The disappointing tea.xyz
Another week, another example of crypto spoiling things. Imagine the worst parts of Hacktoberfest only with added crypto. Yeah, it's that bad.
Public
A Retrospective on Requests
As per the title: a retrospective of requests.
Possibly killer quote: "After receiving our first security disclosure, I was told that Requests wasn't a serious project but instead one person's art project and thus we shouldn't fix the vulnerability. This was despite the project being touted as being used by multiple international government agencies, political campaigns, and boasting about it's #1 download spot on PyPI. So when I say it might be artful, I'm trying to take a neutral stance on what is art and what isn't art and whether the internals of Requests are actually beautiful art."
Lem
A programmer's editor written in Common Lisp, written for Common Lisp, which aims to be a good Common Lisp IDE; but which also works as an IDE for other languages too.
Think Emacs in Common Lisp.
Unsolicited advice is always criticism
Toot that's an image of a capture from Twitter, or something. The content is good though. What's even better is the unironic near-meltdown of some of the replies and the way they totally miss the point, pretty much thereby demonstrating it.
HN: Toolong: Terminal application to view, tail, merge, and search log files
Toolong's apprarance on the Orange Site.
Simulator - Ray Optics Simulation
A very cool optics simulator.
[PDF] A method to unilaterally disable all nuclear bombs on Earth
Twentieth century physicists produced one of the most powerful weapons on earth and they were used twice as an actual weapon with “Results Excellent.” The number of countries which possess or will possess nuclear weapons could increase in spite of the existence of Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). There is no guarantee that these countries which already possess nuclear weapons always behave humanistically. Arms control negotiations may stabilize the world temporarily but, again, there is no guarantee that the long lasting peace on earth will come true in the future. We discuss in this article a rather futuristic but not necessarily impossible technology which will expose the possessors of nuclear weapons in an extreme danger in some cases.
(How to Write a (Lisp) Interpreter (in Python))
This page has two purposes: to describe how to implement computer language interpreters in general, and in particular to build an interpreter for most of the Scheme dialect of Lisp using Python 3 as the implementation language. I call my language and interpreter Lispy (lis.py). Years ago, I showed how to write a semi-practical Scheme interpreter Java and in in Common Lisp). This time around the goal is to demonstrate, as concisely and simply as possible, what Alan Kay called "Maxwell's Equations of Software."
Git Query language
"GQL is a query language with a syntax very similar to SQL with a tiny engine to perform queries on .git files instance of database files, the engine executes the query on the fly without the need to create database files or convert .git files into any other format, note that all Keywords in GQL are case-insensitive similar to SQL."
My favourite Git commit
I've long disliked the approach some people take of writing one-word git commit messages. While this example might be a wee bit over the top, I'd much rather see this level of care over the craft.
The original magic Emacs garbage collection hack
Post going over a pretty sensible approach to doing GC in Emacs (not that I've ever really run into a problem with Emacs and GC).
A Tour of the Lisps
A pretty comprehensive tour of the main Lisps in play as of the end of 2023.
In Loving Memory of Square Checkbox
A love letter to the square checkbox.
Pong wars
The Conway's Game of Life of Pong.
A Deep Dive into the SIGTTIN / SIGTTOU Terminal Access Control Mechanism in Linux
Useful deep dive into all the issues relating to job control and how it affects a running process.
From the Earth to Your Ears: How Mushroom Music is Created
The widely popular saying, “music is a universal language,” implies that music can be understood and appreciated by people all around the world. But what if we told you that this saying also applies to fungi? Yes, you read that correctly — fungi can also produce music, but they require a little bit of help to be audible to human ears.
Mushroom music is taking the internet by storm as several artists have been producing tunes through the bioelectric energy of fungi. The mesmerizing beats are definitely something that you’ve got to hear to believe!
Common Lisp's BLOCK / RETURN-FROM and UNWIND-PROTECT
A nice description of how Common Lisp implements non-local flow control.
Out of the FOG | Personality Disorders, Narcissism, NPD, BPD
Website and support forum that is "Written and developed by people who have experienced a relationship with a family member, spouse or partner who suffers from a Personality Disorder."
Running Open Genera 2.0 on Linux
A guide (that, as per the into, is now kind of old) to getting Open Genera running on GNU/Linux.
How to improve Python packaging, or why fourteen tools are at least twelve too many
"Join me on a journey through packaging in Python and elsewhere. We’ll start by describing the classic packaging stack (involving setuptools and friends), the scientific stack (with conda), and some of the modern/alternate tools, such as Pipenv, Poetry, Hatch, or PDM. We’ll also look at some examples of packaging and dependency-related workflows seen elsewhere (Node.js and .NET). We’ll also take a glimpse at a possible future (with a venv-less workflow with PDM), and see if the PyPA agrees with the vision and insights of eight thousand users."
Why the magic?
Blog post musing over why some mushrooms are magic.
(PDF) Humanism in Business – Towards a Paradigm Shift?
Management theory and practice are facing unprecedented challenges. The lack of sustainability, the increasing inequity and the continuous decline in societal trust pose a threat to ‘business as usual’ (Jackson and Nelson, 2004). Capitalism is at a crossroad and scholars, practitioners and policy makers are called to rethink business strategy in light of major external changes (Hart 2005, Arena 2004). In the following we review an alternative view of human beings that is based on a renewed Darwinian theory developed by Lawrence and Nohria (2002). We label this alternative view ‘humanistic’ and draw distinctions to current ‘economistic’ conceptions. We then develop the consequences that this humanistic view has for business organizations, examining business strategy, governance structures, leadership forms, and organizational culture. Afterwards we outline the influences of humanism on management in the past and the present, and suggest options for humanism to shape the future of management. In this manner we will contribute to the discussion of alternative management paradigms that help solve the current crises.
Python Packaging, One Year Later: A Look Back at 2023 in Python Packaging
Metric Time
While I think the idea of metric time is pretty bad, I think this is a really nice site that illustrates the idea.
The TTY demystified
Some history and details about terminals, their history and their working. Likely very useful for people who haven't encountered actual terminal hardware.
Taking Notes With the Emacs Denote Package
Blog post talking about using dnote in Emacs.
Pydvice: An attempt at bringing (defadvice ...) from Elisp to Python
An implementation of Emacs Lisp's defadvice, for Python.
Sadly thr library itself is very old (14 years old at the time of recording this), and only for Python 2. There is, however, a PR in the repo that makes it work with Python 3.
How We Executed A Critical Supply Chain Attack On Pytorch
"Four months ago, Adnan Khan and I exploited a critical CI/CD vulnerability in PyTorch, one of the world’s leading ML platforms. Used by titans like Google, Meta, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin, PyTorch is a major target for hackers and nation-states alike.
Thankfully, we exploited this vulnerability before the bad guys.
Here is how we did it."
Elisp in replacement string
Something I've never really paid attention to, and it's actually quite a powerful feature: when doing search/repalce in Emacs you can replace with Elisp code (as in, Elisp code can provide the replacement).
Our security auditor is an idiot. How do I give him the information he wants? - Server Fault
An old, but fun (and possibly questionable how real it actually is) thead on a security auditor asking some really dumb questions. Oh gods does this remind me of some IT compines I've dealt with in the past.