Mostly Technical 123: Isolate The Claude
Mar 18, 2026
They swap poker trip war stories and travel chaos. They dig into transcoding videos at scale and running parallel FFmpeg jobs. They debate worktrees versus multiple checkouts and explain copy-on-write filesystems. They explore using AI tools to generate specs and build side projects. They touch on self-hosting video to save costs and conference hijinks.
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Philly Poker Trip Won Then Lost Wrapped Cash
- Ian won roughly $8,000 playing private and casino standup poker during a Philly trip, getting paid in wrapped cash which felt more “real.”
- He then lost about $6,000 next night in a tougher 10-20 game, leaving him net up but reminded him about game selection.
Transcode Videos With Modal Sandboxes
- Use Modal sandboxes to run heavy batch work like FFmpeg transcoding instead of keeping long-lived VPS instances.
- Aaron runs separate Modal apps per bitrate, deploys a tiny Python FFmpeg wrapper from GitHub Actions, and scales sandboxes to e.g., 16–32 vCPUs on demand.
Self-Host Course Video HLS To Avoid Vimeo Overages
- Avoid expensive hosted video platforms for high-volume course libraries; self-host HLS on R2 to cut costs.
- Aaron moved encodings to HLS chunks on R2, using VideoJS for playback and paying only storage/low egress costs.