Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

We are far too informal these days, which is why I'm taking a bold stand against the rampant use of Nicholasnames.

Thank you for coming to my THEODORE Talk.

@leaverou That said, I have heard that with the current generation of batteries, it's better to run them lower before charging them rather than having them hover around 100% all the time.

That said, battery life in a phone has almost never gotten so bad that I was bothered by it before something else dramatic happened to make me get a new phone, and the few times I've had to replace a battery it was pretty simple and/or cheap to do — even in the modern era where no phones have user-replaceable batteries (😭).

As an aside — up until around 4-5 years ago, I always had replaceable batteries, so I *also* often didn't use the USB port, I would charge the batteries by themselves and then swap them out when the one in the phone got too low.

@leaverou I was originally skeptical, but I really prefer wireless charging now, for the following reasons:

1. It's very easy to just have a pad at my desk(s) and on my nightstand and when I take my phone out of my pocket, I put it on there instead of on the table. The tiny decrease in friction makes it way more likely that I'm going to charge as I go.
2. I like being able to pick up the phone without any tether and put it right back.
3. I've had a few phones start to have problems with the USB port. Wireless charging avoids that problem and also reduces strain on the USB port throughout the life of the device.

I haven't noticed my phone charging particularly slower when charging wirelessly when compared to being plugged in, but even if that were the case I don't think it would matter much. The low-friction nature of the charging makes it so that my phone doesn't ever get terribly low in the first place, but even on days when I don't charge during the day, I always get a full charge overnight anyway (and even a dramatic difference like 2 hours vs 1 hours wouldn't matter in that case).

@brettcannon And PyPy's test suite seems to be pretty good at finding PEP 399 violations.

@cnx @webology Oh, weird. I don't think I configured that feed content thing at all, so that must be the default of whatever SSG I'm using for the blog...

@webology @cnx noticed that my Atom feed was broken and he seems like a discerning consumer of technologies, so he might have opinions...

@pbx Carefully removing the previous, low quality wooden fence before installing the chain link fence, clearly.

@webology One last thing on this is that as someone whose allocated OSS maintenance time has gone down a lot lately, I've become acutely aware of how aggressive the bitrot is in the Python ecosystem. CPython itself has a 5-year window after which old versions are EOL. There are deprecations and removals in every version. Pretty much every time I go to touch `dateutil` I spend the whole time fixing up the various parts of the CI that are now raising warnings or errors, then I run out of time to do any meaningful work, and the cycle repeats after a few months.

I think this is a similar set of incentives. People who value stability just literally stop upgrading everything and self-host. Maintainers have limited attention and don't want to allocate it to long-term support. As a result, you need to constantly be moving with the ecosystem.

@webology I will also note that Python 3.11 and 3.12 are getting faster, but the Python 3.x branch was notably slower than Python 2.7. I think at this point Python *itself* has good incentives to increase efficiency because industrial players like Microsoft, Bloomberg, etc, are heavily invested in it already and they can see meaningful reductions in their resource consumption by making improvements.

That said, part of the thing that has been a major sticking point for things like GIL removal is that there is some trade-off between single-threaded performance and multi-threaded performance. I could imagine a future regression (probably small, admittedly) in "older" workflows in favor of big improvements for newer multi-core performance.

@webology As much as I'd love it if people all believed that Apple was deliberately making their products worse, since hopefully that would mean people would stop buying Apple products, I think that something more like Hanlon's razor is way more likely to be at work. If for no other reason than when people complain about the companies they've worked for, I never hear them say stuff like, "My boss told me to make everything slower on older platforms", it's more like, "When I tried testing on the older platforms I was told that it was not a priority and I should focus on building an AI cat emoji for iMessage even if that makes iPhone 11 processors set on fire."

The high level folks making the decisions seem to just say, "Well, we'll lose market share to Google if they get the AI kitty first, and if it makes someone's iPhone 11 slow, I guess that sucks for them, but they're not going to stop using an iPhone over it..."

@webology I think I missed the context that the inciting event was a video about upgrading your laptop. The examples seem to all be other sources of decay like websites shipping several megabytes of JS and assets to display simple text.

That said, my baseline assumption is that even in the laptop upgrade case I suspect that deliberate policies of making old stuff worse are rare. It feels like the facts that developer time is very expensive, it takes time to make things fast and to even test against old platforms and switching costs are high is enough to explain what's happening.

@LouisIngenthron Any pointer to how to do this?

The other thought I had was that I'd set up a local e-mail provider. Normally I'd be afraid of getting on an e-mail blackhole list or something, but presumably deliverability is less of an issue if you never send anything?

There's a website I use all the time where the log-in mechanism involves sending a code to my e-mail address.

Anyone know of a simple way to write a script that retrieves that code? I can set up a custom e-mail address on any free provider and have all these "log-in" e-mails automatically forwarded to that. Is the best way to use something like `imaplib`?

@webology The popularity of Python is in some sense a side-effect of this, since in a lot of cases it is a *lot* slower than compiled languages, but companies adopt it anyway because compute is less expensive than developer time.

@webology I don't really think the phenomenon described there s planned obsolescence, it's more like a hydraulic principle. Hardware gets better and suddenly there's a lot more room to trade off performance for developer time / functionality, etc.

@hynek The thing is, in the ecosystems where there is "one blessed tool", it's still just some 90% solution, and if you aren't in the 90% you are just SOL. Open source or not. Doesn't just apply to packaging, either.

"Hey look, they have video games for the Switch here; maybe we can try something other than Minecraft?"
My 6 y/o: "Cool! Is everything square in this one, too?"

(I think it was a deal-breaker if the answer was "no")