Like so many others, I've gotten into birding in the last few years. I've known so many people who choose eBird over iNaturalist because it's "easier to use". But that's exactly why I don't really enjoy eBird. So many people are just running Merlin, and dumping whatever it picks up to eBird.
There are way fewer observations on iNaturalist, but I know how much to trust every one of them.
I've been frustrated by the constant nudges to use specific AI tools from within VS Code, but I made a different change. Rather than moving to a different editor altogether, I started using VS Codium. If you're unfamiliar, it's the open core of VS Code, without the Microsoft-branded features that make up VS Code.
I believe Microsoft builds VS Code releases by building VS Codium, and then adding in their own branded features, including all the AI pushes. If you like VS Code except for the Microsoft bits, consider VS Codium alongside other modern choices.
> I believe Microsoft builds VS Code releases by building VS Codium
Isnt vscodium a specific product built strictly from open-source VS Code source code? It's not affiliated with Microsoft, they simply build from the same base then tweak it in different ways.
This is somewhat unlike my understanding of Chromium/Chrome which is similar to what you described.
That's a good idea. I considered VSCodium but the issue is that I used VSCode's proprietary extensions such as Pylance. So it would require to switch to OSS replacements at which point I decided why wouldn't give Zed a try – it has a better feeling by not being an Electron app.
I think VSCodium is a good option if you need extensions not available in Zed.
If you are good with a slightly jank option, I have had success with just moving the extension directory from VSCode to the VSCodium directory. Works for the Oracle SQL Developer plugin I use often. It might go against the terms in the extension, but I don’t care about that.
That doesn't help with Pylance and similar extensions. Microsoft implemented checks to verify the extension is running in VS Code, you have to manually patch them out of the bundled extension code (e.g. like this[0], though that probably doesn't work for the current versions anymore).
Basedpyright is really good. I've been using it in neovim for a while. I'm currently evaluating ty. It is definitely not as good, but it is also really new.
I appreciate that we have good alternatives to pylance. While it is good, it being closed source is a travesty.
I've been using vscodium with basedpyright as I've thought it was supposed to be a open source version of pylance. I've got to say it's annoying about type errors and after changing it's setting to be less strict it still annoys me and I've even started littering my code with the their # ignore _____ .
I'm really glad the article mentioned ty as I'm going to try that today.
On zed I tried it but the font rendering hurt my eyes and UI seems to be glitchy and also doesn't support the drag and drop to insert links in markdown feature * I use all the time.
I can't say I've noticed any "nudges" to use AI tools in VS Code. I saw a prompt for Copilot but I closed it, and it hasn't been back.
I'm probably barely scratching the surface of what I can do with it, but as a code editor it works well and it's the first time I've ever actually found code completion that seems to work well with the way I think. There aren't any formatters for a couple of the languages I use on a daily basis but that's a Me Problem - the overlap between IDE users of any sort and assembly programmers is probably quite small.
Are there any MS-branded features I should care about positively or negatively?
I'm a teacher, so I help people get started setting up a programming environment on a regular basis. If you take a new system that hasn't been configured for programming work at all, and install a fresh copy of VS Code, you'll see a number of calls to action regarding AI usage. I don't want to walk people through installing an editor only to then tell them they have to disable a bunch of "features".
This isn't an anti-AI stance; I use AI tools on a daily basis. I put "features" in quotes because some of these aren't really features, they're pushes to pay for subscriptions to specific Microsoft AI services. I want to choose when to incorporate AI tools, which tools to incorporate, and not have them popping up like a mobile news site without an ad blocker.
I have been using vscodium for years, hasn't disappointed until recently (rust analyzer wont pickup changes, not sure if rust or vscode issue). I tried zed once, but just didn't do the basics I needed at the time. I'll have to give it a try again
edit: zed is working much better for me now and does not have the issue vscodioum was having (not recognizing changes/checking some code till I triggered rebuild)
I've been trying to learn piano and guitar. I have both set up near my desk, and they're intentionally set up without any equipment that has a screen. If I have a few minutes between work sessions, playing a few scales is a fantastic way to step out of the work world for a bit.
I also have a hangboard nearby, and one of my 2026 resolutions is to hang at least once a day.
I live just south of Asheville in NC, and we were completely isolated after the storm for a few days. The only reason we were able to get out after a few days was that a fire truck had been abandoned at the bottom of our driveway as trees fell around it, so they came back as soon as they could to get that resource back. People just the other side of those trees were unable to get out for about a week.
Our best source of information, even after we started to get a bit of service, was an inReach. I messaged a friend far from the region and asked them really specific questions like, "Tell me when I can get from our house to I-26 and then south to South Carolina."
Yes, absolutely, emergency information sites should be as light as possible. And satellite devices are incredibly useful when everything local goes down.
> Previous industrial revolutions externalised their costs onto environments that seemed infinite until they weren't. Software ecosystems are no different: dependency chains, maintenance burdens, security surfaces that compound as output scales. Technical debt is the pollution of the digital world, invisible until it chokes the systems that depend on it. In an era of mass automation, we may find that the hardest problem is not production, but stewardship. Who maintains the software that no one owns?
This whole article was interesting, but I really like the conclusion. I think the comparison to the externalized costs of industrialization, which we are finally facing without any easy out, is a good one to make. We've been on the same path for a long time in the software world, as evidenced by the persistent relevance of that one XKCD comic.
There's always going to be work to do in our field. How appealing that work is, and how we're treated as we do that work, is a wide open question.
If valid `data` can be zero, an empty string, or anything else “falsy”, then your version won’t handle those values correctly. It treats them the same as `None`, i.e. not found.
No, this would crash with numpy arrays, pandas series and such, with a ValueError: The truth value of an array with more than one element is ambiguous.
Yeah, but, I mean, those people generally aren't great programmers. "Why does it do that?" "Dunno, it was on stack overflow." was a fairly common code review problem long before "Why does it do that?" "Dunno, robot says so."
I believe the've been looking for two-letter names that aren't already taken, and are easy to type. I think I heard that from one of the podcasts that Charlie Marsh was on.
Source here for anyone interested[0]. From memory, Ruff was its own thing, (I think named after the bird?) since then they've tried to give projects short letter combinations for consistency and ease of typing (uv, ty, pyx)
I bicycled around North America for a year in 1998-1999, and finished in Alaska. It was wild to live on a bike for a full year, and then meet people who had been living that way (on bikes and on foot) for years at a time. There were a lot of people just starting out on aspirational long trips, but there were also a handful of people who had already gone a long long way. Fairbanks was an interesting meeting point for many of those travelers.
Honestly, I don’t really remember. More than a decade ago, but I think maybe I was already working on my sailing adventures by then and working the summer in Fairbanks? Or maybe that was before, I’m not really sure. Too many relationships, kids, and big life changes between here and there to have a sense of the thing. I’m sure you can look it up? IIRC he was in Fairbanks for quite a while. Was a bit of a fixture at the coffee house.
I spent alot of time in Fairbanks throughout 2006 and 2008, doing aerial surveys from plane. Fairbanks was a good airport to get stuck at, and you do meet some interesting non-traditional travelers. I've never met the guy in the article, but I've met a few bike/hike travelers there who were either moving horizontally or vertically across Alaska (no small feat at all), and I always thought it sounded like an adventure.
Iirc he was there for more than a year, flew home for a while, came back? Not sure. I do remember him being there during a summer and also during winter. I think one year the ice was impassible and he was waiting. But I don’t really remember, such things might have been mere conversation crystallized into memories. He seemed a kind and pleasant man , though, of that I am sure.
I read a book called A Walk Across America in college, by Peter Jenkins. I liked the idea of traveling under my own power, but I didn't want to spend years walking. I kept when I got my driver's license, and I was bike commuting in NYC at the time, so biking was a natural fit.
I was teaching at the time, so the first summer without any obligations I rode across the northern US. Then I rode across the southern US the next summer. I loved it, and wanted to live outside for all the seasons. So the next year I quit my job and circled the continent: Seattle to Maine, down to Florida, across to California, then up to Alaska. I moved to Alaska a few years after the trip ended and spent 20 years there. We moved to North Carolina last year, because dark southeast Alaskan winters were getting old, and all our family is on the east coast.
I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to do that trip in the era of paper maps, and truly being out of touch for so much of that time. It pushes you to meet so many new people in all the places you visit, instead of staying in constant contact with people you already know. It was also nice to not see satellite imagery of the road ahead. Every day was a surprise. :)
One of my claims to fame is writing one of the best-selling Python books of all time (Python Crash Course), and one of the lowest-selling travel books of all time. :)
A Walk Across America was amazing reading when I was college aged. I've never forgotten the story about the accident when he and his (then-girlfriend?) were walking along a quiet highway, I think in Nevada, and they decided to walk on the wrong side of the road, against his usual rules, because it had a shoulder.
And, she landed in the hospital after a car hit them.
I think they got married in New Orleans, before they started the rest of the walk together.
Peter and Barbara didn't do so well after that trip. One of their kids took a road trip with his mom recently, retracing their route from New Orleans to Oregon. He wrote a book about their road trip, and it was a pretty interesting read: https://www.jedidiahjenkins.com
American Discovery Trail. Coast to coast, Delaware to California, 6,800 miles. There's actually one glitch in the trail, water that can't be crossed with the resources at hand. Other than that, it's actually a lot more forgiving than the three big north-south trails as you're mostly near civilization.
I rode a bicycle from Canada to Mexico (in about a month) with a close friend. We bought a book called Bicycling the Pacific Coast (before smart phones).
I had a cheap $150 univega bike and my friend had a $3000 cannondale. His broke mine didn't :)
We were amateurs. We hitchhiked to a bike shop near San Francisco to fix it. Had some saddle bags with our tent and sleeping bag, clothes and water.
It's very doable. Hardest part is just showing up.
America, definitely doable. He's got that cart and he's going through civilization as much as possible, so long as you do time it reasonably there shouldn't be any major problems. Darian Gap, though, wow! Likewise, the Bering Straight.
I can't find how it will operate. Will it detect a situation where lines are not painted sufficiently clearly, warn you, and disengage? Or will you need to detect where it begins to operate wonky because lines aren't painted sufficiently clearly and to take over? I guess it's the second. It's hands-off, not eyes-off.
Also, I would like to see a car company that is further down the road of full autonomy clearly describing all the long tail scenarios. It's just impossible.
The current Gen 1s will start beeping at you if they can’t see the lines. If you don’t take over quickly it will start slowing down and beeping very insistently.
I've been saying that it's semi-solved, in the sense that we have a decent idea of how to get there without requiring major breakthroughs. (By "we" I mean Waymo.)
There are way fewer observations on iNaturalist, but I know how much to trust every one of them.