Alex C. Viana
alexcviana.bsky.social
Alex C. Viana
@alexcviana.bsky.social
Mashup of Engineering, Math, and Urbanism | Chicago | 🇺🇸🇧🇷 | acviana.com
Pinned
I feel like I should put up a real profile pic so folks don’t think I’m a bot, but I find this coffee icon quite charming. ☕️
Reposted by Alex C. Viana
Happy snow to all that thrive in it
November 9, 2025 at 1:01 PM
Reposted by Alex C. Viana
October 3, 2025 at 11:04 PM
Reposted by Alex C. Viana
A little rest from tile floors with this deco terra-cotta stunner.
October 2, 2025 at 12:11 AM
Reposted by Alex C. Viana
Hi Folks!
I am hiring a product designer to work on tooling for mechanical and aerospace engineers. It's a SUPER FUN domain.

Prefer prior experience in technical products.

Send an email to maggie at istaridigital dot com
September 30, 2025 at 6:39 PM
Man TRON : Legacy was 15 years ago. Yikes.
September 23, 2025 at 2:41 AM
Reposted by Alex C. Viana
There's a great turnout at the Chicago River Swim, the first time people are swimming in the open river in a hundred years! Here are some phone photos before I get home
September 21, 2025 at 1:48 PM
In the backyard enjoying the last time it’s going to be in the 80s for the next 9 months 🥲
September 19, 2025 at 10:34 PM
Reposted by Alex C. Viana
3²/4²/5² is the perfect day for arguing about best proofs of the Pythagorean theorem. An incredible thing about Euclid's proof is that it applies to the area of *any* similar figures drawn on the sides of a right triangle. 🧮
September 16, 2025 at 1:05 PM
Reposted by Alex C. Viana
📈 DuckDB 1.4.0 is out! This is our first LTS release which comes with *one year of community support*. It also supports database encryption, the MERGE SQL statement and Iceberg writes.

For more details, read the announcement blog post at
duckdb.org/2025/09/16/a...
September 16, 2025 at 11:55 AM
Another wonderful book from Ukraine’s Osnovy Publishing - and yes, they reliably ship to the US.

www.osnovypublishing.com/product-page...
Ukrainian Soviet Mosaics. Revisited | Оsnovy Publishing
www.osnovypublishing.com
September 15, 2025 at 1:11 AM
Reposted by Alex C. Viana
$ duckdb

D .mode line
D SELECT stargazers_count FROM read_json('https://api.github.com/repos/duckdb/duckdb');

stargazers_count = 32768

In other words:
September 14, 2025 at 11:22 AM
Reposted by Alex C. Viana
Get in, losers. We're posting John Berkey spaceships.
September 13, 2025 at 12:08 AM
Reposted by Alex C. Viana
Matrix multiplication is not easy to understand.

Even looking at the definition used to make me sweat, let alone trying to comprehend the pattern. Yet, there is a stunningly simple explanation behind it.

Let's pull back the curtain!
September 8, 2025 at 12:00 AM
Reposted by Alex C. Viana
my kind of artsy, nerdy content
September 5, 2025 at 2:01 PM
Reposted by Alex C. Viana
Reposted by Alex C. Viana
Results so stunningly clear they inspired this classic xkcd (xkcd.com/2400/):
September 1, 2025 at 7:32 PM
Just watched this! As a Python user since 2007 it was great.

Wild to me to see PyCon keynotes I saw in person in the context of the languages history.
Tomorrow at 5pm UTC Python: The Documentary produced by @cultrepo.bsky.social premieres on YouTube! 🎬🐍

From a side project in Amsterdam to a language shaping the world— discover the story of #Python. Featuring Guido van Rossum & many more!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfH4...
Python: The Documentary | An origin story
This is the story of the world's most beloved programming language: Python. What began as a side project in Amsterdam during the 1990s became the software powering artificial intelligence, data science and some of the world’s biggest companies. But Python's future wasn't certain; at one point it almost disappeared. This 90-minute documentary features Guido van Rossum, Travis Oliphant, Barry Warsaw, and many more, and they tell the story of Python’s rise, its community-driven evolution, the conflicts that almost tore it apart, and the language’s impact on... well… everything. Thanks to our sponsors for making this documentary possible: Anaconda: https://www.anaconda.com/ @AnacondaInc. Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/ @Dropbox Meta: https://opensource.fb.com/ @FacebookOpenSource OpenTeams: https://openteams.com/ @openteams PyCharm: https://www.jetbrains.com/pycharm/ @PyCharmIDE Quansight: https://quansight.com/ @quansight And to all the amazing people who are featured: Armin Ronacher, Barry Warsaw, Benjamin Peterson, Brett Cannon, Drew Houston, Guido van Rossum, Jessica McKellar, Ken Manheimer, Lambert Meertens, Lisa Guo, Lisa Roach, Mariatta Wijaya, Paul...
www.youtube.com
August 31, 2025 at 5:17 AM
Reposted by Alex C. Viana
I don't know where you folks get your non-orientable manifolds, but the experience of ordering from Cliff Stoll at kleinbottle.com is second to none
June 27, 2025 at 7:42 PM
Reposted by Alex C. Viana
Useful article from Pew explaining how building new housing (usually more expensive) makes all rent cheaper, but most significantly for older homes www.pew.org/en/research-...
New Housing Slows Rent Growth Most for Older, More Affordable Units
The nationwide housing shortage has driven rents up more in low-income neighborhoods than in the U.S. overall, but in areas that have recently added large amounts of housing, rents have fallen the mos...
www.pew.org
August 5, 2025 at 2:27 PM
Reposted by Alex C. Viana
The 6th busy beaver number is so big that even if you somehow carved a digit into every atom in the cosmos, you’d run out of atoms before making any measurable progress. www.quantamagazine.org/busy-beaver-...
August 24, 2025 at 8:04 PM
Reposted by Alex C. Viana
Machine learning is built upon three pillars: linear algebra, calculus, and probability theory.

Here’s the full roadmap for you: thepalindrome.org/p/the-roadm...
The Roadmap of Mathematics for Machine Learning
A complete guide to linear algebra, calculus, and probability theory
thepalindrome.org
August 24, 2025 at 5:57 PM
Reposted by Alex C. Viana
Stumbled across some old photos of the first computer I built myself, circa 1998. I installed it in a metal tool box into which I cut some holes. The handle was very convenient for carrying the computer to LAN parties.
August 23, 2025 at 6:33 PM
Reposted by Alex C. Viana
Most machine learning practitioners don’t understand the math behind their models.

That's why I've created a FREE roadmap so you can master the 3 main topics you'll ever need: algebra, calculus, and probabilities.

Get the roadmap here: thepalindrome.org/p/the-roadm...
The Roadmap of Mathematics for Machine Learning
A complete guide to linear algebra, calculus, and probability theory
thepalindrome.org
August 22, 2025 at 5:00 PM