Glyph

he/him

You probably heard about me because I am the founder of the Twisted python networking engine open source project. But I’m also the author and maintainer of several other smaller projects, a writer and public speaker about software and the things software affects (i.e.: everything), and a productivity nerd due to my ADHD. I also post a lot about politics; I’d personally prefer to be apolitical but unfortunately the global rising tide of revanchist fascism is kind of dangerous to ignore.

posts: https://blog.glyph.im/
disclosures: https://blog.glyph.im/pages/disclosures.html
code: https://github.com/glyph
patrons: https://www.patreon.com/creatorglyph

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npub16y8yvp4qyfg03ljv5ahvcz0l3l9ggkmry6fszeek5a0x5gtgvd4q0pd455

NIP-05 Address

glyph_at_mastodon.social@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsdzrjxq6szy58clex2wmkvp8lclj5ytd3jdycpvum2whn2y95xx6ssa2e05

Author Public Key

npub16y8yvp4qyfg03ljv5ahvcz0l3l9ggkmry6fszeek5a0x5gtgvd4q0pd455

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Last Notes

2024-09-07 22:57:28

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but also it's hard to find precise, technically-correct terminology that captures these vibes properly

2024-09-07 22:57:11

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yes that was kinda my point, there's no such thing as a "compiled" language, and rust actually does have a runtime, I mean, they even have a page in the documentation about it https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/runtime.html

2024-08-05 16:40:30

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yeah I get that this is a tough line to walk. I am still over there too for a complex mix of reasons, although I don’t use it much any more. And sometimes I log in and the horrors on display shock the conscience in exactly the way you just felt. I just want to scream at somebody.
On the other hand, gamergate was a decade ago, so it’s not like it was all sunshine and roses when I was over there regularly. The floor was just tilted to a less obvious degree.

2024-08-05 16:30:14

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like I also still think that on balance the tradeoffs of the Fediverse are far better but listen to any Black user of both platforms and they will tell you racist abuse is worse here, as well as some clear structural reasons why that’s not an accident, it is due to designed properties of the system. It’s not a pure win.

2024-08-05 16:27:26

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while I understand the desire to keep up the pressure to divest from the mechanism of fascist propagandizing, I think it is important to keep that pressure gentle and empathetic. Consider: you and I both live in the USA, a country whose crimes *vastly* exceed the troubling dalliances of Twitter as a platform. Twitter has advocated for torture but the good old US of A has actually *done* it. So why are we still here? Cost of moving is high, no alternative is perfect. Same as for Twitter.

2024-07-11 16:17:34

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… I did not think that this worked because the iPad is usually *below* my main screen. Diabolical.

2024-07-08 18:21:51

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the ability to remove features from the standard library https://blog.glyph.im/2019/06/kernel-python.html

2024-07-05 21:28:50

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both. This is personal opinion (data on all these practices is maddeningly inconsistent) but I think the benefits of unit testing and CI are nearly universal. Resistance to those practices is largely just discomfort with a missing skill, in my experience. But while I find pairing super useful, people who don’t like it seem to have really good reasons. Social anxiety, mutual distraction, or a simple need to sit quietly as part of one’s process. It only helps some people, for some problems.

2024-07-05 20:25:19

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The problem with this message is that it's made to be subverted. XP took a hard stance and proposed a specific technique and thereby could be wrong. IMO its bets on automated tests and continuous integration won, but pairing didn't. But that was also what made it valuable. Agile, by contrast, wanted to be so broad as to never be wrong. Should I value humans over software? Sure. But what does that look like in practice? Every choice has advocates and adversaries, and they're all human.

2024-07-05 20:13:43

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I was an enthusiastic adherent of Extreme Programming because it was explicitly a *set of processes and tools*. Unit testing, pairing, and continuous integration were concrete things that you were supposed to always be doing in XP. When "Agile" started to take over, it seemed like a milquetoast watering-down, lip service to vague ideas rather than specific steps toward improvement.
I wish I'd had the political awareness then that I have now, so I could see what it actually was.

2024-07-05 20:09:57

"Individuals and interactions over processes and tools" from the Agile Manifesto is just a fancy rephrasing of a "personal responsibility" ideological stance; i.e. if there's a problem, fix it with individual effort rather than systemic change. And the parallel extends. Like every other "personal responsibility" political movement, Agile has become counterintuitively ossified in its own almost cult-like obsession with processes and tools.

2024-06-26 04:29:21

I think a lot of people need to hear this and I do not know how to get it to them, but here goes: sometimes if you want to increase your productivity you don't need a dopamine detox that starts with a 5AM morning routine with cold showers and green juice whey protein isolate smoothies and a guided meditation about minimalism, you need a CPAP machine and psychotropic medication

2024-06-20 06:54:42

Bartender's latest update introduces the new devs, removes the analytics framework, and explains why it was added (in a way that I, at least, find plausible). I am still a little skpetical of the way that this was handled but for the time being I think I'm going to assume good faith until I see any other concerning indicators.

2024-06-20 04:48:56

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Sorry that you are dealing with this. You're one of the most thoughtful people writing about these topics … well, probably in the world. I'm glad you're not letting the assholes win here but it sure sucks that they are nevertheless able to exact a toll every time.

2024-06-20 04:46:37

I don't recommend youtube videos often because most of the folks I watch are really popular now, and it feels redundant to tell you that, like, Hbomberguy's plagiarism vid is good. But that means sometimes I assume something great is already popular when it isn't.
CW for a gut punch of some of the most intense and upsetting misogyny you will ever hear, but boy is it ever worth it. This is a video that should be in the canon of modern feminism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=womJxiWG6Q0

2024-06-17 22:21:18

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I absolutely do not have the energy for a big fight about this and thus have not been yelling about it publicly, but, sigh, YES. Just pass the bylaws changes, there are clear problems that need addressing here, and if we need another round of changes later, sure, whatever, we can refine this mechanism. No need to delay another year or whatever to start improving things.

2024-06-09 23:18:27

A lot of financial regulation is just phrasing. Like I wonder if "pre-orders" would be as popular with gamers if there were a mandate to describe them as "non-refundable zero-interest long-term loans to game publishers"

2024-06-09 22:54:39

Python 3.12.3 came out a few days ago, and that means it's time for my favorite infrequently-run shell command: https://pypi.org/project/MOPUp/
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/112/589/120/553/687/273/original/f2af696715fab35a.png

2024-05-24 04:15:34

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I think we could have done 3.5k easy but there’s no way I’m signing *my* name to that, and therefore cannot blame the organizers even a little bit for being reserved in the estimations of our growth

2024-05-24 04:14:49

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on a macro level though the game is a sort of “price is right” where the stakes are the financial future of the programming language. before you get sponsors, you sign in blood that you will get X people into hotels and Y people into the venue, and if you guess Y too low the sponsors get mad and don’t come back because you’re not getting them sufficient brand equity, and if you guess X too high the hotels and convention center clean out the foundation’s bank account

2024-05-24 04:10:56

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at one point one of the organizers explained to me *just* the logistics of getting coffee for the sprints and I felt like my soul left my body for the astral plane

2024-05-24 04:05:50

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I believe it “sold out” at 2700, so we didn’t completely max out the venue. I’m not an organizer, but the limits have more to do with precommitments from the conference than physical size; i.e. we project we can get 2300 in the door for sure, so we won’t buy food or food-service-worker-time for more than 2700. Stuff like that.
Making these numbers too big (as they have been at a few points in pycon’s past) can be financially ruinous to the PSF so it’s always a little conservative.

2024-05-16 17:27:29

The difference between “continuous deployment”, “continuous delivery” and “continuous integration” is the difference between the eternal torments of sisyphus, tantalus and prometheus, respectively

2024-05-15 20:49:08

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Last year at #PyConUS I was vaxxed and freshly boosted so I wasn’t too worried about COVID in specific for me personally, but it was SO nice to get home with zero con crud

2024-05-07 22:17:38

OH: "I dunno, what's it like to be neurotypical be OK with just, like, hanging out someplace, not thinking about solving the world's problems"

2024-05-04 01:19:30

Yesterday my kid was explaining how to do something on their iPad, and they told me "first you have to go into the debugger", which really threw me for a loop. After asking a few questions about it, it became clear that the "debugger" was the multitasking view. When I asked why they were calling it the "debugger", they said "because that's where you go if an app has a bug, you throw it off the screen to get the bugs out". Apparently "debugger" was a word of their own invention, in this context

2024-04-27 01:31:00

My kid just wanted to do an impression of me giving a talk and they shifted into a much louder register and said “blah blah blah apple blah blah blah python blah blah blah docker blah blah blah” and I have never been roasted so hard in my life

2024-04-22 04:41:25

I auto-updated the Zoom app and apparently it is now "Zoom Workplace", which made me think I'd made a wrong turn in some dialog box, so I checked the website, but it seems this is just what it's called now. And why is it called that? Looks like they added "AI" and needed a rebrand? Sigh. What does the "AI" do? From their own description:
"Drive impact with intelligence across the entire Zoom platform"
So my one remaining question is, can their product managers hear themselves when they speak

2024-04-09 15:22:26

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it is not your responsibility to shift my view here :-). I appreciate the info you’ve already provided and I will continue to try and find my own resources. But what I would find convincing would be a specific measurement of discontinuous increase in energy use associated with AI that does not track with datacenter growth generally

2024-04-09 15:13:27

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I can’t see through the FT paywall but this all appears to be just explaining that datacenters are expensive and consume a lot of power? The idea that AI is driving this and not just the gradual transition of everything to the cloud sounds more like industry hype to me. “Look at how cool and high tech our product is! It is gonna need NUKES to power it!” But a similar effect could be explained by rewriting MS Word in JavaScript

2024-04-09 14:55:30

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do you have sources for those operators? Always happy to learn more about this

2024-04-09 14:47:24

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I think that the idea of out-of-control energy use is pretty wildly overblown by critics at this point. The numbers are hard to find but crypto is worse on the merits by orders of magnitude no matter how you slice it, and even if that is wrong and somehow LLMs are using thousands of times more energy than most estimates put them, as simon points out the similarities are not structural https://mastodon.social/@glyph/112137441750732247

2024-03-31 01:20:33

New Blog: Software Needs To Be More Expensive https://blog.glyph.im/2024/03/software-needs-to-be-more-expensive.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

2024-03-30 00:25:57

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In general this is reasonable, but this there are some clear exceptions for test vectors in cryptographic libraries and compression libraries (which this was).

2024-03-29 20:48:06

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"I never thought a sophisticated APT would backdoor *my* volunteer-maintained infrastructure that I got for free" sobs entire industry who voted for the "volunteer-maintained infrastructure that I get for free with no defense against sophisticated APTs" party

2024-03-29 20:43:59

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I really hope that this causes an industry-wide reckoning with the common practice of letting your entire goddamn product rest on the shoulders of one overworked person having a slow mental health crisis without financially or operationally supporting them whatsoever. I want everyone who has an open source dependency to read this message https://www.mail-archive.com/xz-devel@tukaani.org/msg00567.html

2024-03-29 19:38:56

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I feel both confident and also kind of queasy when saying this: it seems extremely likely that this is not the first time something like this has happened, it's just the first time we have been lucky enough to notice.

2024-03-26 01:04:59

It seems silly but mastodon’s retreat from the language of “toots” and now even “boosts” ( they’re “reblogs” in the official app now ) is exactly the same dumb-as-rocks discarding of a recognizable brand that Xitter is doing

2024-02-18 19:24:32

Hello UI designers. Please stop putting present-relative dates on things. It’s bad. If you put “1 second ago” on some data and I leave the tab open, I will be dismayed when I look at it 3 hours later and the thing that I thought should have happened 3 hours ago happened 1 second ago. Before you say you are going to keep things up to date with javascript or websockets: no you aren’t. You’re going to fuck it up. Correction: you already fucked it up. 1 second ago.