Mahmoud Hashemi @mahmoud@qoto.org

I just wanted to visualize a waveform, randomly searched for "audacity like online", not expecting much... and by god, they did it. The maniacs.

https://wavacity.com/

If you missed my talk but still want to see it, the video is already available for PyCon Online and in-person attendees!

#PyCon #PyConUS #PyConUS2023

This also explains a bunch of "technical debt".

A pattern that repeats throughout my almost 20 year career (I old) is an engineer finds a bug that requires a non-trivial effort to fix systemically.

They make a local change to avoid (not fix) the bug.

Why? Because they don't have time. They can't take time. They don't feel like they can justify it to their manager. Maybe they're worried they won't hit an OKR.

This happens a lot with less experienced engineers but I find myself doing it.

I think a significant amount of organizational dysfunction (like the reading time in meetings thing) is easily explainable by people being overworked.

People aren't prepping for the meeting ahead of time so you move the prep into the meeting.

Why aren't people prepping? A totally reasonable explanation is that they've got 5 of these meetings this week plus a sprint full of coding work plus they're on call.

@jerub RFC 3339 is stricter than the subset of ISO 8601 that most people talk about, because it is only a datetime format and requires a time zone.

As far as I can tell there is no standard that describes the subset of ISO8601 that people actually care about.

Did you know that ISO 8601 is a very large standard that describes more than a single date and time format?

It describes periods, repetitions, many different syntax of describing years, week-of-year, day-of-year, seasons, quarters, semesters, trimesters.

It's mostly unknown because the standards are paywalled: you can't just read ISO 8601 without paying ISO money.

Most of the time, when people refer to ISO 8601, they mean the subset that is described in RFC 3339.

I realize it's very evocative but I kind of hate the term "hallucinate" when talking about AI. When humans hallucinate, it's cognitive apparatus coming unmoored from sensory input. Something different is happening in the brain and in the sense organs when hallucinations are occurring than when one is accurately apprehending the world. But LLMs _only_ hallucinate. They do not have sense organs. The lies they generate are not, in their internal mechanisms, any different from the truths.

Is how every go app is versioned, I call it GoVer because go mod fucked everything up.

I know necromancy was banned by the Mages Guild... but it's just so much fun!

#Python #html5lib

The #Python docs will hopefully soon have a dark theme! 🌒

Demo build at:
https://septatrix.github.io/cpython-dark-docs/

Please try it out and let us know if you find any big problems!
https://github.com/python/python-docs-theme/pull/44

#documentation #docs #DarkTheme #DarkMode

So I read this

https://infrequently.org/2023/02/the-market-for-lemons/

and then I read this

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/04/us/politics/littoral-combat-ships-lobbying.html

and they are the same article. Modern front-end framework development is military contracting is every other prestige industry where complexity : sophistication :: expense : value and outcomes are assumed because testing is disincentivized.

Banning free API use blocks anyone who's inclined to abide by the rules but does nothing to stop anyone who's already using the official app API keys to look like a human

"Thoughts on the Python packaging ecosystem"

A new blog post, with some of my thoughts on the state of Python packaging ecosystem.

https://pradyunsg.me/blog/2023/01/21/thoughts-on-python-packaging/

Layoffs are mostly useless, a kind of “social contagion” that don’t improve company performance in the long term (https://news.stanford.edu/2022/12/05/explains-recent-tech-layoffs-worried/).

Layoffs are an indication that a company is particularly willing to shoot you and itself in the foot just to give shareholders a sugar rush.

Take note. Choose accordingly.

"so, how did you get into hacking?"

I think #poetry gives some bad advice on #python dependency pins: https://python-poetry.org/docs/faq/#why-are-unbound-version-constraints-a-bad-idea

Pessimistic pins like this plunge your consumers into dependency hell when packages update to consume fresh versions of their shared dependencies at different rates. If package Foo needs a new feature from click 8, and package Bar says "well, I work with click 7, better not try click 8" and never releases again, I'm hosed, even if Bar works fine with new click.

Your users should rely on CI, not #semver.