The full changelog for this release is here https://docs.python.org/release/3.11.7/whatsnew/changelog.html#python-3-11-7-final

Surprisingly not shown that obviously in the release announcements, but I guess that’s fair since most of the changes will have no effect on 99.9999% of people.

Sounds fine, they’re both immutable which helps.

UTF-8 is an encoding for unicode, that means it’s a way of representing a unicode string as actual bytes on a computer.

It is variable length and works by using the first bits of each byte to indicate how many bytes are are needed to represent the current character.

Python also uses an encoding, as you describe in the article, but it’s different to UTF-8. Unlike unicode, all characters in Python’s representation of the unicode string use the same number of bytes, which is the maximum that any individual unicode character in the string needs.

I’d probably mess up a more detailed explanation of UTF-8 or Python’s representation, so I’ll let you look into how they work in more detail if you’re interested.

The article says that CPython represents strings as UTF-8 encoded, which is not correct. The details about how it works are correct, just that’s not UTF-8.

That’s just a minor point though, nice article.

It’s described in PEP 585, https://peps.python.org/pep-0585/#parameters-to-generics-are-available-at-runtime

It’d be nice to have a rule specifically for the use of f-strings and template formatting in the same call, since that can easily be a security vulnerability.

I’m pretty sure most type checkers recognise both forms.

I think calling it just like a database of likely responses is too much of a simplification and downplays what it is capable of.

I also don’t really see why the way it works is relevant to it being “smart” or not. It depends how you define “smart”, but I don’t see any proof of the assumptions people seem to make about the limitations of what an LLM could be capable of (with a larger model, better dataset, better training, etc).

I’m definitely not saying I can tell what LLMs could be capable of, but I think saying “people think ChatGPT is smart but it actually isn’t because <simplification of what an LLM is>” is missing a vital step to make it a valid logical argument.

The argument is relying on incorrect intuition people have. Before seeing ChatGPT I reckon if you’d told people how an LLM worked they wouldn’t have expected it to be able to do things it can do (for example if you ask it to write a rhyming poem about a niche subject it wouldn’t have a comparable poem about in its dataset).

A better argument would be to pick something that LLMs can’t currently do that it should be able to do if it’s “smart”, and explain the inherent limitation of an LLM which prevents it from doing that. This isn’t something I’ve really seen, I guess because it’s not easy to do. The closest I’ve seen is an explanation of why LLMs are bad at e.g. maths (like adding large numbers), but I’ve still not seen anything to convince me that this is an inherent limitation of LLMs.

Thanks for the info on crossposting! I thought I’d seen someone mention a cross posting feature but couldn’t see any button to do it. I’m using the Jerboa app on Android which I guess doesn’t have that button, but I see it on the website now as you say.

It’s also good to know that linking to the original URL is generally better and the rest can be handled by the UI - that does seem nicer.

Haha, got a “network error” on my first attempt so clicked send again, I guess it did go through the first time after all :D

Yeah, there currently seem to be a bunch of rough edges with Lemmy. Another is that iirc editing a comment increases the comment count shown on a post.

Nothing that can’t be fixed though, and it’s encouraging how good Lemmy feels already compared to reddit (for me at least).

Confusable characters get a little yellow box which is different from the squiggly underlines most linters and stuff use which at least makes it a bit more recogniseable.

Personally I can’t stand having underlines all over my code, so I’ll usually just “fix” the non-issue if possible, or otherwise just disable whatever the warning is entirely.

To be fair, it’s no worse than articles some people write on those nonsense websites.