Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

I bet the joke was on them when they got to the afterlife and the Shabti figurines kept drawing portraits of them with extra fingers...

So apparently AIs have been taking human jobs for almost 5000 years now:

> Another probable reason for the decline, and eventual end, of retainer sacrifices is the creation of shabti-figures. Shabti-figures were mummy-shaped figurines, meant to replace retainer sacrifices; "... the responsibility for carrying out tasks on behalf of the deceased was transferred to a special kind of funerary statuette, known as a shabti-figure".[2] These shabti-figures were believed to carry out a wide variety of tasks, including everything from cultivating fields, to irrigating canals, to serving the deceased.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_retainer_sacrifices#Reasons_for_dwindling_of_retainer_sacrifices

@freemo Is there any kind of "status" page for qoto.org that is independent of the mastodon instance? Or somewhere that lists known issues?

I'm experiencing significantly degraded performance and I feel like it would be good to have a place to go to find out if this is scheduled maintenance, a DDoS attack, or something else.

Heh, I just noticed that it looks like `virtualenv` seems to use the "COVID-time" version of #calver: https://virtualenv.pypa.io/en/latest/changelog.html

Version 20 starting in 2020, still version 20 now... 😛

@hugovk That's a lot of complexity to find out what version of `setuptools_scm` I've got, particularly when I don't really want to be on the aggressive bitrot train.

The headaches started when I first installed it and they aren't so bad, but honestly it's just kinda not worth it? I don't think the problem it solves is that time-consuming, so it doesn't take much of a headache to not be worth it.

I think at this point `setuptools_scm` (and other tools like it) have probably caused more headaches for me than they've solved.

Haha, `setuptools_scm` apparently does not, itself, expose a `__version__` attribute.

@bernat @internetarchive When I wanted a similar thing, I used this: https://github.com/hartator/wayback-machine-downloader

I doubt they'll have something easy to import into WordPress straight out of the box (though I haven't used WordPress in 15 years, so maybe it's easier now?), but at least you'd have the text, and you can do some cleanup on that.

@y2mango You have jinxed it. Now you are going to get a report tomorrow that says, "Cannot report bugs on Feb 29" 😛

Also it turns out I set up release automation for `dateutil` over 3 years ago and completely forgot about it and only ever used it once. Thanks, past me!

Cutting this release has made me nostalgic for the days when I was a conscientious, responsive and organized maintainer 😛

Oops, someone made it so that you could lazy-load `dateutil` submodules over 4 years ago and I never cut a release including that.

That has now been rectified in `python-dateutil` version 2.9.0. Enjoy: https://pypi.org/project/python-dateutil/

#python

@jerub This is an interesting one. Why is it doing that?

I'll be speaking at this, so if you are in the Western Mass area and are interested to hear about the app I built to teach my kids to have perfect pitch, stop on in. 😀