Today I Learned

October 2024

Austin - A Frame Stack Sampler for CPython

Great tool to share to help optimize any python applications you have in your life.

Lecture Friday: Education Part Three: Teachers

Directive (EU) 2024/2853 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 October 2024 on liability for defective products and repealing Council Directive 85/374/EEC (Text with EEA relevance)

https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/PE-7-2024-INIT/en/pdf

Not the catchiest title. Huge if true!

From my understanding when this goes into effect it means that little clause in every software license that reads something like, THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND stops working legally. You sell it, you're legally responsible for it.

I've been saying for so long we need something like this. How it'll ideally play out is that companies that sell software will be legally on the hook for that software. Those companies will need liability insurance. The insurance industry will gather lots of data on what leads to payouts. That in turn will form lists of practices you need to follow to lower your premiums. Software will be forced to improve kicking and screaming.

There's an absolutely huge number of what ifs and uncertainties around this. That it's possibly happening at all is fantastic to hear. Half a century late, but better now than never.

Lecture Friday: Education Part Two: Administration

Cory Doctorow: Moneylike

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

A great piece to understand what money fundamentally is.

Lecture Friday: Education: History and Development

Starting a series of Friday lectures about education. It's always important to understand what the purpose of a thing is. You only understand that by seeing what it does. Interrogating the name of a thing is completely counter productive. Thinking of what it should do from first principals also doesn't help.

People I talk to are always talking about education and the education industry as though they're interchangeable. Like schools are where the learning is. Seeing past the institution is important to start to understand it has interests and those interests are only marginally if at all interested in education.

The Secret Knots

https://thesecretknots.com/comic/remind-me-later/

Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.

The Magic of Software; or, What Makes a Good Engineer Also Makes a Good Engineering Organization

https://moxie.org/2024/09/23/a-good-engineer.html

I feel like we might be losing sight of the understanding part.

I worry he's right. Not me, but I've learned I'm unfortunately a very weird mind.

NIST Recommends Some Common-Sense Password Rules

https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-4/sp800-63b.html

Verifiers and CSPs SHALL NOT require users to change passwords periodically.