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A late 90s guide to Super Metroid was written in monospaced type, fully justified with no double spaces or hyphens. “I just chose words carefully so that everything lined up on the right hand side.”

Soft-deprecating re.match()

Python has a concept of soft deprecation, where APIs are marked as "should no longer be used to write new code" without any promise/threat to remove them in the future.

Python 3.15 release manager Hugo van Kemenade describes how in the upcoming 3.15 release soft deprecation has come for the venerable but deeply confusing re.match() function. It's now available with the much clearer alternative re.prefixmatch() name - reflecting how it anchors at the beginning of the string but not the end.

Most of the time you probably want re.search() (match this pattern anywhere in the string) or re.fullmatch() (match the entire string) instead.

Via Lobste.rs

Tags: python, regular-expressions

Graham Dumpleton's new monkey patching package wrapture is shaping up to be an indispensable tool for Python developers. I'm not sure why I've seen so little buzz about it! Graham has been posting new tutorials for it almost daily since the initial release on August 31st. He...

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Ever imagined a pear or an apple with a personality?

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Say Hello to PÉPET, a Pear-Shaped, Palm-Size Paper Pal appeared first on Colossal.

In this edition: ㆍBefore, after ㆍMany, one ㆍAthlete, human ㆍSilent, spoken ㆍGame, mystery

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Datasette 1.0a39 and 0.65.4 security releases

Today we're releasing two new security patch versions of Datasette: 1.0a39 and 0.65.4 - one for the current alpha series and one for the stable 0.65.x family.

These are security fixes which you should apply if you are running a Datasette instance on the public web - in particular if that instance mixes both public and private tables.

Following issues reported by Sevban Dönmez, Alex Garcia and I ran an extensive audit of Datasette using Claude Fable 5.1, GPT-5.6, and GPT-6 Astra. We then spent almost a week collaborating on and reviewing the fixes.

They helped find some very subtle bugs. We'll be incorporating security audits by frontier models into all of our development work going forward.

Tags: releases, security, ai, datasette, generative-ai, llms, ai-security-research

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