Making someone’s day. All it really takes is a small unexpected gesture. You pick up a little extra something for a coworker at the coffee shop. You let someone with small kids move ahead of you in the line.

Heck, even asking a favour of someone can be all it takes sometimes. If they’re feeling ignored or in a funk for whatever reason, it brings them back and can be a little self esteem boost knowing they helped you out.

I wonder how much range you would get running your tricked out ebike at 70 mph? I bet you would burn through battery pretty fast. I say this after researching e-motorcycles awhile back. I was disappointed that most of the affordable offerings topped out at around 100 km range or less, where my use case would have been inter-city. I have an e-bike for the city I’m perfectly happy with. But then I found someone on a forum mentioning that you could more than double the e-motorcycle range if you restrict yourself to city speeds to cut the wind drag.

I ride my ebike on mixed use paths on my way to work. My personal policy is to treat it as a class 1 in that case, and not exceed 24 kph. When passing pedestrians, this drops to 20 or lower, depending on the circumstances (e.g. can I get their attention with the bell, are small children/unleashed dogs involved, etc.).

Yesterday, I saw someone shoot past me on an ordinary bike. I briefly sped up to match his speed and checked my speedometer. He was doing 36 kph. In fairness, regular bikes don’t tend to come with speedometers, so he may have had no idea how fast he was moving.

I have also seen ebikes going well over 32 kph though. Mine is software limited to top out at that for electric assist, but the cap can easily be lifted with the phone app. I have elected not to do so. I’m a commuter. I just want to get to work. Not trying to win any races.

I think my most common use case is with dictionary lookups.

if (val := dct.get(key)) is not None:
    # do something with val

I’ve also found some cases where the walrus is useful in something like a list comprehension. I suppose expanding on the above example, you you make one that looks up several keys in a dict and gives you their corresponding values where available.

vals =  [val for key in (key1, key2, key3) if (val := dct.get(key)) is not None]

I’m type 2 diabetic and noticed my blood sugar tends to peak around half an hour after eating. So I now try to time any exercise I do for that window. And actually it feels good. Like I feel an urge to get up and move around at about that point, so I guess the body is trying to tell you something?

Since most of my exercise involves cycling, if I’m say eating out someplace and can afford the time, I relax for about half an hour at the restaurant before hitting the road.

I told this to my diabetic councillor. She said such a regimen is approximately equivalent in therapeutic value to taking a metformin pill, so this is clearly a good thing for me, but I imagine it’s not bad idea in general?

I’m glad you found something that works. I don’t think there is a one size fits all solution to weight gain, but it’s awesome that your approach does not necessitate splurging on diet plans or gym memberships.

I’ve been losing weight very slowly myself over the past several years since I cancelled my largely ignored gym membership during the pandemic and bought an ebike instead. I commute on it regularly and, while it’s hardly what I would call a vigorous workout, it seems to have flipped the weight curve from slight gain/time to even slighter loss. Like we’re talking a pound/month if that. But I’ll take it!

I think that’s part of the plan though right? If they spot a compliance officer walking up, they can drive the patio around the block a bit until he’s gone.

I hope you post an unboxing video. It could be exceptional…

Shit. As a Canadian, I’ve been trying to boycott the US amid the tariffs and 51st state taunts, but I might have to make an exception. It would really, really, suck to lose the likes of PBS.

This reminds me of a story my dad told me. His school went on a field trip to an ice cream factory and he was, of course, expecting this to be the best day of his life. What he discovered, though, left him mortified. They were taking poor-selling flavours and running them back through the machine to change them to something better. If you buy some store brand chocolate and it has undertones of mocha, now you know why. I think of this now whenever I see a product that “may contain peanuts”. Like they’re not sure.

I sort of picture this when I see bread or tortillas marketed as high fibre even when they contain no whole grains.

Pokemon Go?

I can’t remember which comedian it was, but he said whenever he hears something like 4 out of 5 doctors recommend a particular medication, he wonders what that 5th doctor knows that the others don’t?

Microsoft cancelled its support for the Faster CPython project in May this year, as part of a round of layoffs

wtf did they actually axe Guido? I thought he was heavily involved in that.

When I first started taking climatology back in the day, I thought it a bit paradoxical that profs kept going on about how global warming would lead to more extreme weather when, on a first principles basis at least, I would’ve thought it should lessen weather variability. Anthropogenic warming is an insulating effect, and that should tend to even out conditions across the planet, just as insulating your home should reduce drafts and what not.

I guess my problem was that I had it in my head that greater variability = more chance to hit extremes, and we were going the other way. But the way things are playing out, it’s less variability that is giving us what we view as aberrant weather. That heat dome that never leaves or that storm system that parks itself over your head for days on end. We get too much of one thing because the weather systems are actually becoming less chaotic and getting stuck in holding patterns for longer than is healthy.

Aw man, not the early 90s again…

As with most script languages, you can hit the ground running in a very procedural sort of way, as you don’t even have to define a main entry point. You just start coding.

But Python certainly has an object model. If I’m not mistaken, everything in Python is an object. Like even functions.

I suppose there are some aspects of the class implementation that feel a little tacked on? Like the way you need to manage the self reference manually where it may be implicitly handled for you in other languages. At least the way you call super() now is a lot less kludgy.

One thing I miss a bit in Python is method overloading. In a general sense, function overloading is not an OOP feature per se, but I find it useful in OOP, particularly with object initializers. You can sort of achieve it with @functools.singledispatch but it’s pretty janky. For initialization, I prefer keeping the __init__ method pretty rudimentary and writing factory functions to do more complex initializations. And with @dataclass, you can forego writing an __init__ altogether if you do it that way.

Ok, here’s my question for an agoraphobe.

Let’s say we one day decide to build a space colony, but it’s sort of a one-way trip since the lower gravity would acclimatize your body in such a way that it would be difficult to ever return to Earth after several years on the Moon/Mars/wherever. And you would most likely live in an underground habitat where you would maybe make the occasional trip up to the surface to walk around outside, but it would be a hassle since you’d have to get all suited up. So most of the time you would be just chilling in your man cave or what have you.

As an agoraphobe, would you make the ideal pioneer on such a frontier?

For instance, if an AI model could complete a one-hour task with 50% success, it only had a 25% chance of successfully completing a two-hour task. This indicates that for 99% reliability, task duration must be reduced by a factor of 70.

This is interesting. I have noticed this myself. Generally, when an LLM boosts productivity, it shoots back a solution very quickly, and after a quick sanity check, I can accept it and move on. When it has trouble, that’s something of a red flag. You might get there eventually by probing it more and more, but there is good reason for pessimism if it’s taking too long.

In the worst case scenario where you ask it a coding problem for which there is no solution—it’s just not possible to do what you’re asking—it may nevertheless engage you indefinitely until you eventually realize it’s running you around in circles. I’ve wasted a whole afternoon with that nonsense.

Anyway, I worry that companies are no longer hiring junior devs. Today’s juniors are tomorrow’s elites and there is going to be a talent gap in a decade that LLMs—in their current state at least—seem unlikely to fill.

My wife and I are hooked also. I bought the first book in the series and started reading it, but decided it’s better to not get ahead of the plot, as every episode seems to end in a cliffhanger. (I don’t think that’s really necessary, as the show has enough pull to keep us coming back regardless.) I have a feeling though that once season 1 is done, I’m going to binge the novels.