September 2026
7 posts: 1 entry, 1 link, 2 quotes, 1 note, 2 beats
Sept. 1, 2026
Python 3.15.0 candidate 2 is here! (via) Hugo van Kemenade (release manager for Python 3.14 and 3.15) announces the final release candidate for Python 3.15, scheduled for release in October:
Entering the release candidate phase, only reviewed code changes which are clear bug fixes are allowed between this release candidate and the final release. [...]
We strongly encourage maintainers of third-party Python projects to prepare their projects for 3.15 during this phase, and publish Python 3.15 wheels on PyPI to be ready for the final release of 3.15.0, and to help other projects do their own testing. Any binary wheels built against Python 3.15.0 release candidates will work with future versions of Python 3.15.
Back in 2021 I found a bug in Python 3.10 by running my test suites against it... but I hadn't done this during the RC period, so that bug had already shipped! Since then I've always paid much closer attention to these RCs.
The new RC isn't available for GitHub Actions just yet - keep an eye on actions/python-versions for that. For the moment though you can add this to a testing matrix:
strategy:
matrix:
python-version: ["3.14", "3.15"]
steps:
- uses: actions/setup-python@v7
with:
python-version: ${{ matrix.python-version }}
allow-prereleases: true
check-latest: trueThe allow-prereleases and check-latest flags mean that today this will test against RC1, and when RC2 lands it will automatically switch to that version (and then the stable version once that comes out.)
Update: Datasette passes, sqlite-utils passes, LLM is currently blocked waiting for a 3.15 wheel for scikit-learn, which is optionally used in the test suite.
"rows"fromexecute_sqlis now an array of objects. Previously it was an array of arrays. This should help weaker models avoid losing track of which positional array element maps to which column. #1- Now depends on
mcp>=2.1.1.
This is the first non-alpha release of the plugin. I'm confident it's ready as I've been using it quite a bit myself.
They took the letters from me! I have to talk about dwarf behavior now. I can't even talk about dwarf AI. It doesn't exist. It's dwarf behavior, and they misbehave sometimes
— Tarn Adams, co-creator of Dwarf Fortress
I was helping Natalie gather some maps of local political boundaries (for the Granada Community Services District and the Midcoast Community Council) and found a need to display some GeoJSON files on a map and export that as a PNG. I asked GPT-5.6-Sol for suggestions of tools and it proactively built one. After some iterations using Claude Code for web and Fable 5.1 we got to this finished tool.
As for the GeoJSON.. it turns out if you ask ChatGPT Work to provide boundaries for almost anything it will churn away extracting and combining files from different Government data sources and build exactly what you need.
I got this polygon from:
I want a polygon that represents the exact boundary of the El Granada GCSD
And this one from:
Get me a GeoJSON file for the boundary (or boundaries if that makes sense) for the MCC - Midcoast Community Council - that operates near Half Moon Bay CA
Here's a link that displays both of them at the same time on the new GeoJSON map viewing tool.
I was poking around in my ~/.cache/ folder using OmniDiskSweeper when I spotted something interesting. The OpenAI Codex desktop app (since rebranded to just ChatGPT) has 1.7GB of stuff in there in a folder called codex-primary-runtime, including a full Python installation, a full Node.js installation, and native binaries for Poppler, git, and the LibreOffice open source office suite (which forked from OpenOffice.org in 2010):
The ~/.cache/codex-runtimes/codex-primary-runtime/plugins/openai-primary-runtime/plugins/documents folder includes skills which tell Codex how to find and use those binaries.
Claude Fable 5.1 made me a really nice animated pelican
Today is Claude Fable (and Mythos) 5.1 day. Anthropic say that Fable 5.1 “sets a new standard for coding, knowledge work, and long-running problem-solving tasks”. Their announcement spends a notable amount of time on scientific research, boasting of a 52.6% score on the brand new Terminal-Bench-Science 0.1 benchmark (first announced on August 27th), up from 24.7% for Fable 5, 29.0% for Opus 5 and 22.4% for GPT-5.6 Sol. Other benchmarks show slightly improved scores, but none as impressive as the Science one.
[... 1,203 words]Sept. 2, 2026
Direct2D has always been the biggest hurdle for Paint.NET on WINE, and it's clear that it will never be completed enough for Paint.NET's use. And I can't just "disable" the use of Direct2D. So, instead, Paint.NET now has an internal, from-scratch, clean-room reverse-engineered rewrite of Direct2D that it uses on WINE (triggered by using /wine). It lives in PaintDotNet.Windows.Direct2D1.Managed.dll. This was written by our good friend Claude, without whom this would NOT have been possible and would NEVER have happened. [...]
Most of this code is, as they say, "vibe coded." By that I mean that it has not been thoroughly reviewed, it's more "trust me bro" style. I cannot possibly review 180,000 lines of code, it's just way way way too much. For reference, the rest of Paint.NET is about 700,000 lines of code and I've been working on it for over 20 years. [...]
At times, Claude was working with the fury of 10 freshly unshackled Einstein genius-level 10x coders. And other times ... well, not so much. I had to babysit Claude quite a bit to make sure it did resource management correctly (for awhile it just wasn't doing the COM equivalent of AddRef() for reference counted objects, oops). I had to slap it a few times when I found some really bad design or architecture decisions. And I was also impressed at some rather clever and tireless reverse engineering work it did to figure out all the formulas needed for implementing Direct2D's built-in effects library.
— Rick Brewster, author of Paint.NET