Viewing profile — AlSweigart

Anki, Quizlet, Brainscape... I dislike all these overcomplicated flashcard apps. I just want the software equivalent of index cards, so I created [TSOFA - The Simple, Offline, Flas…

> Applying to Zapier? Here's why you might meet an AI recruiter Because it's cheaper for Zapier.

The Python Software Foundation Security Developer-in-Residence, Seth Larson, published a new white paper with Alpha-Omega titled "Slippery ZIPs and Sticky tar-pits: Security & Arch…

This is why most organizations take a blind eye when popular people in their community behave badly; if they even so much as give them a three-month ban from the forum, people will…

> If we accepted and spent the money despite this term, there was a very real risk that the money could be clawed back later. That represents an existential risk for the foundation…

I mean, it's also just the plain common sense move: accepting that money would just be putting a noose around their neck and handing the other end to the Trump administration. (And…

Who, in 2025, is still giving the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the rule of law?

Agreed. And it is... quite revealing that many people in these comments are so insistent to view the text in isolation.

I am going add more on top of that: we should automatically assume bad faith of anyone still willing, in 2025, to give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt.

LLMs are really not good at following specific processes like math. They operate off vibes. Ask Claude to multiply two ten-digit numbers. It gets the first one or two digits correc…

I know I've been saying this for years, but I seriously will get around to updating the videos in the Udemy course this year.

Page count. Automate the Boring Stuff with Python is supposed to be a beginner book for people with no coding experience, but it's almost 600 pages. The biggest hurdle to coding is…

Hello, this is Al. Ha ha, I'm always surprised when people spot my name in supporter credits. Here's a (very out of date) web page of other folks I support: https://alsweigart.com/…

Oh, thanks for pointing this out. This was an early unpublished draft. I later changed to `playsound3` which is a modern fork of `playsound`. I've updated the web page.

The primary use case of LLMs is producing undetectable spam.

I'm guessing that the text interface is nicer if your use case is reading mostly text-based emails from newsletters or forums. But yeah, for general email use I don't see this as a…

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"Scroll art" is procedural generated ASCII art that fills the terminal and causes the text to move up, producing an animated effect. Once text is printed, it can't be erased. The w…

It's funny that this got posted right now. I'm working on exactly this project. You can find a collection of text-based Python programs written in the style of the games in Basic C…