Dear open-source maintainer,

Please expend effort to support a platform that is of no interest to you or the bulk of your project's user base, because “that's where the majority of the non-[your project's audience] user base lies”.

https://github.com/pysam-developers/pysam/issues/1375

it was absolute hell when i was writing academic papers, 30 years ago, quoting sources in 2-3 different languages.

in proper academic writing, if you translate the text, you include the original in a footnote or vice-versa.

Microsoft Office, with their insistence that autocorrect can only happen one language at a time, has kneecapped plurilingual literacy.

we could be using language anchors to deal with dictionary switching, but nooo because illiterate techbros rule the world.

@ewenmcneill @KitL Apparently the group who stole the data have released some samples, and there are people on Bluesky who say they've had a look. Thread here, and it's pretty appalling… https://bsky.app/profile/utf9k.net/post/3mbazyehj6s2k

I added a sentence to the #curl hackerone submission page:

"Please present your case briefly and to the point. Do not use an AI to help you blab hundreds of lines that will exhaust us to death instead of making us understand your claim."

Three years to get a one-line change into conda… 💀

https://github.com/conda/conda/issues/11763

RE: https://social.heise.de/@heiseonlineenglish/115725340534744039

In any kind of normal timeline this would have been stopped by regulators. Instead we let a single company become the sole gatekeeper for everything in #HPC .

SchedMD are the makers of #slurm , the (only) Open Source cluster scheduler, and used by a large majority of cluster computers. Nvidia bought Mellanox a few years ago, the maker of Infiniband, the main network technology for clusters.

@NanoRaptor cycling by the river and a crow landed on the bike path in front of me, jumped in my way when i tried to go around so i stopped.

it jumped up and down until i dismounted and followed it to a nearby road where some of it's friends were squawking, all clustered around an endangered species of tortoise that couldn't mount the kerb to get to the river.

picked up the tortoise and walked it to the river, it swam off and the crows happily cawed and then all flew off.

Spent some more time on the GitHub Actions update treadmill today, so was rereading this posting: “…in April of 2026 … in the fall of 2025 … March 4th, 2026 … later in the summer of 2026…”.

Suppose I should be glad it's only 50% northern hemisphere-centric locationist thoughtlessness.

https://github.blog/changelog/2025-09-19-deprecation-of-node-20-on-github-actions-runners/

@ewenmcneill Guess I'll be holding off on updating that Bluesky iOS app for a while then. (Was this in an app or on the web?)

The filename was garbage because the C code used a pointer to a string computed by a Cython expression — which was garbage-collected before the C code ran. Easily fixed by keeping a live object referencing the string.

Surprising that it worked reliably (or even at all) on other platforms!

Thus testing on i386 was a useful canary indicating problems on more commonly used platforms. 2/2

https://github.com/pysam-developers/pysam/commit/d6fbe29d51049cee8adc23059f82885c01cb3ac5

Reasons to test on obscure platforms, part 87: I don't test pysam on 32-bit i386, but Debian do. Four years ago they patched their package to disable a `samtools calmd` test that fails on i386.

Turns out to be due to pysamised calmd writing to a garbage filename instead of the specified file. 🧵 1/2

"Reserved identifier '__AMIGA__' may not be used"

... wat?

A file format specification (hopefully!) spells out what's valid and invalid. Implementations have choices for how they deal with variously out-of-spec files:

• reject with error message
• reject mysteriously
• accept as an extension, with a well-defined meaning
• accept, with a spurious or unpredictable meaning
• crash
• …

Apparently it is difficult to understand that implementations are not necessarily obliged to reject every out-of-spec file and produce a useful diagnostic accordingly.

"GitHub’s leadership team will now report more directly to Microsoft’s CoreAI team."

Another step seemingly in the wrong direction as the AI-happy CEO jumps ship.

https://www.theverge.com/news/757461/microsoft-github-thomas-dohmke-resignation-coreai-team-transition

Pleased that Debian 13 "trixie" has now been released. Prior to this release, by my reckoning Debian was the only remaining major platform that did not package Cython 3.x in its system package repositories.

Now that Cython 3 is available everywhere, pysam can reasonably require it and simplify a few things.

(I realise it's quixotic to wait for system package availability when the modern way is for everyone to automatically install the latest dependencies via pip during a build anyway…)

“Why are you so mindbogglingly pedantic about not using identifiers in the compiler's reserved namespace, John?”

(Not sure how the reporter has managed to get the Linux kernel version of <ctype.h> though. Or some other header that similarly defines _P.)

https://github.com/samtools/samtools/issues/2248

You can lead an open-source maintainer to water (provide a minimal test file exhibiting your bug, already named according to the style of their existing test files), but you can't make them drink (incorporate the new test case into their test suite).

Do you use PDF, epub, or other downloadable #Python documentation? Or do you only use the web docs?

The core team are trying to decide whether it's worth keeping various non-HTML builds (which are often slow to build).

https://discuss.python.org/t/removing-non-html-pdf-epub-etc-documentation-downloads/101343

At 19 I was told my health came second to my future husband.

At 22 I was told I would feel differently once I was “in love”

At 24 my boyfriend was asked if he would still love me if I couldn’t bear children.

My autonomy was violated for 5 years for a hypothetical baby

I had severe endometriosis and adenomyosis. My periods hell. They were irregular, heavy and painful. I would lay on the bathroom floor in unrelenting pain, throwing up and too weak to move.

As the years dragged on I became more disabled from the pain and anemia.

Surgeries to control the blood loss failed.

Medications to put me into chemical menopause failed.

Birth control pills failed.

I needed a hysterectomy.

I had never wanted children. I wasn’t even sure I wanted marriage. I was also far too disabled to get pregnant or raise a child.

So I asked for the surgery. I asked my doctors to remove the diseased organ destroying my quality of life.

I was firmly told “No” because I might meet a man who wants kids.

That even though I was too sick to survive pregnancy and likely infertile, I couldn’t make the choice to remove my womb in case I changed my mind when I met my dream man.

I told the doctors I didn’t want kids, it didn’t matter.

I pointed out I was too sick to care for myself, let alone a child, and it didn’t matter.

I said that my “dream man” would love me even if I couldn’t have kids, and the doctors laughed.

I had no bodily autonomy.

Medical misogyny was ruining my life.

I spent the next few years getting second and third opinions. Fighting like hell to get the surgery I knew I needed to have any shot at a “normal” life. When I began dating someone, I brought him to my appointments hoping he could convince them to operate.

They asked him if he would love me if I couldn’t give him biological children. He didn’t want kids either, but they said the same thing to him they kept saying to me: “You might change your mind”

Why is the medical system so obsessed with us having babies? Misogyny and patriarchy.

We could have changed our minds. We could have also broken up.

What “could” happen in the distant future should never be given more weight than what was happening in the present.

I was slowly dying. Bleeding to death and confined to bed. Relying on blood and iron transfusions to survive.

I tell this story every few months because I think it’s incredibly important we talk about our lack of autonomy.

The post Roe landscape is putting our lives in danger, and my story can hopefully help people understand why.

If I wasn’t able to make the choice I needed for my body when there was no fetus involved, imagine how hard it must be for pregnant people who need to access abortion?

Forced birth advocates love to trumpet the “exemption for the life of the mother” rule to justify abortion bans

But if doctors weren’t willing to remove my uterus when it was literally killing me, why are we trusting they will terminate a pregnancy when the mother’s life is at risk?

A hypothetical baby came before my life… imagine what would happen if there was a real fetus involved?

We know what happens.

Women die.

They bleed out in parking lots.

They become septic, lose their fertility or spend months fighting for their lives in the ICU.

Their care is delayed because the fetus comes first. And delayed care comes at a cost.

I finally got my hysterectomy, but only because I was bleeding out in the ER and transfusions couldn’t keep up.

By the time they finally gave me the surgery I spent years asking for, my survival odds were only 50/50.

Had they done it when I asked, it would have been 99%

It’s the same thing for those experiencing miscarriage or abortion complications.

If they could get timely healthcare, their odds of survival would be excellent.

When we tell doctors they can’t intervene until the life of the mother is “clearly” in jeopardy?

That’s when we start dying.

We deserve better. We need full autonomy over our reproductive systems, and that includes access to sterilization and abortion.

It’s time.

More on what my hysterectomy taught me about medical misogyny:

https://www.disabledginger.com/p/what-my-hysterectomy-taught-me-about

#uspol #fascism #hysterectomy #abortion #AbortionRights #reproductiverights #misogyny #patriarchy

TIL Python's print() function has a flush=True argument that flushes the output stream after the rest of the arguments have been printed. Thus obviating the need for a separate sys.stdout.flush() in many cases.