I know competent adults whose login flow for most websites is “forgot password.” Might be better off writing your passwords on post it notes at that point.

I've seen a few sites where the login flow is simply entering your email address and you get a time-limited login link sent to you. You never create any password at all. I was skeptical at first but I've found it seems to work pretty decently.

This could not be a more picture perfect example of a Wirth-suboptimal engeneering decision as per the article if it were designed for that. The amount of slowdown to run to the emails, wait for reception, open, copy, paste instead of using the sensible flow of password manager integration is huge. But people will use wasteful processes if they just don't need to change them, so what are you gonna do?

Whenever some website asks me to use specific weird characters in my password. I have to write it down on a post-it note and put it in the top drawer of my desk.

The irony is that the websites which require such passwords are often low-importance.

Access is not as dead as you might hope. The long tail of internal tools written with Access continues to shamble along. I had to figure out how to dump MDB files on Windows last year for just this reason. As an industry I think we often fail to grasp how much outsider art there is, in the form of internal departmental tools.

LLM coding is going to create a cambrian explosion of these tools. It’s going to be very interesting to see the remnants of this wave 30 years down the line.

One of the key questions here - will LLM coding decrease the proliferation of app-specific Excel files (by for example accelerating and simplifying Excel-to-webapp conversion) or would result in an opposite outcome by making feasible managing even orders of magnitude more of those disparate Excel files :)

I wouldn’t bet against cramming more and more business processes into Excel. The guy who was copying cells from one workbook to another yesterday, tomorrow can have a single mega-workbook with all the macros more or less deconflicted.

I am not an AI and I missed the memo on this. I put that line in whenever I need to use a forward-declared type annotation. Last I recall reading about it, there were some deep issues that meant it had to stay in __future__ indefinitely. Is there a PEP / release note about it?

Oh, I was very wrong, my apologies!

I was sure this one was for Python from 3.7 up to 3.10. But it is still here.. But as for 2026 it will not stay forever as it was supposed to - there are 2 PEPs which are suppose to fix it in Python 3.14 - https://peps.python.org/pep-0649/ and https://peps.python.org/pep-0749/

Julia Set. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_set

Funny how that page spends so much of the introduction comparing Julia to Fatou, but the page for Fatou only mentions Julia in passing.

Thank you!

I have a recording of le temps des cerises by Charles Trenet, which I picked up after hearing his music on a movie soundtrack. Anyway, this is a song one could imagine playing in the void, echoing the end of everything. A little melancholy, a little sweet. Pairs will with fractals.

People have romantic ideas about heating with fire and burn the most awful green wood in their fireplaces, stinking up the whole neighborhood. I understand burning bad wood because you have no options -- I witnessed a chimney fire or two as a kid that resulted from burning too much wet pine -- but I cannot fathom the mindset of someone who does it recreationally.

Meanwhile my neighbor is burning wood he stacked eight years ago.

Some of it precious, too. Like black walnut.

I know a few farmstands here that operate on the honor system. Put $5 in the box, take your bag of apples. You have to go a bit out of your way, but they do exist in the States.

I used to think that ESR had slid slowly into the lunatic fringe, but it sounds like he was a crank from the start. He pursued fame but seems to prefer notoriety to compromise. I think there’s a lesson here, but I’m not sure what it is.

Humility maybe? No matter how right you think you are, beware: you might be ESR.

Yeah if you want to talk about sliding slowly into lunacy, it'd be a once-respected computer scientist who now haunts online discussions looking for anything which could be obliquely linked to one of his personal betes noires and flooded with semi-irrelevant copy-paste.

I thought it was relevant context for the discussion. I’ve read some real gems in his big pasted blocks.

> give it loads of memory (32GB+ surely)

Make that 64 if you’re obliged to run Teams. I wonder how many power plants the US could retire if we all stopped using it.

I wonder what exactly Microsoft did with “New Teams” that was supposedly written in Rust and uses the system browser engine or whatever instead of Electron. On release it seemed better, but now it seems as bloated, slow and annoying as the Electron one. MS Teams seems to have some incurable infection.

If I could, MS Teams would be the second tool I’d eject out (after Outlook and Exchange). But the company I work in is tied to MS 365 and will not give up on Teams and its useless cousin SharePoint.

> manufacturing

This is sadly far from the truth. Manufacturing is nowhere near metric conversion. Horsepower, foot-pounds, and my all time least favorite unit, the mil, are everywhere. And relatedly, manufacturing execution systems that use localtime internally cause all manner of hilarity twice a year. It’s like we’re just deliberately trying to be bad at measuring things.

Force and mass is what always drove me crazy in engineering school. I assume that courses in the US have largely given up trying to pay some lip service to common older units but sorting out pounds-mass, pounds-force, and slugs? Pretty sure I couldn't do it today.

The rocket company I worked at designed their orbital rocket in inches and lbm. Engine flow rates in lbm/s, temperatures in deg Rankine, thrust in lbf. Btu/hour/inch^2/degR heat transfer coefficients.