Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

One or more birds is loudly singing outside my window right now (01:37 local time).

Is this a sign of an impending earthquake, or did they just stumble on an old Pepsi warehouse or something?

@freemo I think that might be the default — they allow it to be a long alphanumeric pin, but then you need to open your password manager and copy-paste if you want access to your text messages.

The only reason (they explicitly say this) they do the unskippable PIN reminder thing is because they want you to remember the password, but nearly any password you can remember is... not a good password.

@freemo I'd even be fine with doing that if this was "extra" security, but it's actually a significant change to their threat model: they will now store your data in the cloud, protected by this PIN.

@freemo Both induce users to use less safe passwords that they can easily remember. I do not want or need to remember my Signal password, it would be better if I stored it in a password manager, but if I'm going to get bugged for my PIN daily, then weekly (with the possibility of an account lockout I guess), I'll just set it to 1234 and be done with it.

Signal using spaced repetition to force you to remember the new mandatory PIN is basically just a website that disables copy-paste in disguise.

Oh wow, I didn't know that if you want to prevent os.walk from walking a specific subdirectory, you can modify the list of directory names it returns in place: https://stackoverflow.com/a/19859907

Not the most intuitive way to accomplish this, but definitely useful.

This Back to the Future Delorean is clearly depicting the scene in BTTF 1 where Doc and Marty are testing the time machine, but it's already been modified as a flying car! There isn't even a Mr. Fusion.

HAVE YOU NO REGARD FOR CANON, PLAYMOBIL?

Now that I have a nice microphone on a fancy boom arm, it is clearly time to start a podcast.

I'm thinking maybe a review podcast where I watch every episode of Tayo the Little Bus.

@foxhkron ISO 8601 is not a single date format, it's actually hundreds of related datetime formats, plus some other stuff.

It's shockingly complicated and doesn't even capture some important stuff, but YYYY-MM-DD is a pretty good date format.

Anyone know how much data processing is done in the #entomology world? What, if anything, is the common software stack? How do entomologists use computers?

Just came across this article on realpython.org about working with datetimes.

Unusually for articles of this genre, I actually agree with most/all of the recommendations I read (doesn't hurt that they linked to 4 of my blog posts... 😛):

https://realpython.com/python-datetime/

Test & Code 111: Subtests in Python with unittest and pytest with @pganssle

https://t.co/5Dkus9CqRc

What are subtests?
Why you might want them?
What should you watch out for if you decide to use them? https://twitter.com/brianokken/status/1256638539246104576

Little known fact: before their company pivoted, the supercomputer in Westworld Season 3 was designed to generate new episodes of Gilmore Girls.

‍@brianokken on episode 102 of @testandcode: "Oh totally, I would not read something that had 'Enterprise' in the title."

Sick burn on @mhashemi 🔥

Most of you just know me as a fan of chiptune music, but did you know I also do #python programming?

I've just had my first PEP accepted to the Python language! PEP 615, to add IANA time zone support to the standard library:

https://mail.python.org/archives/list/python-dev@python.org/thread/MDR2FL66R4T4VSLUI5XRFFUTKD43FMK4/

PEP 615: https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0615/

Harumph. I'm supposed to be sad right now because so many of my friends are leaving #pycon, not sad because I haven't seen them in so long. This is the wrong kind of sad!

If anyone has opinions about ZoneInfo equality and hash behavior, now is the time to make your voice heard: https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-615-support-for-the-iana-time-zone-database-in-the-standard-library/3468/60