Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

@freemo There are many judicial philosophies, and judges also have different different approaches to sentencing or any of the other aspects of their job where they have discretion.

Do they believe that long prison sentences are appropriate for drug possession? What is their approach to setting bail? What do they think of geofence warrants?

There is a lot of room for reasonable disagreement on first points.

@freemo I haven't been able to find that information. I tried last year (without a LexisNexus subscription), but I obviously put in more effort than 99% of other people did, and was largely frustrated.

It's not a good sign that no one even feels the need to give a summary of their positions (I don't trust any politician, but I can at least find out who they are targeting, broadly speaking).

@brainwane Yeah, were you able to find any useful information about these people's records, judicial philosophy, etc from that? For district 11 I'm just seeing links to official bios for some people, and that's like, "J.D. from Columbia, 1985" or whatever.

@freemo I guess? Doesn't seem like a meaningful choice when you cannot find information about these people and literally a million people vote anyway!

This is "pick a hand", not meaningful voting. Just seems like a waste of time.

Still, maybe we're better off. It's not clear to me that election of judges is a particularly good idea.

Another election year where I can find basically no information about any of the judges running for office.

You would think that they would have some sort of at least rudimentary campaign information, such that you could know like... their positions on issues and their track record as judges?

Talk is done!

The video is available here if you missed it (with an archive of the chat): https://youtu.be/S4TjOnkFLtI

Slides (with speaker notes) are here: https://pganssle-talks.github.io/pytexas-2020-upstream-bugs/#/

The slides are probably not especially mobile-friendly.

#python

The beginning of my @PyTexas@twitter.com talk: "Here are a bunch of hacky strategies that you should do everything to avoid using."

Every "real-life examples" section of the talk: "Here are a bunch of my projects that use these horrible hacks!" 😅 🤦‍♂️

My PyTexas talk, "What to Do When the Bug is in Someone Else's Code" will be streaming in 15 minutes!

I'll be in the Youtube chat answering questions and "not really a question, more of a comment"s!

Link to stream:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4TjOnkFLtI&list=PL0MRiRrXAvRgAFCdfHUcw8PNPqS7ux_BK&index=20

#python

One advantage of virtual conferences: if PyTexas had been in person, me running out of the room halfway through @moshezadka@twitter.com's talk screaming "That's a red-breasted nuthatch!" while scrambling for my camera would have been really inappropriate in person.

Fun fact: If you scatter peanuts around your yard and porch in an attempt to attract birds, it will also attract other animals.

Tonight we got a visit from a possum and a skunk at the same time!

As promised a few days ago, we now have a 2020.4 release of the first-party tzdata package on PyPI:

https://pypi.org/project/tzdata/

This includes changes to Palestine's DST rules that take effect THIS SATURDAY, so a good time to upgrade this (and your system package) is now!

#python

And for the "try before you buy" types among you, my slides are already available!

https://pganssle-talks.github.io/pytexas-2020-upstream-bugs/#/

The @PyTexas@twitter.com talk schedule is up!

If you're interested in my talk, "What to do When the Bug is in Someone Else's Code", it'll be airing from 14:00-14:30 CDT on Sunday, October 25:

https://www.pytexas.org/schedule/#:~:text=Speaker%3A%20Paul%20Ganssle

To be honest, I feel like I may have shot myself in the foot by trying to get the word out about this the last few years. It's so widely misunderstood that I may have been able to make the case for a backwards-incompatible change based on "we'd be fixing more code than we break".

This is starting to come up a lot more as people switch from pytz to zoneinfo, so a reminder about datetime arithmetic semantics; addition is NOT referring to elapsed time:
https://blog.ganssle.io/articles/2018/02/aware-datetime-arithmetic.html

(Relevant SO question: https://stackoverflow.com/q/64440016/467366 )

#python

@eric I think they must be more common up in CT. Never seen a pair like this before, but I've gotten photos of them twice before (and this is my first month with a camera that can take decent bird photos).

This was all within ~10 minutes of one another.

Three different kinds of woodpecker in my back yard today. Yellow-bellied sapsucker (male, then female), hairy woodpecker (male), then downy woodpecker (female).

You can tell the hairy and downy woodpecker apart because the hairy woodpecker has a longer beak, and the downy woopecker has black bands on her white inner tail feathers.

#birding #birds

Going to be a confusing few weeks for anyone in Palestine. Evergreen link:

https://codeofmatt.com/on-the-timing-of-time-zone-changes/