is done) collapses it into a mass eigenstate (with measured mass as the eigenvalue), but what collapses a neutrino into a flavor eigenstate? i.e., how is flavor "measured" (and what does the eigenvalue mean operationally)?

2026-01-29 22:57:23 UTC

I really love designing tabulation machines here at IBM. Such cool technology. I'm not really exposed to the sales side but hear there's a lot of demand from Europe, Germany maybe? Anyway, super-fun technology to work on.

2025-10-27 21:06:56 UTC

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well he did protest the Obama admin's droning of a US citizen back in the day, and has called these "extrajudicial killings" and faulted them for lack of due process.
https://newrepublic.com/post/202275/rand-paul-donald-trump-caribbean-strikes-extrajudicial-killings

2025-10-27 18:10:28 UTC

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unfortunately Rand Paul is an extreme outlier among the GOP (always has been a principled noninterventionist), so his response doesn't tell you much about the general "conservative" attitude to these extrajudicial killings.

2025-06-22 04:06:00 UTC

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if this is subtooting the bombing, why do you think Harris would have acted any differently?

2025-04-14 20:42:22 UTC

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granted, the intuition I'm referring to is from 25+ years ago when I was learning diff geo, and I might well approach it differently if I were learning it now.

2025-04-14 17:46:06 UTC

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It may be less elegant than derivations but I find the equivalence class definition useful for building intuition for e.g. pushforwards of tangent vectors: I just imagine a representative curve through the source point mapped to another representative curve through the target point.

2025-02-10 02:10:23 UTC

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We need a general strike, but that seems like an impossible collective action problem. I suspect a general strike against just the big tech companies would be enough to get the oligarchs’ attention.

2024-08-24 01:55:07 UTC

only now appreciating this wisdom
https://www.yosefk.com/blog/profiling-with-ctrl-c.html
https://fd.discuss.systems/media_attachments/files/113/014/505/286/825/722/original/ef0ff742ffc46bc1.png