Enjoyed this post by @heathermeeker.bsky.social about the chardet controversy, so I thought I’d share. heathermeeker.com/2026/04/09/t...

I put together a set of agent skills for building and tuning Commander/EDH/Brawl MTG decks, and they're pretty useful, so I thought I'd share them with the world: github.com/dan-blanchar... It says "Claude Code" in the repo name, but it should work with any agent and they're `npx skills` installable

I spent a couple weeks putting together as thorough an account of the chardet rewrite as I could imagine. People are still welcome to disagree, but at least this way they’ll have all the facts about what happened

Forgot to share that I was on the Building for Others podcast talking about the chardet controversy www.elvex.com/podcast/he-r...

Another day, another chardet release: chardet 7.4.0 is even more accurate and significantly faster from cold start. I also put together this fun historical accuracy chart that covers all the Python 3 compatible versions. chardet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/pe...

Just released chardet 7.3.0 with one big new feature: MIME type detection for both binary and text files. Other big news is that as of this release, all 7.x releases are 0BSD licensed. And from this release forward the only license included will be 0BSD

And another release! chardet 7.2.0 is out with some long-requested features: you can now filter the encodings that are considered (inclusively or exclusively), and you can get the detected language from the CLI now. Also fixes a bug with null byte separators not being considered valid ASCII.

Just released chardet 7.1.0 with PEP263 encoding detection, a cold-start performance improvements, and a couple backward compatibility fixes github.com/chardet/char...

Definitely didn’t expect to be asked to comment on a piece for The Register, but I think they did a great job summarizing the controversy around chardet 7. www.theregister.com/2026/03/06/a...

chardet was vipeforked to MIT and I have thoughts about it. Spoiler: I like it. lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/3/5/the...

After 3 years of very sporadic development, I just released chardet 6.0.0! This one is a pretty huge update, as all the models have been retrained, and I added language-specific models for 38 more languages. It should be more accurate and faster to boot! github.com/chardet/char...

How I am going about my days lately (cc @crmarsh.com)

Republicans want to tell you what books you can read, what bathroom you can use, what words you can say, what history you can learn, what you can or can’t do with your own body and what gender you are… but tell me more about how the Dems are “coming for your freedoms”. Idiots.