#290: Sentient AI? If so, then what?

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Special guest: Nick Muoh

Brian #1: picologging

• From a tweet by Anthony Shaw
• From README.md
• “early-alpha” stage project with some incomplete features. (cool to be so up front about that)
  • “Picologging is a high-performance logging library for Python. picologging is 4-10x faster than the logging module in the standard library.”
  • “Picologging is designed to be used as a drop-in replacement for applications which already use logging, and supports the same API as the logging module.”
• Now you’ve definitely got my attention.
• For many common use cases, it’s just way faster.
• Sounds great, why not use it? A few limitations listed:
  • process and thread name not captured.
  • Some logging globals not observed: logging.logThreads, logging.logMultiprocessing, logging.logProcesses
  • Logger will always default to the Sys.stderr and not observe (emittedNoHandlerWarning).

Michael #2: CheekyKeys

• via Prayson Daniel
• What if you could silently talk to your computer?
• CheekyKeys uses OpenCV and MediaPipe's Face Mesh to perform real-time detection of facial landmarks from video input.
• The primary input is to "type" letters, digits, and symbols via Morse code by opening and closing your mouth quickly for . and slightly longer for -.
• Most of the rest of the keyboard and other helpful actions are included as modifier gestures, such as:
  • shift: close right eye
  • command: close left eye
  • arrow up/down: raise left/right eyebrow
  • …
• Watch the video where he does a coding interview for a big tech company using no keyboard.

Nick #3: Is Google’s LaMDA Model Sentient?

• authored by Richard Luscombe (The Guardian)
• The Google engineer who thinks the company’s AI has come to life
• Transcript of conversation

Brian #4: richbench

• Also from Anthony
• “A little Python benchmarking tool.”
• Give it a list of (first_func, second_func, “label”), and it times them and prints out a comparison.
• Simple and awesome.

  def sort_seven():
      """Sort a list of seven items"""
      for _ in range(10_000):
              sorted([3,2,4,5,1,5,3])
  
  def sort_three():
      """Sort a list of three items"""
      for _ in range(10_000):
              sorted([3,2,4])
  
  __benchmarks__ = [
      (sort_seven, sort_three, "Sorting 3 items instead of 7")
  ]
  

Michael #5: typeguard

• A run-time type checker for Python
• Three principal ways to do type checking are provided, each with its pros and cons:
  • Manually with function calls
  • @typechecked decorator
  • import hook (typeguard.importhook.install_import_hook())
• Example:

  @typechecked
  def some_function(a: int, b: float, c: str, *args: str) -> bool:
      ...
      return retval
  

Nick #6: CustomTkinter

• A modern and customizable python UI-library based on Tkinter.

Extras

Michael:

• OpenSSF Funds Python and Eclipse Foundations - OpenSSF’s Alpha-Omega Project has committed $400K to the Python Software Foundation (PSF), in order to create a new role which will provide security expertise for Python, the Python Package Index (PyPI), and the rest of the Python ecosystem, as well as funding a security audit. (via Python Weekly)

Nick:

• Terms of Service Didn’t Read - Terms of Service; Didn't Read” (short: ToS;DR) is a young project started in June 2012 to help fix the “biggest lie on the web”: almost no one really reads the terms of service we agree to all the time.

Joke:

• Serverless
• A DevOps approach to COVID-19