jt-hill

Welcome to the deepfates program

Always read the PKGBUILD. Always read the updates diffs. It’s that easy.

> I have no idea if it works or not because I haven’t yet tried running it.

This should have been disclosed in the first paragraph

Wow it just keeps going. Extremely thorough.

This is a relief in many ways. With Fivetran’s acquisitions of both dbt labs and Tobiko, I was expecting the end of the open source data ecosystem.

Astral was always going to have to find some way to sustain itself financially. They weren’t going to just make the best free tools in the ecosystem forever. uv is sufficiently entrenched as infrastructure that I’m sure it’ll take no time for a community fork to show up if they do anything stupid with it.

Ruff solves this. You should not be manually fiddling with indentations in 2026.

Hah, thanks. Believe it or not I proofread it like three times but my mental autocorrect is just really aggressive.

I keep making this argument elsewhere on the Internet, so I thought it would be nice to make my point all in one place. Python is good now, if you weren't paying attention.

Related recent discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47202864

Thanks! And you're right this is true for storage and at the transaction level where nothing smaller than, e.g., a penny is allowed to move or exist in the first place. But when you're working with interest rates and the main calculations involve multiplying by numbers < 1, you still have to figure out rounding.

Author here. I thought was doing what I was supposed to do by using Decimals heavily in my credkit[0] Python library, but I did some testing and discovered it wasn't worth the pain for me. Test code [1] is available for the curious.

The moral of the story is that "best practices" are not a substitute for using your brain.

[0]: https://github.com/jt-hill/credkit

[1]: https://gist.github.com/jt-hill/839e1a6c51d28cbcb8fc69e61431...

I work in credit risk and needed to model consumer loans in Python. I couldn't find a tool that made it easy to model simple loans either individually or at the pool level, so I decided to make my own.

It's early (v0.2.0) but works end-to-end and can produce an amortization schedule from loan characteristics

Up next are the actual credit risk features I wanted from the start.

Feedback welcome!

I highly recommend this one too. It completely solved my issues with FOMO/compulsive refreshing

Classic mistake theory vs conflict theory. Just being right is not a good enough reason for someone to believe you. They have to believe you’re on their side.

Tbf I don’t think the parent meant all Lexuses (Lexes? Lexi?) are soulless, just theirs. But the brand has its fans.

> No one will look at it and feel stirred by its beauty

Except for the Toyota nerds who will want to come talk to you about the LFA. Ask me how I know!

I’m sympathetic to the desire to recapture the electricity of early Twitter, but I’m reminded of the famous quote that “a man cannot step in the same river twice.”

I’m on Bluesky too, and it’s alright, but the internet has changed, the world has changed, and I have changed. It can’t ever be quite the same experience.

This makes me think of The Sort, coined by the venerable patio11.

The types soft skills it takes to to be effective in the kinda crappy jobs described by the author can command much better remuneration in any number of other roles, and society has gotten much better at efficiently allocating that human capital.

Wait, this is Andy Weir? Like, that Andy Weir? Like, The Martian and Project Hail Mary Andy Weir? I had no idea.

It's funny, I instantly recognized that iconic atrium when they used it in Severance and my poor wife had to suffer through an explanation of the history of Bell Labs when she was just trying to watch her TV show.

I agree that holding the line and failing the whole class if the whole class deserves it is the only hope universities have of breaking the feedback loop, but the author seems to think that represents an insurmountable coordination problem.

I remember this frustration clearly. It's valuable to be challenged and struggle and overcome, but the value of a perfect GPA is a lot more salient.

Goodhart's Law in action

I can't respond to any specifics of the documentary, but it looks to me like the universities themselves are the biggest cultivators of this perception, with the goal of increased enrollment.

If a college degree wasn't so important in the job market, do you think there we'd be handing out even 1% of the ones there are today? Sounds like a recipe for a lot of unemployed professors.

I agree that the trend is not sustainable, but that's not the students' responsibility — they're just responding to incentives.

Either institutions maintain their standards or employers stop relying on the signaling value of the credential, and both are difficult coordination problems until the moment it becomes too late. I don't see a third option.

"Things changed" is the part I disagree with. The students just have better tools to respond to the same incentives. My cohort ~15 years ago would have used just as much chatgpt if it had been available, and our spelling would have been just as bad if AIM had autocorrect when we were kids.

When better technology and lower standards allow disengaged students to pass, what you get is more disengaged students.

Don't hate the player — hate the game.

The degree is still highly preferred (if not a hard requirement) for basically all white collar/middle class jobs. It's still, generally, a +EV proposition, so I don't think it's a convincing claim that it's just a post hoc rationalization.

That is true, but I don't think the students are the ones responsible for the second and third order effects of maintaining academic rigor. They're just playing the game they're given.

The technology may be amplifying the effects because that's what technology does but it is not a change to the underlying dynamics.

"The average college student today" is not uniquely lazy or lacking in character. They just have better tools to respond to the same incentives.

I'm not saying it's good - it's clearly an unsustainable trend, but the students are not the ones driving it, so they're not equipped to stop it.