Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

@brainwane It would be somewhat interesting to see numbers, and whether this is restricted to a specific subset.

If there weren't similar "cheat sheets" distributed among the politically active in the past, it's possible that there was an analogue among religious circles (e.g. "How to talk to your D&D playing nephew about Satan").

@design_RG In any case, I definitely am not worried about interacting with people with a different ideology or background than me. What's shocking to me is that anyone sees it as something you need to worry about, or prepare for.

@design_RG Increased polarization seems to be the common wisdom, but I don't know if it's so straightforward. Consider that rates of terrorist-related killing were much higher in the 70s than today because of violent left-wing bombings and such, so there was a time in the US where some subset of the politically-active were literally killing people over their ideology.

There are probably ways in which we are more polarized now, but it's easy to forget the details of the past.

Is it just a meme that people need talking points memos to have Thanksgiving conversations with their relatives, or do people really have that much anxiety about interactions with people outside their filter bubble? Or was it always this way and it was just less public?

Do you think Darius Rucker released this album to help him remember the answers to his "security" questions?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charleston,_SC_1966

Shameful admission: I don't know how to use tmux. Does anyone have any good resources for getting started quickly?

I usually learn best by jumping right in.

Actually, I often forget the beginning of a sentence by the time I'm finished composing it, actually. 😅

The easy_install change will probably break all kinds of weird edge cases, but in the end it's definitely for the best.

The only thing that bothers me about it is that it's very hard to declare our "opportunistic dependency" on pip.

@arkedos Yeah, I wasn't sure mainly becuase that's actually a fairly common idiom for converting to bool in some languages, actually. I've definitely seen !!x around in C and C++.

According to this random blog post, it shows up more than 5000 times in the Linux kernel: https://dev-notes.eu/2019/10/Double-Negation-Operator-Convert-to-Boolean-in-C/

This past weekend we released setuptools 42.0, which has some big changes:

1. easy_install officially deprecated, with some workflows falling back to pip if installed!
2. Removed upload and register commands.
3. Support plugin keywords in setup.cfg

https://pypi.org/project/setuptools/

@arkedos I suppose this is a joke, but if you actually want to convert a string to its raw boolean, you can use `bool(string)`.

In most cases, you don't need to do that because it's done implicitly, e.g.

if string:
...

I sometimes think I'm overly worried about exposing services on my home network to the internet. I've had #syncthing configured to be LAN-only since I installed it, and the only service I run on the open internet is the VPN so I can get access to my system remotely.

Have I been fooled by the internet equivalent of health class scare tactics where any sort of sexual activity = instant STDs and pregnancy?

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