New blog post: I got tired of having repetitive arguments explaining why I think it’s OK to be skeptical of LLMs for coding, so I wrote six and a half thousand words on the topic that I will be referring people to from now on.
www.b-list.org/weblog/2026/...
Today, I got messages from 3 different devs at 3 different large tech companies (1,000+ devs each). "tokenmaxxing" is happening inside all of them.
Why?
Because all of them measure either token usage, or surface metrics like DX's TrueThroughput that reward complex code!
“Good luck, I’m behind seven YubiKeys”
For Spanish I'd honestly be more likely to try something with "papá"/"papa".
Dunno, I was just running it through machine translation to play with the hungry/Hungary idea :)
For Hungarian, perhaps:
“Szia Magyarország, apa vagyok.”
Gittensor is paying crypto for merged OSS PRs and it’s generating slop contributions to repos listed on their platform without maintainer consent.
If you maintain an open source project, it's probably worth checking if you’re listed and requesting removal: gittensor.io/repositories
New blog post: Rewriting a 20-year-old #Python library
www.b-list.org/weblog/2026/...
So, given the state of air travel, how are people planning to get to PyCon US this year? Is this going to be the year of Amtrak to the conference?
Also, I am still looking for resources on this if you know of any (tl:dr company threatening me with debt collection over an account they admit is not mine).
infosec.exchange/@ubernostrum...
If you’re looking for a nice, modern, featureful #Python package and environment manager, may I suggest PDM?
And maybe also toss some funding their way.
pdm-project.org
"Our engineers are bad at documentation" Oh, really? When was the last time anyone got promoted for documentation? Or, you know, tons of tech writers who would be happy to have work right now. You get the behavior you reward.
In a Python REPL, the following code is entered: '🍎' > '🍊' The result is True
People say you shouldn't compare apples and oranges but it seems to work fine for me in Python 3.14, I don't see what the issue is...
So when I say I've taken a look at these tools and I'm just not super impressed by them, it's because of things like this. OK, your big parlor trick that gets literal national headlines is that you can quickly do something today that could already be done roughly as quickly twenty years ago.
And I mean that literally. Here's an example (archive link): web.archive.org/web/20080304...
That took two developers (one frontend, one backend) two days from "reporter comes downstairs and says they have data tables in Word docs, what could we do with that" to being live on the site.
I saw that NYT bit about LLMs being great at extracting and converting data and building an app, and I can't help thinking: "For you, the day an entire data-browsing app was built quickly before your eyes was the greatest software experience of your life. But for me, it was a Tuesday. In 2008."
"AI skeptic" is unhelpful because it:
1) Minimizes contributions Bender, Gebru, Mitchell, and others have made to our understanding of LLMs (untold hours of research and writing boiled down to "skepticism")
2) Sounds like they are denying the merit of something with merit like "vaccine skeptics."
Hey Benjamin, you're getting some suff wrong here, starting with framing me and my colleagues as "AI skeptics". It's true that we call BS on claims of AI, AGI, LLMs understanding etc. But "AI skeptic" is a term that resides within the AI booster's frame of view, not ours.
>>
Stoked to share that the Steering Council has accepted PEP 814. frozendict is coming to Python 3.15!
discuss.python.org/t/pep-814-ad...
happy `ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'pkg_resources'` day to all who celebrate #setuptools
Your annual reminder that your monthly metrics will be 9% lower in February because February is 9% shorter than January.
The coolest feature in Python 3.14 can be used to build a zero-preparation remote debugger for Python applications running in Kubernetes and Docker containers??? 🐛🪄
savannah.dev/posts/the-co...
Sumerian engineers 2000 years ago
The #dateutil library is a popular and powerful #Python library, but still supports Python 2.7 by depending on the #six compatibility shim, which I’d prefer not to install on Python 3.10+.
Here’s how I replaced its relativedelta in a couple of CLIs that didn’t really it.
hugovk.dev/blog/2025/mi...
Screenshot from Jurrasic World Rebirth scene about open source. "We open source it. It's all of us, not some of us" "I don't make any money in that scenario" "Oh, no, you're broke as hell"
Screenshot from Jurrasic World Rebirth scene about open source. "We open source it. It's all of us, not some of us" "I don't make any money in that scenario" "Oh, no, you're broke as hell"
Screenshot from Jurrasic World Rebirth scene about open source. "We open source it. It's all of us, not some of us" "I don't make any money in that scenario" "Oh, no, you're broke as hell"
Screenshot from Jurrasic World Rebirth scene about open source. "We open source it. It's all of us, not some of us" "I don't make any money in that scenario" "Oh, no, you're broke as hell"
This dialogue about open source from Jurrasic World Rebirth movie is so accurate 🥲
"We open source it.... It's all of us, not some of us"
"I don't make any money in that scenario"
"Oh, no, you're broke as hell"
#OpenSource
Thackeray said it well:
My song, save this, is little worth;
I lay the weary pen aside,
And wish you health, and love, and mirth,
As fits the solemn Christmas-tide.
As fits the holy Christmas birth,
Be this, good friends, our carol still—
Be peace on earth, be peace on earth,
To men of gentle will.
Given that there is Python code running off-world, should the PyCon CFP switch from “anywhere on Earth” to “anywhere in universe” time zone specification?
RE: https://fosstodon.org/@squidfunk/115739987490118848
since nobody listened to me, now you heard it from The Man: stop using MkDocs 😇
⁃ Sphinx: still maintained
⁃ API docs and cross links: work out of the box
⁃ MyST (Markdown in Sphinx): still maintained
⁃ Furo, sphinx-book-theme, …: still […]
Comments like these do not make me feel safe. I understand that rewriting history is alarming. Being concerned about a supply chain attack is understandable! But jumping to victim-blaming, ableism, and giving up on empathy are not healthy reactions, and should not be acceptable. 6/7