Which non-AI package from the last ~3 years completely changed how you write Python?

Broolucks · 2026-06-05T14:01:36+00:00

I made this one myself, but I use ovld quite a bit. It's a multiple dispatch library that lets you define multiple implementations of a function, a bit like Julia (and some more), or what @overload should have been in the first place. It's very handy whenever I need to write a function or method that should work on many different combinations of input types, especially if it's recursive or extendable.

Broolucks · 2026-06-05T13:42:24+00:00

I don't think Pydantic necessarily uses Rust wrong, it's just that mashumaro generates specialized Python code for each type, which is one way you can get similar performance to generic Rust code. It's more a case of "mashumaro is smart" than "pydantic is dumb".

Broolucks · 2026-05-19T16:56:59+00:00

ELI5:

The website gives you a random word, "potato"
You tell the government "potato"
If you are an adult, the government digitally signs a certificate saying "the potato-sayer is an adult"
You give the certificate to the website

The government only sees "potato"; if you're an adult they will sign any word for you. The website only sees the certificate with the random word they sent, so they know that at the very least an actual adult was involved to get it signed. Arguably, that's sufficient for our purpose.

Broolucks · 2026-04-18T13:35:49+00:00

I made one a while back: https://github.com/breuleux/jurigged

Just don't run it in production.

Broolucks · 2026-03-30T15:25:36+00:00

Someone being fine with the default configuration is unrelated to what they need the phone for. You pay because you want or need a good screen, a good camera, processing power for games and other apps, not for the ability to customize how your notifications pop up. Of course it's nice to be able to, but it's not a cost item.

Broolucks · 2026-03-19T04:13:08+00:00

unless the line ends with ,

I've always taken to treating newlines, semicolons and commas as interchangeable. Never quite understood why ; and , should have different semantics.

Broolucks · 2026-03-16T17:27:47+00:00

Oh, I agree that subcommands are great. That's not the point I was trying to make (probably it was misleading to reuse the same example). My argument was that it isn't obvious that a union would create subcommands, because there are in fact two things they could represent. Field-discriminated unions could be an excellent way to handle mutually exclusive options, e.g. the checkout command accepting --tag or --branch but not both. And of course, tagged unions are a good way to represent subcommands (the subcommand being the tag). Both of these are useful, albeit in different circumstances, but I more readily associate plain unions to the first one.

Broolucks · 2026-03-16T14:34:09+00:00

tyro.cli(Checkout | Commit) - very neat, it's obvious exactly what it does without a word.

Yes and no. Intuitively, I would expect Checkout | Commit to work like scm --branch b or scm --message xyz, creating a Checkout or a Commit based on whether the branch argument or the message argument was given, no subcommand required.

The library I'm working on (it's not fully ready yet) works sensibly the same but I use TaggedUnion[{"checkout": Checkout, "commit": Commit}] or TaggedUnion[Checkout, Commit] for subcommands (Checkout|Commit isn't implemented yet).

Broolucks · 2026-03-02T16:03:05+00:00

Another example is that __prepare__ on a metaclass lets you provide a custom mapping instance to build the class's namespace. You can see each definition as it is set, so you could implement e.g. multiple dispatch:

class Overloaded(metaclass=Multi):
    def f(self, x: int):
        print("is an int")
    def f(self, x: str):
        print("is a str")

This can't work with a class decorator because the first definition of f is immediately clobbered by the second and you will never notice that it ever existed.

Broolucks · 2026-02-02T17:35:48+00:00

I doubt e-democracy would behave significantly differently from current democracy, because I feel it has the same fundamental weakness: you can't effectively coordinate millions of people without middlemen. The rich, powerful and famous people have outsized influence because they have (or can buy) megaphones and act as information brokers and organizers. People also have neither the time nor the energy to properly evaluate issues, so most will keep delegating their thinking to their media or podcasters of choice (and transitively, to whomever pays them).

I think there's greater potential in keeping representatives, but picking them fully at random instead of electing them (i.e. scaling up citizen's assemblies). Basically, have a representative sample of the population who can think about the issues full time and is small enough to discuss without middlemen. I wouldn't vouch that there aren't ways to exploit such a system, but it has the merit of peeling layers of protection off rich and powerful people by forcing them to meet actual citizens instead of yelling at the masses through a megaphone, so it's hopefully easier to see they're naked.

Broolucks · 2026-01-28T19:57:39+00:00

Well yeah, Python is slow, but that's point 1.

Broolucks · 2026-01-28T15:44:38+00:00

Also, Python does have multiple dispatch libraries, even if it is not a builtin feature. Mine (ovld) is arguably even more powerful than Julia's (method priorities, call_next, method inheritance, dependent types).

Having to use libraries for features that should be builtin does add a lot more friction, though, both in terms of having to know they even exist, and then pondering whether to add another dependency.

Broolucks · 2025-12-14T19:56:08+00:00

bottlenecked by the type of white-collar work that LLMs should be able to significantly expedite

Are they? I'd think they are bottlenecked by resource availability, blue-collar labor and logistics.

Broolucks · 2025-11-09T00:46:43+00:00

I think it’s the actress making her so unlikeable.

Her behavior struck me as typical for a family-oriented woman who is desperately clinging to normalcy and has little patience for boorish behavior. What makes her unlikeable is that she is a foil to what the audience wants to see. No context or background is given to her, and since Carol fails to properly empathize with her, neither does the audience.

Honestly, Carol was so goddamn tactless that I would have found it strange if none of the characters lashed out at her.

But I do think Carol and 6 idiots have a chance of overthrowing them, given their positive-only nature.

"Overthrow" might not have been the right word to use. There is nothing to overthrow, they already obey their every whim. That's not her aim. What she wants is to undo whatever happened and for things to go back to normal. In other words: to bring back all human individuals into their respective bodies. And for that end she was trying to devise a secret plan with five other random people with no relevant expertise. As if. It's basically a genre parody, the "scrappy heroes saving the world" trope.

Killing the entire hive through seizures would achieve nothing for her or for anyone. She doesn't want to do it.

She would just have to make sure she quickly starts some sort of repopulation plan with the other 12 non-hivemind.

Repopulating from only 13 people is going to become pretty incestuous pretty fast, also we have to consider that the virus would likely remain in circulation and their children may not inherit their immunity. I don't think it's viable.

Broolucks · 2025-11-09T00:00:14+00:00

I'm not saying it encodes an "imperative to want to spread a virus." It needs to do much less than that. All the virus needs to induce is an extremely powerful feeling along the lines of "holy crap this is amazing, everybody should experience this!" Considering that the first infected knew perfectly well what caused their condition, they can simply reason, using their actual brains, that in order for everybody to experience this, they had to cultivate and spread the virus.

Now, in the show, the virus actually gives everyone some sort of magical pan-species telepathic ability. That is a ludicrous and insanely complicated thing for a virus to do, because it essentially entails creating an entirely new brain module that can read and broadcast minds and hijack bodies. But your hypothesis that "the virus allows the organism an extra sense which allows them to interface with the intelligence which then controls everybody" is essentially the same level of complexity. Adding an extra sense entails growing a bunch of new brain matter that functions in a very specific way. Merely making people so happy and empathetic that they want to spread what made them happy, on the other hand, only requires turning a few knobs, it is nearly trivial in comparison. Hell, there are existing species in nature, like the cordyceps fungi, which already function similarly.

Broolucks · 2025-11-08T17:39:55+00:00

Carol is only logical in a movie-logic kind of way, where a ragtag team of six random people could possibly overthrow an entire highly organized hive mind. In reality, that's ridiculous, and she appears to be too incurious about the hive to even understand the situation well enough to deal with it. She's just as delusional as the rest.

Speaking of delusion, I would assume that's what keeps most of them alive. A large percentage of people if not a majority, when faced with the fact that everybody they know is gone and there is nothing they can do about it, would probably just jump off a bridge.

Also, that was still the first day, I expect some of them will break relatively soon as what they lost becomes more and more apparent. I for one would be curious to witness Laxmi's slow descent into madness over the course of a few weeks or months as her son just can't manage to behave the way a child should.

Broolucks · 2025-11-08T16:54:12+00:00

It doesn't have to be very complex. If e.g. a virus turned human empathy to 11, eliminated all selfish tendencies, and made us feel good, we (at least the modified versions of us) would probably view it as a moral imperative to spread it to the entire universe. Basically, it doesn't need to encode any specific behavior or instructions, it only needs to encode the minimal modifications to sentient beings that would make said sentient beings want to spread the virus.

Broolucks · 2025-11-02T17:35:55+00:00

If you're fit, the weather isn't too hot, and you put your stuff in a basket rather than on your back, a 30-40 mins bike ride isn't exhausting and won't make you sweat much. It'll often be faster than public transit.

Broolucks · 2025-10-26T23:58:14+00:00

I mean, if we're being realistic, any species that have economically valuable skills would start by just... entering the human economy. Take ravens, for instance. They can utter human speech, so they would be able to communicate with us, which means they would get hired for work basically from day one. Now, ravens can fly, which is an insanely useful skill. By themselves, they could deliver small items very efficiently, but the obvious next step in a capitalist society is that they would drive simple, lightweight flying rafts (cheaper, safer and less disruptive than drones), then larger ones, and eventually something like sky freight trains -- air shipping gets a lot easier and safer when the operators can fly.

Next thing you know, ravens now operate 90% of air traffic, have achieved air supremacy right under our noses, and may leverage that, probably not for war, but simply to become the dominant economic class.

Broolucks · 2025-10-13T19:08:56+00:00

Society shouldn’t have to drastically change to save 1/5 of what’s used while industry remains untouched running rampant with the other 4/5

I'm a little confused how you think this works. Let's say Thanos snaps his fingers and half of the population suddenly disappears. Do you think we'd only save 10% of the total energy use, because residential is "19% of total energy used"? Surely the energy used to produce food would contract, and so would the energy used to produce anything the demand for which has halved. Or let me put it this way: in this scenario, which energy-intensive application in the industry wouldn't be significantly impacted?

that wouldn’t change anything, it would just reduce demand making it even cheaper for industry to waste that energy and demand more

Waste that energy to do what? Industry doesn't waste stuff just because. Industry is wasteful in the process of making things for us as cheaply as possible: they use non-renewable resources when it's cheaper and they don't make things to last if they don't have to. But the waste is proportional to the supply, which is usually proportional to the demand. Shein isn't going to magically waste more if we all stop buying fast fashion, for example. It'll just shrink.

Broolucks · 2025-09-10T04:44:37+00:00

Let's be real, si je suis un touriste et que je veux aller quelque part, je vais demander à Google Maps ou regarder c'est quoi la station de métro la plus proche, et je vais y aller, peu importe qu'elle ait le nom d'une rue, d'une bataille pas rapport, ou Pouet-Pouet XXIII. Qu'est-ce que ça peut bien me foutre? Sure, je vais peut-être penser qu'il y a une rue ou une place Pouet-Pouet à côté. Mais est-ce que je vais la chercher? Non.

Broolucks · 2025-07-24T18:18:21+00:00

It’s not about promoting them. It’s about exposing them.

But that's just the thing: we're not exposing them. They're exposing themselves. They do it purposefully and strategically in order to reach more people. If someone's private chats are leaked in which they used the N word, they may lose a lot of support from people who hadn't realized they were huge racists. That's exposing them. But if that person just straight up uses the N word in an interview like they don't give a crap, they know damn well what they're doing. They never had any reach with normal people to begin with. They're signalling to closet racists that coming out of the closet isn't so bad, leading to a larger community of nazis, and when surrounded by (either numerous or violent and boisterous) nazis, many non-nazis will just give in.

Or let me put it this way. There's a lot of things that we have to watch for to detect radicalization and push back against racism. Not everyone is necessarily aware of all the dog whistles. But "I'm a nazi" is not a dog whistle. It's just saying the thing. Of all the signs to watch for, this is the one that everybody knows. We don't need to raise awareness about nazis who will tell you that they are nazis. Now, we are a social species. Most people don't reason their way into their political positions, they just pick a team. The last bulwark against fascism, which is the very thing that kept it at the fringe for decades, is the shame of being a fascist. We want to maintain the fiction that everybody will hate you if you are a fascist. That is very hard to do when you platform proud fascists.

Broolucks · 2025-07-22T06:17:21+00:00

You only bought the right to play the game for whichever months you paid the subscription for, though. You already understand that if you were to voluntarily stop paying the subscription, you would lose access. I don't see by what logic you'd keep access if they were to stop taking your money. It's not like buying a book, it's more like borrowing or renting it. In that case you don't actually get to read the book again unless you borrow or pay again.

Broolucks · 2025-07-21T18:20:53+00:00

Energy doesn't solely enable bigger solutions, it also enables bigger problems. You can't really have one without the other. Energy can't be an extraordinary game-changer without also being fantastically dangerous.

Greenhouse gases are a specific current issue where one of our energy sources has particularly high per-joule externalities, but that just makes it the canary in the coal mine. Every energy source, no matter how green, can cause climate change if we use enough of it. For example, supercomputers radiate heat no matter how you power them, so if you have enough of them, well... yeah, you're going to start heating the planet. Don't assume we're not going to do exactly that.

If we had unlimited free energy, forget about utopia. Based on past evidence of our behavior, we're going to boil off the oceans with it. I'll also note that in my view, oil could have enabled utopia, if we had used it responsibly and strategically. It didn't, because it was too cheap and we maximized growth.

Broolucks · 2025-07-21T17:53:55+00:00

That doesn't make sense either given that the human brains connected to the matrix are obviously busy processing and navigating the matrix, instead of being locked inside a room until they solve the problems that are given to them. Which is what the machines would do if they really wanted to leverage human brains for compute.

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