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According to a famous and fortunate Homeric expression, words are winged, not so much like birds but rather like arrows, which cut the air quickly to go straight to the target and break through the listener’s heart. The Greeks have always known that the word is used to convince and show truth and correctness. But they also know that it has a magical force in it: it can turn into a spell, capable of dominating and dragging the listener’s soul; to bewitch like music and to heal like medicine; but, above all, to deceive and mislead. ...

Flask 2.0 has just been released. Along with it come many other major satellite releases: Werkzeug 2.0, Jinja 3.0, Click 8.0, ItsDangerous 2.0, and MarkupSafe 2.0. Across all projects, Python 3.6+ is now required, and comprehensive type annotations are supported. At a glance, I’d say that the biggest news is async views in Flask 2. Work has also been done around Werkzeug Request and Response classes to allow for better sync and async in the future (it’s not a public API yet.) Jinja, Click and ItsDangerous come with a lot of new niceties. Details are available on the Pallets website. ...

For decades Scandinavian countries have been renowned for their educational systems, low levels of corruption, sustainable economy, social justice, overall quality of life. According to Jukka Savolainen on Slate, the reason why Finns have now been dominating the World Happiness Report four years in a row has little to do with these factors and more with their life expectations. Savolainen perspective is interesting because he is a Finn living in the US. He experienced the Scandinavian system first hand, then moved to a (very) different culture. ...

I am very late to the party, but today I learned that the good old dotnet SmptClient is considered obsolete and should not be used. Quoting the documentation: We don’t recommend using the SmtpClient class for new development because SmtpClient doesn’t support many modern protocols. Use MailKit or other libraries instead. (source) Interestingly, Microsoft is recommending a third-party open-source library as an alternative. I hope we’ll see more of that in the future. ...

Robert Edison Fulton was the first solo round-the-world motorcycle tourer. He made his worldwide trip on a two-cylinder Douglas motorcycle between July 1932 and December 1933, more or less 90 years ago. On his way from London to the colonial Middle East, Fulton crossed Nazi Germany. Some of the countries and places he passed do not exist anymore. Most have changed dramatically; others, not so much. I suspect, for example, that his adventures in Syria, Afghanistan, or at the Indian-Pakistani borders might have been written today. ...

The official Git documentation presents the following example as a valid use-case for the worktree command: You are in the middle of a refactoring session and your boss comes in and demands that you fix something immediately. You might typically use git-stash1 to store your changes away temporarily. However, your working tree is in such a state of disarray (with new, moved, and removed files and other bits and pieces strewn around) that you don’t want to risk disturbing any of it. (source) ...

Only 24 people have journeyed far enough to see the whole Earth against the black of space. The images they brought back changed our world. Here is a selection of the most beautiful photographs of Earth — iconic images and unknown gems — digitally restored to their full glory. Toby Ord’s recent Earth Restored project is a must-see.

It’s maintenance day in my little Python world. I just released new versions of two small but apparently quite popular packages: eve-swagger, the OpenAPI/Swager extensions for Eve-powered APIs, hits v0.1.4. It’s just a single fix for API breakage introduced with the previous release; details available here. Thanks to Asger Gitz-Johansen for the help with this release. Flask-Sentinel, an Oauth2 Provider for Flask, hits v0.0.8. This also is a small release that fixes 500 errors if you were using unpinned versions of redis. This time, my gratitude goes to Adrian Cin. ...

As I was browsing my RSS feed this morning, I came across a [new blog][1] from Nat Friedman over at GitHub. The piece was titled “Open source goes to Mars”, and, of course, it caught my interest. In the article, Nat announced a Mars 2020 Helicopter Mission badge added to GitHub profiles contributing to open-source projects and libraries used by Ingenuity. Some time ago, like many others, I was granted the Arctic Code Vault badge, so I am familiar with the concept. I quickly dismissed the information as “nice, not gonna get it” and moved along. ...

Consider the 10x10 grids of green and white boxes below. How would you make them symmetrical? Most people would add green boxes to the emptier half of the grid rather than remove them from the fuller half. Even when the latter would have been more efficient. The case, along with a similar problem revolving around the stability of a peculiar lego structure, is reported by an intriguing Nature article on the topic of psychology and human behaviour. The paper linked to the piece demonstrates that people consistently consider changes that add components over those that subtract them. ...