In the last year I've gotten back into RSS feeds as a news aggregator. Sometimes I want to share things. Here's a monthly aggregate of my favorite stuff. I hope you find something cool!
🎸 Juliaplaysgroove's Bass Cover of "Good Luck, Babe!" by Chappell Roan: Polish bassist, youtube superstar, and general bad-ass Julia Przybysz picks up her fretless and covers that one song that you heard at least twenty times during the Pride Parade. Love it.
I was editing a story someone had written and there was a back-and-forth like this:
"If a great carpenter builds a house it will never collapse."
"But our house is completely demolished!"
"Right. I'm not a great carpenter."
I remembered a long time ago taking a logic class where we did rules of inference; this line closely resembles Modus Tollens ("modus tollendo tollens": "method of removing by taking away"). The formal statement of modus tollens is $$P\to Q,\neg P\therefore \neg Q$$.
One example closer to the actual rule is something like: "If Anne is with Beth, Anne will be happy. Anne is not happy. It must be the case that Anne is not with Beth." Poor Anne.
When I have an app or a site I always want to get to "inbox zero" on warnings and errors. I noticed when trying to tweak Mathjax (a Math symbol rendering library for browsers which made the P->Q thing in the previous link) I was getting a "cdn.polyfill.io name not resolved" issue. Curious, I thought, but I have no idea what polyfill even is.
I googled it and found that, in February 2024, the cdn.polyfill.io domain and github account were sold to a Chinese company; on June 25, 2024, cdn.polyfill.io began injecting malware into polyfill.js. Mathjax had included using polyfill in copy+paste examples in their documentation but decided to simply remove it with no replacement as nearly all browsers already support ES6 and that was all that they were using polyfill for. tl;dr: If your website uses polyfill it's probably best to remove it or use a safe alternative.
💻 Playing with fonts again @ Anarc.at: A tiny dive into some font things.
📊🐍 How to Move From pandas to Polars @ Jetbrains: a guest post by Cheuk Ting Ho on how to migrate from pandas to Polars. If you haven't tried out Polars and you're a pandas user, check this noise out. I switched over a few months ago and have found it to be much faster and much less annoying to use (looking at you, pandas indexing).
📊 The Meaning of Explainability for AI: Explainability in AI, posted by the ever-interesting data science pro, Stephanie Kirmer.
💃 Jerome Robbins' The Concert: Mistake Waltz: (3 mins) Watched this for a comedy Burlesque class --- it's about how it's okay to make errors and you can easily turn this into a nice thing by either making it a "wink" to the audience or by doubling down. Neat stuff.
💃 Queen of Hearts in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Comedic Ballet): The Queen of Hearts (played by Zenaida Yanowsky) showing off how a high status character can be bumbling and silly while still maintaining high status in the scene.
🎸 Ice Nine Kills & Reel Big Fish Share Metalcore-Ska Cover Of “Walking On Sunshine” For American Psycho Comic Book: Yeah, it's exactly what it sounds like.
🐍 Python Type Checking Quiz: I learned a few things from this. Always be using type hints.
🐍 The convoluted story behind np.top_k @ Quantsight: Jules Poon describes their journey contributing to NumPy. It's an interesting look behind the scenes at open source contribution!
🎸 The Beaches – "Takes One To Know One": This song has been stuck in my head for a few days.
🐍 Free-threaded CPython is ready to experiment with! @ Quantsight: The GIL, the bane of some Python dev's existence, is becoming optional. From PEP-703:
The GIL is a major obstacle to concurrency. For scientific computing tasks, this lack of concurrency is often a bigger issue than speed of executing Python code, since most of the processor cycles are spent in optimized CPU or GPU kernels. The GIL introduces a global bottleneck that can prevent other threads from making progress if they call any Python code.
From the article, looks like the major hurdles are to try to get C-related stuff to play nice. It will be nice having this option since, as the article notes, CPUs are currently better at scaling horizontally (more cores) than vertically (better, faster cores).
🐍 Modern Good Practices for Python Development: A non-exaustive, opinionated list of best practices for Python dev. The only one I felt was surprising was to use an src layout over a flat layout. I've honestly never thought about it and didn't know there was a reason to use one over the other.
🎸 Charli xcx – “The girl, so confusing version with lorde” : Is there beef between Charli XCX and Lorde? I dunno, but this song is a banger.