Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

Latest post is a big one: “Why you shouldn’t invoke setup​.py directly”

A lot of people don’t know about this because we haven’t been great about getting the word out. This blog post is in part an attempt to remedy this.

Please help spread the word!

https://blog.ganssle.io/articles/2021/10/setup-py-deprecated.html

From the archives of my blog but still very relevant: "pytz: The Fastest Footgun in the West", about why you probably shouldn't be using pytz:

https://blog.ganssle.io/articles/2018/03/pytz-fastest-footgun.html

Anthropic has a pretty solid language model, but other aspects of their user experience leave something to be desired.

Been trying to test out their API for several days now and I’m stuck in some situation where it seems to think that my “organization already has a verified phone number” (which is great and all, but it’s also asking me for a phone number in order to claim the trial credits?)

To their credit, they seem to have a support line! To their discredit, queries to it have gone unanswered for 2 days now.

Major takeaways from today’s Spanish conversation lesson:

1. There are a lot of words to describe cheese and various types of cheese.
2. I know very few of them in Spanish.

I just bought some e-readers for my niece and nephew, and I’d like to get them started by loading them with some high quality books. Anyone have recommendations for engaging books for teens/preteens?

Nephew is 14 and he’s really into tech. I think he mostly wants the e-reader because it’s an e-ink screen that he can hack on, so that archetype should be easy for the kind of crowd that follows me. He was also asking a lot of questions about physics when I was there, so high quality explainers for stuff like relativity and quantum mechanics aimed at a young teen level would probably be good.

Niece is 12 and insists that she will not use the e-reader. My wife thinks that she will like anything that says boys are stupid (this makes her sound vapid, but she is quite sharp). Tougher nut to crack, obviously.

Fiction and non-fiction recommendations are fine.

#books #recommendations #ya

Did double red cell donation today; normally this is a very nice experience because you get some saline infusions to rehydrate you, but apparently today I accidentally got a little hole in my vein and all the saline just went into the space around my veins and muscles and such.

So now one of my arms is all inflated like a water balloon 😅 I will spare you the picture, but it looks like a lumpy potato 🥔😛

To be fair I do think these signs are primarily there to communicate that the button doesn’t affect the timing of the signal.

I don’t know how long I’ve seen these signs before realizing the fundamental mismatch between the medium and the intended audience here…

#hashtag

Does anyone know of a site that has historical pollen index data (just needs to cover the last few weeks)? I am trying to figure out what precisely my son may be to.

Seems to me like all the pollen sites are like weather sites, where they only enter give the current values and forecasts.

#pollen #allergies

This is going to turn me into one of those airline miles people who gets on random flights to Singapore for the points, except I’m going to have to set up an alert for any time plane tickets to anywhere in Spain drop below $100 so I can show up for 3 hours to buy yogurt and then fly right back.

Do they have this specific brand and flavor of yogurt outside of Spain? I think it is basically Oikos Triple Zero, but this particular flavor is super good (it has little chunks of banana in it), and doesn’t compare to the banana cream flavor we have in the States.

Apparently if you filter a Danish it turns into a donut, which is something smokers prefer?

Since it came up several times at #pyconus, I thought I’d post here. The method I’ve been using to learn Spanish (and liking quite a bit), is Comprehensible Input.

A good starting point for finding information about CI, and finding materials in your target language is Compehensible Input Wiki

For Spanish, I started with Dreaming Spanish

#comprehensibleinput #languagelearning