Notices by Al Sweigart (alsweigart@mastodon.social)

The fact that all these court cases against Trump are just self-evaporating right now shows that "checks and balances" was always a silly fairy tale.

Python question: I am writing MyLibrary which has a container MyClass. Should the __getitem__() method for MyClass raise KeyError or my own custom MyLibraryKeyError?

The advice for after Burning Man or coming down from taking ayahuasca:

Don't make any big decisions for the next 72 hours.

Yeah no offense, fortune cookie, but get fucked.

I asked ChatGPT to give me a list of 100 books by No Starch Press, and it got... weird.

My Halloween costume: Recursive fractAL.

(btw you can get my book on recursion at https://nostarch.com/recursive-book-recursion )

You shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good, but you shouldn't let good be the enemy of better, either.

@mekkaokereke "Vunce ze rockets go up, who cares vere zey come down? 'Zat's not my department', says Wernher von Braun"

@jwz The reason you should always pirate movies and tv shows is so that you can still sue Disney if they kill your wife.

The BBC has expanded their free to use (for non-commercial use) library of sound effects to 33,000 items.

https://sound-effects.bbcrewind.co.uk/

@ryanfb https://www.zdnet.com/article/accuweather-caught-sending-geo-location-data-even-when-denied-access/

"Popular weather app AccuWeather has been caught sending geolocation data to a third-party data monetization firm, even when the user has switched off location sharing."

51 years ago today, the United States overthrew the democratically elected President of Chile and installed the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

This is a reminder that you don't have to watch the debates. You are not a more informed citizen by spending your time doing this.

The Matrix came out a quarter century ago.

Only old people buy Cybertrucks.

The third edition of Automate the Boring Stuff with Python is arriving in just a few months! Preorder your copy now from Barnes & Noble and get 25% off by using code PREORDER25. 🐍🐍🐍

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/automate-the-boring-stuff-with-python-3rd-edition-al-sweigart/1143968394?ean=9781718503403

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

4. IGNORE PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS

PEOPLE: "That's not natural."

NATURE:

I've just now verified these results on ChatGPT-4o and Llama 3 8B Instruct.

My conspiracy theory is that this cafe's wifi that works great except cuts out completely two or three times an hour for about thirty seconds is not a bug but a feature to keep people from watching videos or playing games in the cafe.

I regularly post a screenshot of the Houston Health Department and Rice University's COVID Wastewater dashboard to the r/houston subreddit.

You can tell it's bad because all the usual hecklers have been replaced with people confirming they or their families have COVID.