lesser daemon: brent bailey's personal weblog

31

Mar

did i pick up a cursed amulet or something

A quick note tonight because there was a fire in my building and I am a bit distracted. Everyone is fine and my apartment is smoky but otherwise intact. I just do not appear to be allowed to catch a break. If I have wronged some supernatural being I apologize but surely there is some way for me to make it up to you. If my karma is bad fair enough but I better get a sweet deal the next time the wheel of samsara turns. Make me a seagull or a frog or something. I know I have it

1 min read

30

Mar

do not engage

I got a bitter and nasty email this morning that kind of threw off my whole day. I don't, generally, like it when people are mad at me, especially in a circumstance like this one where I am pretty much entirely confident that I have done nothing wrong. In this case I was furious about the whole deal and had to stop and calm myself down before proceeding.

Not responding might be the best option - and usually is if it's a social media stranger - but this was someone I know and I have never much liked ghosting people.

2 min read

29

Mar

Sustainable Software

About a week ago I had a nice long conversation with my brother about wine. This is something that happens a lot in my family: my brother is a wine rep, my uncle spent a while running a small wine importer, I've worked in wine production and sales, and the rest of my family really enjoys drinking wine even if they've kept it out of their professional lives. I am the annoying friend who likes to talk about and think about the wine we're drinking at dinner but I pale in comparison to most of my family.

My brother has

4 min read

28

Mar

Using Dependency Groups with uv

I've slowly been getting more familiar with uv and the broader new school of python packaging ecosystems (sorry, I used virtualenv for a long time, it does the job fine), and one of the most exciting things to me is its use of dependency groups in a pyproject.toml file: finally, a non-janky way to use different packages in different environments. However, I think its documentation leaves a bit to be desired on this front, so:

To add a package to a specific group:

uv add --group dev python-dotenv

Which should appear in your pyproject.toml as:

[dependency-groups]
dev = [
"python-dotenv"

1 min read

27

Mar

Living in different worlds

If you're online at all you've probably seen the flood of Studio Ghibli-style images from ChatGPT's new image model update. It is technically impressive, ethically pretty gross, and most likely something that will fade in usage after this viral moment but continue to contribute to the critical mass of slop on the internet.

Beyond "this sucks", I don't know how to feel about it. This is a weird moment where a lot of what's being said seems to lack context on one side or the other. A few things are true at the same time:

1) Lots of people are

2 min read