for the third time this year I have successfully confronted an all-consuming phobia, one which results in week-long, unbearable panic attacks. not really possible without the staunch support of friends, family, and a cocktail of extremely powerful anti-anxiety drugs, but I did it nonetheless […]

TIL: ``` if not path.exists(path): return None with open(path) as f: f.readline() ``` can fail if the path is deleted between the first and the second block. #python.

the AI discourse is going to turn me into a batman villain who builds an underground lair for the sole purpose of kidnapping pundits and Clockwork Orangeing them to read the wikipedia pages on "metacognition" and "fundamental attribution error"

RE: https://mastodon.social/@glyph/116661163978253459 I really have to stress that the "hypothetically" parenthetical here is load-bearing. Nobody has *actually* had any code deleted yet by one of these LLMs, as a result of this logged prompt. If such a deletion did occur, who could even tell […]

Everyone talks about not having senior devs in the future because we’re replacing the juniors with LLMs, but nobody’s talking about losing senior devs now because people who are competent and care about the quality of their work are leaving this LLM-infested hellscape of a career path to go into […]

Due to my somewhat prickly and precise definition of "software ethics" I would not, personally, do this, but I think it's good that someone has. The industry—and the "community", such as it is—needs a wake-up call. The conversation *around* this reminds me of the loud booing from commencement […]

I actually worked at the same place as Andrew Tridgell, over a quarter-century ago. I got to know a few of the OzLabs folks during their immediate post-IBM years, and always had the highest respect for them in that way where you feel acute impostor syndrome when they're in the room. Tridge […]

Say what you will about the current Pope (I often do), but it sure is useful that there is one person in the world who is paid exorbitantly to be a scholar of _some_ ethical code and is given a large amount of attention in that role.

I’m proposing a new Law of the Internet: In any conversation about AI agents’ flaws that lasts long enough, the probability that someone will make an unfounded assertion that everyone else is just using slightly inferior tools that they know how to get around approaches 1.

Working in tech in 2026 feels like hiding from the angel of death daily.

This museum exhibition has the strongest point-and-click videogame room energy.

a stalwart Man was subjected to my post with a cute girly aesthetic and he took the time to let me know how much it annoyed him that there are posts on Mastodon that are cute and girly. There is of course only one solution

you ever just sit and think about the skill auction portion of the 1991 Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game

what's cool in the world of browser extensions

finally fixed my LinkedIn profile to switch "PSF Fellow" from an "experience" to an "honor" so it stops telling me and everyone who asks that I work at the PSF

RE: https://dragonscave.space/@TheQuinbox/116631951142675724 Hot take: Touchscreen GUIs with a screen reader are the raised print of our time. For context, read about the origin of Braille.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@glyph/116627317646590362 now I'm really wondering what the apparently substantial number of "yes" votes were thinking here

I feel there is a risk I might slightly overuse this thing https://trek.epicrandomness.com

Regular scheduled weekly update for patrons is up! This one is my post-conference report for PyCon and a report on some of the work that it inspired. https://www.patreon.com/posts/patreon-post-21-158907338

RE: https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/116619593419184629 this is why “prompt injection” is a bad name. it’s not a remediable vulnerability, it’s the entire way the technology works

Mastodon Status Page: All systems operational Mastodon API Endpoints: 503 503 503 500 503 503 503 503 503 200 503 503 503

Today I learned about "Malus" and parody is genuinely impossible now.

New blog! This one's for the library & framework maintainers. In brief, it's how to make a private constructor in Python: https://blog.glyph.im/2026/05/opaque-types-in-python.html

I could have solved all this in 20 minutes myself but I chose to use Copilot instead. Terrible decision. "AI" is *actively slowing me down* here and also making me angry. Sigh.

"Wait… SQLAlchemy Core Support?", I hear you ask. Yes, #dbxs supports #sqlalchemy Core, and has done so for quite some time. This was previously undocumented so I can certainly forgive you for not knowing. So the *real* story of this release is not so much any big code changes, but rather […]

New release of DBXS today: https://pypi.org/project/dbxs/2026.5.20/ This is a very minor release with a small tweak to its SQLAlchemy Core support so that `.returning()` statements don't cause a spurious type error.

everybody loves open source maintainers until it's time to do some open source maintainer shit (with apologies to @penguin whomst I am lightly rephrasing here)

[link to AI slop] Occasionally boosters will claim that all the trivially reproducible errors ("R"s in strawberry, full wine glass) are all solved, and I need to demonstrate that this is not the case. It's annoying that this keeps happening without any fundamental progress, but in case you need […]

Remember: we were never given credit for being right about crypto, we were never given credit for being right about NFTs, we were never given credit for being right about the metaverse and we will never be given credit for being right about AI. Fuck 'em up anyway.

In Yesterday's IO Keynote Google declared war on the remnants of the Web. While they packaged it as a lot of "AI" talk what their whole approach of decontextualizing information, of taking away links to sources and instead producing some LLM generated response means is that they want to […]

I'm at #rustweek2026 and Greg Kroah-Hartman from the Linux Foundation is PREACHING🙌 :rust:

Who gives a single shit how good the "AI" can code when the purpose of "AI" is and always has been enclosure of all information in an ad-driven surveillance platform. If you love LLMs, this is the future you, yes you, are actively helping create.

gonna gently push back that there's no reason (according to github's version of the story) to associate this with AI or with spectacular incompetence on the part of the employee; the issue is that industry standard, extremely widely used text editor Visual Studio Code has a big button that says […]

If you've ever thought to yourself, "sure, Twisted sounds neat, but isn't it done yet, it sure seems like network sockets are more or less a solved problem", I would encourage you to read this decade-old issue and all the discussion (both recent and historical) and also the resources it links to […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@AlSweigart/116602626276300598 I really want to stress that copyright infringement is a civil infraction unless you pass the specific tests set out in US law that make it a criminal infraction (>$1000 retail value worth of infringement). I am not a lawyer but it […]

shot, chaser

liberating this classic from a followers-only conversation because you all deserve to behold the long-ago glory of the height of my powers https://legacy.python.org/workshops/2002-02/papers/09/index.htm

On the way home from #pyconus 2026. Quite an experience this year; very intense. No point in sugar-coating the part where there is a pervasive vibe-sickness, open source is suffering a massive sustainability crisis, slop security PRs are overwhelming everyone (etc etc). But there was a lot of […]

OH: "I'm switching to Evolution as my mail client… because I have given up on life." #pyconus

I think my inherent disgust towards LLM AI is because it divorces the user from the weight of creation. What brilliance illuminated your life? What insights left you breathless? What strange paths did you wander? What work did you put in towards understanding what it means to be human?

this week I learned that if a computer program runs on a CPU, it is called a “computer program”. however if a computer program runs on a GPU it is called a “shader”. but! if, instead, a computer program runs on a GPU, it is called a “kernel”

free as in "the first one's always"

OH: “Now that I work on infrastructure, I don’t build anything” #pyconus

“Someone I didn’t know created something I didn’t know I needed next” is the best thing about the #python and #pyconus community.

If you are at #pyconus let's talk about Twisted and its ecosystem in a couple of hours! Whether you're an existing user who has some feedback for the maintainers, or someone who's heard about it and is curious about what it can do, I'll see you in Room 102B, 11 a.m. - noon […]

If you are at #pyconus let's talk about Twisted and its ecosystem in a couple of hours! Whether you're an existing user who has some feedback for the maintainers, or someone who's heard about it and is curious about what it can do, I'll see you in Room 102B, 11 a.m. - noon […]

no gods no kings no masters no LLM contributions please

Wandering the #pyconus expo floor I was able to find a company that did not once use "AI" in its marketing materials and in a 15-minute conversation nobody said "agentic" even once. In the spirit of rewarding what we want to see in the world, check them out: https://phemeral.dev

it's that time again #python