Notices by Blaise Pabón - controlpl4n3 (blaise@hachyderm.io)

Think of those ICE officers hiding their faces while they kidnapped students. They don't want us to remember.

Think of those Avelo airlines employees who didn't think they were signing up for those — but see the names and the faces.

Think of what meticulous records meant in the Nuremburg trials.

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Are there any modern tools which deploy a Python application as a collection of .pyc files without source? Not as a way to obfuscate anything, but just as a disk-space saving measure? I am messing around with a prototype and finding that `.pyc` files still directly import just fine… but only if I manually move them out of the __pycache__ directory and rename them to remove the python version tag from their names, which doesn't seem like the way I'm intended to leverage this feature

@blaise

* TheParliament: Europe's universities lure US academics under fire from Trump, but face similar risks - https://www.theparliamentmagazine.eu/news/article/european-universities-using-trump-to-lure-us-academics-face-similar-dangers

* Inside Higher Ed: Rector: Recruiting U.S. Scholars Can Protect ‘Threatened Research’ - https://www.insidehighered.com/news/global/2025/03/28/rector-recruiting-us-scholars-can-protect-threatened-research

* The Local SE: Swedish minister calls in universities to discuss recruiting US researchers - https://archive.is/Wy02T

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@blaise

Many countries are recruiting academics, generally in targeted fields. This is not new, but there have been a few semi-organized efforts in the past few weeks. Much of the media coverage, however, is from within the USA. Here is some from other media:

* France24: French research groups urged to welcome scientists fleeing US - https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20250309-french-research-groups-urged-to-welcome-scientists-fleeing-us

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#BrainDrain

Platinum is a silver-colored metal with a high melting point. If you heat it to 3825 °C, it will boil! If you carefully study platinum vapor, you can see spectral lines - different colors of light - as the electrons hop from one energy level to another.

Inside a platinum atom there's a nucleus. This too has different energy levels, shown in the middle picture. The energies here are huge: about 1 million electron volts. So, as the nucleus hops from one energy level to another, it emits gamma rays.

Physicists have come up with many theories that try to predict these energy levels. At left we see predictions of a theory called the SO(6) DS model. DS stands for 'dynamical symmetry' and SO(6) is a group of symmetries. The predictions are not *completely* wrong, but they're damned bad. At right are predictions of a more complicated theory called the SO(6) 'partial dynamical symmetry' model. They're better, though still flawed.

I'm studying these theories not because I care about the energy levels of platinum nuclei, but because it's incredibly cool that symmetry groups like SO(6) have anything to do with nuclear physics! Why? Because SO(6) is the group of rotations in 6-dimensional space!

What in the world does 6-dimensional space have to do with platinum nuclei? Here's what:

A platinum nucleus in its lowest energy level is shaped roughly like a kiwi fruit: an ellipsoid with all 3 axes of different length. In higher energy levels this ellipsoid is vibrating, constantly changing shape back and forth. It takes 6 numbers to describe an ellipsoid. So, we can describe the nucleus with a point in 6 dimensional space, which vibrates back and forth.

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Something that made me sad and kind of shocked me was the nice Canadian infosec people asking why senior cybersecurity people like me didn’t just immigrate to Canada. A lot of my friends tried, very hard, famous ones. You’re full, we are too old. Bless you, though 💜❤️🩹🙏

Can confirm US immigration in Canada looks like a zombie movie, and I got to personally see like 12 security agents and three customs and border people totally by myself.

We warned you about the SAVE act. Now it’s nearing a reality. If it passes the senate, many women who changed their last name won’t be voting in the US anymore.

On stage live in LA
https://www.youtube.com/live/T2449UaMaiQ?si=XfDzSHsuwQ3AZFgq

A few weeks ago, there was some chatter about how this would be a good time for #Canada , #mexico , or even #EuropeanUnion to acquire a generation of accomplished #Science researchers from the USA.

I don't suppose that there's any new developments on that topic? ( Or how to even search for it.)

@webology @brettcannon @pauleveritt
There's a branch you can build today:
https://peps.python.org/pep-0750/#reference-implementation

Otherwise it should be in the first 3.14 beta in just under a month and the full release in October.

@brettcannon @pauleveritt congrats!

When can I use it?

Gimmie, gimmie, gimmie.

Fascists want normal people to feel alone. They want us all to feel at their mercy. But what Hands Off! demonstrated is that we are not mere victims of political events. Democracy is a participatory sport, and we are active participants.

@SynAck @blaise there is unfortunately a lot of diversity in different approaches and even more unfortunately there are actually good reasons for using different tools in different circumstances. But as @hynek explains in his project layout 2025 video, you can get started with a standards-based approach and avoid going too deep on any particular tool, then use uv for basic setup unless you have a more specialized need https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFyE9xgeKcA

@blaise I'm actually just working through code from a book and am trying to get a handle on which environment tool I should use to give me a good leg-up when I start writing my own programs and projects. This book is fairly basic, with a more advanced one to follow.

I'm just trying to get used to the environment and "how things are generally done" these days in Python-land. :bec_wink:

@SynAck
btw, @glyph makes this topic engaging and coherent: https://youtu.be/kcfERM6fcgU
I know it's beyond your use case, but if the author of the the code you downloaded had seen this, your life today might be easier.

@SynAck
> are you referring to any Python program that I might want others to run or specifically libraries or Python tools that I would want others to use in writing their programs?

Both. In both cases you would want something different from venv or Conda.
If you want others to be able to pick up and run your Python program, then you will need to consider the target platform and the decision tree becomes more complex, the simplest answer is `flit`.
Poetry is good if you're building code for others to use in writing their own python programs, particularly if some on the ingredients are non-python.

Since I think you're looking for a broad common denominator as "final" consumer, I would suggest `python3 -m venv .venv` to create the environment called `.venv` then `source .venv/bin/activate` then pip install whatever you need.

@br00t4c Oh! #til , I wish I knew in advance, I would have marched with them.

In either #enshittification news… Recently filling out the tuition contract for my son for 12th grade, I discovered that #Blackbaud is now imposing a fee for direct debit payments. There was previously no fee.
There's no fee for mailing a paper check, which you can do for free through most banks nowadays.
It costs Blackbaud far more to process a paper check than a direct debit.
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A #gulfstream G650ER (Reg: N887WM) reportedly used by #billgates has just been detected in flight at Wed Apr 02 2025 19:48:23 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time).