Al Sweigart
@alsweigart.bsky.social
2.9K followers 200 following 910 posts
Author of "Automate the Boring Stuff with Python" and other books. Mostly harmless. he/him
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Reposted by Al Sweigart
juliusgoat.bsky.social
Send every ICE employee to the fucking Hague.
caitlindeangelis.bsky.social
ICE kidnapped a 7th-grader with a pending asylum claim and spirited him out of state without notifying his parents, seemingly with the cooperation of the local police in Everett, MA.

www.bostonglobe.com/2025/10/12/m...
Everett 13-year-old arrested by ICE and sent to Virginia detention facility
By Marcela Rodrigues Globe Staff,Updated October 12, 2025, 44 minutes ago



31
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia.
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia.
A 13-year-old boy was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Everett after an interaction with members of the Everett Police Department and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia, according to his mother and immigration lawyer Andrew Lattarulo.

The boy’s mother, Josiele Berto, was called to pick her son up from the Everett Police Department on Thursday, the day he was arrested. After waiting for about an hour and a half, she was told her son was taken by ICE, Berto told the Globe in a phone interview.

“My world collapsed,” Berto said in Portuguese.

From the police department, the boy was taken to ICE’s holding facility in Burlington on Thursday evening, where he spent a night before being transferred by car to the Northwestern Regional Juvenile Detention Center in Winchester, Va., on Friday morning, his mother said. The juvenile facility is more than 500 miles away from Everett.

The boy is a 7th-grader at Albert N. Parlin School in Everett, his mother said. The teen and his family, who are Brazilian nationals, have a pending asylum case and are authorized to work legally in the United States, Lattarulo said.
alsweigart.bsky.social
Capitalism can't be trusted with anything that doesn't get cheaper on a Black Friday Sale:

Housing, healthcare, education, food, utilities, transportation, energy...
alsweigart.bsky.social
Copilot seems to have stopped working in the last few days? Now it won't even enable the Accept/Keep buttons after it applies its suggestions. Have people seen this before?
alsweigart.bsky.social
I vibe-coded a GUI toolkit in Python. The LLM seems really, uh, cautious with all these try/except statements. The source file is full of stuff like this: Catch an exception and print an error message, and catch any exceptions that might happen while printing the error message.
alsweigart.bsky.social
I'm reminded of a quote like, "There are three groups: fascists and anti-fascists who understand the law is whatever people with power say it is, and a third group who has a deeply unexamined belief that the law is some kind of magic force field that will keep the government from doing bad things."
alsweigart.bsky.social
We live in a fascist regime. Resist. Organize with others. Be careful.
alsweigart.bsky.social
Kind of a reminder that these things can break or go away at anytime.
alsweigart.bsky.social
Damn. And AI was working perfectly until I touched it.
alsweigart.bsky.social
There's no point trying to appease someone who won't be appeased. You don't make a deal with a backstabber about how far they'll put in the knife.

"MIT President Sally Kornbluth formally rejected the Trump administration's proposed compact"

thetech.com/2025/10/10/m...
BREAKING: MIT rejects federal compact | The Tech
On Friday Oct. 10, MIT President Sally Kornbluth formally rejected the Trump administration's proposed compact in an email to the U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon.
thetech.com
alsweigart.bsky.social
Hey, has anyone noticed that Copilot in Visual Studio Code has just... stopped working? It used to apply the code changes into the editor, but now it doesn't. At best, I can apply the tiny changes one at a time, each taking 30 seconds as it rewrites the entire file.

This is completely unusable.
alsweigart.bsky.social
I was playing around with AI art to generate those mindless "corporate memphis" style graphics. When I asked it to turn it into a photorealistic drawing, the man and woman turned argumentative, the other woman obviously doesn't want to be there, and the black guy was cropped out almost entirely.
alsweigart.bsky.social
I thought about asking if anyone knew of any apps made by non-programmers, but then realized I'd probably get more responses if I said it was impossible and waited for people to try to prove me wrong.
alsweigart.bsky.social
My first test of the Grok Code Fast 1 model for AI-assisted coding... did not go well.
alsweigart.bsky.social
It's not possible for a non-programmer to use AI to create software.
Reposted by Al Sweigart
alsweigart.bsky.social
In the novel A Long Way Down by Nick Hornby, a disgraced tv personality who is now broke is paid by a morning talk show to say an angel that looks like Matt Damon talked him out of killing himself. It was humiliating for him. But he got 5,000 pounds, and they got their clickbait tabloid headline.
Screenshot of CBS Saturday Morning show with an interview and caption: He proposed to an AI and she said yes.
Reposted by Al Sweigart
dynamicsymmetry.bsky.social
Gavin Newsom isn’t trolling Trump, he is not actually the one posting, the person you love is the anonymous underpaid staffer who runs his social media
alsweigart.bsky.social
Instead of "AI proponents" I started saying "AI evangelists".

Then instead of "AI evangelists" I started calling them "AI evangelicals".
alsweigart.bsky.social
Oh, even before that: Missing colon, wrong keyword, extra underscore...
Reposted by Al Sweigart
nytpitchbot.bsky.social
Pete Hegseth practices day drinking the right way.

by Ezra Klein
alsweigart.bsky.social
I've come up with a new game. I ask AI to create an image of some Python code, and you point out all the mistakes in it:
alsweigart.bsky.social
Not really. I've always stuck with writing quick little Python tools, and in my reading, these no-code/low-code tools always seem as much work as learning to program.
alsweigart.bsky.social
I find the timing suspect. Ranked choice in NYC has been around for years, but she didn't write this article until it became apparent it would let a progressive take office.

It's just that being against ranked choice is *such* a weird stance and her reasons are so flat.
alsweigart.bsky.social
This thread is worth reading:
wagatwe.com
we showed the brutality of the anti-Black (and anti-ally) violence by police in 2020 (and before) yet we still got Trump for a second term and police violence has only worsened.
asharangappa.bsky.social
We’re in a moment now where it would be worth people taking three hours to watch Gandhi, particularly the scene of the salt march. There is value to making the brutality of your opponent so plain as day that no one can argue with it. The clarity of that brought down an empire
alsweigart.bsky.social
Hey experienced software dev folks: do you use any low-code/no-code tools for your job, hobbies, or work? Either for polished products or rough in-house tools?
alsweigart.bsky.social
Annie Lowrey, wife of Ezra Klein, gets an Atlantic Cuomo-apologist hit piece (with a scary illustration) against Zohran Mamdani, and is against ranked choice voting.

"Liberals" like this are why Trump wins. They'll throw aay "vote blue no matter who" and even democracy to stop progressives.