It's an interesting approach that's way simpler than relying on soil moisture sensors placed high up on mountainsides. It's not as widely applicable as measuring soil moisture directly, but it's been running steadily for over 5 years now.
I didn't see this until this morning, and the continuing through for the whole 18 words was a really good experience. I got 14/18, and that was much more satisfying than ending at my first failure.
When vehicles were starting to get noticeably bigger about 20 years ago, I asked some family members why they were buying vehicles they had to climb up into.
"On the highway, I'd rather kill someone than be killed in a wreck."
They would not recognize that while that might work for a while, it wasn't going to lead anywhere good for our society. A generation of people thinking like that has filled our roads with vehicles that protect their occupants while making it more dangerous for everyone else.
> In fact, I think Guido himself resigned due to the experience he had trying to get a PEP through the committee.
If you're referring to the steering council, that group was created in response to Guido stepping down.
He stepped down partly in response to the changing nature of online discussions around changes to the language. He just didn't want to be at the center of every polarizing discussion anymore. I think he also recognized that the transition needed to happen at some point, and that was as good a time as any.
> But adoption is the starting line, not the scoreboard.
Yes yes, shout it from the rooftops! Over the next few years I think we're going to see that companies that get this point will keep doing meaningful things, and stand a chance of weathering this transition period.
I think we're going to see a bunch of companies that went all in on AI for AI's sake go under because they've lost their mission, lost their implementation, and won't have a way to get those back in a reasonable timeframe and at a reasonable cost.
It depends on your definition of "threaten", but the short answer is yes. I live in a mountainous area that's a destination for road bikers and mountain bikers. There's lots of sources of tension between cyclists and drivers.
On a regular basis I see people racing past cyclists, rolling coal at cyclists (I can't believe that's even a term now), blaring horns, and a number of other behaviors that fall under "threatening".
US vehicles, especially pickups, have outgrown a lot of rural roads that had their origins as footpaths and horse paths. Even with well-intentioned cyclists and drivers, it's often times a setup for conflict.
So many areas in the US are much less walkable and bikeable than they used to be. I say that as someone who bicycle commuted for years. When I rode my bike to school as a kid I dealt with 25-35 mph traffic. The traffic was much lighter, the vehicles were much smaller, the drivers weren't perfect but they were way less distracted, and the shoulders were in better shape.
We can try to raise our kids with values that are consistent with the ones we grew up with. But trying to give them the same conditions because "it's what we did" doesn't always match up with reality.
This is great, but it's also easy to go too far in this direction. This can work through elementary school and into middle school, but I don't think it works in high school.
It's really hard to be a high school student without your own phone. I know some people who have kept their kids from having phones into high school. It avoids some of the addictive and distracting issues that come from having phones at a young age, but it's way more isolating than people realize. You might have a landline, but if no other high school age people are making voice calls to communicate, no one's going to call that landline. And the landline at home doesn't help you coordinate pickups and drop-offs as people start to do a wider variety of activities.
We have plenty of conflict in our home around devices, so I don't criticize any particular approaches. I'd just say that if you're taking this approach, it's probably a good idea to figure out how you're going to transition to kids having devices as they get into their high school years.
I met Chad during the gittip years, and one of my life goals now is to go find him in the offline world some day and sit around an open fire at night to share stories. :)
I wish I still had my gittip penny, but I seem to have lost it in several moves since that time.
Anecdotal data point: My son is finishing 9th grade, and he's taking 10th grade math because he got ahead a year when he was younger. At his school, you're exempted from having to take the final exam if you're passing with a reasonable grade at the end of the semester. He said there are about four students who don't have to take the final exam.
Math has always been hard to teach well, because issues with earlier math classes compound so much. With all the societal interruptions to education, and the impact of addictive tech on young people's minds, it's only gotten more difficult.
I'm partway through Anthony Shaw's NDC talk, "Are LLMs good software engineers?" One of the realizations he shares is that he found himself treating AI assistants like junior engineers. Then he realized they're like junior engineers in how they work and behave, but they don't learn like juniors do.
I thought that was an interesting thing to point out.
People are talking about Covid, smartphones/screens, social media, and AI. No one has mentioned defunding public education yet.
In Alaska, where I lived most of the last 20 years, education has been largely flat funded for about a decade now. Imagine running an organization in 2026 on that organization's 2016 budget. Schools have a bunch of obligations they have to spend on. Every time health care costs for staff go up, and funding is flat, something gets cut. You can't cut education for a decade straight without impacting student learning.
I don't think Alaska is that much of an outlier in this regard.
> With most parks the crowds quickly disappear once you are 2 miles in.
And those crowds just aren't present in the early morning. Nobody gets up early enough to be out at sunrise. I'm not worried about saying this out loud and spoiling it either, because most people just don't like to get up that early.
I've been to gorgeous places all over the US that are absolutely packed by 10am or noon. Those same places are completely empty, and even more beautiful at sunrise. I live near one of the best mountain biking places in the southeast US, and regularly do 20-30 mile rides starting at sunrise, and only occasionally see a runner or another cyclist. There's just nobody out in the early mornings.
From my understanding there are a lot of companies that need their own package repositories, for a variety of reasons. I listened to a couple podcasts where Charlie Marsh outlined their plans for pyx, and why they felt their entry into that market would be profitable. My guess is that OpenAI just dangled way more money in their faces than what they were likely to get from pyx.
Having a private package index gives you a central place where all employees can install from, without having to screen what each person is installing. Also, if I remember right, there are some large AI and ML focused packages that benefit from an index that's tuned to your specific hardware and workflows.
This has me thinking about VS Code and VS Codium. I've used VS Code for a while now, but recently grew annoyed at the increasingly prevalent prompts to subscribe to various Microsoft AI tools. I know you can make them go away, but if you bounce between different systems, and particularly deal with installing VS Code on a regular basis, it becomes annoying.
I started using VS Codium, and it feels like using VS Code before the AI hype era. I wonder if we're going to see a commercial version of uv bloated with the things OpenAI wants us all to use, and a community version that's more like the uv we're using right now.
Astral was building a private package hosting system for enterprise customers. That was their stated approach to becoming profitable, while continuing to fund their open source work.
The last section focuses on how to use LLMs to make contributions:
> Use an LLM to develop your comprehension.
I really like that, because it gets past the simpler version that we usually see, "You need to understand your PR." It's basically saying you need to understand the PR you're making, and the context of that PR within the wider project.
> One of the main issues is that pointing to your GitHub contributions and activity is now part of the hiring process.
If I were hiring at this moment, I'd look at the ratio of accepted to rejected PRs from any potential candidate. As an open source maintainer, I look at the GitHub account that's opening a PR. If they've made a long string of identical PRs across a wide swath of unrelated repos, and most of those are being rejected, that's a strong indicator of slop.
Hopefully there will be a swing back towards quality contributions being the real signal, not just volume of contributions.
I'm the author of Python Crash Course, published by No Starch Press: https://nostarch.com/python-crash-course-3rd-edition
I taught high school math and science for many years. I live in western North Carolina, and before that I lived in southeast Alaska for 20 years.
[email protected]
@[email protected]
https://bsky.app/profile/ehmatthes.bsky.social
Current thoughts: www.mostlypython.com
---