WEBVTT 00:00:00.020 --> 00:00:04.780 Hello and welcome to Python Bytes, where we deliver Python news and headlines directly to your earbuds. 00:00:05.180 --> 00:00:10.100 This is episode 469, recorded Monday, February 9th, 2026. 00:00:10.760 --> 00:00:11.820 And I am Brian Okken. 00:00:12.040 --> 00:00:12.880 And I am Michael Kennedy. 00:00:13.300 --> 00:00:18.360 As usual, as frequently lately, this episode is brought to you by us. 00:00:18.960 --> 00:00:27.420 So thank you for supporting us through contributing through Patreon or grabbing a course or book or whatever you want. 00:00:27.580 --> 00:00:31.340 But, you know, chipping in a few bucks helps keep the show going. 00:00:32.400 --> 00:00:33.000 Connect with us. 00:00:33.200 --> 00:00:34.920 Send us news if you hear something exciting. 00:00:36.000 --> 00:00:39.200 Even if you think we've heard it, we may not have or we may have forgotten. 00:00:39.520 --> 00:00:41.020 So send it on over. 00:00:41.380 --> 00:00:45.340 Connect with us through Mastodon or Bluesky. 00:00:45.820 --> 00:00:48.360 Links are in the show notes or email. 00:00:49.080 --> 00:00:52.320 You can also, yeah, there's a contact form on the site too. 00:00:52.820 --> 00:00:57.540 You can join us live if you'd like to see us on YouTube or live. 00:00:57.940 --> 00:01:01.240 Go to pythonbytes.fm/live and be part of the audience. 00:01:01.620 --> 00:01:05.780 And you can listen to us, heckle us, send in questions, comments. 00:01:06.160 --> 00:01:09.120 And sometimes we read those during the show, and that's fun. 00:01:09.340 --> 00:01:13.200 And then also, you don't need to take notes because we'll send it to your inbox. 00:01:13.600 --> 00:01:16.600 Just go over to the pythonbytes.fm. 00:01:16.820 --> 00:01:17.960 You can sign up to the newsletter. 00:01:19.120 --> 00:01:26.360 And we will send you links to everything we covered, plus a little background information, and send that to your email once a week. 00:01:26.820 --> 00:01:27.280 Yeah, that's great. 00:01:28.300 --> 00:01:30.800 Well, I am excited about this first topic, Michael. 00:01:31.180 --> 00:01:32.240 So let's kick it off. 00:01:32.460 --> 00:01:32.900 Thanks, Brian. 00:01:33.240 --> 00:01:36.620 So this one is a homegrown topic. 00:01:37.180 --> 00:01:38.660 So I've created a new app. 00:01:38.680 --> 00:01:45.540 And I got to tell you, this is one of the very first proper desktop applications I have shipped in a long time. 00:01:45.620 --> 00:01:48.920 Like when was the last time that you shipped a desktop app? 00:01:49.040 --> 00:01:50.460 Like I tell you, it's been years for me. 00:01:50.800 --> 00:01:52.160 I don't think I ever have. 00:01:52.480 --> 00:01:52.680 Yeah. 00:01:53.110 --> 00:01:56.980 Well, I used to do a lot of Windows development and build legit desktop apps. 00:01:57.030 --> 00:01:59.340 I worked at this scientific visualization company. 00:01:59.500 --> 00:02:02.700 We'd build like things to do, data processing and visualization. 00:02:03.110 --> 00:02:05.060 And this predates the web being real powerful for that. 00:02:06.020 --> 00:02:08.080 Oh, I guess I did way back when. 00:02:08.460 --> 00:02:08.580 Systems. 00:02:09.200 --> 00:02:09.560 Exactly. 00:02:10.050 --> 00:02:11.120 I mean, that used to be the way. 00:02:11.440 --> 00:02:18.420 And so I've been working building a ton of web apps, which is what drove me to build a desktop app, which is strange. 00:02:18.820 --> 00:02:19.660 But here's the deal. 00:02:19.740 --> 00:02:21.900 I built this thing called Command Book. 00:02:22.400 --> 00:02:29.280 And the idea is, as developers, we have a lot of long-running processes that we keep in the terminal. 00:02:29.640 --> 00:02:31.300 I want to tail this log. 00:02:31.640 --> 00:02:34.040 I want to turn on some monitoring software. 00:02:34.230 --> 00:02:36.520 I want to run this web app. 00:02:36.860 --> 00:02:39.520 Oh, yeah, but the web app also has this background daemon thing. 00:02:39.550 --> 00:02:40.580 So I got to run that. 00:02:40.760 --> 00:02:44.080 And I want to run the database that powers that, those two things. 00:02:44.510 --> 00:02:49.580 So then you end up with like four terminal tabs, all that just say Python, Python, Python, 00:02:49.860 --> 00:02:49.980 Docker. 00:02:50.350 --> 00:02:50.860 And you're like, huh? 00:02:51.260 --> 00:02:53.140 Well, I need to go see the output of one of those. 00:02:53.500 --> 00:02:54.520 Which one do I go to? 00:02:54.680 --> 00:02:55.900 Like, maybe it's this Python. 00:02:56.030 --> 00:02:57.320 No, it was no, no, that Python, right? 00:02:57.680 --> 00:02:58.220 Oh, guess what? 00:02:58.470 --> 00:03:03.760 I set him to auto reload so that as I'm working on the code or Claude code is working on the 00:03:03.900 --> 00:03:08.740 code, I don't have to keep closing the web app, opening it back up, then refreshing it. 00:03:08.940 --> 00:03:12.500 I can just set it up to auto, you know, like --reload or set it in dev 00:03:12.620 --> 00:03:14.280 mode with reload true, that kind of thing. 00:03:14.560 --> 00:03:15.240 That works great. 00:03:15.530 --> 00:03:20.360 Except for if the timing lines up such that your app detects the change, but the 00:03:20.540 --> 00:03:24.360 code is in an invalid state, like you're typing def function, open parentheses, 00:03:24.640 --> 00:03:25.620 but you haven't closed it yet. 00:03:25.980 --> 00:03:26.180 Boom. 00:03:26.280 --> 00:03:26.940 It tries to reload. 00:03:27.010 --> 00:03:30.520 It goes, cannot parse code shuts down and won't reload ever again. 00:03:30.620 --> 00:03:32.780 You're like, ah, now I gotta go find it amongst those tabs again. 00:03:32.940 --> 00:03:33.020 Right? 00:03:33.100 --> 00:03:35.200 So that's the kind of the thing I'm like, can we just do better? 00:03:35.260 --> 00:03:39.720 Like do these long running commands, should they really be four or five terminal tabs? 00:03:40.240 --> 00:03:40.320 No. 00:03:40.580 --> 00:03:42.200 So I created this thing called command book. 00:03:42.380 --> 00:03:46.020 And the idea is that you take those long running commands and you put them into an 00:03:46.220 --> 00:03:51.500 app, a native app that runs them with just the same output, but a bunch of bonuses. 00:03:52.060 --> 00:03:55.920 And then you keep your terminal for actually, I want to do commands that 00:03:55.920 --> 00:03:56.660 are more short lived. 00:03:56.780 --> 00:03:56.840 Right. 00:03:57.270 --> 00:04:01.660 And also let's, let's you jump around really quick from like, I want to quickly 00:04:01.880 --> 00:04:02.840 see what this log looks like. 00:04:02.880 --> 00:04:05.440 oh, I also, I need to turn on this database thing real quick. 00:04:05.490 --> 00:04:07.460 Do him hit this, you know, hit this thing to run it. 00:04:08.280 --> 00:04:10.900 And so here I even have a little example. 00:04:11.290 --> 00:04:12.880 I could even run the Python bytes thing. 00:04:13.040 --> 00:04:17.140 So if you check out the video, you can see the app in action, 00:04:17.340 --> 00:04:19.799 but a link to the website at commandbookapp.com. 00:04:20.380 --> 00:04:22.300 And so it does a bunch of cool things. 00:04:22.370 --> 00:04:25.140 So like if I go and edit, it has a command palette. 00:04:25.400 --> 00:04:26.780 So if I want to type anything with Hugo, 00:04:26.940 --> 00:04:28.520 like I want to publish to the talk Python blog, 00:04:28.630 --> 00:04:30.940 I just type Hugo and find that, or I want to publish this one. 00:04:31.040 --> 00:04:34.580 I want to just run my personal blog, hit that one, off it goes. 00:04:34.900 --> 00:04:38.320 And it doesn't just do that because what else is it doing? 00:04:38.540 --> 00:04:40.120 You don't want to have merge conflicts. 00:04:40.300 --> 00:04:41.660 So it runs get pull. 00:04:41.980 --> 00:04:43.060 You can specify what to do. 00:04:43.080 --> 00:04:44.900 It runs get pull before it runs your server. 00:04:45.100 --> 00:04:48.160 Every time you say run your server and it makes sure no matter where you are, 00:04:48.260 --> 00:04:50.220 you're always in the right directory, that kind of stuff. 00:04:50.220 --> 00:04:53.160 And you can like chain them with ampersand ampersand, 00:04:53.260 --> 00:04:55.480 which is like a Linux terminal thing. 00:04:55.860 --> 00:04:57.600 And it will auto detect those, break them apart, 00:04:57.840 --> 00:05:00.320 run them as multiple commands and that kind of stuff. 00:05:00.480 --> 00:05:03.120 So yeah, I think this is just super neat. 00:05:03.520 --> 00:05:06.080 It detects all the URLs that are shown. 00:05:06.150 --> 00:05:09.200 So if you're the thing to start the browser to the right place, 00:05:09.420 --> 00:05:10.880 scrolls off the screen, you don't have to scroll. 00:05:11.230 --> 00:05:13.400 It shows you uptime, how much memory is being used. 00:05:13.500 --> 00:05:15.440 There's a bunch of cool little things that you can do 00:05:15.550 --> 00:05:17.460 if you just go like, maybe these long running things 00:05:17.740 --> 00:05:20.080 don't need to live in my terminal all the time. 00:05:20.370 --> 00:05:22.600 Because you'll have messages like, oh, there's an update for warp. 00:05:22.800 --> 00:05:25.080 You're like, yeah, but I don't really want to install it right now 00:05:25.220 --> 00:05:27.440 because all this other stuff's been going for a day 00:05:27.470 --> 00:05:28.220 and I want to shut it down. 00:05:28.310 --> 00:05:29.780 Like, do those need to be the same thing? 00:05:29.920 --> 00:05:31.480 So I hope people really like this. 00:05:31.780 --> 00:05:37.100 There's a free and a paid version over at commandbookapp.com. 00:05:37.350 --> 00:05:41.500 I spent about three full-time weeks working on this thing, 00:05:41.740 --> 00:05:44.220 and I'm really proud of how it came out. 00:05:44.230 --> 00:05:46.940 I think it has a bunch of cool features that are not obvious, 00:05:47.280 --> 00:05:49.700 but as you start to work with them, oh, and that's cool. 00:05:49.980 --> 00:05:52.740 And I built it with SwiftUI if people are interested. 00:05:53.220 --> 00:05:54.900 The backend is all Python, of course, 00:05:55.240 --> 00:05:58.560 but the app itself is SwiftUI 20 megs. 00:05:58.780 --> 00:06:01.860 It's not a huge electron thing and it starts in. 00:06:02.120 --> 00:06:03.960 I'm excited about trying this out, Michael. 00:06:04.220 --> 00:06:04.660 This is neat. 00:06:04.710 --> 00:06:11.920 I like the stop all and also like there's so I don't normally have stuff running for like a long time, like days. 00:06:12.360 --> 00:06:25.620 But I do have things that I run regularly in the background, like you said, running a server or something like that, or that I kind of forget all the command, all the prompts that I the command line things that I usually add to it. 00:06:26.320 --> 00:06:31.040 And having them already there, just waiting, and I can go, oh, yeah, run that. 00:06:31.300 --> 00:06:31.620 It's right there. 00:06:31.840 --> 00:06:32.380 I can just run it. 00:06:32.540 --> 00:06:34.200 Yeah, totally awesome. 00:06:34.520 --> 00:06:34.800 Thanks, Brian. 00:06:34.980 --> 00:06:38.960 I totally agree with that because it's like, oh, I got to change directory to here and 00:06:39.000 --> 00:06:40.200 then activate the virtual environment. 00:06:40.280 --> 00:06:41.100 And then I run this command. 00:06:41.240 --> 00:06:42.060 Oh, I forgot that flag. 00:06:42.220 --> 00:06:43.780 And then I got to change directory there. 00:06:43.940 --> 00:06:45.140 And it's just like, click, click, click. 00:06:45.240 --> 00:06:47.820 Or you can group them and say, just run all of these things for this project. 00:06:48.439 --> 00:06:49.260 It's pretty neat. 00:06:49.500 --> 00:06:54.179 And my experience building with SwiftUI and publishing, this has to be signed and 00:06:54.200 --> 00:06:57.720 notarized by Apple, which made me worry given my last experience. 00:06:58.040 --> 00:06:59.820 And I hinted at this last time we talked. 00:07:00.200 --> 00:07:05.480 It was a lot better to distribute a desktop app, even though it has to be signed. 00:07:06.500 --> 00:07:09.880 You've got to digitally sign it and notarize it with your developer key. 00:07:10.240 --> 00:07:14.020 But then you've got to put it into one of those DMG things that you open up and drag 00:07:14.140 --> 00:07:15.680 from like over to the app folder. 00:07:15.860 --> 00:07:17.400 That's how the Mac stuff installs. 00:07:17.680 --> 00:07:20.100 You've got to digitally sign and notarize that. 00:07:20.580 --> 00:07:24.160 And I'm like, oh my gosh, where are they going to tell me I've got to add in that 00:07:24.160 --> 00:07:26.980 purchasing for this just so they can have more money, you know? 00:07:26.980 --> 00:07:28.960 And no, it was way better. 00:07:29.460 --> 00:07:34.260 And one final wild sort of it's turtles all the way down thing. 00:07:34.590 --> 00:07:39.260 With this app down here, I can run the website for command book app, of course, 00:07:39.520 --> 00:07:42.040 but I can also build command book itself. 00:07:42.610 --> 00:07:44.780 Like, so the app has a command that builds itself. 00:07:45.180 --> 00:07:49.080 And then it has another command that will actually notarize and 00:07:49.340 --> 00:07:53.560 sign the app and build the installer and upload it to the server and 00:07:53.580 --> 00:07:57.460 set up an auto update sequence that starts kicking off from within the app. 00:07:57.660 --> 00:07:58.260 It's super cool. 00:07:58.660 --> 00:08:01.800 So yeah, anyway, people check commandbookapp.com out. 00:08:02.520 --> 00:08:02.840 It's neat. 00:08:03.340 --> 00:08:04.560 For now, it's Swift only. 00:08:04.920 --> 00:08:07.980 If I get a bunch of people going, Michael, where's my Windows version? 00:08:08.380 --> 00:08:10.260 I will gladly build us a Windows version. 00:08:11.060 --> 00:08:11.460 Gladly? 00:08:13.100 --> 00:08:15.620 Hey, I'm going to build this baby in Windows Forms. 00:08:15.620 --> 00:08:16.560 I'm going back old school. 00:08:16.640 --> 00:08:17.580 I love that. 00:08:17.620 --> 00:08:20.620 It's like the VB6 style, and I would be happy to do it. 00:08:21.400 --> 00:08:26.600 But again, I'd have to figure out how to notarize stuff on Windows, which I think is even harder these days. 00:08:27.100 --> 00:08:28.540 Can I get it in DOS 6.2? 00:08:28.810 --> 00:08:29.260 You know what? 00:08:29.500 --> 00:08:31.120 We only support Dr. DOS. 00:08:33.280 --> 00:08:36.479 No, I think this is a fun app, and hopefully people can check it out. 00:08:36.640 --> 00:08:39.580 Maybe I can inspire some people to write some other desktop apps as well. 00:08:40.160 --> 00:08:45.360 It's not a terrible idea, even though the web is a really nice option these days. 00:08:45.660 --> 00:08:45.740 Yeah. 00:08:45.980 --> 00:08:46.320 Okay. 00:08:47.000 --> 00:08:47.740 Well, let's see. 00:08:47.790 --> 00:08:48.240 What do I got? 00:08:48.280 --> 00:08:52.200 I wanted to talk about uvx.sh. 00:08:52.570 --> 00:08:55.340 So this came out from Astral. 00:08:55.700 --> 00:08:58.880 Install Python tools with a single command powered by uv. 00:08:59.320 --> 00:09:02.300 Okay, so I didn't quite know what to make of this. 00:09:03.760 --> 00:09:06.600 I know that we use curl sometimes to install. 00:09:07.220 --> 00:09:10.920 If you want toinstall ruff, you can use curl or actually uv. 00:09:11.240 --> 00:09:16.820 If you want to install uv, you use the curl to pull in a sh and install it and stuff. 00:09:16.960 --> 00:09:19.100 But like, why other stuff? 00:09:19.380 --> 00:09:24.960 So I was really glad that Tim Hopper wrote a couple articles about it. 00:09:25.300 --> 00:09:31.680 So Tim Hopper wrote, uvx.sh install Python tools without uv or Python. 00:09:32.200 --> 00:09:35.980 And then also how to install Python CLI tools without Python. 00:09:36.480 --> 00:09:38.580 So Astral's released UVA. 00:09:38.920 --> 00:09:40.040 I'm just going to read right here. 00:09:40.440 --> 00:09:46.620 Astral's released uvx.sh, a service that generates installation scripts for any Python tool on PyPI. 00:09:46.960 --> 00:09:58.740 With a single curl or PowerShell command, users can install tools like rough pytest, a nice example, without having uv or Python already installed in their system. 00:09:59.200 --> 00:10:00.320 Now this sort of makes sense. 00:10:00.480 --> 00:10:07.480 So you've got like something, I don't know, some people that need to write, you want to distribute something and distribution is hard sometimes. 00:10:08.220 --> 00:10:11.760 And you maybe don't want to write a Windows app. 00:10:12.400 --> 00:10:17.960 you could do something like this and use this service to distribute your stuff. 00:10:19.230 --> 00:10:21.720 Or as long as you publish it, I guess. 00:10:22.020 --> 00:10:24.520 This is super interesting because it does not, 00:10:24.820 --> 00:10:27.160 it just takes one more step out of the sequence. 00:10:28.260 --> 00:10:31.200 The much improved sequence was first you figure out 00:10:31.340 --> 00:10:33.040 however the heck you install uv with curl, 00:10:33.150 --> 00:10:36.840 and then you can start running uv tool install or uv run. 00:10:37.150 --> 00:10:41.060 But now you just go straight to the thing that you're actually trying to get to, 00:10:41.420 --> 00:10:43.400 even though it makes uv happen, right? 00:10:43.520 --> 00:10:44.040 I like it. 00:10:44.340 --> 00:10:45.760 Yeah, so I'm not sure. 00:10:46.020 --> 00:10:49.520 So clearly it's installing without Python or uv, 00:10:49.780 --> 00:10:54.660 so somehow it's sort of doing a shimmed version of both, maybe? 00:10:54.660 --> 00:10:58.160 I think step one is basically run the curl install command for uv, 00:10:58.560 --> 00:11:01.800 and then step two is then uv toolinstall ruff, 00:11:02.180 --> 00:11:03.140 or whatever it is you picked. 00:11:03.240 --> 00:11:06.700 I think it's just those two things and one CLI command. 00:11:06.940 --> 00:11:07.240 Okay. 00:11:07.960 --> 00:11:09.160 Anyway, interesting, 00:11:09.220 --> 00:11:12.000 and thanks Tim for writing up some examples. 00:11:12.890 --> 00:11:16.560 So, yeah, anyway, I don't know if I'll use it, 00:11:16.780 --> 00:11:17.520 but that doesn't matter. 00:11:17.740 --> 00:11:18.380 A lot of people will. 00:11:18.680 --> 00:11:22.120 I already know where I can start putting this in. 00:11:22.260 --> 00:11:22.780 So this is sweet. 00:11:23.120 --> 00:11:26.060 And really quick before we move on to the next topic, 00:11:26.480 --> 00:11:30.120 the Command Book app is a GUI Swift UI app, 00:11:30.500 --> 00:11:33.860 but it also has a command line CLI. 00:11:34.240 --> 00:11:36.100 So anything that you can do in the GUI, 00:11:36.440 --> 00:11:38.180 you can do in the CLI and just like, 00:11:38.320 --> 00:11:41.240 If you've constructed one of these really careful commands with like six steps, 00:11:41.310 --> 00:11:44.180 you can just, you know, command book space, name of your command and boom, 00:11:44.540 --> 00:11:44.880 off it goes. 00:11:45.180 --> 00:11:47.980 And they're always in sync, which is kind of weird for a desktop app that, 00:11:48.170 --> 00:11:49.780 um, seems very gooey focused. 00:11:50.240 --> 00:11:50.480 All right. 00:11:50.570 --> 00:11:52.320 but let's move on. 00:11:52.670 --> 00:11:54.900 I want to talk about sub process polling. 00:11:55.360 --> 00:11:57.660 Now this is actually a good follow on from command book. 00:11:57.690 --> 00:12:00.900 Cause all that thing does is just run a bunch of sub processes and stream the 00:12:01.020 --> 00:12:02.460 output and check on their ending. 00:12:02.920 --> 00:12:03.780 And do you know what it's been doing? 00:12:04.420 --> 00:12:05.120 Hey, is that done? 00:12:05.350 --> 00:12:05.880 Let me wait a second. 00:12:06.040 --> 00:12:06.420 Is that done? 00:12:06.720 --> 00:12:07.120 Is it done? 00:12:07.440 --> 00:12:07.800 Is it done? 00:12:08.180 --> 00:12:08.660 Is it done? 00:12:08.940 --> 00:12:10.540 Like, no, that is not great. 00:12:11.100 --> 00:12:15.640 So I want to talk about this thing called ending 15 years of subprocess polling. 00:12:16.100 --> 00:12:19.880 So this comes to us from Yom Polo. 00:12:20.780 --> 00:12:25.420 And it says from Python 3.3 until today, we've always had code that goes like this. 00:12:25.820 --> 00:12:29.600 While we're waiting for some amount of time, get us, you'll wait on this, 00:12:29.960 --> 00:12:31.240 get us details about this process. 00:12:31.520 --> 00:12:31.980 Is it done? 00:12:32.280 --> 00:12:32.440 No. 00:12:32.800 --> 00:12:33.420 Time.sleep. 00:12:33.740 --> 00:12:33.880 Okay. 00:12:34.040 --> 00:12:34.820 We're going to try to do it again. 00:12:34.980 --> 00:12:35.360 Is it done? 00:12:35.600 --> 00:12:36.060 Time.sleep. 00:12:36.360 --> 00:12:42.080 And obviously this means that there's a bunch of effort going into just sitting there and spinning over and over. 00:12:42.080 --> 00:12:43.440 There's extra CPU time. 00:12:44.040 --> 00:12:46.320 Yeah, it sounds like it's not that big of a deal. 00:12:46.380 --> 00:12:49.220 Like, oh, you just, you know, it sleeps for a tenth of a millisecond. 00:12:49.560 --> 00:12:52.640 So at first, and then like it backs off as it gets longer. 00:12:52.780 --> 00:12:54.560 So it sleeps for up to 40 milliseconds. 00:12:54.980 --> 00:12:55.160 Great. 00:12:55.240 --> 00:12:57.480 So that's like zero CPU usage. 00:12:57.820 --> 00:12:59.560 Let me tell you where it does matter. 00:12:59.840 --> 00:13:09.860 If you think a little bit more deeply, when you've got multiple processes running and checking on things and so on, and your process says, I need to just wake up for a second. 00:13:10.180 --> 00:13:11.360 Oh, there's nothing for me to do. 00:13:11.420 --> 00:13:12.300 Let me go back to sleep. 00:13:12.680 --> 00:13:17.760 It's blown out the L1, probably L2 cache of that CPU that it ran on. 00:13:18.020 --> 00:13:19.080 And then it just went back to sleep. 00:13:19.240 --> 00:13:19.860 You're like, great. 00:13:19.860 --> 00:13:22.540 You woke up to like wreck the room and you left. 00:13:22.840 --> 00:13:22.940 Right. 00:13:23.460 --> 00:13:27.420 Because I don't know, a lot of people know this, but not everyone, I'm sure, is if you 00:13:27.620 --> 00:13:32.940 try to access memory from your program and it's in the L2 cache, that's 400 times, 200 00:13:32.960 --> 00:13:35.280 to 400 times faster than you have to access it. 00:13:35.420 --> 00:13:36.740 And it's in regular RAM. 00:13:37.100 --> 00:13:37.760 It's not in the cache. 00:13:38.100 --> 00:13:40.200 So that's a huge challenge, right? 00:13:40.320 --> 00:13:44.540 There's a bunch of things like this, plus the latency, like, you know, it might not be 00:13:44.540 --> 00:13:48.980 a huge deal that it might be 20 milliseconds till you actually see the end, but still, 00:13:49.380 --> 00:13:49.940 it's not ideal. 00:13:50.260 --> 00:13:57.060 So it turns out that all POSIX systems provide at least one mechanism to be notified when a file descriptor becomes ready. 00:13:57.440 --> 00:14:00.060 But here's the thing that unlocked it. 00:14:00.520 --> 00:14:07.640 So he said, until recently, I believe that this could only be used with file descriptors, like files and sockets and so on. 00:14:07.650 --> 00:14:10.880 But it turns out a file descriptor can also be a process ID. 00:14:11.840 --> 00:14:13.760 How about that for great naming and documentation? 00:14:13.760 --> 00:14:14.580 I didn't know that. 00:14:15.040 --> 00:14:15.220 Yeah. 00:14:15.640 --> 00:14:19.600 So what you can do is you can just give it the process ID and just go, wait until this thing is done. 00:14:20.060 --> 00:14:20.920 Wake me up when it's done. 00:14:21.280 --> 00:14:26.680 And Linux in 2019 introduced PIDFD underscore open, 00:14:27.200 --> 00:14:30.020 which was added to the OS module for Python 3.9, 00:14:30.360 --> 00:14:31.820 and it returns a file descriptor, 00:14:32.020 --> 00:14:33.940 a descriptor referencing the PID, right? 00:14:34.280 --> 00:14:37.380 So it can be used in conjunction with a select, a pull, or an e-pull, 00:14:37.720 --> 00:14:40.220 usually like OS-level things, to effectively wait until it exits. 00:14:40.380 --> 00:14:41.500 So that works well there. 00:14:42.000 --> 00:14:44.880 macOS, I believe, has always had this thing called KQ, 00:14:45.020 --> 00:14:46.980 which always has had this pulling capability. 00:14:47.420 --> 00:14:49.920 And then Windows, actually, Windows is the winner here. 00:14:50.040 --> 00:14:52.640 You know, it's fun to like, oh, Windows is in the corner eating glue. 00:14:53.080 --> 00:14:55.380 No, not this time. 00:14:55.660 --> 00:14:59.960 In fact, Windows is the only one that had native support from the beginning. 00:15:00.500 --> 00:15:03.680 So there's a Win32 call, I believe, wait for single object or something like that, 00:15:03.980 --> 00:15:07.240 which has always been able to just wait for a process to end. 00:15:07.580 --> 00:15:09.280 And it can fall back to polling if it has to. 00:15:09.640 --> 00:15:10.980 So anyway, pretty interesting. 00:15:11.220 --> 00:15:16.360 And the big news is this bad boy right here has been merged by Victor Stinner. 00:15:16.860 --> 00:15:20.300 And you can go, actually, I'll link to the pull request. 00:15:20.460 --> 00:15:22.960 Pull request 144,047. 00:15:23.510 --> 00:15:24.800 That was merged two weeks ago. 00:15:25.230 --> 00:15:25.620 Pretty cool, huh? 00:15:25.860 --> 00:15:27.560 Yeah, so that'll be in 3.15. 00:15:28.100 --> 00:15:28.440 Exactly. 00:15:28.880 --> 00:15:29.320 Yes, exactly. 00:15:29.620 --> 00:15:29.780 Okay. 00:15:29.920 --> 00:15:30.400 Exactly, exactly. 00:15:30.760 --> 00:15:32.020 So, yeah, people can check that out. 00:15:33.260 --> 00:15:34.420 And you don't have to do anything. 00:15:35.100 --> 00:15:38.460 Your subprocess, your multiprocessing, et cetera, gets a little better. 00:15:38.800 --> 00:15:39.300 Yeah, cool. 00:15:40.420 --> 00:15:45.280 Also, actually, there are some people that are already doing extra things to try to get around this. 00:15:45.600 --> 00:15:48.780 And in 3.15, they'll be able to get rid of those workarounds. 00:15:48.780 --> 00:15:48.800 Oh, yeah. 00:15:49.320 --> 00:15:49.760 Yeah. 00:15:50.020 --> 00:15:50.120 Yeah. 00:15:50.720 --> 00:15:52.940 So, OK. 00:15:53.780 --> 00:15:58.200 I mostly wanted to talk about this next topic because of the name. 00:15:59.180 --> 00:16:03.540 So Pedantic came out with Monty for Monty Python, of course. 00:16:04.760 --> 00:16:08.960 So Monty Python is experimental. 00:16:09.170 --> 00:16:12.080 This project is still in development, not ready for prime time. 00:16:12.520 --> 00:16:13.680 But, you know, sure. 00:16:14.080 --> 00:16:15.640 FastAPI is still on zero ver. 00:16:16.040 --> 00:16:16.780 So who knows? 00:16:18.820 --> 00:16:20.040 So I think. 00:16:20.500 --> 00:16:21.660 Sorry, FastAPI, if I'm wrong. 00:16:22.940 --> 00:16:23.100 Okay. 00:16:23.390 --> 00:16:26.980 So pedantic folks, Lise Monty, 00:16:27.300 --> 00:16:30.440 minimal secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI. 00:16:30.960 --> 00:16:31.320 Wait a second. 00:16:31.780 --> 00:16:33.900 I don't know if this is the first one, 00:16:34.140 --> 00:16:39.160 but a programming implementation of a language 00:16:39.839 --> 00:16:41.900 primarily intended to be used by AI. 00:16:42.260 --> 00:16:43.480 I don't know if there's others. 00:16:44.040 --> 00:16:48.160 Anyway, it's a minimal secure interpreter. 00:16:49.560 --> 00:16:53.120 It says, "Monty avoids the costs, latency, complexity, 00:16:53.280 --> 00:16:58.140 and general faff of using a full container-based sandbox 00:16:58.540 --> 00:17:00.340 for running LLM-generated code." 00:17:00.620 --> 00:17:04.959 So I'm guessing that a lot of people in some process are 00:17:05.160 --> 00:17:10.040 saying, hey, sandbox this so that the AI doesn't escape 00:17:10.100 --> 00:17:11.680 and try to take over the world. 00:17:12.459 --> 00:17:15.240 Maybe it can only access these directories. 00:17:15.620 --> 00:17:17.939 Maybe it can't call these kernel methods or something, right? 00:17:18.000 --> 00:17:18.380 Who knows? 00:17:18.520 --> 00:17:18.740 Yeah. 00:17:19.880 --> 00:17:30.480 And we get like, you know, so promises from the Claude people and other people that they've like turned off reasonable things or like things that we, but, you know, who knows? 00:17:30.720 --> 00:17:35.940 So there's a subset of what Monty can do. 00:17:36.060 --> 00:17:41.900 It has a reasonable subset of Python code enough for your agent to express what it wants to do. 00:17:43.279 --> 00:17:45.820 completely block access to the host environment. 00:17:46.060 --> 00:17:49.580 No access to the file system, environmental variables, or network access. 00:17:50.580 --> 00:17:51.220 This is interesting. 00:17:53.380 --> 00:17:56.380 Okay, file system, environmental variables, and network access 00:17:56.520 --> 00:18:00.060 are all implemented via external function calls 00:18:00.460 --> 00:18:01.900 that the developer can control. 00:18:02.100 --> 00:18:03.880 Okay, so it doesn't completely block it, 00:18:04.080 --> 00:18:07.120 but the developer can control what it can have access to. 00:18:07.340 --> 00:18:07.820 That's cool. 00:18:09.180 --> 00:18:16.100 Anyway, so there's basically this minimal Python set that controls what your AI can do with it. 00:18:16.900 --> 00:18:17.380 Kind of interesting. 00:18:17.840 --> 00:18:18.400 I'm not sure. 00:18:19.360 --> 00:18:20.240 It can't do. 00:18:20.270 --> 00:18:21.900 It can't do standard library yet. 00:18:22.100 --> 00:18:28.980 So I'm not sure exactly where this use model is, but I'm interested to watch and see what's going to happen. 00:18:29.720 --> 00:18:32.140 So any take on this at all, Michael? 00:18:32.460 --> 00:18:33.500 I'm very excited about it. 00:18:33.860 --> 00:18:38.820 When I do like to troll the GitHub feed, I used to think that was a dumb. 00:18:38.900 --> 00:18:41.920 thing. I'm like, what is this? It's in my way, in my code. Like, get out of here. I actually really 00:18:42.100 --> 00:18:46.460 love the GitHub feed. And I was watching it a day and a half ago or something. And I saw this come 00:18:46.560 --> 00:18:51.400 by and I saw Samuel Colvin was behind it. I'm like, yes, this is interesting. So he and I are 00:18:51.560 --> 00:18:56.080 talking next week. I think it's next week. No, wait, it might be tomorrow. I'm like, you know, 00:18:56.100 --> 00:19:00.280 that joke for the progress monitor or the progress bar for the windows, the windows guy. 00:19:00.740 --> 00:19:06.520 Yeah. No, it is. It's next Tuesday, the 17th. The joke is I'm on my way to your house. I'll be 00:19:06.540 --> 00:19:10.180 there in about half an hour. No, wait, it's going to take a day. Actually, I'm at your front door, 00:19:10.420 --> 00:19:16.560 right? That's kind of how I feel. No, I'm talking next, not tomorrow, but the week after tomorrow, 00:19:16.690 --> 00:19:20.780 I said, hey, when I saw this come by, I'm like, this is looking like it could be a huge thing. 00:19:21.080 --> 00:19:26.620 Let's talk. So that was my take, right? Email Samuel, say, this looks awesome. How do we share 00:19:26.720 --> 00:19:31.880 it? His announcement when he said it was something like, it might be a little early for this, but 00:19:31.970 --> 00:19:35.919 what the heck, here we go, right? And sharing it. And that thing, like maybe the standard library 00:19:36.040 --> 00:19:37.760 and so on is a bit of that. 00:19:38.860 --> 00:19:41.000