"everything depending on GPUs would quickly grind to a halt." is there any one thing essential depending on the existence of GPU processors ?
Weather forecasting thus farming, fishing, logistics.
Readit Newspletnes commented on Margin debt surges to record high advisorperspectives.com/d... · Posted by u/pera
pletnes commented on PYX: The next step in Python packaging astral.sh/blog/introducin... · Posted by u/the_mitsuhiko
The problem for me: a non-python developer, is that I just don't know what to do, ever, to run an existing script or program.
It seems every project out there uses a different package manager, a different version of python, a different config file to set all of that up.
Most of the time, I just have a random .py file somewhere. Sometimes it's a full project that I can look at and find out what package manager it's using. Sometimes it has instructions, most of the time not. _That's_ the situation I struggle with.
Do I just run ./script.py? python script.py? python3 script.py? python3.12 script.py? When inevitably I miss some dependencies, do I just pip install? python pip install? pipx install?
As a developer I'm sure that you just set it up and forget about it. And once things work, they probably keep working for you. But man, it really reflects negatively upon Python itself for me. I don't hate the language, but I sure hate the experience.
I believe what is missing is a way of distributing apps. You face similar issues if you get the C++ source of a random program - there are quite a few build systems in use! However, the compiled program can often just be zipped and shipped, somehow.
pletnes commented on PYX: The next step in Python packaging astral.sh/blog/introducin... · Posted by u/the_mitsuhiko
I started with "sudo apt install python" a long time ago and this installed python2. This was during the decades-long transition from python2 to python3, so half the programs didn't work so I installed python3 via "sudo apt install python3". Of course now I had to switch between python2 and python3 depending on the program I wanted to run, that's why Debian/Ubuntu had "sudo update-alternatives --config python" for managing the symlink for "python" to either python2 or python3. But shortly after that, python3-based applications also didn't want to start with python3, because apt installed python3.4, but Python developers want to use the latest new features offered by python3.5 . Luckily, Debian/Ubuntu provided python3.5 in their backports/updates repositories. So for a couple of weeks things sort of worked, but then python3.7 was released, which definitely was too fresh for being offered in the OS distribution repositories, but thanks to the deadsnakes PPA, I could obtain a fourth-party build by fiddling with some PPA commands or adding some entries of debatable provenance to /etc/apt/lists.conf. So now I could get python3.7 via "sudo apt install python3.7". All went well again. Until some time later when I updated Home Assistant to its latest monthly release, which broke my installation, because the Home Assistant devs love the latest python3.8 features. And because python3.8 wasn't provided anymore in the deadsnakes PPA for my Ubuntu version, I had to look for a new alternative. Building python from source never worked, but thank heavens there is this new thing called pyenv (cf. pyenv), and with some luck as well as spending a weekend for understanding the differences between pyenv, pyvenv, venv, virtualenv (a.k.a. python-virtualenv), and pyenv-virtualenv, Home Assistant started up again.
This wall of text is an abridged excursion of my installing-python-on-Linux experience.
There is also my installing-python-on-Windows experience, which includes: official installer (exe or msi?) from python.org; some Windows-provided system application python, installable by setting a checkbox in Windows's system properties; NuGet, winget, Microsoft Store Python; WSL, WSL2; anaconda, conda, miniconda; WinPython...
I think I have a similar experience in some ways, but building python from source should work on linux in my experience. On a debian ish system I’d expect apt installing build essentials and the libraries you need and you should be good. I’ve done it with some pain on red hat-ish distros, which have tended to ship with python versions older than I’ve experience with. (I guess it’s better these days..?)
pletnes commented on Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1M tokens of context anthropic.com/news/1m-con... · Posted by u/adocomplete
> Having spent a couple of weeks on Claude Code recently, I arrived to the conclusion that the net value for me from agentic AI is actually negative.
> For me it’s meant a huge increase in productivity, at least 3X.
How do we reconcile these two comments? I think that's a core question of the industry right now.
My take, as a CTO, is this: we're giving people new tools, and very little training on the techniques that make those tools effective.
It's sort of like we're dropping trucks and airplanes on a generation that only knows walking and bicycles.
If you've never driven a truck before, you're going to crash a few times. Then it's easy to say "See, I told you, this new fangled truck is rubbish."
Those who practice with the truck are going to get the hang of it, and figure out two things:
1. How to drive the truck effectively, and
2. When NOT to use the truck... when talking or the bike is actually the better way to go.
We need to shift the conversation to techniques, and away from the tools. Until we do that, we're going to be forever comparing apples to oranges and talking around each other.
Being a consultant / programmer with feet on the ground, eh, hands on the keyboard: some orgs let us use some AI tools, others do not. Some projects are predominantly new code based on recent tech (React); others include maintaining legacy stuff on windows server and proprietary frameworks. AI is great on some tasks, but unavailable or ignorant about others. Some projects have sharp requirements (or at least, have requirements) whereas some require 39 out of 40 hours a week guessing at what the other meat-based intelligences actually want from us.
What «programming» actually entails, differs enormously; so does AI’s relevance.
pletnes commented on Never write your own date parsing library zachleat.com/web/adventur... · Posted by u/ulrischa
pletnes commented on Keep Pydantic out of your Domain Layer coderik.nl/posts/keep-pyd... · Posted by u/erikvdven
This seems ridiculously over-complicated. This guy would love Java.
He doesn't even say why you should tediously duplicate everything instead of just using the Pydantic objects - just "You know you don’t want that"! No I don't.
The only reason I've heard is performance... but... you're using Python. You don't give a shit about performance.
Pydantic seems to be fast (in the context, it’s written in rust) so it might make sense to keep using pydantic for performance reasons.
pletnes commented on Never write your own date parsing library zachleat.com/web/adventur... · Posted by u/ulrischa
> and i don't want to pay my employees to learn, i want to pay them to produce output i can sell.
This can be a bad local optimum. It probably depends on what exactly your business does, but it can make sense to pay an employee to acquire knowledge and skills that are needed in the business. You can't buy this off the shelf in all circumstances. Of course, it also has to make economic sense and be viable for the company. Unfortunately, I often see employees doing things quite badly that they don't really understand because they are not given the opportunity to learn properly. I can't imagine that this burns less money in the medium and long term than giving paid employees adequate space to learn.
Also as an employee, this forces me to job hop to stay relevant.
The point that he's a con man is that he signed a document with IBM to supply an OS when he had none. Of course in retrospect he was "smart" to go around and buy one, but in fact he was promising IBM something he didn't have and in an alternate universe he could be sued for that.
If I order a new car, it may well not exist yet. The deal is that there will be a car on hand at some agreed upon date. I don’t think Gates did anything more illegal than the analogous car deal. More risky, perhaps, but that’s another thing entirely!
pletnes commented on I'm switching to Python and actually liking it cesarsotovalero.net/blog/... · Posted by u/cesarsotovalero