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James Bennett

@b-list.org

416 followers 81 following 134 posts

Django/Python guy. Tip your servers and normalize your Unicode. he/him Angry politics and other non-tech parts of me are at @ubernostrum.bsky.social Elsewhere: www.b-list.org infosec.exchange/@ubernostrum github.com/ubernostrum

Posts Replies Media

James Bennett @b-list.org · 08/09/2026

Voiceover: “Each grape is milled from a single billet of aluminium…”

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James Bennett @b-list.org · 27/08/2026

And yes, I know, but I’m not going to give any more detail than that.

Batman Beyond meme of the character Blight, saying “Do you have the slightest idea how little that narrows it down?”

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James Bennett @b-list.org · 12/08/2026

Ah yes, the three genders.

Gender selection drop-down with three options:

* Female
* I do not wish to disclose (United States of America)
* Make

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James Bennett @b-list.org · 16/05/2026

BLIMP #PyConUS

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James Bennett @b-list.org · 18/10/2025

Today was when I realized that the Mail app icon on iOS and macOS has Apple’s address in tiny print on the back of the envelope. Apparently macOS has had it for a while, but on iOS it was just added.

iOS Mail icon. It’s the back of an envelope, and in tiny print on the flap it says “Apple Park, California 95014”.

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James Bennett @b-list.org · 11/07/2025

It was this guy, who was not only rude to word it that way but also factually wrong, and has now blocked me to save face.

Screenshot of part of a Mastodon post, saying:

`pip` tends to the lag the standards a little bit, especially if someone directly involved in the standards process is not already a champion of the stuff being added to `pip`

To put it bluntly: maintaining `pip`'s existing features is already a lot, so some standards become "implementations welcome" until there are cycles available from the maintainers themselves. PEP 723 is another one that comes to mind

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James Bennett @b-list.org · 18/04/2025

Apparently it’s not a singleton. Perhaps there’s an “implements ToteBag” somewhere inside.

More tote bags on a shelf. They are made of other materials and in different colors but all still say THE TOTE BAG on the side.

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James Bennett @b-list.org · 17/04/2025

Static typing in action

A tote bag on a rack at a store. On the side in large letters is printed THE TOTE BAG and the name of designer Marc Jacobs

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James Bennett @b-list.org · 08/04/2025

Comparing JSON objects in #Python can be tricky because the default equality checks care about ordering (of items in lists, of keys in dicts, etc.) in ways *you* might not. Some fancy JSON comparison packages solve this properly, but instead I used a horrible good-enough hack in a script this week.

import json

type JSONObject = dict | list

def compare_json_objects(first: JSONObject, second: JSONObject) -> bool:
return sorted(json.dumps(first)) == sorted(json.dumps(second))

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