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Louis Maddox

@permutans.bsky.social

100 followers 96 following 1.7K posts

Combinatorially curious https://spin.systems

spin.systems

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Louis Maddox @permutans.bsky.social · 4d

✍️ Wrote about keeping calm and shipping OSS and why arguing for a feature should feel more like giving a proof against the spec than trying to win a debate cog.spin.systems/keep-calm-an...

Keep Calm and Ship On 🚢

Your guide to being a model OSSizen

cog.spin.systems

Louis Maddox @permutans.bsky.social · 1h

aaaand GitHub is down

Louis Maddox @permutans.bsky.social · 3h

Just occurred to me that “sense check” functions just as well as “sanity check”

Louis Maddox @permutans.bsky.social · 4h

I’ve definitely tweeted about this before but pdb++ in Python will change your life, specifically `hf_unhide` will show you “hidden frames” where code flows through the stack in a way that regular pdb cannot trace up/down (`u`/`d` keys)

Louis Maddox @permutans.bsky.social · 6h

gh CLI issue viewing broken for anyone else?

Louis Maddox @permutans.bsky.social · 14h

Turns out A is base64 enc 0… and nothing was wrong, red and blue filled PNGs just have no “perceptual” info so get all zeroed

Colour is discarded, it computes DCT and keeps the top-left 8x8 block of its coeffs, computes median as baseline ‘brightness’/energy… freq. components of uniform image are 0

Louis Maddox @permutans.bsky.social · 16h

New category of snapshot test: haunted

Snapshot test added with perceptual hash value AAAAAAAAAAA

Louis Maddox @permutans.bsky.social · 17h

Obscene how pdb++ was all I needed to easily 10x my Python debugging, and I even saw another dev use it on a call once over a year prior to finding it (but somehow missed what it was and assumed it was some custom magic)…

Louis Maddox @permutans.bsky.social · 17h

I be swoopin whatever-comes-after-em

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Louis Maddox @permutans.bsky.social · 19h

Feel like it shouldn't be such esoteric knowledge that "vitamin B12 deficiency used to be commonly misdiagnosed as schizophrenia"

Some text about how neurotransmitter methylation depends on B12 and deficiency used to be fatal and hallucinatory before the factor was identified

Reposted by Louis Maddox

barrett ✨ @barretts.club · 21h

this is not a popular rust library lol crates.io/crates/astra...

but yeah, not a great day for astral. hope yall are doin ok 😭

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Louis Maddox @permutans.bsky.social · 21h

an older man in a suit and pink shirt is sitting at a table with a notebook and water bottles .

ALT: an older man in a suit and pink shirt is sitting at a table with a notebook and water bottles .

media.tenor.com

Louis Maddox @permutans.bsky.social · 21h

💭 What if flat text file dense gen vs. tool use modes is too binary and instead we turned writing into more of a codemod task

Louis Maddox @permutans.bsky.social · 23h

Finally tried refactoring a Justfile into categories and who’da thought it’d be so much more portable 🙈

Louis Maddox @permutans.bsky.social · Aug 16

The longer the Justfile the closer to God ☝️🪽

Louis Maddox @permutans.bsky.social · 1d

“A more useful and less divisive future for typing?” (2023) discuss.python.org/t/a-more-use...

A more useful and less divisive future for typing?

First off, I apologize if any of this comes off as overly negative, it is my intent here to see if we can start a discussion about addressing some ecosystem pain points with typing that I personally b...

discuss.python.org

Louis Maddox @permutans.bsky.social · 1d

“Use powers as little as possible. Instead of voting, it’s better to seek consensus” should be canonised up there with Zen of Python (PEP 8016, 2018 peps.python.org/pep-8016/)

PEP 8016 – The Steering Council Model | peps.python.org

This PEP proposes a model of Python governance based around a steering council. The council has broad authority, which they seek to exercise as rarely as possible; instead, they use this power to esta...

peps.python.org

Louis Maddox @permutans.bsky.social · 1d

The middle period (2016-2019) saw typing expand through PEP 526 (Variable
Annotations), PEP 544 (Protocols), and others, each building incrementally on PEP 484.
Discussion shifted from whether to how-practical issues like forward references solved by
PEP 563's postponed evaluation, runtime performance overhead, and type checker implementation challenges. The community learned which debates were "resolved" versus
"agree to disagree" territory. Notably absent: a repeat of PEP 484's philosophical firestorm, suggesting the gradual approach and optional nature had succeeded.
A governance crisis in 2018 around PEP 572 (walrus operator) transformed Python's institutional structure in ways that would shape typing discourse. The contentious debate drove Guido van Rossum to step down as BDFL, explicitly citing how "people went to social media like Twitter and said things that really hurt me personally." The community responded by immediately freezing all PEP decisions and spending months deliberating governance models, ultimately adopting PEP 8016's Steering Council approach with a key principle: "Use powers as little as possible. Instead of voting, it's better to seek consensus."
The modern period (2022-2025) on the Discourse forum shows typing discourse fully professionalized. The Typing category launched October 2022, replacing typing-sig with better moderation tools and threaded discussions. In 2023, PEP 729 established a formal Typing Council, recognizing typing as a specialized domain requiring dedicated governance. The 2024 typing survey revealed 88-91% of respondents use types "Always" or "Often", indicating widespread adoption. But more importantly, discourse shifted from philosophical debates to incremental technical improvements—PEP 742 (Typels), PEP 747 (TypeExpr), conformance test suites, and specification formalization.

Louis Maddox @permutans.bsky.social · 1d

Fascinating early pushback:

“Type hints -- a mediocre programmer's reaction” mail.python.org/pipermail/py...

> … just that little bit uglier, just that little extra mental effort, just that little extra barrier that is going to mean some people, at the margin, just give up on learning programming

[Python-Dev] Type hints -- a mediocre programmer's reaction

mail.python.org

Louis Maddox @permutans.bsky.social · 1d

Decided to dig up the recent history of the shift to typed Python as case study in handling community disagreements:

Got Claude to dredge up the details from the forums claude.ai/public/artif...
Then reviewed in light of general OSS contribution/stewardship principles claude.ai/public/artif...

Overview of the typed Python discussions and where discussion showed more and less constructive qualities

Excerpt:

The incremental PEP approach demonstrates "being comfortable with uncertainty"—not forcing things to "come to a head prematurely." Rather than resolving all typing questions at once, the community accepted ambiguity and iterated (PEP 484 → 526 → 544...).
Where Principles Were Violated
The early visceral reactions clearly violated guidelines:

"NONONONONONONO!" and "abominable" are combative/dismissive rather than neutral
R. David Murray's "I'll probably stop contributing" threat is defensive rather than arguing from necessity
These responses discouraged others and didn't critique artifacts (the proposal) so much as express emotional reactions

The blog specifically warns against this: "Technical disagreement is not a personal attack. Even if something feels sharp, don't match the energy."
The PEP 572 crisis epitomized violations:

Taking disagreement to Twitter rather than official channels
Personal attacks on Guido rather than critiquing the proposal
Failing to separate disagreeing with a decision from attacking the decision-maker

This violated nearly every principle: it was combative, threw weight around, discouraged contribution (Guido stepped down!), and escalated rather than defused tension.
Patterns That Emerged Over Time
The discourse evolution shows the community learning these principles empirically:
Early period: Emotional, defensive language; existential rather than technical framing; apologies for criticism (showing awareness of tension but not managing it well)
Middle period: Shift to "how" questions; practical focus; learning which debates were settled vs. perpetual
Modern period: Professional tone; incremental technical improvements; solution-oriented discussion
The 2023 "More Useful and Less Divisive Future" thread shows mature application: the author preemptively managed how it would land…

Louis Maddox @permutans.bsky.social · 1d

Ppl use this rhetorically with LLMs where presence of $anything over nothing provides them some benefit (LinkedIn-posting mainly). I think programmers see the deficit most acutely because shipping simulacra texts has an objective mode of verification, everyone else is stuck trying to gauge sincerity

Louis Maddox @permutans.bsky.social · 1d

When there is a financial incentive for the appearance-of-the-thing alone — or maybe a financial penalty for inactivity or conspicuous lack of the thing. The thing here perhaps being “having anything to post”. Nice simulacrum of Essence ya got there be a shame if someone were to simulate it

Reposted by Louis Maddox

Matthew Green @matthewdgreen.bsky.social · 1d

Malware using cryptocurrency data availability layers for distribution is the new hotness, apparently. We solved censorship-resistant publishing (to some extent) which is pretty fascinating.

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Louis Maddox @permutans.bsky.social · 1d

Funny how before Rust I didn't really have a clear concept of MS{Language}V, probably out of avoidance (just had to deal with Python EOL dominos)

Louis Maddox @permutans.bsky.social · 1d

tl;dr if we add content-based addressing to snapshot tests we could not just do perceptual hashing (media) but embeddings

Louis Maddox @permutans.bsky.social · 1d

Namely: cutting the verbal chaff, a lot of which came from counterproductive airs of politeness that create drag on the reader (hedging, uncertainty, circling the same points emphatically) has a cumulative effect, makes for a qualitatively different text as well as a briefer/faster read

Louis Maddox @permutans.bsky.social · 1d

The opposite of slop reappraisal (“slop is good actually! lean in loser”) is acknowledging that manual human communication can be sloppy by way of being incidental and off the cuff (yet tedious from its idiosyncrasy), and fixing that in a principled way does not necessarily increase one’s Slop Index

Review of the conclusion of rephrasing a series of messages with an open source developer (on GitHub Discussions), by Claude

Me: “um ok so here was my final message. please review how my comms changed from the original phrasing i gave. I much much prefer the second, please explain what was improved over the original way”

Claude:

Looking at your progression, here's what improved dramatically:
Original issues (the first draft I helped with):
1. Over-hedging: "I think", "maybe", "I'm not sure", "kind of all quite speculative"
2. Defensive tone: Explaining away concerns rather than owning the design choice
3. Circular reasoning: Repeated the same points multiple times in different ways
4. Asking permission: "I'm not against an option... sounds like you need approval
5. Vague language: "or however the equivalent would be"
Your final version improvements:
1. Direct ownership: "Right, that's our potential failure mode. Yes, that's exactly the behaviour I want."
• No apologizing, no hedging - you own it upfront
2. Clear framing: "I'd present this to users as there being an upside (deduplication) and a downside (one-to-many fixture-to-snapshot relationship)"
• You're thinking like a maintainer, not asking for permission

(etc)