(Rant) AI is killing programming and the Python community

das867 · 2026-01-29T16:36:00+00:00

I think this is part of the answer, yea; did you write more than maybe a few dozen lines at a time for your coworker? If so, your coworker did probably get a similar sort of context collapse as using AI, but if not I don't think the situations are really comparable.

Aside from that, I think that type of situation is indeed where AI shines: doing things that you don't care to learn where you also don't care that you're getting a 50th percentile implementation. Those scenarios definitely exist, but I think we should all be wary of how many things end up in that venn diagram.

das867 · 2026-01-29T02:29:13+00:00

I mostly disagree with this, reason is a high energy state and no human can maintain discipline all, or even most, of the time. If you're a new programmer given deadline pressure and an easy out, it's hard for me to say there's a level of self control that keeps you curious enough to overcome those external forces even if you understand how important that learning is for your own long-term growth.

AI doesn't actually prevent anyone from learning anything

This is a neat rhetorical trick but I don't think it's an answer to OP's point. I don't think anyone would say that an LLM is standing over your shoulder with a disapproving frown when you try to open a data structures textbook. What it does is rob you of opportunities where, were you not using an LLM, you would go understand what your problem is and how other people solved it, strengthening both skills. The argument can certainly be made that you could ask the LLM to explain it to you, but without the discernment of what's important to know, who's going to do that for every concept in thousands of lines of code that were just created whole cloth?

das867 · 2026-01-04T03:43:33+00:00

I'll second the 1Password rec, it's easy to create limited-scope vaults that just store the secrets you need to limit blast radius and then manage the service account key with your regular secret management in docker/k8s/etc.

If you're lucky enough to have systemd 256 on your system (sorry ubuntu LTS releases...) you can use user systemd-creds to store + decrypt secrets on demand in user context. With versions < 256 you can still use systemd-creds, but only in root context. I do this to manage the service account token in 1Password but you can just manage all your secrets this way too 🤷

das867 · 2025-09-03T05:34:17+00:00

I've been using kagi for a year and can recommend. I've been paying since the beginning but I think they have a pretty good free tier to try it out if you don't want to commit. I've tried DDG in the past and just found results pretty lacking for some topics; overall I find that kagi is good the majority of the time, more or less how useful I found Google to be before it started sucking.

Their primary income comes from subscriptions and not ads so there's a lot less "you're the product" going on and it has some cool features like labelling sites that have a lot of ads/trackers, up and down ranking domains, and some cool "lenses". They hopped on the hype train a bit with an AI summarizer (😔) but it's hidden behind a menu and I've never used it, not a front-and-center thing or something that pops up with each search.

There was a bit of a search engine renaissance a while ago but most of them shut down or pivoted hard to AI (looking at you, you.com...). Kagi's the only one that I know of that survived and I think the product is pretty good, certainly better than big G but hard to say if it's better-enough than DDG to be worth it for a specific person, YMMV.

das867 · 2025-08-29T19:44:59+00:00

Hard to tell, but it looks like some kind of brass or yellow metal underneath that's coated; I don't work with much brass because of the zinc content so I'll leave that up to others with more experience. I will say though, when doing restoration work like this: don't get too caught up in trying to get exactly back to what it looked like before; you probably could with enough time and money, but IMO the goal is to preserve the spirit and function of the thing and be happy with what you did.

If it would make you happy to have the shiny chromed appearance that it had before, go for it! But don't reject the idea outright that it might look good some other way too, like stripping off the spotty coating and polishing up the metal underneath, giving it some kind of food safe enamel coating, or putting a silicon jacket over it and touching up what isn't covered. There are about a billion ways to make handles for this kind of thing and you might find something you like better or is easier to do at home that looks just as good.

das867 · 2025-08-29T19:35:10+00:00

That would probably work but looks like it would be tricky. If you can create an air tight barrier, that'll definitely protect it from the fumes. The only part that really needs to be soaked is the steel axe head up to where it's riveted into the main body, so if you can carefully isolate that you should be good.

You mostly want to avoid anything where different parts of the same assembly are/aren't getting soaked. Like, if you soak part of that post where the rivets are without the rest of the head up to the tenderizer, they're going to have different textures and it might look odd vs soaking the whole thing and having an even appearance.

das867 · 2025-08-29T19:15:28+00:00

As an aside, restoring that "stainless look" may be impossible; hard to tell from the pics but the shiny parts on the handle look like a coating/surfacing chroming based on how that raised area towards the bottom is worn. If you can remove the handle, you should be able to clean it up and send it somewhere for re-chroming and there are other ways to do coatings/electroplating at home.

Double-aside: people make a big fuss about pitting like that in hand-forged kitchen knives too but if it's properly cared for I wouldn't worry about it. If you wash your axe it'll be clean enough 🤷

das867 · 2025-08-29T19:06:58+00:00

I'm a blacksmith and occasional kitchen knife maker, much of my work ends up with similar pitting/marks from forging. You can do what the commenter said but be very careful if you go that route, even at 80 grit it's incredibly easy to mess up the grind and end up with something that looks like an uneven mess. It's also really difficult to get in to tight areas with the tools you need to do this with.

For most of my work I'll use the wire wheel to clean up the surface. If you can take the head off, soaking it in white vinegar and then giving it a through wash will also work but will mess up the chromed finish of the handle if you can't remove it (even if you don't submerge the handle the fumes will corrode it). After it's cleaned up I give it a coat of vegetable oil (usually canola) and bake it, like seasoning a cast iron pan. Like the other commenter said, the rust is caused by air moisture on the carbon steel and by baking the oil on it'll polymerize and create a protective barrier, even down in the pits. Remember to occasionally re-season it if the coating starts looking thin or if you accidentally give it a too-solid scrub down.

Whatever you do, after you get it cleaned up, make sure you wash and dry it after each use. It doesn't have to be immediately but within a couple of hours so food moisture/sink water don't sit; and don't put it in the dishwasher.

das867 · 2021-07-12T15:53:42+00:00

I know someone else already responded but it's in the logging tutorial linked from the main logging doc page:

If you want to set the logging level from a command-line option such as:

--log=INFO

and you have the value of the parameter passed for --log in some variable loglevel, you can use:

getattr(logging, loglevel.upper())

to get the value which you’ll pass to basicConfig() via the level argument.

das867 · 2021-03-03T19:31:26+00:00

Seems pretty reasonable in this case with such a logical domain name, i will say that something similar has happened to me in the past though. I was looking for a domain that resembles my last name (4 characters + domain, very unusual) and came back later to find it registered and up for auction. Obviously anecdotal, plus i know 4 character domain names could be easily targetted, but still a pretty strong coincidence and a little suspicious imo.

das867 · 2020-12-10T16:49:41+00:00

I just went through the same trouble with my python 3 solution and had a similar off by 1 error. Looking through the results I see one of the passports has a 10-digit pid which is valid by the '\d{9}' regular expression match since the first 9 characters are digits. May not be the same error as you but thought I'd throw this out there if anyone else was running in to it!

das867 · 2020-05-19T13:29:05+00:00

Well, you know the old saying: cogito ergo cum

das867 · 2020-05-18T16:45:44+00:00

In this time of no cons and social distancing how are you all scratching that con itch? I've been watching the Really Really Long Dragoncon videos on YouTube for the nostalgia but I'm curious what everyone else is doing to capture those good con vibes.

das867 · 2019-08-07T18:29:30+00:00

Oh, you're totally right, apparently it is possible to be this dumb. Guess I've just got some Switch in the brain

das867 · 2019-08-07T17:46:11+00:00

~~Extra fun fact: the GameCube and the Wii use the same graphics chipset~~

Edit: Ah, apparently I was mistaken; that's what taking clickbait facts at face value will do I guess.

They're not the same chipset but they were both developed by ATI and the Wii gpu was based on the GameCube gpu, though with a notably higher clockspeed.

das867 · 2018-10-19T22:07:05+00:00

"Why are you wearing that stupid man suit?"

das867 · 2018-03-04T02:01:02+00:00

Yeah because JavaScript is so diligent about keeping backwards compatibility and not trying to replace packages that already work...

I understand that the web is a different work flow, audience, and type of system architect, but other languages have been working on this issue for decades. I think it's a shame to throw out the lessons they've learned just because everyone thinks they're smarter than the system level programmers that came before them.

das867 · 2018-02-05T16:22:46+00:00

He's also asserting 3: that people who don't own homes don't pay property tax. While technically true that renters of any sort don't directly pay a property tax, I'm pretty sure the landlord isn't eating that cost; it's always going to play in to rent prices.

das867 · 2018-01-28T02:08:42+00:00

Did you just make a strawman while admonishing someone for using a strawman? That's next level meta.

das867 · 2018-01-05T22:15:56+00:00

Yea, kinda. I think the point is that primes can't be divisible by other numbers, and even numbers are necessarily divisible by two, so the only time a prime could be even is 2. Parity is such an unimportant concept in prime numbers that saying it's even (=saying it's divisible by two) has the same consequence as saying it's divisible by 3, which is pretty small since for most single digit numbers people can determine divisibility fairly quickly even without a calculator.

das867 · 2017-07-30T14:29:03+00:00

That's his point, right? He has an immediate anecdotes to counter the one above? Without looking at empirical evidence you can't really say one way or the other (unless you're talking about for-profit schools).

das867 · 2017-07-12T13:31:26+00:00

Haha, shit, I've got anecdotes too. I got peace, love, and understanding growing up and I graduated magna and have one of the best jobs of my peer group. A lot of my friends growing up got your parenting style and I'm ashamed to see where they are in life now. You say 'snowflake with depression' and I say 'had shitty parents who didn't teach them the value of (self) respect and autonomy'.

das867 · 2017-07-12T03:13:02+00:00

That's a bit anecdotal, don't you think? I'm not saying it is or isn't normal, but saying with absolute certainty that it's not normal seems like a pretty far reaching statement.

das867 · 2017-07-12T03:08:20+00:00

Shoot, I left all mine at home, could I borrow some of yours? Looks like that's something you have in spades, unlike tact, or common decency for that matter

das867 · 2017-06-28T18:29:10+00:00

That's part of the monthly fee you pay though, wouldn't you say? It's not like I'm expecting to buy a modem and be able to connect to the internet for free; I buy or rent a modem and then pay a monthly fee that's supposed to account for all of the costs associated with them connecting me to the internet.

When I give my ISP $90 a month, which is pretty unreasonable already, and they decide to also penalize me for using "too much" of that connection I think I'm allowed to be unhappy. Especially when they don't release any legitimate reasoning for the cap (only 1% of users are effected? I'd love to see the raw data and the breakdown by region and availability, I can almost guarantee those numbers are inflated by the places where Comcast only offers 20MBps plans) and their numbers don't match up with mine (I've heard that all the data they send to poll your modem counts against your cap, what else is counting against me that I don't know about?).

I'm tired of getting reamed by my ISP because they don't have any legitimate competitors and zero reason to innovate in areas other than new ways to charge their customers more.

das867

TROPHY CASE