Dispatches

Writing for Wired, Vijith Assar raises some excellent points on how bad actors with capital are the most dangerous threat to any system. Capital can kill code. Capital can kill anything.

I am a firm believer that no system is ever “designed” for the consequences of high adoption. This is especially true with regard to Mastodon, as most of our team has never operated a production Mastodon instance before.

I realize it’s actually Tuesday, but it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these weeknotes, so here we go! Over the course of the last week: Finished watching Brand New Cherry Flavor on Netflix, which was an outstanding horror miniseries.

The whole article is 🔥 and well worth a read, but this part of the conclusion hits the crux of Musk’s new dillema. The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works.

A few months ago, I came across this post by Simone Silvestroni explaining how they implemented a styled and human-readable RSS feed for their Jekyll-powered blog. I really liked the idea and wanted to implement it on my own site for browsers that don’t automatically offer to subscribe to a given feed.

Draw me your map of utopia and I’ll tell you your tragic flaw. — Laurie Penny, Ship of Fools This is the opening line from Laurie Penny’s piece on a cryptocurrency-centered cruise.

I’m over fifty. Being over fifty is miraculous. You get just a broader view on your previous iterations of yourself, and they all look like miserable failures. But I’m told that the next errand is to have pity on them.

If you haven’t been following the ongoing saga of incredible grift in the so-called web3 space, I highly recommend checking out the work being done by Molly White, whose site Web3 is going just great is a shocking timeline of the various scams and hacks occurring constantly within the broader “crypto” market.

This week has been both incredibly busy, but also frustrating vague on things I can share. It doesn’t help that I’ve had a cold kicking my ass for the last few days.

This week in the world of Daniel: Released two new versions of django-quotes. Those are focused around making the app more flexible for lots of users, and some developer help with typing annotations.

Python 3.10 introduced several improvements for type hints, including a much more concise Union operator. This means that instead of using: def square(number: Union[int, float]) -> Union[int, float]: return number ** 2 You can instead write this:

This week in the world of Daniel: I updated my quote service project to use my reusable django-quotes app. This should make maintenance easier. Since this is a backwards-incompatible change, I also updated ewdiscordbot and ewtwitterbot to use the new API endpoints.

Here’s the scenario: you’ve got an actual play TTRPG podcast, and you want to invite a guest onto your show for a special appearance. This is a great idea! It’s delightful to collaborate with other creators, and you can learn so much simply by working with new people.

This week in DanielVision: I ran a game of Monster Care Squad for my daughter and wrote down my thoughts. Sent a number of additional job applications out the door. And hey, if your company is doing cool things and looking for seasoned product executive, let me know.

I wrote recently about receiving my backer copy of Monster Care Squad, which is a Ghibli-inspired RPG about the people caring for the magical monsters that once protected their communities from a terrible illness.

This week I: Released django-quotes, the reusable Django app version of my quote service project. It’s available on PyPi, and you can find documentation on adding it to your Django project here.

I was hacking on my quote service the other day, and notice that Read the Docs wasn’t building my module level documentation, which meant that anyone that wanted to look at said modules in more detail was getting a 404 error.

This Week In, Well Everything: I have been horrified by the news coming out of Texas and Alabama, and strongly encourage you to donate to organizations that help trans youth and combat the hate in those places.

I’m trying to get back into the habit of writing more regularly here, and taking some inspiration from Quentin I’m going to start doing brief weekly updates. My hope is that doing these short posts will get me back in the groove and lead me to resuming more detailed write-ups.

A few GDPR rulings have recently been handed down that are going to be causing major shakeups across a number of sites and services. This year’s off to a wild start.