If no other explanations for the Iran War seem satisfying, have you considered that the point is to bring about the end of the world and the return of Jesus Christ? The people in power have.
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Podcast production by Elena Schwartz, Paige Osburn, Anna Phillips, Madeline Ducharme, and Rob Gunther.
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Dan Blanchard, maintainer of a Python character encoding detection library called chardet, released a new version of the library under a new software license. (LGPL → MIT)
Dan is allowed to make this change because v7 is a complete “clean room” rewrite using AI
BTW, v7 is WAY better:
The result is a 48x increase in detection speed for a project that lives in the hot loops of many projects. That will lead to noticeable performance increases for literally millions of users (the package gets ~130M downloads per month).
It paves a path towards inclusion in the standard library (assuming they don’t institute policies against using AI tools).
Thread-safe detect() and detect_all() with no measurable overhead; scales on free-threaded Python 3.13t+
An individual claiming to be Mark Pilgrim, the original creator of the library, opened an issue in the project's GitHub repo arguing that Blanchard had no right to change the software license, citing the LPGL requirement that the license remain unchanged.
A 'complete rewrite' is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code (i.e. this is not a 'clean room' implementation).
Blanchard disagreed, citing how version 7.0.0 and 6.0.0 compare when subjected to JPlag, a library for detecting plagiarism.
Blanchard told The Register he had wanted to get chardet added to the Python standard library for more than a decade since it’s a core dependency to most Python projects.
A browser plugin that improves the GitHub experience
A sampling
Adds a build/CI status icon next to the repo’s name.
Adds a link back to the PR that ran the workflow.
Enables tab and shift tab for indentation in comment fields.
Auto-resizes comment fields to fit their content and no longer show scroll bars.
Highlights the most useful comment in issues.
Changes the default sort order of issues/PRs to Recently updated.
But really, it’s a huge list of improvements
Michael #3: pgdog: PostgreSQL connection pooler, load balancer and database sharder
PgDog is a proxy for scaling PostgreSQL.
It supports connection pooling, load balancing queries and sharding entire databases.
Written in Rust, PgDog is fast, secure and can manage thousands of connections on commodity hardware.
Features
PgDog is an application layer load balancer for PostgreSQL
Health Checks: PgDog maintains a real-time list of healthy hosts. When a database fails a health check, it's removed from the active rotation and queries are re-routed to other replicas
Single Endpoint: PgDog can detect writes (e.g. INSERT, UPDATE, CREATE TABLE, etc.) and send them to the primary, leaving the replicas to serve reads
Failover: PgDog monitors Postgres replication state and can automatically redirect writes to a different database if a replica is promoted
Sharding: PgDog is able to manage databases with multiple shards
Show: @pythonbytes@fosstodon.org / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky)
Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 10am PT. Older video versions available there too.
Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it.
Dan Blanchard, maintainer of a Python character encoding detection library called chardet, released a new version of the library under a new software license. (LGPL → MIT)
Dan is allowed to make this change because v7 is a complete “clean room” rewrite using AI
BTW, v7 is WAY better:
The result is a 48x increase in detection speed for a project that lives in the hot loops of many projects. That will lead to noticeable performance increases for literally millions of users (the package gets ~130M downloads per month).
It paves a path towards inclusion in the standard library (assuming they don’t institute policies against using AI tools).
Thread-safe detect() and detect_all() with no measurable overhead; scales on free-threaded Python 3.13t+
An individual claiming to be Mark Pilgrim, the original creator of the library, opened an issue in the project's GitHub repo arguing that Blanchard had no right to change the software license, citing the LPGL requirement that the license remain unchanged.
A 'complete rewrite' is irrelevant, since they had ample exposure to the originally licensed code (i.e. this is not a 'clean room' implementation).
Blanchard disagreed, citing how version 7.0.0 and 6.0.0 compare when subjected to JPlag, a library for detecting plagiarism.
Blanchard told The Register he had wanted to get chardet added to the Python standard library for more than a decade since it’s a core dependency to most Python projects.
A browser plugin that improves the GitHub experience
A sampling
Adds a build/CI status icon next to the repo’s name.
Adds a link back to the PR that ran the workflow.
Enables tab and shift tab for indentation in comment fields.
Auto-resizes comment fields to fit their content and no longer show scroll bars.
Highlights the most useful comment in issues.
Changes the default sort order of issues/PRs to Recently updated.
But really, it’s a huge list of improvements
Michael #3: pgdog: PostgreSQL connection pooler, load balancer and database sharder
PgDog is a proxy for scaling PostgreSQL.
It supports connection pooling, load balancing queries and sharding entire databases.
Written in Rust, PgDog is fast, secure and can manage thousands of connections on commodity hardware.
Features
PgDog is an application layer load balancer for PostgreSQL
Health Checks: PgDog maintains a real-time list of healthy hosts. When a database fails a health check, it's removed from the active rotation and queries are re-routed to other replicas
Single Endpoint: PgDog can detect writes (e.g. INSERT, UPDATE, CREATE TABLE, etc.) and send them to the primary, leaving the replicas to serve reads
Failover: PgDog monitors Postgres replication state and can automatically redirect writes to a different database if a replica is promoted
Sharding: PgDog is able to manage databases with multiple shards
The war in Iran has essentially closed the Strait of Hormuz, the world's most important oil transfer point, sending oil prices over $100 a barrel with the potential to go even higher. And yet, the odds of the Trump administration suddenly pivoting to invest in renewable energy are pretty much zero. Last year, the Department of Justice submitted a brief urging the Supreme Court to take up a case that could limit cities' and states' ability to sue oil and gas companies for environmental damage — and the court has agreed to hear it. For more on what's at stake here, we spoke with Mike Meno. He's the communications director for the Center for Climate Integrity, an advocacy organization that works with communities to hold Big Oil accountable.
It’s likely you have at least one “guilty pleasure.” Maybe it’s romance novels. Or reality TV… Playing video games… or getting swept into obscure corners of TikTok. Neuroscientists say the pleasure response helps us survive as a species. So why do we feel embarrassed by some of the things we love the most? Even if you don't have these negative emotions, experiencing – and studying – pleasure is not as straightforward as it might seem. For a long time, neuroscientists thought the concept of "pleasure" referred to a singular system in the brain. But as research into the subject grew, scientists realized that pleasure is really a cycle of "wanting" and "liking" – each with separate neural mechanisms. Today on the show, producer Rachel Carlson explores this cycle with researchers, who weigh in on the science of pleasure. Even the kind that makes us feel guilty.
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Leah, Melissa and Kate go on Corruption Watch to catch up on all the sketchy things happening in the judicial and executive branches. Then, they cover some recent oral arguments and opinions from The Court before bringing you a conversation from last week’s live show in LA with Representative Jimmy Gomez of California’s 34th Congressional District.
Leah: Kacey Musgraves, “Dry Spell”; Judge Young’s opinion denying a stay of the remedies he ordered in response to the federal government’s illegal targeting of students & noncitizens based on pro-Palestinian speech; Sonja Starr & Genevieve Lakier, The War on DEI as a Project of Constitutional Subversion
Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent became a runaway hit for its exploration of a life told through letters. When readers meet Sybil Van Antwerp she’s in her 70s, and she takes readers on a journey through her various correspondences — which include names as revered as Joan Didion and Ann Patchett. But Sybil isn’t telling us everything, and her clever prose might hide as much as it reveals. In today’s episode, author Virginia Evans joins Here and Now’s Robin Young to discuss the value of correspondence, and how the book’s success has changed the letter-writing industry itself.
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If you were in the business of making a bunch of money in 2026, you probably wouldn’t pick journalism. From social media to AI, the attention economy has upended the economic calculus for delivering news. But some entrepreneurs are looking to buck the trend.
Today on the show, we examine what the success of two startups could mean for the future of journalism.
Also pretty good and related:
