jaza

Yes! Exactly that - basics of unix - was one of the first-semester courses in my comp sci degree. It has served me well ever since.

You don't pay for RDS because you care about IOPS. You pay for it because you want backups and replication to be somebody else's problem. And because you (by which I mean probably the MBA management above you, rather than you yourself) care about it being an opex rather than capex cost, a lot more than you care about how much the cost is. And because ISO audit boxes get ticked.

Agreed. But I'd also be willing to bet big, that the cycle of "new AI breakthrough is made, AI bubble ensues and hypesters claim AGI is just around the corner for several years, bubble bursts, all quiet on the AI front for a decade or two" continues beyond the lifetime of anyone reading this message right now.

True. We have our gods, same as every other tribe throughout history.

We've "succeeded" at space flight about as much as we've "succeeded" at AI. Yay, man on the moon! Over half a century later, and it turns out that the "next small step" - man on Mars - isn't so small and still hasn't been achieved. Anything remotely resembling sci-fi-style ubiquitous space travel remains exactly that - sci-fi!

I can accept that everything else is fake, but UNICORNS ARE REAL, dammit!

Highly unlikely - Python 3.15 is already under active development: https://docs.python.org/3.15/whatsnew/3.15.html

I learnt a lot from your numerous Flask blog posts over the years. Your blog is often better than the official Flask docs. Kudos to you, Miguel!

This was before my time, but older folks have told me that in the early days of credit cards here in Australia (70s and 80s), for larger purchases at department stores (which were virtually the only merchants who accepted credit cards back then), it was common for the checkout person to phone your bank to get authorisation for the transaction, before you could walk out the door with the merchandise.

I reckon Satoshi understood quite well what he created. But what he quite possibly didn't understand as well, is how human behaviour would play out with his creation. He clearly believed that at least 51% of the node-grunt-power would be controlled by people who have good intentions - or at least by people in who's interest it is - to maintain the rules of the system. That has held up so far, but there's no guarantee it will always hold up.

Errr... a circle is a shape in Euclidean geometry. Pi is a property of that shape in that geometry system. The OP article steps outside of Euclidean geometry. It discusses "circles" that aren't really circles. Therefore, the "pi's" that it discusses also aren't really pi's.

My conclusion therefore isn't "we have the best pi", but is rather "we have the only pi", because pi is simply not applicable, as soon as you alter the rules of there being a 2-dimensional plane and there being real-world distance, that the definition of pi depends on.

Anyway, I am not a mathematician, maybe I'm just too stuck in the boring old real world to get it!

WordPress is dying as ungraciously as free-to-air TV is.

I wouldn't be too quick to jump to that conclusion, we could easily shove another 960k emojis into the spec!

Alright alright, maybe not "various studies", but I read this article a few months ago: https://www.aureusfinancial.com.au/blog/title-are-credit-car...

Various studies have shown that, for the investment needed to "maximise your rewards" (ie time needed to research the different cards on the market / read the fine print of your chosen product / put through payments on a high rewards card; money on signup fees, recurring fees, transaction fees, etc), you'll achieve a much better ROI just investing the equivalent time and money into an index fund.

I started university (in Australia) in 2004, not long after the dot com crash. CS enrolment rates were low, kids were getting scared off due to perceived lack of jobs. As a result, there was a shortage of grad talent (companies were already ramping up hiring again by 2004). I got a grad job just fine, in 2008, and I've never been short of work since.

So my advice to high school kids of 2025: right now is the perfect time to enrol in CS. 5 years from now, the AI hype will be over, and employers will be short on grads.

Exactly! I code in Python every day, I haven't done so without a type checker (usually mypy) for years, I don't push a single change without type-checking it first, it catches stupid mistakes and saves me from breaking production all the time.

iOS market share: 56% in Australia (where I live) [1]; 58% in United States [2]; 47% in UK [3]; 64% in Japan [4]; 60% in Canada [5]; 55% in Denmark [6]; 54% in Switzerland [7]; 55% in Sweden [8].

Yes, I've cherry picked from the minority of countries with near or over half iOS market share. But, they're all high GDP countries with a very valuable customer base. Apple and Google care about these markets, they don't care about global market share.

[1] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/australia [2] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-sta... [3] https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/united... [4] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/japan [5] https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/canada [6] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/denmark [7] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/switzerlan... [8] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/sweden

Interesting! I didn't know about the London Overground, only visited London once (nearly 20 years ago).

I like our trains here in Sydney for similar reasons. The lines are almost all aboveground, you get to see plenty of neighbourhoods and plenty of sunshine out the windows (you also get the full panoramic scenery when going over the harbour bridge). And they're double decker and have lots of seating, so there's not nearly as much shoulder jostling as on typical metro trains (although there is frequent squeezing past peoples' knees to get out of a window seat).

Ironically, there is a brand new "metro" line here in Sydney (and they're building more metro lines), and many people prefer it - even though it has less seating, is often crowded, and is more underground - because it's faster and more reliable. Opposite of the situation in London. I guess the grass is always greener!

Works for me from Australia

It's been too long! Off to The Oatmeal I go...

Nice write-up! I've heard about Litestar now and then, haven't tried it, maybe I should give it a go. I've been using FastAPI quite heavily for the past several years.

I think OP's arguments about FastAPI being hard to work with in a bigger codebase are exaggerated. Splitting up the routes into multiple files, each with its own route object, and then importing and building up a big hierarchy of route objects, isn't that hard, it does the job for me. Agreed that it's probably not well documented enough, how to structure a larger FastAPI codebase - but follow a mix of best practices and your personal tastes, break it up into modules, split it into specific files for constants / errors / routes / schemas / crud / etc, and you can scale up sanely.

I haven't used SQLAlchemy with FastAPI - for my day job I mainly connect to data stores for which it doesn't make sense - so maybe I'm biased, because I've avoided that pain.

Seriously?! I wouldn't know, my Pixel 3 and its stock earphones are still going strong. I'll have to save the earphones for my next phone. :P

This is why I've never used wireless earphones (I just use the stock wired earphones that come with the phone). Sure, the wires are tangled every time I pull them out of my pocket. But they never need charging! That, plus a loathing of Bluetooth.

When everything is urgent, nothing is urgent

Heck yes! I recently dusted off (had to literally dust the inside of the cartridges to get past a black screen, lol) my old Sega Genesis (and bought an HDMI adaptor for it), and have been letting my school age sons play it. They haven't even commented on the basic graphics. They're like "wow dad, no boot time, no connecting to server time, no waiting to skip ads time". They love it.

We're pretty lucky here in Australia. Over the past decade or so, PayID has been successfully rolled out to virtually all banks, giving us free and (usually) instant money transfers - I'd say more than half of all personal payments are now done with PayID. Old-skool bank transfers are still the norm for business and administrative payments, but that's changing too, and in any case, those transfers are increasingly being executed behind the scenes over Osko (aka PayID), so they end up settling in seconds (or at least hours) instead of days.

I miss Yahoo Games. My favourite was dominoes, many hours spent in there as a teenager. The only Yahoo thing I've accessed for the past decade or so is Finance, the stock price info and the investing news seems to still be reasonable.

See "List of assigned /8 blocks to commercial organizations" at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assigned_/8_IPv4_addre...

Mercedes-Benz isn't the only corporation with its own /8 block - although it is the only non-US one; and it's a pretty small exclusive list, only six in total. I guess someone at Mercedes-Benz just happened to hear about this Internet thing relatively early (53.0.0.0/8 was registered Oct 1993 according to Wikipedia - the relevant European authority, RIPE NCC, was only founded in Apr 1992), and/or happened to have a buddy at IANA / RIPE NCC, and the rest is history.

In Landru we trust