James Bennett's Avatar

James Bennett

@b-list.org

Django/Python guy. Tip your servers and normalize your Unicode. he/him Angry politics and other non-tech parts of me are at @ubernostrum.bsky.social Elsewhere: https://www.b-list.org/ https://infosec.exchange/@ubernostrum https://github.com/ubernostrum

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14.11.2024
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Latest posts by James Bennett @b-list.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.

08.03.2026 17:12 πŸ‘ 23 πŸ” 9 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
In a Python REPL, the following code is entered: '🍎' > '🍊'
The result is True

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...

21.02.2026 22:28 πŸ‘ 55 πŸ” 9 πŸ’¬ 4 πŸ“Œ 0

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.

19.02.2026 00:44 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Preview
LJWorld.com / Crimes reported in KU residence halls Top jobs Β· Top rentals Β· Top transportation

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.

19.02.2026 00:40 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

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."

19.02.2026 00:39 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0

"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."

16.02.2026 16:02 πŸ‘ 132 πŸ” 23 πŸ’¬ 5 πŸ“Œ 3

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.

>>

16.02.2026 14:25 πŸ‘ 317 πŸ” 61 πŸ’¬ 5 πŸ“Œ 12
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PEP 814: Add frozendict built-in type After careful deliberation, the Python Steering Council is pleased to accept PEP 814 – Add frozendict built-in type. The absence of an immutable dict counterpart has been a long-standing gap in Pytho...

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...

11.02.2026 17:13 πŸ‘ 58 πŸ” 13 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 1

happy `ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'pkg_resources'` day to all who celebrate #setuptools

09.02.2026 05:29 πŸ‘ 15 πŸ” 2 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 1

Your annual reminder that your monthly metrics will be 9% lower in February because February is 9% shorter than January.

04.02.2026 17:28 πŸ‘ 48 πŸ” 16 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 0
Post image
23.01.2026 15:02 πŸ‘ 413 πŸ” 108 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 2
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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?

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??? πŸ›πŸͺ„

savannah.dev/posts/the-co...

10.01.2026 06:46 πŸ‘ 31 πŸ” 8 πŸ’¬ 3 πŸ“Œ 0

Sumerian engineers 2000 years ago

31.12.2025 23:42 πŸ‘ 2944 πŸ” 463 πŸ’¬ 19 πŸ“Œ 4
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Replacing python-dateutil to remove six

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...

29.12.2025 20:20 πŸ‘ 15 πŸ” 2 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 0
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"

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 πŸ₯²
"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

29.12.2025 22:50 πŸ‘ 7 πŸ” 3 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

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 stillβ€”
Be peace on earth, be peace on earth,
To men of gentle will.

25.12.2025 01:19 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Given that there is Python code running off-world, should the PyCon CFP switch from β€œanywhere on Earth” to β€œanywhere in universe” time zone specification?

20.12.2025 02:32 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
Original post on mastodon.social

RE: https://fosstodon.org/@squidfunk/115739987490118848

since nobody listened to me, now you heard it from The Man: stop using MkDocs πŸ˜‡

⁃ Sphinx: still maintained
⁃ API docs and cross links: work out of the box
⁃ MyST (Markdown in Sphinx): still maintained
⁃ Furo, sphinx-book-theme, …: still […]

18.12.2025 15:50 πŸ‘ 4 πŸ” 5 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

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

16.12.2025 22:52 πŸ‘ 29 πŸ” 2 πŸ’¬ 3 πŸ“Œ 0

Today in a work meeting I literally said "for those who come after" as a reason to document something well, and a couple of co-workers apparently appreciated that.

16.12.2025 23:27 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
Outstanding PyLady Award The PyLadies community is made up of many remarkable members and volunteers that make significant contributions to bettering the Python community. The Global Council’s Outstanding PyLady award is m...

Is there a PyLady that has made meaningful impact in your community?
Nominate them for the Outstanding PyLady Award.

Examples of who to nominate:
Community leader, speaker, educator, open source contributor, mentor, blogger, volunteer, etc

secretcodes.dev/outstanding-...

#PyLadies

12.12.2025 22:12 πŸ‘ 5 πŸ” 4 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Deprecations via warnings don’t work for Python libraries Last week urllib3 v2.6.0 was released which contained removals for several APIs that we've known were problematic since 2019 and have been deprecated since 2022. The deprecations were marked in the...

urllib3 used "DeprecationWarning" for 3 years to deprecate API features and it didn't work, so what do we do instead?

#python #deprecation #deprecate #api

sethmlarson.dev/deprecations...

08.12.2025 17:45 πŸ‘ 17 πŸ” 6 πŸ’¬ 9 πŸ“Œ 0

Tried to type β€œsource” and got β€œspurce” instead. And now that I look at it, β€œspurce tree” seems like a thing that would make sense.

04.12.2025 20:49 πŸ‘ 1 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Context: www.minecraft.net/en-us/articl...

02.12.2025 22:05 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0
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Python Software Foundation News

Please join us in thanking @sovereign.tech for committing to a €86,000 investment to improve the security of CPython and the Python Package Index (PyPI). We're thrilled to partner with them to improve security for all users. Read more on our blog:

02.12.2025 12:15 πŸ‘ 26 πŸ” 10 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

Minecraft has announced it will move to (a form of) CalVer.

Now I need a picture of someone standing on top of a hill in Minecraft, shouting down "It's over, SemVer! I have the high ground!"

02.12.2025 22:02 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 1 πŸ“Œ 0
UNIX SYSTEM V/88 Release 4

UNIX SYSTEM V/88 Release 4

using a non-free operating system atm like and subscribe to make richard stallman sad

26.11.2025 03:49 πŸ‘ 8 πŸ” 3 πŸ’¬ 2 πŸ“Œ 0

Any multi-user application with a backing persistent data store is a distributed system and you have to think about distributed-system problems when building it send skeet

24.11.2025 01:07 πŸ‘ 0 πŸ” 0 πŸ’¬ 0 πŸ“Œ 0

8675309 is prime, and so is 8675311, so if you ever need a middlin'-large pair of adjacent primes to test your cryptographic suite, all you need is a 1980s earworm and a +2 and you're all set.

21.11.2025 03:28 πŸ‘ 2381 πŸ” 455 πŸ’¬ 25 πŸ“Œ 37
Conversation with Claude about tracery parsers, and it advises me to look at kate comptons parser, to which i reply β€œbut Doctor i am kate compton”

Conversation with Claude about tracery parsers, and it advises me to look at kate comptons parser, to which i reply β€œbut Doctor i am kate compton”

Doctor says, 'Dont worry, parser design is simple. Great programmer Kate Compton has written the parser you seek’

16.11.2025 14:44 πŸ‘ 2726 πŸ” 454 πŸ’¬ 26 πŸ“Œ 6