Brandon Rohrer

Robots and data and robots learning from data.
https://brandonrohrer.org 
#Robots
#Robotics
 #ReinforcementLearning 
#MachineLearning
#DataScience

blog: https://brandonrohrer.org

Public Key

npub1jh4qsxnz0nhyfefjsfvcdmxxvgfe6p5vf0dvh6pq4r6ytwwxcp4sl9eag0

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsft6sgrf38emjyu5egykvxanrxyyuaq6xyhkktaqs23az9h8rvq6cpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds2ag658

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relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1jh4qsxnz0nhyfefjsfvcdmxxvgfe6p5vf0dvh6pq4r6ytwwxcp4sl9eag0

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Last Notes

2026-05-12 11:37:10 GMT

I host my blog repo on Codeberg with mirrors on GitHub and GitLab. It started as a fun exercise in overkill, but I’m feeling better about it by the day. It’s three times the hassle. But maybe going multi-infra is worth the robustness benefit when trusted institutions start failing.

2026-04-20 11:36:32 GMT

Front end is my passion
https://cdn.masto.host/recsyssocial/media_attachments/files/116/436/827/434/342/557/original/5629e9c9f5ecfa36.jpeg

2026-04-16 11:24:33 GMT

The more I read about Python packaging the less I understand

2026-04-15 11:35:45 GMT

I can’t tell whether the Boston Globe wants me to feel happy or sad about this
https://cdn.masto.host/recsyssocial/media_attachments/files/116/408/512/790/831/346/original/c0395d4c3c7edbb9.jpeg

2026-04-14 20:28:51 GMT

This from @npub1fzn…nnyk came across my RSS feed. Chef’s kiss worthy, as always.
https://vickiboykis.com/2026/04/13/mechanical-sympathy/

2026-04-13 14:01:55 GMT

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Menopause Manifesto by Dr Jen Gunter is excellent

2026-04-10 11:34:47 GMT

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Banksy-level art here. Thank you for this

2026-04-09 01:22:44 GMT

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hooooly crap what a ride. I always thought espionage movies were exaggerating. I never suspected they were underselling reality.

2026-04-01 22:32:48 GMT

You want to see a rocket go to the fucking moon? Happening in two minutes!!!
https://www.youtube.com/live/Tf_UjBMIzNo?si=RImwNgSRjgIPm63l

2026-03-14 15:03:26 GMT

Any sufficiently detailed sourdough recipe is in distinguishable from erotica

2026-03-03 13:38:08 GMT

Signature move of a good Baltic rye
https://cdn.masto.host/recsyssocial/media_attachments/files/116/165/514/613/170/812/original/722d11f59a5777fc.jpeg

2026-02-10 00:17:58 GMT

I’ve played embarrassingly few computer games (and most of those in a quarter arcade) but the Fallout tv show makes me want to give it a go

2026-02-06 02:08:42 GMT

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🤦
I think it's fixed now

2026-01-25 03:27:30 GMT

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very good looking site! Instant rss sub

2026-01-24 14:51:34 GMT

🎶🎵🎶
A scream
is a wish
your heart makes
🎶🎵🎶

2026-01-23 23:24:27 GMT

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oh someone beat me to the joke!

2026-01-23 15:16:38 GMT

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dark coffee today. With you on this. 💙💜💚🩵🩷🩶

2026-01-23 15:13:59 GMT

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text supplied by my wife, sentiment supplied by my Shih Tzu

2026-01-23 14:35:59 GMT

https://cdn.masto.host/recsyssocial/media_attachments/files/115/944/912/008/682/105/original/ede833b28a4fcd68.jpeg

2026-01-22 16:14:50 GMT

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you must be so productive! #lifehacks

2026-01-21 13:51:49 GMT

Solid group therapy session for anyone in tech
https://www.anildash.com/2026/01/05/a-tech-career-in-2026/

2026-01-21 11:33:36 GMT

https://cdn.masto.host/recsyssocial/media_attachments/files/115/932/870/203/753/483/original/8e42fa4e5cce2cdb.jpeg

2026-01-21 00:51:58 GMT

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that is three Shih tzus of hair

2026-01-19 12:52:00 GMT

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I feel like the name “greedy algorithm” is kind of judgy

2026-01-19 12:43:14 GMT

The cool thing about starting with the lowest hanging fruit is that there will always be another piece of lowest hanging fruit.

2026-01-18 23:01:35 GMT

The answer to almost every programming question is “it depends” so it is remarkable that the answer to “when should I do this refactor?” is “right now”. I’ve never regretted it.

2026-01-16 23:45:17 GMT

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pro tip: If you image search "the sweet boutique fuck ice cookies" it pulls up something very different

2026-01-16 23:01:09 GMT

Mass. bakeries do not mess around.
https://cdn.masto.host/recsyssocial/media_attachments/files/115/907/262/182/149/101/original/e1bbff718aa587e2.png

2026-01-15 15:32:42 GMT

The autistic urge to write a Risks section that is four times longer than the rest of the document combined

2026-01-13 21:38:30 GMT

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at least they are consistent 🙄

2026-01-13 11:48:17 GMT

“but you haven’t tried the *latest * models”
[@iris_meredith](https://mastodon.social/@iris_meredith ) did, so you don’t have to. An open eyed snapshot of 2026 coding assistants. https://mastodon.social/@iris_meredith/115887026554644125

2026-01-03 01:04:07 GMT

If the tone of Technology Review is anything to go by, patience of the mainstream with LLM hype is wearing thin.

2026-01-02 20:05:04 GMT

RE: https://hci.social/@mdekstrand/115826575230913077
"Some of the best websites in the world are just HTML, and they belong to their authors. ... Don’t get caught up in tooling and frameworks, just write HTML and get something online. If you’re an engineer, delight that you’re not beholden to the same standards of quality and rigorous testing that you are at work — draft some ideas, hit the h1 to p tag combo, and publish."
#note169e…cgud

2026-01-01 15:30:05 GMT

happy new year
https://cdn.masto.host/recsyssocial/media_attachments/files/115/820/553/872/330/683/original/3fca8c4c6b6d4b27.jpeg

2025-12-31 22:53:46 GMT

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@nedbat/115815743499718930
OF COURSE I clicked. Now all I can do is repeat [@nedbat](https://hachyderm.io/@nedbat ) 's warning. Save yourselves. It's too late for me.

2025-12-31 22:15:47 GMT

I know today’s date but could not with confidence tell you the day of the week

2025-12-31 18:02:38 GMT

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genuine gratitude for the eye rolling/day brightening

2025-12-31 17:58:03 GMT

PAVEL
@npub1yyd…d3ge https://mastodon.social/@PavelASamsonov/115815180936717189

2025-12-31 03:01:29 GMT

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But instead I nerdsniped myself into writing an arbitrary precision addition function
https://codeberg.org/brohrer/graffitiwall-server/src/branch/main/arithmetic.py
Because it was focused on such a tiny slice of functionality with a particular use case, I was able to craft it to be simple and to give exactly the behavior I want.
If you discover any breaking cases in the Adder app please let me know. I've been having a really good time putting it together and now feel an unreasonable amount of pride in it.

2025-12-31 03:00:30 GMT

It is surprisingly hard to get computers to do addition with decimals the way a third-grader can.
adding floats gives things like
0.1 + 0.2 = 0.30000000000000004
https://graffitiwall.nexus/graffiti_adder.html
The mpmath library in Python is capable of arbitrary precision, but still gives things like
-1.2 + 1.21 = 0.009999999999...
https://mpmath.org
The answer I was looking for was Python's decimal library. It gives
0.1 + 0.2 = 0.3
and
-1.2 + 1.21 = 0.01
https://docs.python.org/3/library/decimal.html
https://cdn.masto.host/recsyssocial/media_attachments/files/115/811/941/266/725/311/original/e341c7ad07b83a88.png

2025-12-29 01:47:52 GMT

4 STARS from @npub1503…fme5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
https://weatherishappening.network/@WEATHERISHAPPENING/115800132926368560

2025-12-28 20:03:07 GMT

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UNGOVERNABLE

2025-12-28 03:00:38 GMT

My Magnificent Adding Machine app has gotten a glow up.
https://graffitiwall.nexus
- no floating point weirdness
- a bit of amateur web design
- timing info
- a beefy database behind it
I won't say unbreakable, but harder to accidentally break.
https://cdn.masto.host/recsyssocial/media_attachments/files/115/794/938/986/638/436/original/5499e6a613316230.png

2025-12-27 14:23:19 GMT

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this makes my LoTR nerd heart sing

2025-12-27 14:12:08 GMT

This is doubly funny if you watch her character in A Man on the Inside
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@mtothevizzah/115788551133863383

2025-12-25 23:55:52 GMT

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not all heroes…

2025-12-23 18:39:25 GMT

I’ve been intimidated by Postgres for a long time, but now that I’ve gone and got it working I feel kind of silly. It is a wildly powerful tool, so I expected to have a painful installation with building from source and modifying environment variables, but it turns out Postgres is built to be put to use quickly.
https://brandonrohrer.com/postgres_intro.html

2025-12-22 22:18:56 GMT

A long time SQLite user, I’m using my own Postgres server for the first time and having a real “I know kung fu” moment

2025-12-22 16:27:21 GMT

When I meet someone I've stopped asking myself whether they're fucked up. Instead I ask myself what flavor of fucked up they are. If I can't tell it means I don't know enough about them yet. The fuckedupedness is a foregone conclusion.

2025-12-22 12:19:29 GMT

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I’m expecting these to eventually become “promoted”, “please please” and “watch these dammit”

2025-12-21 20:23:42 GMT

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stunning. Someone pulls a strong line.

2025-12-21 20:14:45 GMT

me: no need for code hygiene or documentation. I’m the only one who’s ever going to see it.
3- days-from-now-me: what asshole wrote this

2025-12-20 15:08:26 GMT

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I love how installing and spinning up a postgres server in Linux is a one-liner

2025-12-20 15:07:38 GMT

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I resonate with this approach. It is definitely on my short list.

2025-12-20 13:06:13 GMT

seeking database opinions
It's a wild swing, but does anyone have experience with a database that
1. handles concurrency well
2. is a columnar store
3. is open source
Here is list of 2 with 3, but doesn't help with 1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_column-oriented_DBMSes&section=1#Free_and_open-source_software_(FOSS)

2025-12-19 18:00:22 GMT

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But don’t lose your head. You wouldn’t want to end up like Windows. Have some self respect.

2025-12-19 17:18:25 GMT

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be ungovernable
#govpunk

2025-12-19 15:07:57 GMT

Live with the confidence of someone who starts their version numbering at 1.0

2025-12-19 01:23:51 GMT

Apple TV just recommended me an M Night Shamalan and I'm trying not to feel insulted

2025-12-16 13:53:16 GMT

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I think I fixed it.
https://graffitiwall.nexus
https://cdn.masto.host/recsyssocial/media_attachments/files/115/729/574/155/603/761/original/240de219dbbc920c.png

2025-12-16 13:51:48 GMT

My gratitude to @npub1vgc…6zv2 for this cool html injection attack and reminding me about the importance of client-side validation.
https://kolektiva.social/@lumecolca/115727469759214470

2025-12-16 13:49:25 GMT

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OK this is very cool and a very good client-side validation cautionary tale.
I think I patched this particular hole

2025-12-16 05:04:50 GMT

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what am I even looking at here? I feel like there is secret knowledge being bandied about

2025-12-16 05:01:20 GMT

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I don’t understand this. But I’m going to.
https://cdn.masto.host/recsyssocial/media_attachments/files/115/727/484/001/406/992/original/92601bda78a2d930.jpeg

2025-12-15 15:58:09 GMT

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Tilly Seuss

2025-12-15 14:15:31 GMT

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My clickbait LinkedIn post:
It gives narrow-domain performance at super-human levels and exceeds benchmarks on this task for Gemini, GPT, Claude, and DeepSeek, far faster and at practically no cost.

2025-12-15 06:27:35 GMT

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what are you talking about that’s totally how math works

2025-12-15 06:24:37 GMT

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the only winning move is not to play

2025-12-15 02:20:07 GMT

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lol. Ok I’m going to have to revisit the documentation. Or add some clever backend logic and smartass error messages.

2025-12-15 01:45:06 GMT

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oh no! If it’s still breaking I’d love to see a screenshot for debugging

2025-12-15 01:43:41 GMT

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floats are gonna float

2025-12-14 23:33:28 GMT

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Also please appreciate my courageous neo-brutalist design aesthetic.

2025-12-14 23:32:18 GMT

I'm unironically proud to show off my web app https://graffitiwall.nexus
It will add two numbers for you. Whatever numbers you want.
https://cdn.masto.host/recsyssocial/media_attachments/files/115/720/511/183/164/928/original/a7263564355d3a7f.png

2025-12-13 23:10:26 GMT

How you know Die Hard is a *classic* Christmas movie.
https://cdn.masto.host/recsyssocial/media_attachments/files/115/714/780/217/078/716/original/c239ebdc8f7666ad.jpeg

2025-12-13 20:31:14 GMT

“Librarian” is the most punk rock profession. Even more so than “punk rocker”.

2025-12-13 03:39:01 GMT

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When you consider all of the things that could go wrong with a service exposed to the Internet, it’s kind of amazing that we can get it to work at all, which makes this setup extremely cool.
There are other, fancier ways to do all of these steps, and ways to handle yet more security and yet larger scale, but this Flask/Gunicorn/nginx set up is something you can put out into the world without apology. It’s a fully-baked grown-up solution.

2025-12-13 03:38:17 GMT

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systemd lets us run Gunicorn as a daemon, a background process that is automatically started when you turn the computer on and restarted when necessary. Once you set up Gunicorn as a daemon, you don’t have to worry about whether your lemonade vendors fell asleep, or decided to go home. Nope, with systemd the lemonade emporium is up and running 24/7.

2025-12-13 03:38:02 GMT

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ufw provides additional security. It has one job, which is to check people’s ID and destination (IP address and port). You can feed it a list of known bad actors' IPs to block them preemptively. ufw is a ridiculously high compound wall that surrounds your lemonade complex, providing a comfortable layer of protection from anyone seeking to do violence or so mayhem.

2025-12-13 03:37:49 GMT

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nginx is a fully featured HTTP server. It often gets used on its own to serve webpages, but it can also route API requests. In our setup, we are going to use it as a reverse proxy, an extra front door and lobby with a security guard and a metal detector that people have to get through before they can line up. nginx turns away lot of troublemakers who might be trying to sneak in and take our lemons. nginx helps make sure that the people who show up are there to buy lemonade.

2025-12-13 03:36:56 GMT

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Gunicorn beefs up the walls of your lemonade stand and adds a headset-wearing coordinator that lines up all the customers and makes sure they keep moving, get their lemonade efficiently, and get out. It also builds carbon-copies of your lemonade stands next to the original and forms a queue of customers in front of each one. Gunicorn gets you ready to handle the throes of people that want to come visit your stand.

2025-12-13 03:36:51 GMT

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Gunicorn (short for Green Unicorn) is an open source WSGI server written in Python. WSGI is short fo web server gateway interface, and happily can be pronounced "whiskey". It serves as a bridge between a web app and a web server. Gunicorn handles scalability and adds some security.

2025-12-13 03:36:23 GMT

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Luckily, there are really helpful tools for handling this.
Flask is the first layer of order we add. It takes willy-nilly functions and makes sure they fit the structure of an API. They turn your Python into a web app. Flask takes your lemonade stand, and puts four walls, a ceiling, and a well defined front door on it.

2025-12-13 03:36:00 GMT

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However, I feel like it is worth spending a couple minutes on the Why. Why do any of this? Why not just share your code from your personal computer? You could if you wanted to. But it turns out that the Internet is an extremely busy and occasionally harsh place to be. Prototyping on your laptop is like setting up a lemonade stand in a private garden and selling cups to your mom. Opening your service up to the Internet unfiltered is moving your card table lemonade stand to an active combat zone.

2025-12-13 03:35:20 GMT

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I won’t bother walking through How to do this because DigitalOcean has an amazing documentation page for setting this up in Ubuntu 22.04. It worked for me on 24.04 as well. Follow their page to the letter and it will get you safely through. And it is such a cool feeling when it does.
https://flask.palletsprojects.com/en/stable/deploying/gunicorn/

2025-12-13 03:34:56 GMT

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This deployment starter kit includes
Flask, a Python package for turning your code into an app.
Gunicorn, a more serious production grade WSGI server.
nginx, an industry standard web server.
ufw, an Uncomplicated Firewall for Linux
systemd the Linux tool for turning your code into a daemon.

2025-12-13 03:33:38 GMT

New post: Moving your code from prototype to production
https://brandonrohrer.com/hosting8.html
tl;dr: Flask/Gunicorn/nginx
So you wrote a cool little weather app that predicts temperatures in your neighborhood. Now you want to be able to share those predictions with everyone of the thousand people who live there. How do you go from "It works on my machine" to "No matter where you are in the world you can use this in your own browser."?

2025-12-12 13:24:30 GMT

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Look at me I’m adulting

2025-12-12 13:24:09 GMT

When you’re a grown-up, you can eat brown sugar by the spoonful and no one will make you stop

2025-12-12 03:07:32 GMT

The longer I look at this the more I snort laugh
https://cdn.masto.host/recsyssocial/media_attachments/files/115/704/387/801/441/635/original/f2d4a2ea74d06480.jpeg

2025-12-12 02:47:32 GMT

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This API runs on a server collective just outside Prague. That means that instead of the soulless sums I get from my laptop, it sends me an artisanal addition from hardware lovingly created with traditional techniques by Czech silicon smiths and aged 132 milliseconds on the bottom of the Atlantic.

2025-12-11 03:14:29 GMT

You know how you always wish there was a dedicated server waiting to add two numbers together for you? Wait no more.
try in your browser
https://graffitiwall.nexus/add?a=56.03&b=938.7
the results will amaze you

2025-12-09 01:21:34 GMT

find someone who looks at you the way Trinity looks at Neo when he needs reminding that his friends are about to die
https://cdn.masto.host/recsyssocial/media_attachments/files/115/686/980/090/283/460/original/9699641e48434bd8.png

2025-12-08 17:18:09 GMT

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not to mention they were fucking enormous. Uphill both ways, man.

2025-12-08 01:28:59 GMT

bring it
https://cdn.masto.host/recsyssocial/media_attachments/files/115/681/351/090/063/415/original/691a2e2c8de26a0a.jpeg

2025-12-07 22:24:38 GMT

Some tin foil hat stuff:
Grid lines disappeared from a Google calendar.
Google search turns up one relevant but entirely unhelpful result.
DDG turns up dozens of results, including an obscure solution. (It was a conflicting extension)
I’m trying to think of an explanation that isn’t self interested results tampering

2025-12-06 17:27:57 GMT

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https://cdn.masto.host/recsyssocial/media_attachments/files/115/673/796/853/203/320/original/5d93b36b50b9ba9b.jpeg

2025-12-06 16:59:07 GMT

Sure sex is great but have you ever tried taking a nap?

2025-12-06 15:08:55 GMT

If I work out hard, I feel hammered the first day and great the next. If I get too free with my whisky cabinet, I have a fun evening one day and feel hammered the next. This gives me an idea.

2025-12-06 13:03:14 GMT

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sounds NSFW

2025-12-06 01:21:19 GMT

You’re not weak, you’re exhausted. Even the most badass dump truck stalls when it runs out of gas. Get you some gas.