Planet Avium

A river of news from a selection of feeds I follow. Disclaimer: This is not an endorsement.

Pluralistic: End of the line for corporate sovereignty (27 Mar 2024)

Today's links End of the line for corporate sovereignty: ISDSes are on the ropes, and not a moment too soon. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2014, 2019, 2023 Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em. Colophon: All the rest. End of the line for corporate sovereignty (permalink) Back in the 1950s, a new, democratically elected Iranian government nationalized foreign oil interests. The UK and the US then backed a coup, deposing the progressive government with one more hospitable to foreign corporations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalization_of_the_Iranian_oil_industry This nasty piece of geopolitical skullduggery led to the mother-of-all-blowbacks: the Anglo-American puppet regime was toppled by the Ayatollah and his cronies, who have led Iran ever since. For …

Posted by Cory Doctorow on Wed 27 Mar 2024 in Pluralistic.

Home Server Offline ☹️

Today, I woke up and noticed that my home server, located in my second flat, and also the router, all behind a 5G connection (that was showing as working fine on the provider’s website), were offline. No VPN connection anymore, and also Tailscale showed the nodes as being offline. I’m glad that I had automatic backups and was able to easily restore the three important services from that server on my VPS, without the need to travel to the second flat first.

Posted by Anonymous on Tue 26 Mar 2024 in jlelse's Blog.

On Tech Debt: My Rust Library is now a CDO

You're probably familiar with tech debt. There is a joke that if there is tech debt, surely there must be derivatives to work with that debt? I'm happy to say that the Rust ecosystem has created an environment where it looks like one solution for tech debt is collateralization.

Here is how this miracle works. Say you have a library stuff which depends on some other library learned-rust-this-way. The author of learned-rust-this-way at one point lost interest in this thing and issues keep piling up. Some of those issues are feature requests, others are legitimate bugs. However you as the person that wrote stuff never ran into any of those problems. Yet it's hard to argue that learned-rust-this-way isn't tech debt. It's one that does not bother you all that much, but it's debt nonetheless.

At one point someone else …

Posted by Armin Ronacher on Tue 26 Mar 2024 in Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings.

The "current branch" in git

Hello! I know I just wrote a blog post about HEAD in git, but I’ve been thinking more about what the term “current branch” means in git and it’s a little weirder than I thought.

four possible definitions for “current branch”
  1. It’s what’s in the file .git/HEAD. This is how the git glossary defines it.
  2. It’s what git status says on the first line
  3. It’s what you most recently checked out with git checkout or git switch
  4. It’s what’s in your shell’s git prompt. I use fish_git_prompt so that’s what I’ll be talking about.

I originally thought that these 4 definitions were all more or less the same, but after chatting with some people on Mastodon, I realized that they’re more different from each other than I …

Posted by Anonymous on Fri 22 Mar 2024 in Julia Evans.

The wrong way to speed up your code with Numba

If your NumPy-based code is too slow, you can sometimes use Numba to speed it up. Numba is a compiled language that uses the same syntax as Python, and it compiles at runtime, so it’s very easy to write. And because it re-implements a large part of the NumPy APIs, it can also easily be used with existing NumPy-based code.

However, Numba’s NumPy support can be a trap: it can lead you to missing huge optimization opportunities by sticking to NumPy-style code. So in this article we’ll show an example of:

  • The wrong way to use Numba, writing NumPy-style full array transforms.
  • The right way to use Numba, namely for loops.
Read more...

Posted by Anonymous on Thu 21 Mar 2024 in Python⇒Speed.

Announcing a PyPI Support Specialist

We launched the Python Package Index (PyPI) in 2003 and for most of its history a robust and dedicated volunteer community kept it running. Eventually, we put a bit of PSF staff time into the maintenance of the Index, and last year with support from AWS we hired Mike Fiedler to work full-time on PyPI’s urgent security needs.

PyPI has grown enormously in the last 20+ years, and in recent years it has reached a truly massive scale with growth only continuing upward. In 2022 alone, PyPI saw a 57% growth and as of this writing, there are over a half a million packages on PyPI. The impact PyPI has these days is pretty breathtaking. Running a free public service of that size has come with challenges, too. As PyPI has grown, the work of communicating with users and …

Posted by Deb Nicholson (noreply@blogger.com) on Wed 20 Mar 2024 in Python Software Foundation News.

Is this for autistic people?

Special Olympics swimming season started this past weekend. A new athlete joined us, a young boy I’ll call Bryan. He asked me a question that has stuck with me.

Bryan is 12 or so, with the slightly goofy look of a boy growing into his body. He has braces on his too-large teeth. It was his first time swimming with us, so we needed to show him the locker room, how to get out to the pool, and so on. He was serious and inquisitive about all of these things that were new to him.

We got out on the deck and started stretching with the other athletes, most of whom don’t look like Bryan. They are older and have a variety of intellectual disabilities. Bryan surveyed the group then turned to me and asked the question: “is …

Posted by Ned Batchelder on Wed 20 Mar 2024 in Ned Batchelder's blog.

Python 3.10.14, 3.9.19, and 3.8.19 is now available

Howdy! Those are the boring security releases that aren’t supposed to bring anything new. But not this time! We do have a bit of news, actually. But first things first: go update your systems!

Python 3.10.14

Get it here: Python Release Python 3.10.14

26 commits since the last release. Python 3.9.19

Get it here: Python Release Python 3.9.19

26 commits since the last release.

Python 3.8.19

Get it here: Python Release Python 3.8.19

28 commits since the last release. Security content in this release
  • gh-115399 & gh-115398: bundled libexpat was updated to 2.6.0 to address CVE-2023-52425, and control of the new reparse deferral functionality was exposed with new APIs. Thanks to Sebastian Pipping, the maintainer of libexpat, who worked with us directly on incorporating those fixes …

Posted by Łukasz Langa (noreply@blogger.com) on Tue 19 Mar 2024 in Python Insider.

2D Triangle Maps using Shape Functions

Notebook

In a recent project at work, I’ve been working with triangles in 2D and 3D meshes.

The question I got stuck on (even though I’ve discussed very similar ways of mapping trianges before) is the following:

what is an efficient way to define a map function that goes from a 2D triangle (with local $\xi, \eta$ coordinates) to a given 3D triangle (with $x, y, z$ coordinates)?

Intuitively, it should be relatively easy, since both are surfaces of dimension 2. However, in practice, it took me a long time to find "the right solution". Things finally clicked for me when I read this stackexchange post: https://scicomp.stackexchange.com/questions/25327/finding-shape-functions-for-a-triangle-in-3d-coordinate-space

In this blog post, we will discuss the solution proposed above, but in the context of 2D triangles, since this makes for nicer plots.

So …

Posted by Florian Le Bourdais on Tue 19 Mar 2024 in Frolian's blog.

Syntax Error #13: Playgrounds

Online playgrounds are a great tool for debugging as they require distilling your example to a minimal form and they enable sharing with others to get help.

Posted by Juha-Matti Santala on Sun 17 Mar 2024 in Syntax Error.

Making GitHub Notifications UI slightly nicer for bulk triage

I’m someone who gets a lot of GitHub notifications – this week had >100 individual notifications. The problem The “new” GitHub Notifications UI1 was based on Octobox. It was a step in the right direction to help with my notification “workload”, although I recognise that it was not perceived as such by many others. That said, they copied over the exact same design issue I had with Octobox: the action buttons are on the completely opposite side from where my attention is.

Posted by Anonymous on Sun 17 Mar 2024 in Pradyun Gedam.

🥯 Bread so lazy, it's always loafin' around

I’m honestly enjoying the new vigour from the ounce of serotonin I get from the sun being out a bit.

In this issue, we have an OpenAIs video generation model, helpful code snippets, and CVs rendered from a YAML file. I talk about fairness in AI, circular plots, and a bunch of fun things I’m up to.

So, let’s dive right into some fascinating machine learning!

The Latest Fashion

Worried these links might be sponsored? Fret no more. They’re all organic, as per my ethics.

My Current Obsession

I accidentally hyperfocused and started collecting Python conference archives from all the way to …

Posted by Anonymous on Sat 16 Mar 2024 in Late To The Party 🎉.

PEP 743: Add Py_COMPAT_API_VERSION to the Python C API

Add Py_COMPAT_API_VERSION and Py_COMPAT_API_VERSION_MAX macros to opt-in for planned incompatible C API changes in a C extension. Maintainers can decide when they make their C extension compatible and also decide which future Python version they want to be compatible with.

Posted by Victor Stinner (vstinner@python.org) on Mon 11 Mar 2024 in Newest Python PEPs.

Fanart tribute to Toriyama. Arale, Dr. Slump

I learned this morning of the passing of Akira Toriyama, the father of Dragon Ball, Dr. Slump, designer of Dragon Quest, Chrono Trigger. Also, probably the artist who influenced me the most when I started drawing. So I'm repurposing the blog post I made of a fan art I drew of Arale and I'll date it of today. My heart is really heavy this morning...

Original post ( 23 october 2022 ):

A fanart of the little girl robot Arale Norimaki, main character of the Japanese manga series Dr. Slump (Japanese: Dr.スランプ) written and illustrated by Akira Toriyama from 1980 to 1984. I have all the manga at home and I had a lot of fun painting this one.

This artwork was also here to test my new workflow, one that attempts to get better volumes, light, and …

Posted by David REVOY on Fri 08 Mar 2024 in David Revoy.