Randy Au
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randyau.com
Randy Au
@randyau.com
Hobby consultant, 💎🪚🎮🖥️🎙️🎹🎧👨‍🍳📷🪛➕
Quant UX Researcher @ GCP (posts are my own)
Writes a data newsletter: https://www.counting-stuff.com/
https://linktr.ee/randy_au
Languages: EN/JP/CN
Pinned
So on here I talk about hobbies and crack snarky data jokes. But once a week I also write a very long form data science newsletter. at www.counting-stuff.com
#DataBS

Here's a thread of old posts that people liked [ugh no thread writing interface] (1/n)
Counting Stuff
A weekly newsletter about the important, mundane, parts of being a data scientist, UX researcher. With some extra fun about tech and hobbies.
www.counting-stuff.com
Reposted by Randy Au
Turns out you can communicate across containers via 63-bits of available space in a shared lock you acquire on /proc/self/ns/time that all processes have access to.

No networking required. The post has a demo of a chat app communicating across unprivileged containers.

h4x0r.org/funreliable/
November 12, 2025 at 2:35 PM
I love how the weather is colder now and the cat's tail looks extra fluffy
November 12, 2025 at 2:37 PM
Its funny how my desk is littered with gloves, I think there's two pairs of cloth, one woven fingerless. And I have a separate compression fingerless gloves... And the leather ones I use when I ride my escooter...
My hands just feel chilly most of the day (until I eat)
November 12, 2025 at 1:53 PM
Reposted by Randy Au
Finally polished the first (largest here) tier of pavilion facets. Hit a few spots that had pitting in the material. Grinding those out meant nudging down neighboring facets and those neighboring facets to correct the minor depth changes 🫠 also I stubbornly didn't switch back to 8k for a while
November 12, 2025 at 6:12 AM
Finally polished the first (largest here) tier of pavilion facets. Hit a few spots that had pitting in the material. Grinding those out meant nudging down neighboring facets and those neighboring facets to correct the minor depth changes 🫠 also I stubbornly didn't switch back to 8k for a while
November 12, 2025 at 6:12 AM
yay managed to migrate my ghost install from the CLI setup to the now-preferred (?) docker-based setup... despite having a turnkey migration script I managed to screw up a password setting in the db and didn't realize i had to delete the persistent db file 🙃 "experienced data engineer" !
November 12, 2025 at 1:40 AM
hrmmmm a rando impersonation account is contacting me... on my active bsky account.. regretfully saying my account has been "suspended"... riiiiiiight

reported this nonsense
November 12, 2025 at 12:33 AM
So the retrofit heat vents were pointing at the walls because the installers didn't want the hot air blowing onto people, but I've finally given up and pointed a bunch of them inwards because why bother directly heating up the wall when no one is near the air stream
November 11, 2025 at 9:21 PM
O.o I didn't even realize we passed post 400....
November 11, 2025 at 6:04 PM
This week on Counting Stuff, I dislike working on persona projects because they're usually started when there's a lot of -organizational level- nonsense going on. Plus they're technically nightmare fishing trips #dataBS

www.counting-stuff.com/i-dislike-pe...
I dislike persona projects
A rant about failure and magical thinking
www.counting-stuff.com
November 11, 2025 at 6:00 PM
grrr somehow I had scheduled a post for this morning, and it even had the correct date AND the correct EST time... and somehow it didn't seem to send ><
November 11, 2025 at 5:59 PM
🤪 thanks to the cutting oil still on the stone, I can't tell much difference between the 50k grit polished facets (the lower big ones) versus the 8k prepolished smaller facets above
November 10, 2025 at 7:44 PM
Got up to 8k prepolish over the weekend. First time trying to do an oval stone and am happy I got the facets to line up without too much fuss. Next is to polish on 50k grit and then somehow cut the girdle... Not sure how to do that well yet
November 10, 2025 at 3:38 PM
Doing glue surgery to fix the Swarovski bear that the kid got as a gift a few years ago and inevitably managed to break
November 10, 2025 at 12:31 AM
booo I wanted to get a second belomo 10x loupe and thanks to the tariffs they don't even ship to the US anymore
November 8, 2025 at 8:59 PM
A friend asked me some questions about gems and that got me off my butt to unpack all my cutting gear. This time learning to cut an oval stone which is tricky because I have to place the side facets by eye, not absolute reference like a round. This is the first prepolish facet I had (8k grit)
November 8, 2025 at 4:43 PM
... Damn it, I thought I had a 1/2 digital torque adapter to go with the new breaker bar I got for doing wheels but no, apparently I have a 3/8s one for doing spark plugs.. time to get another one 🫠
November 6, 2025 at 10:53 PM
gyah make the shitty "contract position at THE BIGGEST SOCIAL NETWORK" (I wonder who could that be???🙄) spam stop linkedin....
November 6, 2025 at 6:34 PM
Reposted by Randy Au
10/10, no notes
vi-coding
It's the future
www.thegadhian.com
November 6, 2025 at 5:15 PM
ok the one tool I need to find in my boxes is a pair of parallel pliers... after that Ithink I have everything located
November 6, 2025 at 5:04 PM
yay, digging around my project boxes, I found my calibrated usb-c mic so I can use my phone as an SPL meter again! also found my clearly bootleg "mitutoyo" dial test indicator
November 6, 2025 at 4:06 PM
Damnit there's a Wera screwdriver advent calendar?!? www.kctool.com/wera-136610-...

I need to pretend I didn't see this so that I don't impulse buy a set
Wera 136610 Advent Calendar, 2025
Wera 136610 Advent Calendar, 2025 - high quality German engineering at the lowest price
www.kctool.com
November 6, 2025 at 2:48 PM
my barbaric american 15oz mug cup that I use all the time is apparently juuuuuuust barely able to put a stroopwafel on top without it falling into my tea. seriously, there's maybe 1-2mm of clearance on both sides
November 6, 2025 at 2:41 PM
O.o whut, there's going to be a new lyrical nanoha anime series for 2026? @cyanoacry.bsky.social
November 6, 2025 at 12:50 PM
Yikes, Japanese community for Mozilla disbands because an AI bot has been running all over the kb articles with slop MT translations, ignoring guidelines, and other things
November 6, 2025 at 12:08 PM