Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

This is one reason I am a fan of targeted advertising in principle — it *should* prevent people from polluting the information landscape.

In practice, I'm not convinced it works amazingly well, and the pursuit of it has done all kinds of damage to the information consumption and distribution architecture ­— plus it's involved creating incredibly juicy targets for adversarial actors like governments.

Another thing to note: news is probably more useless than it should be because of the spam problem.

General news is probably fairly useless because there are just not a lot of things happening that everyone in the world needs to know about, so the S/N ratio is very low for any given consumer.

It's made even worse, though, because attention is valuable and any broad communications medium will be infested by memetic parasites.

Ideally, everyone in the world would be notified of stuff like, "Here's a new vaccine that will stop a terrible disease if you get it today", but any sufficiently broad, high-priority channel like that will get hijacked by people who think educating people about their preferred cause justifies using the scarce bandwidth of the high-priority broadcast spectrum.

You might object, "Sure it's not actionable for me, but if no one consumed the news, even important things wouldn't percolate through society!"

That is probably true, but we're so far from the point where the marginal consumption of additional news is a net positive that I don't think we're in any danger of an under-informed network here.

It would be interesting to have a service that gives you summaries of the news from 6 or 12 months ago, with care taken to cover the general response and counter-narratives.

I think more people should have this attitude (that you should not consume news):

https://www.econlib.org/archives/2011/03/the_case_agains_6.html

I have talked to people who are genuinely distressed by things happening in the news and are afraid to miss something if they cut it out. But usually information in the news isn't *actionable* even if it's important.

Just finished speaking at Chicago's #python meetup Chipy.

One nice thing about virtual meetups — no waiting for the video to be processed and released!

Stream from my ChiPy talk is already up. Full meetup: https://youtu.be/8JFUgAJLoQE

My talk starts at ~41:53: https://youtu.be/8JFUgAJLoQE?t=2513

Slides: https://pganssle-talks.github.io/chipy-nov-2020-zoneinfo

Saw this in my back yard on Monday.

Man, people around here really over-feed their dogs!

The pumpkins I carved for Halloween yesterday. My son picked the general designs and left me with the trivial detail of executing them. 😅

Not bad considering I can't remember the last time I carved a pumpkin. 😀

(Note the "Easter egg" shadow behind the kitty 😺)

#Halloween #pumpkins

The workbench has taken its rightful place as a work station for electronics and such (though some of the components migrate to the main desk if I need to program a microcontroller...)

This is likely the last picture of a tidy workbench I'll get for a while.

"Bigger" here means 27" or 32". I probably would have upgraded long ago, but I find it hard to tell whether my day-to-day experience (using Linux and not playing games) would be significantly degraded by getting some of the drastically cheaper models available.

Some steps in the evolution of my workstation:

1. Workbench as desk
2-3. Switched to standing desk
4. Added monitor arms

Next steps: Get at least one bigger monitor, setup up my cable management game.

Exciting announcement: I'll be giving a keynote talk at PyConf Hyderabad, which will place December 5-6th, 2020 (virtually, this year):

https://twitter.com/pyconfhyd/status/1321728958052794368?s=20

Tickets are available here: https://pyconf.hydpy.org/2020/

CfP is still open until November 8th: https://twitter.com/pyconfhyd/status/1313690523555819522?s=20

#PyConfHyd2020 #python

Of course, there are legitimate reasons for this sort of dependency injection-style parameterization, but adding support for arbitrary interfaces broadens your "supported configuration surface" so much that usually it doesn't pass the YAGNI test — unless you need it for tests.

That's obviously a pithy twitter-sized take, but I think most of the time when you have some highly parameterized class / function, you aren't doing it because you actually want to support an interface where someone supplies their own provider of some core language functionality.

You do it because it makes your testing easier, and you can nominally it allows you to test using only the public interface.

That sort of thing is a necessity in languages without monkey patching, but it seems like it's a considerably worse code smell than patching in tests.

Listening to Anna-Lena Popkes on @TalkPython@twitter.com and I realized something I've never consciously understood: mocking is bad because it is tightly coupled to implementation details, but dependency injection solves this problem by promoting those details to be part of the public API.

In the book "Brooklyn", @builtbrooklyn@twitter.com says early aviator Calbraith Rodgers was "blogging all the way" on a cross-country flight.

I am kinda startled to find that I can't think of a non-anachronistic verb to describe what he was doing: sending regular dispatches for publication.

Citation: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Brooklyn/JHbTDwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=blogging