Learn how to use lazy imports to speed up the startup time of your Python applications. Python 3.15 introduced explicit lazy imports. An explicit lazy import is an import statement that starts with the keyword lazy: import json lazy import math lazy from pathlib import Path The module json is imported normally, but math and Path are imported lazily. If an import is lazy, the module will only be loaded when it is needed instead of being loaded immediately when Python encounters the import…

As someone who has, over the years, found himself deep in the Google ecosystem of hardware and services, I had been curious about the Googlebook concept for a while — whether it would be basically a fancy Chromebook, or if it would offer something more, and more useful, than that line of affordable but mostly limited laptops. When the Googlebook models for were announced in September, I decided to go ahead and pre-order one: The Acer Googlebook 14. It turns out, however, that apparently lots of…

This week, we are presenting the Barista paper at ASE'2026, and by 'we', I mean Catarina Gamboa, who is leading this work. When trying to adopt LiquidJava, an annotation-based language that adds refinements to types, in your Java project, you will have to write the annotations for any library that you use, including the Java Standard Library. This is just a huge amount of work for your simple application. This issue is shared by LiquidHaskell, Frama-C's ACML and Java Modeling Language. Roughly…

One thing I’m enjoying over at Bubbles is the non-tech blogs. Every other blog list I visit is usually mostly tech-related stuff, and then it’s usually developers. I’m a techie myself, and I don’t have anything against developers, but it’s nice to see more blogs about humans just being humans.

Publishing “Cryptographic Right Answers” for developers is a tradition by now. Colin Percival started in 2009, Thomas Ptacek followed up in 2015, and then Latacora carried on in 2018 and 2024. It might feel too soon for an update, but so much has changed. The timeline of the post-quantum transition dramatically shifted in early 2026, and there is now consensus that it needs to complete by 2029. 2029! We have three years! The good news is that, despite what you might have heard, symmetric…

Interesting hypothesis that the calibration from Apple might be different.

Various parties concerned about the risks that artificial intelligence (AI) pose to humanity have called for a pause in its development. But such a call faces a difficult collective action problem. Can it be solved? I have been skeptical (and suggested an alternate type of approach to AI safety here). But a new report argues that a pause is indeed possible. Drafted by the Working Group on AI Pause Feasibility, an interdisciplinary group led by statistician William Fithian and philosopher Wesley…

im the type of person to quite enjoy forumsyes i know shocking the guy who pays for a domain for his silly site likes forumsand one thing i keep running into that i find so interesting is how tricky image hosting actually istext is incredibly easy to store and retrieve, but images can be millions of times denser for a single pngthe naive solution of just letting users upload opens the door to losing all of your storageand the number one security rule of Dont let people upload arbritrary files…

I have been pondering the Audio Intelligence Live Rewind feature that Apple announced in the last keynote, and even though I know I am very late to this entire discussion, I still want to go on the record about it. In short: The feature is stupid, and was demoed poorly (you can usually just ask people to repeat what they said, and the idea that anyone would prefer using the watch is bonkers) Rather than adding value to the watch, it makes it a target (companies and specific locations are likely…

UnicodeChecker – Explore and convert Unicode (macOS) Mac application to explore Unicode. Analyse and convert Unicode strings for HTML or programming. [ 📌xcession ] Museum of Numbers Open the cabinet of oddly specific numbers Every number here gets treated like a small exhibit label. Some come from mathematics, some from physics, some from the strange edges of computing, and a surprising number come from history, money, or pure coincidence. [ 📌fileformat ]

Don’t stop the feeling! updated: 12 Oct 2026 created: 24 Aug 2020 Sony MP3 NWZ-B183F Portable Walkman 4GB USB MP3 Player 1 pics pixabay.com/illustrations/hot-tub-high-rise-upper-class-5349481/ pixabay.com/vectors/music-player-mp3-player-walkman-5453006/ ✓ 5 minutes ago ago

iron-proxy is an egress proxy to manage traffic for untrusted workloads. It works as a MITM proxy, has a DNS server and can apply an allowlist on MCP tool calls. While trying to sandbox an agent with docker, I added iron-proxy as a container to route all the traffic through it. The idea was to have agent and MCP each in their own containers and isolated networks, both communicating through the proxy. The proxy was the only container having outbound internet access. Either all the workloads had…

Hello, future Neil! You are probably trying to remember how you blurred part of a video. You blurred the bottom left portion of a circus video, using ffmpeg. You used: ffmpeg -i vid.mp4 -filter_complex "[0:v]crop=440:80:0:370,boxblur=2[mask];[0:v][mask]overlay=0:370[v]" -map "[v]" -map 0:a -c:a copy vid-with-blur.mp4 where: crop=440:80: this is the size of the boxblur, 440px wide, 80px high :0:370: this is the position of the boxblur, starting from left top. i.e. 0 pixels from the left, 370…

This was the last week of the spring school holidays, and we spent the last weekend staying in beautiful Narooma on the NSW south coast. We swam in the ocean and hung out with some seals! I also shipped some code. The larger part of my week was in getting some of the final Dry CLI pieces in place. After last week’s introduction of required options, I did some work on their counterparts, and went in the opposite direction, being strict about how how we handle required arguments, since their…

A clear overview of PHP 8.6's readonly property defaults RFC, why the old restriction existed, and why interface properties made it worth revisiting. It also covers the practical edge cases, so you know where the new syntax helps and where it still does not. Read more

The blog campaign "Ein ♥ für Blogs" encourages sharing other blogs. I've also created new notebooks.As I sit here these days, wondering what the point of all this even is anymore, constantly wavering between "It's all pointless anyway because of AI" and "Now more than ever!", this blog campaign (German only) pops up and reminds me: "Ah yes, that's why: building connections!" So, if you have a blog and are interested in such campaigns, please join in! I will and try to link to blogs that aren't…

Habitat maps Missing data As mentioned last week, I'm working towards doing a regional habitat map based on global data, to see if we can utilise Tessera's global reach to make up for local data-deficiencies. But in doing this I ended up doing a review what data we were using from GBIF, and found a couple of interesting points. The major one was that despite GBIF containing species occurrence data from many different sources, including Cornell's eBird repository which is often cited in the…

In reply to Laptop Stickers Yay Or Nay? by Wouter Groeneveld Wouter asks the question below. I never place stickers on my laptop. Not because fear of glue marks or loss of gloss though. Because of context. I would enjoy stickers on my laptop, but don’t add them. My laptop ends up in various different contexts, including different cultural contexts. Not all of those will know to interpret all stickers I might want to have or have interpretations that negatively impact my work there. It also…

There's no shortage of commentary on LLM usage and I've penned several posts that have never left draft status because in part I can't articulate exactly what I want, and partly because there's so much noise around the subject. That's been true for the last few years but as an senior (and old) developer I think it might be useful to at least put in writing what happens to be true for me this moment in October 2026. Fair notice: this post will only briefly cover any policy I personally hold and…

Many software engineers are righteously angry about AI. It’s understandable to be upset that the skills you built your professional identity around are getting automated away. But software engineers are the last people in the world who should be complaining about this. If you live by the sword, you will perish by the sword1. Software engineering has always automated industries From the very beginning, software engineering has been about automating other people’s work. Every single commercial…

Indiekit Beta 30Yesterday I was extremely excited to see the latest big update (Beta 30 & 31) to Indiekit, the Micropub server + client I use in conjunction with Hugo for this site. Lots of QoL updates and bugfixes. I want to thank Paul, Ricardo, and Anthony for making Indiekit better. Having upgraded a few times, I now know the routine to upgrade my server. When I first started I was very lost indeed… 😅 Here’s a quick rundown of how I did it (mainly for myself in case I forget in the future):…

Allegedly, it's a harmless question. Can XYZ send you notifications? Allow, allow! Of course you can, app for my vacuum cleaning robot from China. You deserve a piece of my attention. It's now split between you and 30 other apps (slash companies) that all deserve to inform me whenever they seem fit. What can go wrong? First, there is the cue. The cue triggers your brain to initiate a behavior. It is a bit of information that predicts a reward. Our prehistoric ancestors were paying attention to…

In the previous article we found out that the kernel makes all the memory feel like one single big thing, even though underneath it’s split into pieces. Today we go the other way: we’re going to make one machine look like several. You’ve probably done this already without thinking about it. Start a container, and the processes inside it see their own hostname, their own list of processes, their own network and their own filesystem, as if they had the machine to themselves. But there’s no second…

On software engineering, epistemology, and liability when code is generated by LLMs. Robert C. Martin recently generated much interest with a tweet: "My current strategy is to not read any of the code written by my agents. That's the only way I can take advantage of their productivity. What I do instead is to surround the agents with extreme constraints. Unit tests, gherkin tests, QA procedures, quality metrics, mutation testing, test coverage, and a plethora of others. In the end, I have very…

I’ve done a proper unboxing before on this blog, and since SuSE Linux 7.2 is contained in a box, it needs unboxing. But where normally for any box six sides are plenty to make clear what’s inside, advertise logos and paint one corner red with the word “New” (or translations thereof), SuSE apparently needed two more sides, so they simply added them. A box with eight sides This box was for the Dutch market, so it’s in Dutch, but the contents are mostly not. On the back side (not visible) a price…

Download Now Intro In the late 80s, I spent an embarrassing number of hours hunched over my ZX Spectrum, typing in Sinclair BASIC programs and rudimentary assembler routines copied from magazines, trying to re-create the Amiga crack intros I’d seen round at a friend’s house. Obviously, they never came even slightly close - but now, many decades later, I’ve finally managed it! I’m now the proud author of a hand-rolled retro demoscene intro that runs on a stock 128Kb Spectrum. It features all…

Hey friend. It's great to see you, a big welcome to new readers this week. I have something exciting to share today - a new site that I hope you'll find useful. Let me know what you think, MattStuff I've WrittenThe Values Finder. An exercise I use with coaching clients, rebuilt as a free tool. If you give it a try, save the results, because the next few posts are about what you do with the report.From the Archive: Stop Overthinking Career Decisions. Use this Test. A quick test for when you are…

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Sheets.works: People post this comic whenever something breaks. The tower is labelled "all modern digital infrastructure" and it stands on one small block, "a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003". We wanted to know how close to true it is. We downloaded the full history of 23 pieces of software that phones, browsers and servers depend on, and counted everyone who made ten or more changes to each one between October 2025 and October 2026. Then we…

I have a friend who aspires to have his own startup. He intended to do it alone so used AI to prepare all his business, marketing and operation plans. AI helped him to write a fantastic business plan. When he shared the plans to our group of friends. We all told him that we are not sure about his idea because he has not tested his ideas. He has not fully explored how users feel about using his solutions. Through vibecoding, he created a prototype. Our group of friends used the app and gave some…