BiteCode_dev

Selling pyx to biz: https://astral.sh/pyx

Yeah, I used to be in the top 100 SO users, so I wrote a lot of SO answers, and if you used Red Hat Linux, you probably used my library.

But according to your definition, I'm a script kiddy.

That's assuming this is most people's objective when they are at work.

And even if it was, that's also assuming this benefit would be superior to the benefit of remote work for the individual.

Yes, but flexibility that happens in those conditions is at the cost of tremendous effort and risk from the population, usually under the tutelage of bigger power structures. EG: scammers are usually part of some organisation that has the power to do that, and the guy giving his name on the bank account is basically disposable.

Also the fact the population is so huge make it hard even for such a powerful state to grasp it all.

But regular citizen flexibility when something is not state-approved in advance is very limited compared to ours. The state can limit where they can move because of the citizen passport, limit what they can buy (and say) because of wechat, limit what they can see and know because of the GFW, limit how much you can be anonymous because big cities have cameras everywhere, coupled with AI tracking.

In Europe, if my government does something I don't like, I can pay in cash, or cross a border and do it in a different country. I can complain on the internet and find like-minded people to organize, advice, help...

I want to go to a gay bar and pay without having a record of it? I can. I want to finance an art or political project that the government would not like? I can.

In fact, anywhere in the world there is cash, and I have some secure cash stash, I can pay if I lost my phone, or with no battery. I can pay if my bank account is blocked by the bank. If it's in the red. If there is an outage on their app. I can pay if I've been robbed of my wallet and phone. I can pay if there is no electricity or no internet. I can even pay if war is declared, if I'm under bombs. I can buy illegal drugs, illegal plant seeds, illegal literature, and illegal human services.

Remember when visa prevented us to send money to wikileak? It was not illegal to do so in my country, and it was my money, but they just said no. Yet I could pay in Bitcoin, that I could buy with cash.

No-cash societies make everything easier when everything goes according to plan. When you fit in the box, and the box is not broken. It's why it feels so great, because day-to-day life is mostly this, for most people.

But the lack of alternatives will make you feel helpless the day you really need it. Cashless has never been about convenience, it's about deleting those annoying grey areas, inch by inch. It's about control.

It's not a new thing for China. The first time I went there, I was 17 years old, and there was no internet. So the state appointed us a state guide, and she was following us everywhere during the whole time, to make sure "we were safe".

Now China doesn't need to do that anymore. They know everything you do at any moment except in the remote countryside. And they can push a button if they want to stop you.

While I do believe that China is surpassing the West on many points, I'd like to underline that a cashless society is not a good thing. It's a terrible, terrible idea.

With no cash, the citizen passport and the GFW, the dictatorship has total control of society. It's not that there are no homeless, is that they are pushed to even worse conditions, out of sight. It's not that there is zero crime, it's that the crime is from the state, the mafia, and there is a lot of corruption. But nobody can talk about it because there is no free press.

I do think it's important to state how much China is advancing, and surpassing the West, because they are going to rule the world as the Americans did, soon.

But let's not pretend it's some kind of utopia.

Most of my big clients have about 10 intermediaries between them and the data: the antivirus, the browser, the VPN, the company proxy, the API gateway, their authentication layer, the virtualization layer, the application server, the microservice it requests and whatever data source this one requests.

So unless you are a lean startup, the reasons many products are horribly slow are very low hanging fruits no body are ever going to bother picking.

If you ever reach the time where pipelining is giving you a boost in perf, your app was already in a nice state.

It's so nice to be able to code on a baremetal server where my monolith has directly access to my postgres instance on my personal projects.

As usual, user are not making them paying the price for being badly treated. Software companies do this because they can get away with it, that's it.

Even on HN many people can't be arse to use Firefox, how could we expect anyone to avoid giants like Microsoft?

One thing is certain, I can't remember a time in my life were this matter was a serious and regular debate by the general american public like today.

Agree, they really did their homework, listed edge cases, made practical compromises, chose not to overdo it, reworked it again and again quite a bit and compared it to real life experience.

It's really beautiful work, especially since touching the back bone (the import system) of a language as popular as Python with such a diverse community is super dangerous surgery.

I'm impressed.

Async was a soft keyword for many, many years in order to maintain compat. And before that, asyncio used yield to be even more compatible.

They took a decade to solidify that. At some point, you have to balance evolution and stability. For a language as popular as Python, you can not break the world every week, but you can't stay put for 5 years.

They thought about backward compatibility, and offer an alternative syntax that use no keyword for library that want to activate it yet stay compact with old version. It's already in the spec.

Especially since it is opt in, with various level of granularity, and a global off switch. Very well constructed spec given the constraints.

We heard that about types, the walrus, asyncio, dataclasses and so much more. But it didn't happen, if people don't need something (and many don't know it exists or what it does), it's unlikely they use it.

In fact, half of the community basically uses only a modernized set of python 2.4 features and that's one of the beauties of the language. You don't need a lot to be productive, and if you want more, you can optionally reach for it.

It has worked very well for the last 2 decades and it will likely work again.

What if they leave?

Their company already don't produce much in France, it's all imported. They are paying minimal taxes already on what they produce and sell outside of France. And they don't pay taxes personally. So what would we lose if they leave?

For the things that are actually made in France, it's because they have to. They would have moved it already otherwise. So it's physical assets and people that can't be moved or sourced elsewhere. So what they have to produce there, they will still do. Their real estate, their logistic chain vehicles, and their local workshops will stay here. Even if they would sell part of it in fact, the actual physical stuff would stay here.

And what they sell here, they will still do: they are not going to exit the French market just because they can't be physically here so it's not going to affect the economy that much. What, less jet and luxury hotels revenue? It's ok.

And of course, we can increase taxes on their companies so that they get less revenue to compensate for their exile. We tax trading or exporting French-based company stocks so that they can't move that around without paying first.

Besides, once a stock is bought from the IPO, moving it from hand to hand is not investing more money into the company in any way. It's not going back into the economy.

They can move with their bank accounts and bonds, why do we care? It's not something that goes into our economy. They made sure of it.

Ideally, something that we could share between JS and Python.

Yes, you are old.

I meet an unexpected number of young devs that:

- Find hypermedia to be exotic. JSON web API is the only way that makes sense to them.

- Say they use the cloud to "save money".

- Use third-party services for things as basic as authentication because "it's hard".

- Encode security stuff in the frontend code.

It's the cycle of life.

The main argument is "it's been in the mix for 20 years", and part of demonstrating it has been was to state that even the Obama administration didn't do much to stop it, so it kept escalating.

Not only I don't conflate the two, but you make the whole Obama note the center of this discussion, while it was there for the purpose of illustration.

This is how tribe politics work and how the US fell to the best populists instead of trying to tackle society's problems.

I have no interest in discussing with you anymore, since you don't seem interested in talking about ideas, only find an enemy to your tribes.

This type of comment is a problem.

Instead of trying to evaluate the argument on its merits:

- There is a long-term systemic problem, POTUS is a symptom.

- Democracy has been at risk for 20 years in the US, starting with the destruction of Habeas Corpus after 9/11, under thunderous applause.

- The opposition has been weak at best, and didn't show its value by attempting to reverse the worse of the trends when they had the chance. So nobody trusted them anymore. They didn't represent something to rally for, only the opposite of what you didn't want.

You attempt to put me in a tribe and judge me on that.

Except... I live in Europe. I don't care about your tribes, I can only see you have a wannabe dictator in place, and that it's the consequence of a long chain of events. It's not an unexpected surprise.

Arguing "that's because of the bad guys" is like falling in the mud and blaming the mud.

Run away if you can is the only practical, actionable thing one can do at this stage. And few people can actually do it.

I have, myself, rejected all mission offers to the US since January, but I have the luxury of not living there.

From the other side of the pond, the US future looks very grim, and I have no knowledge at my disposal that lets me see a path toward reversion that doesn't go through a violent phase.

It's a systemic problem; the POTUS is a symptom. And I don't see how such a large and complex system is going to get fixed fast enough to prevent something terrible from happening.

After that, it will go back to something more peaceful. But I wouldn't want to be there during the transition.

The time to act was 20 years ago I'm afraid.

Yes, but critical policies stayed the way they were, and the social order didn't smooth back to pre 2001. There was no move in that direction.

It was a short break, not a rebuilding.

Hence, what's happening today is not going to be a one time event. It's been escalating since 2001, and at best, stagnating under Obama.

Basically, ergonomic testing, but for your doc instead of your software.

No but him and his crowd have been keen on denying reality on a daily basis, and it's scary how well it works. I have people around me who drink this BS, and will argue in support for it because the arguments against it requires nuance thinking. At least, with a paper, it's harder to do this. You have to admit he pretended the sky was red, when it's obviously blue. There is less nuances if you get something clear in writing.

It's not much, but it's better than the alternative.

Indeed, we already heard that in 2001:

- Bush was hated and considered a national shame.

- The invasion of Iraq while lying about WMD and against the UN vote, eroded international trust.

- The Patriot act was supposed to be temporary be was extended again and again.

- We got the reveal of mass spying by Snowden.

And... nothing. Obama didn't do anything about the wars, mass spying, or the patriot act. He was an elegant break from the dumbness, but didn't stop the elevator to keep climbing after him, just paused it for a few years.

All of it was just stepping stones after stepping stones.

It's not a one-time aberration; it's a sign of the times.

> A logical next step would be for POTUS to declare himself as the supreme leader of the world

Well, he is already positioning himself for being at least the US DFL, already suggesting a 3rd illegal mandate:

https://www.trumpstore.com/product/trump-2028-hat/

And the US, being the most powerful country in the world, barred, maybe China, the next step is not so far-fetched.

This works only if none of those are true:

- There is real competition. It's less and less the case for many important things, such as food, accommodations, health, etc.

- Companies pay a price for misbehaving that is much higher than what they got from misbehaving. Also less and less the case, thanks to lobbying, huge law firms, corruption, etc.

- The cost of switching is fair. Moving to another places is very expensive. Doing it several times in a row is rarely possible for most people.

- Some practice are not just generalized in the whole industry. In IT tracking is, spying is, and preventing you from managing your device yourself is more and more trendy.

Basically, this view you are presenting is increasingly naive and even dangerous for any citizen practicing it.

Even if it were not a bottleneck, speed allow use cases you wouldn't consider before.

I use Python differently because uv made many things faster, less costly. Stuff I used to do in bash are now in Python. Stuff I wouldn't do at all because 3rd party modules were an incompressible expense, now I do because the cost is low.

Same with AI.

Every week, there was a small tool I actively chose to not develop because I know that it would save less time by automating the thing than it would take coding it.

E.G: I send regularly documents from my hard drive or forward mails to a specific email for accounting. It would be nice to be able to do those in one click. But dev a nautilus script or thunderbird extension to save max a minute a day doesn't make sense.

Except now with claude code, it does. In a week, they paid off. And now I'm racking the minutes.

Now each week, I'm getting a new tool that is not only saving me minutes, but also reducing context switching. Those turn into hours, which turn into days. These compounds.

And of course, getting out a MVP, or a new feature demo out of the door quickly allows you to get feedback faster.

In general, AI lets you get a shorter feedback loop. Trash bad concept sooner. Get crucial info faster.

Those do speed up a project.

At first stable coins were to avoid taxes when selling and buying again by skipping the round trip to fiat.

But now, the use case Stripe is talking about is basically the equivalent of creating WoW Gold for companies, and bypassing state money entirely, but IRL.

This is a dangerous idea.

Big corps have become immensly powerful, but they are still kept in check by the state for 3 reasons: the monopoly on law, violence, and minting money.

Lobbying is taking care of the law.

And now they are coming for the money.

Crypto currencies were supposed to taken the power of currency from big actors and back to the people. It's going to take it from the state to companies.

Soon, they will effectively have more power than the state, and citizens will be screwed.

Basically, authoritarian rule shows its nature with the swiftness you are punished if you try to go against the flow. Usually if things go wrong, if you want to change things against the grain.

Free system don't make those easy either, but you have way more layers of protections, safety nets, and way less death sentences looming over your head. Money and who you know matter less the freer a society is.

However, this is an abstract concept that people can't grasp unless you lived it.

That's the problem with building a society: people can't be arsed to do anything unless they felt the pain. They can't picture problems they didn't live through.

This is why you'll see people telling you the UAE is the best things since sliced bread, only to come back years and years later, once they actually paid the price. They had a car accident with the wrong person. They tried to do business by got pwned by corruption. They got sick because of pollution. A family member got in jail for BS reasons.

All that can happen in a free society, it's just less likely, and the consequence are less dire.

Very hard to make people get how important it is. Anything that requires nuances and projection is near impossible to communicate to the mass.

That's why we have tribes and symbols. This is the only way to sell a project to big groups of humans, because then you substitute the complicated concept with a simple us vs them or good vs bad narrative.

Of course, once you do that, people think even less, and you get extremism rising.

This is why, IMO, free systems never last. Our last 80 years run was a statistical anomaly. We got very lucky.

I stand by my statement! Compare the number of strings a violin has to the keys on a piano! :)

Many people nowaday can't read clocks with hands, so if you want to sell to the mass, you need to take that into consideration.