James Bennett

The man with the plan and the pocket comb. 

Django security team. Ex-Mozillian.

I have enough opinions of my own to tell you about, without wasting time trying to give you my employer's.

Don't forget to tip your servers and normalize your Unicode.

Public Key

npub1sqpyyt3q96akgwe3c68zt5cwl86pug0uutw34656zud5rcv2vy4snpsy7u

NIP-05 Address

ubernostrum_at_infosec.exchange@mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsgqqjz9cszawmy8vcudr396v80naq7y87w9hg6a2dpwx6pux9xz2c34fqgt

Author Public Key

npub1sqpyyt3q96akgwe3c68zt5cwl86pug0uutw34656zud5rcv2vy4snpsy7u

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Last Notes

2024-07-24 22:09:44

Whenever I see one of those viral social media posts about “there’s no such thing as depression/ADHD/etc., there is only CAPITALISM which is the source of all evils” (at least one of them is going around today)I have to control my visceral reaction to it. In no small part because this sort of shit is where it inevitably leads:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/07/rfk-jr-wants-to-send-people-on-antidepressants-to-government-wellness-farms/

2024-07-20 23:27:45

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@npub1wfj…2ewz There's another indirect followup in a more recent post where I continue to sing the praises of message queues.
https://www.b-list.org/weblog/2023/oct/20/silver/

2024-07-19 21:48:31

Once again: it’s rich people who are mad at Biden’s policies who are driving all of this, and you all got played with the narrative that it was about the debate performance or his polling numbers.
Tech bro billionaires want Biden gone. That’s the story.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/19/us/politics/michael-moritz-biden.html?smtyp=cur&smid=bsky-nytime

2024-07-08 18:30:52

Today in "the New York Times hates democracy", they ran the following headline.
Coincidentally, Congress just passed and the President just signed into law funding and other resources for a major push against Parkinson's:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/bill-hope-president-biden-signs-231021975.html
Gee. I wonder why someone might have wanted to consult with experts on Parkinson's?
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/112/752/292/559/532/361/original/91e0400a2e0eeb44.jpeg

2024-07-06 01:52:34

Feisty Joe Biden is the best Joe Biden.
Also: he’s right. Political press has been getting this stuff wrong for years.
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/112/737/042/404/092/463/original/eeb11848e31231a2.jpeg

2024-07-04 21:36:46

On Independence Day, the New York Times ran an op-ed by a literal right-wing monarchist insisting it's bad to vote and people shouldn't do it.
Also, public records confirm he does vote. He just doesn't want *you* to.
If you needed any further evidence that their "Biden must go" coverage is rooted in hatred of democracy, this should be it.
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/112/730/374/235/817/899/original/27013bd1c95aae98.jpeg

2024-07-04 21:32:47

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@npub1pfe…e2dm I have a thought on this but I also don't particularly want to publicly hand out where I live -- what's a good private channel? Signal?

2024-06-30 08:49:58

Apropos of nothing, here's a list of headlines after the first debate of the 2012 US Presidential election.
As a reminder, Barack Obama won that election by picking up 61% of the electoral votes.
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/112/704/707/350/090/957/original/486d1ea828453431.png

2024-06-28 21:12:53

At least one of the New York Times’ “Biden didn’t do perfectly at the debate, he must now drop out of the election” hit pieces was, according to the date in its URL, written days before the debate and then was post-dated.
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/112/696/305/864/860/975/original/1216b56c2f1eac6b.jpeg
https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/media_attachments/files/112/696/306/273/181/060/original/8bee320bf726434d.jpeg

2024-03-01 02:18:13

I will have more to say about this at a later time, but this week I used svcs by @npub1txc…ajj9 for the first time and I think it is going to become a standard part of most of my #Python projects going forward. Highly recommended:
https://svcs.hynek.me/en/stable/

2023-12-08 03:57:38

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@npub1pfe…e2dm Might also compare to how some of the type-hint-oriented frameworks do it. I believe this is Litestar's implementation here:
https://github.com/litestar-org/litestar/blob/8f2cbe630ad9d71521f0477c6f0a3c0ed1c9a4a5/litestar/typing.py#L481

2023-10-25 05:34:36

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@npub172v…689n A tl;dr is that this is a band-aid, and not even a particularly good one, and now we're stuck with it for compatibility purposes, making the real long-term solution (a single standard high-level Python project management tool that avoids the need for most people ever to write, edit, or necessarily even know about a packaging config format) harder to achieve and slightly further out of reach.

2023-10-21 01:23:00

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@npub172v…689n I'm really sad because accepting either one of those PEPs seems likely to do more to hold back better experiences than to help them, but it seems like the decision was made early on that one or the other had to be accepted ASAP, and the only allowable discussion would be "which one" rather than "maybe neither".
(didn't pipe up in the threads because I have a personal policy of never commenting and only rarely even reading packaging-related discussion threads because of how much they tend to raise my blood pressure)

2023-10-20 20:10:37

(reposting for this time zone)
New blog post as we head into the weekend:
https://www.b-list.org/weblog/2023/oct/20/silver/
Musings on Fred Brooks' "No Silver Bullet”, acknowledging he was right, #programming is hard, and what it means for us, and some vaguely silver-y things I've encountered. And some implications for/mentions of #Python and #Django in there, too, just to make sure I stay on my usual topics :)

2023-09-29 02:02:17

This is your occasional reminder that it's not "Congress" or "politicians" who are throwing a tantrum and shutting down the US federal government due to their inability to pass a budget.
It's exactly one of the two major parties: the Republican party. Every single time this happens? It's the Republicans. And they bank on you blaming "politicians" or "Congress" in general, rather than holding them accountable.

2023-09-26 08:01:01

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@npub1znz…8l64 @npub1pfe…e2dm Just FYI, in the US the ARP (the big COVID “stimulus” which was actually a huge pile of stuff) allocated USD$122B (yes, “B” as in “billion”) for COVID prevention in schools and explicitly recommends ventilation and air quality improvements as a good use of that money. There’s also a broader not-just-schools initiative on indoor air quality. Problems are that A) stuff takes time to roll out and B) US federalism doesn’t always provide ways for national government to force state/local to act.
https://www.ed.gov/improving-ventilation-schools-colleges-and-universities-prevent-covid-19
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/03/17/fact-sheet-biden-administration-launches-effort-to-improve-ventilation-and-reduce-the-spread-of-covid-19-in-buildings/

2023-09-12 21:54:36

A quick #Python tip/plea: the standard library "http" module, since Python 3.5, has contained an enum of the HTTP status codes: https://docs.python.org/3/library/http.html#http.HTTPStatus
You can import it and write things like
assert my_success_response.status_code == HTTPStatus.OK
And this replaces both raw integer "magic number" values and framework-specific constants/enums, so you no longer have to remember that Web Framework A calls it "HTTP_200_OK" while Framework B calls it "HTTP_STATUS_OK", etc.
I plan to ensure all of my own projects switch to this as their standard way of referencing status codes, and urge everyone else to do the same (and web frameworks to deprecate and begin removal of their own variations on status-code constants/enums).

2023-08-10 22:52:19

Something I've been thinking about a bit lately:
Back in the 2000s, Java was being hyped up, so a lot of time and effort was spent on trying to make #Python interoperable with, and feel more like, Java. The Jython interpreter, a zillion interface and abstract-class implementations and JAR-alikes, etc.
Now in the 2020s, Rust is being hyped up, and people are spending a lot of time and effort trying to make Python interoperable with, and even feel more like, Rust.
I wonder if the outcome will be different this time.

2023-08-01 06:14:59

If you're upset that an open-source project is using a non-open-source/centralized tool for hosting or communication or whatever? Being angry at the project is not going to help.
That stuff gets chosen because it's easy and it's where the people are. If you want alternatives to be adopted, make them easy and help build them up to where the people are, rather than yelling at an already-overworked maintainer.

2023-06-04 00:54:56

The number of allegedly #Python tools being written in Rust, whose story on interoperability with existing Python code or extensibility from the Python side is basically the Bugs-Bunny-saying-"no" meme, is too damn high.
I just don't feel like trading in years of reliable working tooling for a thing that has to rebuild entire pre-existing ecosystems from scratch in a different language in order to get to kinda-sorta-maybe parity with what I already have.

2023-05-30 01:43:29

The battle flag of the 28th Virginia Infantry is in the possession of the Minnesota Historical Society, after previously being on display at the Minnesota state capitol. It is only occasionally exhibited now, and kept in an undisclosed location to prevent attempts to steal it.
How it ended up like this is a good story for this Memorial Day.

2023-04-27 08:52:05

I saw someone point out today that to a French speaker “ChatGPT” reads like “Cat, I farted” (« Chat, j’ai pété ») and now that is what I am going to think of every time I see it mentioned.