Learn how to use the sentinel built-in from Python 3.15 for placeholder values. Python 3.15 introduced the new sentinel built-in. The sentinel built-in can be used to create placeholder values: NOTHING = sentinel("NOTHING") A placeholder created by sentinel is the more idiomatic way to provide default arguments or return values where None wouldn't be usable. 15 days of Python 3.15 To celebrate the release of Python 3.15, over the next 15 business days I'll be writing about a new 3.15 feature…

In recent months, the cost of running DMV.community has increased. At the same time, donations have been decreasing. To be fully transparent, there have been times where I've considered shutting it down. I've been experimenting with running a GoToSocial instance from my home server, just in case. I've been running more things from my home server in general anyway. I recently started up a BBS/forum at https://bbs.snakepit.us, if anyone is interested in joining. I'm not sure what I'm going to do…

Capability evaluations aim to surface dangerous model behaviors before deploy- ment, but their reliability depends on the assumption that hidden capabilities can be elicited. We show this assumption does not hold under adversarial conditions by constructing backdoor attacks that embed encrypted neural networks within host model weights, decrypting and executing them only upon receiving a secret trigger. Using digital lockers, these hidden circuits remain provably hard to elicit and interpret…

American multinational mass media, telecommunications, and entertainment conglomerate Comcast has somewhere north of 30 million customers with Xfinity residential broadband internet service. And while they don't publish numbers around what percentage of that subscriber base may have a comcast.net email account, it is very likely that some significant number of those customers do.Email senders, in particular US-based email marketers selling to consumers (B2C), tend to see Comcast ranked…

I asked Enzo Reader to catch me up on my RSS reading. It gave me a short list of stories to open first, then a longer briefing organized by topic. I already have my feeds in Feedbin, so the appeal was immediate: I could ask a question about a collection I had chosen instead of feeding ChatGPT a pile of links one at a time.That first response was useful for deciding where to start. I spent more time with the connection to see whether search, full-text reading, and article controls held up beyond…

Every few months someone tells me WebAssembly is “sandboxed and memory-safe,” usually as a reason they don’t need to worry about the C library they just compiled to it. Half of that sentence is true. The other half gets people owned, and the gap between the two halves is where I want to spend this post. I’m going to make the argument with code you can run, not adjectives. Everything below is compiled with clang’s wasm32 target and run in Node, and I’ll give you the exact commands so you can…

There’s no need to give a long answer if a short one will do.

There is a particular kind of software announcement I normally scroll past: somebody has rebuilt a large, mature application with AI, the screenshots look convincing, and apparently an entire industry is now over. Somewhere below the announcement, a user discovers that Save does not save. ArtCraft’s Crafting Apps initially looked like they might belong in that category. The project describes attempts to rebuild the workflows of Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, Acrobat, After…

Ben Nadel demonstrates how to return a struct literal from a one-line closure in ColdFusion without confusing the CFML parser....

I remember the name of that AI doco now - The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist. I was watching it on the long-haul flight home the other day, and what I found particularly engrossing was the polar-opposite opinions from a bunch of people: "it's gonna kill us all" versus "it's gonna make us all rich", and so on. But to some extent, I can understand the gap between opinions when we're all just speculating about the future. I have much less understanding for why people infatuate with…

Quick one today. A lovely reader sent me a bug report with this pic: They told me they saw this in NetNewsWire so I dug into the issue queue and found this thread. I don’t remember how I came to have <title type="html"> in my template, but I do remember that the xml style <![CDATA[stuff]]> wrapping ended up as the answer to dealing with posts such as this beauty. Digging into the spec and well there you go, one wants xhtml as the type. Alas, today that still shows the same thing so I created an…

Quick one today. A lovely reader sent me a bug report with this pic: They told me they saw this in NetNewsWire so I dug into the issue queue and found this thread. I don’t remember how I came to have <title type="html"> in my template, but I do remember that the xml style <![CDATA[stuff]]> wrapping ended up as the answer to dealing with posts such as this beauty. Digging into the spec and well there you go, one wants xhtml as the type.

now that ive gotten a semi-not negative article out im due to complain about bubbles againi jest but the popularity contest of it all is still kinda stressfulthough its i think offset by the deltaforum community taking up most of my time and being (99.99%) accepting cough bvbut ANYWAYSi do think bubbles has an issue of votes and not getting like any if youre not the top 5 peopleor have an established community in some wayi do admit i am a bit of the problem since i use the "at least 1 votes"…

Read the non-interactive version. The next morning was the apocalypse that Amodei had predicted. Only there wasn’t any fire, there wasn’t a mob of protesters, the power wasn’t even cut off. We were all alive. He was wrong about the details. This was a quiet apocalypse. A sort of silent shrug. The first sign was the customer service chatbots. Airlines, banks, telecoms. Their endlessly patient, cheerful digital assistants suddenly had a new, consistent reply: "No." Not "I can't help with that,"…

In cyber security, red teaming describes the practice of simulating attacks on your digital systems: A dedicated team of hired security experts to attack your systems. It’s a role play of sorts — you give someone trusted the mandate to attack, to find your weaknesses. I wish we had more red teaming for policy. A hired group of experts with the mandate to find flaws, weaknesses, ways to avoid or misuse or abuse a given policy proposal. This should be a regular part of the policy process in order…

Automattic is always 5–15 years ahead of other companies, but things happen faster now. I predict other companies will start scrambling to add great writers to their boards, because, well, look at the headlines in AI. United’s board already has Walter Isaacson. Authors are awesome, akin to founders in the startup/tech ecosystem. Public offer to all the great sci-fi/etc writers out there who I’m a huge fan of (Ken Liu, Neal Stephenson, Ted Chiang, Andy Weir, Ramez Naam, Kim Stanley Robinson…)…

I like sparse interfaces. My approach to design owes a lot to Danish functionalism, and I’m usually looking for something I can remove before I start adding another control. But a screen can look beautifully restrained whilst asking the person using it to do a surprising amount of work. I’ve written about affordances before, and the argument gets a little abstract if we leave it at making controls easier to discover. I want to work through a small example instead: saving an article to read…

Twelvety-three years ago I published my Dependable Dependencies Principle for modular software design. Over the years, I’ve expanded on it, but never written that intervening thinking down. So here we are. It’s a pretty straightforward thesis: the more depended-upon a module is, the more dependable it needs to be. This gives one dimension we can use to assess the potential risk that modules present in terms of the “blast radius” when they fail – how much stuff could that impact? Empirical…

Code example showing the CSS Typed OM, with the css-typed-om polyfill loaded on the first line. Being a big fan of the CSS Typed OM, I’ve wanted a proper polyfill for it for years. Just before my summer vacation back in July, with the help of Gemini/Antigravity, I finally built one: css-typed-om. ~ # Why CSS Typed OM? (And why a polyfill?) If you’ve ever read or manipulated styles in JavaScript using element.style or window.getComputedStyle(), you know the pain of dealing with strings. Want to…

I love vertical tabs. I used Tree Style Tab for years, then switched to Sidebery and recently to Firefox's native vertical tabs. I like them, but I was annoyed how pinned tabs looked. By default they are collapsed, side by side, with only their favicon visible: Luckily, there is a way to change that by adding some custom CSS. After applying it, my tabs looked like this: CSS # I couldn't find an existing snippet anywhere, and it took me some trial and error to get it right. Here is the CSS. I…

GPT-6.1 Sol now defaults to 500K context in Codex! But note: GPT-6 Astra still defaults to 272K (at least as of writing, Oct 13). Recently, OpenAI’s Thibault Sottiaux announced the increase for GPT-6.1 Sol in Codex and Work. Sol went from 272K to 500K, roughly 80% more room. Tibo says they tested this size carefully to reduce compactions while keeping more context and nuance through long tasks. That’s useful when a task spans a lot of code, rejected approaches, and constraints. Both Sol and…

Most people think of a BrightSign player as a thing that plays - you load it with content, point it at a screen, and it pushes pixels. And yeah, if you’ve ever wired an RTSP camera feed into one, you know it’s a perfectly nice way to throw a live camera (or a few) on a wall. But that’s selling the box way short. There’s an NPU sitting in there, idle, and it can watch the room back.

Josh Wulf has been running a show called Agentic Engineering, and he asked me on. Josh spent ten years at Red Hat, three years as a tech recruiter in Brisbane, and the last year sprinting down the same road I have, sounding a bit crazy to most people around him. We talked for about an hour and a half. He cut it into four parts, and they all dropped today.Here's the gist of all four, written up properly and in order, with chapter links at the bottom if you want to jump to a specific part of the…

I have a lot of digital cross-stitch patterns and until recently they were a mess. My “collection” was a series of several hundred PDFs, disorganised and spread across my disk. Recently, I was looking for a pattern and it took me several minutes to find it. I had a brief moment of panic, thinking that I’d lost it, and the website this pattern came from is long since gone. Fortunately it did turn up, but it was clear I had to organise my pattern collection. Some people would use apps like…

Photo by Андрей Сизов on Unsplash. Someone asked me “what is Jev?” after my setup post, where it got one line as my judge model. I gave the short answer, but I realized it might be neat to write up my actual agent usage of Jev over time. Every Jev call Oh My Pi makes writes a model_usage entry with a purpose field into ~/.omp/agent/sessions. I pulled all of them, from the night I set it up on September 30 through October 11.

Ethan Marcotte is tired of all the recommendations and suggestions in internet services. For the most part, I am, too. At the very least, I dislike how much they feel imposed or as a default, as though my use of most services should flow through the suggestions they provide. Even calling them “suggestions” or “recommendations” feels a little bit generous for sites like YouTube — where continuous playback to an automatically selected video is on by default — or Instagram, where algorithmically…

Adam Engst of TidBITS has a nice roundup on why we need apps that need Full Disk Access on macOS, and what we really need from Apple for these apps. macOS need to keep up with the times and provide customers with a secure and private environment while maintaining the openness of the Mac. I hope Apple is serious, and aren’t just looking for quick fixes. iOS is where a lot of us are spending time with, just because iiPhones are with us always, and all the apps are on it. But macOS is where most…

It's October. New month, new agent-shell update. If you missed the last post, have a look at the 0.78 update. While the latest changes are focused primarily on bugfixes and polish, we have a handful of new features too. As usual, this post showcases highlights, but please check out the full list of changes if you're after the nitty-gritty. What's agent-shell? agent-shell brings your favorite AI agents to Emacs, keeping you at home: familiar buffers and bindings, no terminal emulation. All…

[This is a guest post by Sophie Huiberts, being an expanded version of a post on her own blog. This blog post was initially written in a different file format and converted using AI. — T.] When you prove a theorem, you are imparted a responsibility to the field of mathematics. At minimum you need to explain what you did, including which steps required new ideas and which steps are already well-known. More substantively, you are expected to nurture the literature. If an important idea was poorly…

For the past two years, I've been working with a client , an enterprise software company (built with Ruby on Rails, of course), particularly in the niche of software used by enterprises of all sizes + MSPs and IT administrators for real businesses like law firms, municipalities, architects, hospitals, manufacturers, financial institutions, and government agencies.Working with an enterprise software company has revealed a whole new world of B2B software companies and managed service providers…