Have you ever wanted to create a presentation in your computer's terminal? While this is an uncommon need, a clever open source developer has provided a solution to this problem! The project is called Spiel, and while it is currently archived, the idea is pretty cool. Spiel uses the Rich package to create the slides for your presentation. Note: while the GitHub page doesn't explain why the project is archived, it appears to use a very old version of Textual which cannot be upgraded.

Let's spend a little time learning how this all works.

Installing Spiel

According to the Spiel GitHub page, you can try Spiel without even installing it if you have docker installed. Here's how to try Spiel:

$ docker run -it --rm ghcr.io/joshkarpel/spiel

However, for the purposes of this tutorial, you really should install Spiel. To do that, you will be using pip. Open up your terminal and run the following:

pip install spiel

Feel free to create a Python virtual environment first if you don't want to install Spiel into your global Python packages.

Once you have Spiel installed, you can check that it is working by running the Spiel demo, like this:

spiel demo present

If that works, you are good to go!

Creating Your Presentation

The documentation gives a good example of how to create a one-slide presentation. Here's their example:

from rich.console import RenderableType

from spiel import Deck, present

deck = Deck(name="Your Deck Name")


@deck.slide(title="Slide 1 Title")
def slide_1() -> RenderableType:
    return "Your content here!"


if __name__ == "__main__":
    present(__file__)

According to the documentation, there are two ways to add slides:

• Use the decorator like in the example above
• Use `deck.add_slides()` and pass in one or more Slide objects

Here is a more complete example that creates a couple of custom slides:

from rich.align import Align
from rich.console import RenderableType
from rich.style import Style
from rich.text import Text
from spiel import Deck, Slide, present


def make_slide(
    title_prefix: str,
    text: Text,
) -> Slide:
    def content() -> RenderableType:
        return Align(text, align="center", vertical="middle")
    return Slide(title=f"{title_prefix} Slide", content=content)

deck = Deck("Test Deck")

title_slide = make_slide(title_prefix="First", text=Text("Python 101 - All About Lists",
                                             style=Style(color="blue")))

intro_slide = make_slide(title_prefix="Second",
                    text=Text("A Python list is",
                              style=Style(color="red"))
                    )

deck.add_slides(title_slide, intro_slide)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    present(__file__)

When you run this code in your terminal, you will see something like this:

You can move to the next or previous slide using the arrow keys on your keyboard. If you want to exit, press CTRL+C.

Wrapping Up

Spiel seems like a neat package. It's a shame that it is currently archived. Hopefully, the author will reopen it at some point, or someone else will pick up the torch. In the meantime, you can easily use it in a Python virtual environment and give it a try.

The post An Intro to Spiel - Creating Presentations in Your Terminal with Python appeared first on Mouse Vs Python.

10 Jul 2026 3:13pm GMT

You ask an AI a question and it answers with total confidence. Most of the time, a confidently wrong answer is just an annoyance. But what if the question is medical, and there's a real patient on the other end? In that world, a hallucination isn't a bug, it's a patient-safety event. Sumit Gundawar is a London-based software engineer who builds the clinical platform for a UK longevity and aesthetic-medicine clinic, and his whole argument is that in high-stakes AI, the model is the easy part. Earning trust is the real engineering. We dig into grounding, refusal logic, human-in-the-loop design, and the messy frontier of longevity and biohacking, plus a live demo of an assistant that refuses to answer when it can't back up the claim. Let's get into it.<br/> <br/> <strong>Episode sponsors</strong><br/> <br/> <a href='https://talkpython.fm/sixfeetup'>Six Feet Up</a><br> <a href='https://talkpython.fm/training'>Talk Python Courses</a><br/> <br/> <h2 class="links-heading mb-4">Links from the show</h2> <div><strong>Guest</strong><br/> <strong>Sumit Gundawar</strong>: <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/sumit-gundawar-759470129/?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >linkedin.com</a><br/> <br/> <strong>Course transcripts announcement</strong>: <a href="https://talkpython.fm/blog/posts/announcing-german-subtitles-on-courses/" target="_blank" >talkpython.fm/blog</a><br/> <br/> <strong>Sumit Gundawar - JAX London Speaker</strong>: <a href="https://jaxlondon.com/speaker/sumit-gundawar/?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >jaxlondon.com</a><br/> <strong>Anthropic</strong>: <a href="https://anthropic.com/?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >anthropic.com</a><br/> <strong>OpenAI Platform</strong>: <a href="https://platform.openai.com/?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >platform.openai.com</a><br/> <strong>Anthropic</strong>: <a href="https://anthropic.com/?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >anthropic.com</a><br/> <strong>LangChain</strong>: <a href="https://langchain.com/?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >langchain.com</a><br/> <strong>OWASP</strong>: <a href="https://owasp.org/?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >owasp.org</a><br/> <strong>Pydantic</strong>: <a href="https://pydantic.dev/?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >pydantic.dev</a><br/> <strong>EU AI Act - Regulatory Framework</strong>: <a href="https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory-framework-ai?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu</a><br/> <strong>HIPAA - HHS</strong>: <a href="https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >www.hhs.gov</a><br/> <strong>NHS</strong>: <a href="https://www.nhs.uk/?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >www.nhs.uk</a><br/> <strong>Llama</strong>: <a href="https://llama.com/?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >llama.com</a><br/> <strong>Qwen - QwenLM on GitHub</strong>: <a href="https://github.com/QwenLM?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >github.com</a><br/> <strong>OpenAI Platform</strong>: <a href="https://platform.openai.com/?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >platform.openai.com</a><br/> <strong>Hugging Face</strong>: <a href="https://huggingface.co/?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >huggingface.co</a><br/> <strong>Llama</strong>: <a href="https://llama.com/?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >llama.com</a><br/> <strong>Granola</strong>: <a href="https://www.granola.ai/?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >www.granola.ai</a><br/> <strong>HIPAA - HHS</strong>: <a href="https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >www.hhs.gov</a><br/> <strong>CodeRabbit</strong>: <a href="https://www.coderabbit.ai/?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >www.coderabbit.ai</a><br/> <strong>Cursor Origin</strong>: <a href="https://cursor.com/origin?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >cursor.com</a><br/> <strong>GitHub Status</strong>: <a href="https://www.githubstatus.com/?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >www.githubstatus.com</a><br/> <strong>Midjourney Medical</strong>: <a href="https://www.midjourney.com/medical?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >www.midjourney.com</a><br/> <strong>Neko Health</strong>: <a href="https://www.nekohealth.com/?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >www.nekohealth.com</a><br/> <strong>CERN</strong>: <a href="https://home.cern/?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >home.cern</a><br/> <strong>ATLAS Experiment</strong>: <a href="https://atlas.cern/?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >atlas.cern</a><br/> <br/> <strong>Watch this episode on YouTube</strong>: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp2v9paEoq4" target="_blank" >youtube.com</a><br/> <strong>Episode #554 deep-dive</strong>: <a href="https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/554/trustworthy-ai-in-healthcare-and-longevity#takeaways-anchor" target="_blank" >talkpython.fm/554</a><br/> <strong>Episode transcripts</strong>: <a href="https://talkpython.fm/episodes/transcript/554/trustworthy-ai-in-healthcare-and-longevity" target="_blank" >talkpython.fm</a><br/> <br/> <strong>Theme Song: Developer Rap</strong><br/> <strong>🥁 Served in a Flask 🎸</strong>: <a href="https://talkpython.fm/flasksong" target="_blank" >talkpython.fm/flasksong</a><br/> <br/> <strong>---== Don't be a stranger ==---</strong><br/> <strong>YouTube</strong>: <a href="https://talkpython.fm/youtube" target="_blank" ><i class="fa-brands fa-youtube"></i> youtube.com/@talkpython</a><br/> <br/> <strong>Bluesky</strong>: <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/talkpython.fm" target="_blank" >@talkpython.fm</a><br/> <strong>Mastodon</strong>: <a href="https://fosstodon.org/web/@talkpython" target="_blank" ><i class="fa-brands fa-mastodon"></i> @talkpython@fosstodon.org</a><br/> <strong>X.com</strong>: <a href="https://x.com/talkpython" target="_blank" ><i class="fa-brands fa-twitter"></i> @talkpython</a><br/> <br/> <strong>Michael on Bluesky</strong>: <a href="https://bsky.app/profile/mkennedy.codes?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" >@mkennedy.codes</a><br/> <strong>Michael on Mastodon</strong>: <a href="https://fosstodon.org/web/@mkennedy" target="_blank" ><i class="fa-brands fa-mastodon"></i> @mkennedy@fosstodon.org</a><br/> <strong>Michael on X.com</strong>: <a href="https://x.com/mkennedy?featured_on=talkpython" target="_blank" ><i class="fa-brands fa-twitter"></i> @mkennedy</a><br/></div>

10 Jul 2026 5:10am GMT

EuroPython wouldn&apost exist without the wonderful volunteers who pour countless hours into organising it. From contracting the venue to selecting and confirming talks and workshops, hundreds of hours of loving work go into making each edition the best one yet.

Join us in celebrating one of the humans behind the keyboard. Today, we&aposre delighted to share an interview with Daria Linhart Grudzień, our Communications Lead.

Thank you for being the voice of the EuroPython community, Daria!

EP: What first inspired you to volunteer for EuroPython? And which edition of the conference was it?

I got pulled into the team in 2025, tempted with a chance to work with a friend on organising an event for juniors in tech in Czechia, which became the Beginners Day Unconference. I appreciated that a major European conference offered a program for the local community.

EP: Did you make any lasting friendships or professional connections through volunteering?

Lots! The EuroPython team is full of kind and fun people who like to do interesting things in their free time. Being a member of the core organising team gave me a chance to get to know a lot of folks. For the first time I feel like I'm going to the conference to meet up with friends.

EP: What was your primary role as a volunteer, and what did a typical day of contributing look like for you?

After doing the Humans of EuroPython interviews during the winter, I got invited to lead the Communications Team for the 2026 edition. My days include a variety of tasks,which I love. From building a productive team, working on finding media partners, occasional web development, co-ordinating with other teams, building documentation for the next edition, to making sure folks in the team enjoy contributing - I do what's needed to make sure EuroPython speaks to our community with a friendly, slightly quirky, but always inclusive voice.

EP: Was there a moment when you felt your contribution really made a difference?

There were a few. Some of the core Python developers reached out to me personally saying that the Communications Team is doing a great job. Seeing our social media posts engage and resonate with the community is another reminder that our work is making an impact.

EP: Would you volunteer again, and why?

Absolutely. Contributing to EuroPython, I feel empowered to bring ideas, experiment, and work on impactful initiatives which benefit the community. I've been able to take on roles and projects which allowed me to learn, get out of my comfort zone, and grow. I hope to do more of that in the future, and this is a fantastic group of people to do this with.

EP: If you could describe the volunteer experience in three words, what would they be?

Ownership. Impact. Collaboration.

EP: Did you have any unexpected or funny experiences at EuroPython?

I got invited to talk about the conference on the Real Python Podcast. This wasn't on my bingo card for this year 🙂

09 Jul 2026 5:05pm GMT

(One of my summaries of the 2026 one-day Foss4g open source geo conference in Groningen, NL).

Accessibility: geoinformation for everybody - Liliana Santoso-Avis & Jedidja van der Sluis - Stoutjesdijk

WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) deals with accessibility (a11y). (I personally try to take accessibility a bit into account, proper headings and reasonably contrast-rich colors on my website, for instance. I've made other summaries of "a11y" talks, for instance this one about accessible documentation, held at the 2025 pycon.de.

It is not just accessibility, but really about the quality of the information as a whole. Thinking about the accessibility guidelines (listed below) helps you create better information projects.

• Perceivable
• Operable, for instance navigating a website with keyboard instead of mouse.
• Understandable
• Robust

When making a map viewer, we often claim "we're an exception", but that's not fully the case. Your map component should not be a "keyboard trap", for instance. And the contrast of your map should be right. And if the map is essential for navigating through the rest of the site, you also can't claim an exception.

You need a mindset shift. From "bah, extra work" to "hurray, better work".

They started with an inventory, for instance of the applicable laws. Then getting the roles/responsibilities right. Then lots of experience sharing. Now they want to get certification for the work they did. And they want to do outreach. And they now try to cooperate with partners (like other provinces and government agencies), software companies and other organisations.

In tourist areas, you sometimes have tactile maps. You can also do that in Qgis! You can print those maps. https://touch-mapper.org/en/

Colors: don't use only colors to indicate differences. Also differ the shapes of points, for instance. As a test, try to sort M&Ms while wearing colored glasses...

Some browser tools: taba11y to show the tab order of your site. Color contrast checker, heading map, leat's get color blind, link checker, WCAG color contrast checker.

GeoNode: digital sovereignty in practice - Finn Peranovich & Guido Schaepman

Two Dutch water boards, Rijnland and Schieland en de Krimpenerwaard, cooperated in a project to move to open source with GeoNode.

They did an inventory in 2024 whether open source was an option. They looked at the current usage and identified possible open source alternatives. Open source promised more autonomy (no ESRI lock-in, geopolitical, etc.), lower costs (the costs of switching would be paid back within three years), more innovation and better compliance (both NL and EU laws).

The first test was with public-facing data that previously was served with ArcGIS server.

Geonode is a management layer on top of geoserver. It uses open source tools like Django, Mapstore, Postgresql, RabbitMQ. They run Geoserver and GeoNode inside a kubernetes cluster. Conversion from ArcGIS server was done with several homemade scripts.

Tip: Qgis has a handy Geonode plugin for browsing everything in your Geonode.

They were surprised by the quality of GeoNode: everything they needed from ArcGIS server is also available in GeoNode. They're currently in the test phase, they'll soon go to production. They really want to make other water boards enthusiastic about open source, too, hopefully leading to cost sharing.

Unrelated photo: we have two offices in the center of Utrecht. As a handy connection, we're using a radio link ("straalverbinding") between the two. We have line of sight, as you can see in this photo. The dark gray wall to the right of the far radio link doesn't look like much, but it is part of our office and part of one of the oldest buildings (around 1200!) in Utrecht. (See wikipedia).

09 Jul 2026 4:00am GMT

It's been a while since my last post, mainly because June saw me start a new client, GSOC really taking off and we have our first real customers in Hamilton Rock with money being deposited and some money being spent, not without its teething issues! Also with a fair amount of social engagements as well!

But anyway, on to today's post. During June I proposed a new feature idea which is an extension to Django's form rendering capabilities to include widgets templates inside a form renderer. Currently, it's only possible to Override widgets at a project level by specifying the template name, or you have to overwrite the widget and then specify your own custom template name and then use that custom widget. It's not possible to customize widgets at the form renderer level.

My idea is to extend the form renderer API. Well actually extends the budget rendering API to check the specified form renderer. It should only be an extension to a private method inside the widget API. Below is the relevant code that I actually got Claude to spit out inside Hamilton Rock today. This is a first iteration which very likely needs some improvement, but it does work!

_CAMEL_BOUNDARY = re.compile(r"(?<!^)(?=[A-Z])")

class Widget(metaclass=MediaDefiningClass):
    ...
    
    def _render(self, template_name, context, renderer=None):
        if renderer is None:
            renderer = get_default_renderer()
        # Walk the widget MRO for a ``<widget>_template_name`` on the renderer.
        # A class that defines its own ``template_name`` short-circuits (attribute
        # shadowing): a custom widget keeps its template over a base override,
        # while an unstyled subclass resolves up to a styled base.
        for klass in type(self).__mro__:
            slug = _CAMEL_BOUNDARY.sub("_", klass.__name__).lower()
            override = getattr(renderer, f"{slug}_template_name", None)
            if override is not None:
                template_name = override
                break
            if "template_name" in klass.__dict__:
                break
        # Same trust posture as Django's own Widget._render.
        return mark_safe(renderer.render(template_name, context))  # noqa: S308

and here is the current method from the source

    def _render(self, template_name, context, renderer=None):
        if renderer is None:
            renderer = get_default_renderer()
        return mark_safe(renderer.render(template_name, context))

There is also some code to allow admin classes to specify a renderer so that your custom renderer doesn't overwrite admin form widgets. In the coming week or so, I will extract this code into a third-party package for others to use.

But what's the real win with this potential change? Honestly I see this unlocking simple packages which unlock custom and complete form rendering packages with Django. Most of these themes would be HTML, CSS & Javascript, with the only python being the declaration of the FormRenderer class like so (pulled from Hamilton Rock):

class DrawerFormRenderer(TemplatesSetting):
    form_template_name = "forms/drawer_form.html#form"
    field_template_name = "forms/drawer_form.html#field"

    text_input_template_name = "forms/drawer_form.html#text_input"
    email_input_template_name = "forms/drawer_form.html#text_input"
    password_input_template_name = "forms/drawer_form.html#text_input"
    date_input_template_name = "forms/drawer_form.html#text_input"
    number_input_template_name = "forms/drawer_form.html#number_input"
    select_template_name = "forms/drawer_form.html#select"
    textarea_template_name = "forms/drawer_form.html#textarea"
    checkbox_input_template_name = "forms/drawer_form.html#checkbox"
    radio_select_template_name = "forms/drawer_form.html#radio"

If you like the look of this, give the feature a thumbs up on the issue and we can hopefully get it progressed. Also do let me know what glaring holes that I have missed in this idea.

08 Jul 2026 5:00am GMT

03 Jul 2026 3:00pm GMT

As I have discussed in previous posts, "AIs" can make mistakes. In fact, they do make mistakes, and their mistake-making patterns are such that where and how they will make mistakes is both uncertain and constantly changing.

Thus, in any scenario where you want to attempt to make "productive" use of "AI", you must have a system in place for checking every result. Not checking some results; checking every result. If each result might have a consequence for you (and if it didn't have a consequence, why bother automating it?) and you cannot predict in advance which kinds of results will need verification, then verification is always required.

The verification often ends up being just as expensive as doing the work in the first place, which means that if you want your usage of "AI" to be personally profitable, you have to find someone else to externalize the cost of verification onto. This person becomes your adversary, and, if you are successful, your "AI's" victim.

The Ladder-Climber And Their Reverse-Centaur Rungs

One way that this constellation of facts can straightforwardly assemble themselves into a dystopian nightmare is the phenomenon, described by Cory Doctorow, of the reverse centaur. This is when your employer non-consensually turns you into the verification system. The "AI" does the fun part of initially performing the work, and then you do the boring part where you check if the robot is right and clean up its messes, even if everyone already knows that it would, in aggregate, be cheaper for you to do the work in the first place.

Reverse centaurs can be made from any automation, not only "AI" automation. I think that there is a reason that this term happens to have emerged in the "age of AI", though, and not with earlier automation technologies (even those which were considerably more viscerally horrific). That reason is: the wrongness of "AI" output is not merely a technical feature that must be compensated for, it is a generalized externality.

As I mentioned above, if you are responsible for the entirety of the work, both extruding the "AI" output and checking it, it's usually cheaper to have humans do the entirety of the work to begin with. When humans do the writing directly, we can check as we go, and thus verification doesn't need to be as comprehensive.

When "AI" coding advocates say "code review is the bottleneck", what they are observing is that the LLM is still rolling the dice for each PR, and a human is still necessary to verify that each of those rolls is a winner. But calling this process "code review" is a bit of a misnomer; it's not really "code review" in the traditional sense, it's human understanding.

Before the advent of "AI", the human understanding was implicit in the process of writing the code in the first place¹, and the code review was a way of diffusing and extending that understanding. Now that the code can be authored with no initial understanding taking place, that cost has not gone away, it has moved.

Human understanding was always the bottleneck.

However, this is taking a collaborative view of a software project, where satisfying the needs and solving the problems of your customers are the goals. We can see that "AI" is a bad tool to satisfy those goals, because all it's doing is converting the first half of the work, that of understanding the code as you write it, to understanding the agent's output as you read it.

What if, instead, we were to take the view that every software company is a Hobbesian nightmare, red in tooth and claw? In this view, the only goal of a software project is for the individual developers to make their promo cycles and get their bonuses. Given that there is only a certain amount of money to go around, this is a zero-sum game where each programmer wants to look more productive than their colleagues.

Pretty much every organization finds it easy to reward "productivity" as expressed by lines of code emitted, but the benefits of doing thorough and thoughtful design, analysis, and code review very difficult to reward. In this world, an LLM is an invaluable tool for the sociopathic ladder-climber, particularly if your legacy organization is still structuring their workflows as if the person prompting the bot is "writing" the code, and then they get to foist off the act of "reviewing" the code onto someone else.

Here, the prompter effectively externalizes the cost of the LLM's failures but internalizes any benefits. The prompter will vibe-code a big feature, so large that the assigned reviewer can't possibly comprehend it all effectively. When this happens, the reviewer will, eventually, be pressured to approve it, even if they can try to spot a few problems along the way. The reviewer has their own work to get back to, after all, the obligation to review the prompter's (read: the bot's) code is a drain on their time that they are not going to get rewarded for.

If this feature is a big success, the prompter gets a promotion. If it causes a big issue, well, the reviewer must not have been careful enough.

This is why LLMs are "good for coding", and also why their biggest promoters keep having outages.

The Generative Gish Galloper

Coding is the biggest "success story" of this type of adversarial communication, but it is by far not the only instance of such a thing. LLMs create a new form of leverage that can turn Brandolini's law from a linear advantage into an exponential one. If you are engaged in a political debate where you want to overwhelm the other side in nonsense, an LLM can generate bullshit faster than it is physically possible for a human being to type, let alone respond thoughtfully. There is an asymmetry to the utility of this weapon as well: only one side of the political spectrum wants to flood the zone and destroy trust in institutions and the concept of truth. There's a good reason that the fascists love it.

Straightforward Spam and Fraud

This is kind of obvious, but LLMs can generate lightly-customized, plausible-looking text much more quickly than any human being. This facilitates their use in fraud, spam, and scams. In a spamming or fraudulent interaction, once again, the costs are externalized onto the victim: the recipient of a spam message has to do all the work of "checking" the LLM's output. Spammers already expect very low hit rates from boilerplate, and if the LLM can increase those percentages from 1% to 5% the technology will pay for itself; they don't need anything like reliable accuracy.

Customer "Support"

If you have any kind of commercial relationship with a company, I probably don't even need to mention this: customer "support" bots are a misery. Everybody knows it at this point. But customer support is usually conceptualized by businesses as an adversarial interaction, because it is a cost center. They maintain internal metrics on time-to-resolution and try to optimize them. Implicitly, this creates a dynamic where the goal of the customer service agent's job is not to solve your problem, but to emit noise that will cause you to think your problem is resolved, or to give up, as fast as possible. Unsurprisingly, LLMs can emit this noise faster than humans can, getting those customers off the phone. But those customers will remember those interactions, and the story outside the TTR metrics is horrible.

Similarly to the situation in software development, LLMs can look very good on paper for customer support, but mostly what they are doing is illuminating the problems with the industry's existing metrics, by turning "winning the metrics battle against the customer" into a more obvious and immediate defeat for the company's long term reputation.

"Education"

In 2026 it is sadly a fact of life that students cheat all the time using "AI", and that this cheating is very successful, in that the teachers find it very hard to detect.

LLMs are great for cheating on schoolwork because the student is externalizing the work of the checking onto the teachers, who are often starting at a disadvantage to begin with, at least in the US.

My view is that this is happening because of a divergence in the way that students vs. teachers (or, more accurately, "the broader educational system") view grading.

When a student is asked to write an essay, the teachers see the effort as both intrinsically worthwhile for the student, as well as useful as a pedagogical tool to evaluate and react to the student's progress. The student, by contrast, sees a stumbling block designed to knock them off the path to success and into a permanent underclass. It is no wonder that the student sees "AI" as useful to their own goals and has no compunction about deploying it.

There is a bitter irony that the ability to understand the inherent value of actually writing the essay on their own is the sort of thing that students can really only learn by writing a bunch of essays. There's no way that I can think of which makes the benefit legible as long as a shortcut is available.

The net effect here is a downward spiral, where the already-wobbling educational system is sustaining an attack that it doesn't have the resources to recover from. The individual students' attacks against their teachers and their schools' grading systems might appear to momentarily succeed, but they will win the battle and lose the war.

Spamming "For Good"?

Usually when we talk about someone unilaterally choosing to enter into an adversarial relationship, that's an "attack" and for good reasons we have a negative impression of the attacker. However, I would be remiss if I did not point out that there are some cases where the relationship was already adversarial; just because you're the attacker doesn't mean that you are evil.

For example we might imagine use-cases like automatically filing appeals for prior authorizations against health insurance. It's relatively well-known at this point that the main way for-profit insurers maintain their margins is by denying claims right up to the line of the policies themselves being fraud, so using a spamming tool to fight them might be entirely justifiable² in that case.

Similarly, using an LLM could be justified in a fight against a company refusing to honor a warranty. One could imagine using an LLM to immediately generate replies and escalations.

However, even in imagined cases like these, the underlying problem is that the insurers and the vendors already have a tremendous amount of structural power, so it is more likely that they will have the advantage in deploying a communications weapon like an LLM, as well as enacting policies to simply ignore any LLM-based communication that you might submit. Worse, if these strategies were to become widespread, they might provide an excuse to reject any communications by feeding them into an unreliable "LLM detector" and issuing an automated "computer says no" even to hand-written correspondence.

It is also worth stressing that these cases are imagined, as compared to the very real coworker-abuse, spam, scam, fraud, and disinformation campaigns being waged in real life today.

Therefore, while legitimate uses might exist, it's hard to imagine that there's anywhere they would be genuinely valuable and sustainable. In the best case "AI" will provide a temporary advantage for underdogs that will provoke an arms race which the resource-advantaged adversaries will win in the long run, in the worst case the arms race itself will cement permanent structural change that will make things worse.

"Search" By Stealing

Most of the adversarial utility of "AI" is on the "write" side, since write-amplification is more obviously aggressive than reading. But the "read" side of LLMs - summarization and question-answering - can be a form of attack as well.

To begin with, the act of reading itself is currently enormously destructive, but that's arguably not a fundamental aspect of this technology. They could set reasonable rate-limits and respect things like robots.txt, as search engines have for decades now. They could also refrain from committing criminal levels of copyright infringement. But, today, using "AI" tools does suborn this sort of out-of-control crawling.

More insidiously, consider the scenario described in this YouTube video. The LTT Bros decided to try Linux again, and in the course of so doing, they had problems. When trying to solve these problems, they were faced with a choice: they could consult Reddit, or they could ask an LLM. Asking an LLM would "gaslight the heck out of" them, but they still found it preferable, because they would at least get an answer without getting yelled at.

Initially this sounds great. But it also means that you want to extract knowledge from a community, while mechanically eliding any values or norms that the community may want to impart as part of offering that knowledge. As someone who spent many years in a community tech support role, this is worrying. Many requests for support are people asking how to do things that will momentarily solve a superficial problem but create a long-term reliability problem or even an immediate security risk, that the question-asker doesn't want to hear about. Consider the question "I'm tired of entering my password so much, how do I make it so my laptop unlocks automatically". An obsequious chatbot will helpfully tell you how to do this without pushback.

But, this is also a sort of ethically murky area. The Linux community is somewhat famously, for many years now, a toxic cesspool of general hostility, misogyny, etc. It is certainly a good thing that people can get access to this knowledge without subjecting themselves to abuse. But it also means that the people with the power and the privilege to change the community for the better can just quietly withdraw, rather than fixing the problems. It also means that the positive elements of culture cannot be transmitted, and people will have no opportunity to learn about unknown unknowns.

In this case, the "adversarial" communication is with society. The thing that using an LLM for search lets you do is withdraw from society and avoid forming any personal connections. There are some personal connections which are painful and annoying, and so that can feel like a momentary balm. But the need to make connections in general is, like, the concept of society itself.

Who Am I Hurting?

LLMs are good at adversarial communication. They are so good at it, relative to their other benefits, that they will tend to make communications adversarial if you are not remaining vigilant about the possibility that it might do so. My request to you, dear reader, if you are going to use such tools, is to always ask yourself, "who might I be hurting, if I use an LLM for this?"

If you're using an "AI", who is its adversary? If you haven't given it one yet, who might the "AI" turn into an adversary? Who might you overwhelm with an asymmetric amount of output, or, if you're receiving information and not sending it, who are you taking that information from without consulting?

Figure out the answers to these questions and conduct yourself accordingly; the answer might be "yourself".

Acknowledgments

Thank you to my patrons who are supporting my writing on this blog. If you like what you've read here and you'd like to read more of it, or you'd like to support my various open-source endeavors, you can support my work as a sponsor!

23 Jun 2026 8:06pm GMT

Codecov's unreliability breaking CI on my open source projects has been a constant source of frustration for me for years. I have found a way to enforce coverage over a whole GitHub Actions build matrix that doesn't rely on third-party services.

09 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT

Let's say you're writing a Python library.

In this library, you have some collection of state that represents "options" or "configuration" for a bunch of operations. Such a set of options is a bundle of potentially ever-increasing complexity. Thus, you will want it to have an extremely minimal compatibility surface, with a very carefully chosen public interface, that is either small, or perhaps nothing at all. Such an object conveys state and might have some private behavior, but all you want consumers to be able to do is build it in very constrained, specific ways, and then pass it along as a parameter to your own APIs.

By way of example, imagine that you're wrapping a library that handles shipping physical packages.

There are a zillion ways to do it ship a package. There are different carriers who can ship it for you. There's air freight, and ground freight, and sea freight. There's overnight shipping. There's the option to require a signature. There's package tracking and certified mail. Suffice it to say, lots of stuff.

If you are starting out to implement such a library, you might need an object called something like ShippingOptions that encapsulates some of this. At the core of your library you might have a function like this:

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async def shipPackage(
        how: ShippingOptions,
        where: Address,
    ) -> ShippingStatus:
    ...

If you are starting out implementing such a library, you know that you're going to get the initial implementation of ShippingOptions wrong; or, at the very least, if not "wrong", then "incomplete". You should not want to commit to an expansive public API with a ton of different attributes until you really understand the problem domain pretty well.

Yet, ShippingOptions is absolutely vital to the rest of your library. You'll need to construct it and pass it to various methods like estimateShippingCost and shipPackage. So you're not going to want a ton of complexity and churn as you evolve it to be more complex.

Worse yet, this object has to hold a ton of state. It's got attributes, maybe even quite complex internal attributes that relate to different shipping services.

Right now, today, you need to add something so you can have "no rush", "standard" and "expedited" options. You can't just put off implementing that indefinitely until you can come up with the perfect shape. What to do?

The tool you want here is the opaque data type design pattern. C is lousy with such things (FILE, pthread_*_t, fd_set, etc). A typedef in a header file can easily achieve this.

But in Python, if you expose a dataclass - or any class, really - even if you keep all your fields private, the constructor is still, inherently, public. You can make it raise an exception or something, but your type checker still won't help your users; it'll still look like it's a normal class.

Luckily, Python typing provides a tool for this: typing.NewType.

Let's review our requirements:

1. We need a type that our client code can use in its type annotations; it needs to be public.
2. They need to be able to consruct it somehow, even if they shouldn't be able to see its attributes or its internal constructor arguments.
3. To express high-level things (like "ship fast") that should stay supported as we add more nuanced and complex configurations in the future (like "ship with the fastest possible option provided by the lowest-cost carrier that supports signature verification").

In order to solve these problems respectively, we will use:

1. a public NewType, which gives us our public name...
2. which wraps a private class with entirely private attributes, to give us an actual data structure, while not exposing the constructor,
3. a set of public constructor functions, which returns our NewType.

When we put that all together, it looks like this:

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from dataclasses import dataclass
from typing import Literal, NewType

@dataclass
class _RealShipOpts:
    _speed: Literal["fast", "normal", "slow"]

ShippingOptions = NewType("ShippingOptions", _RealShipOpts)

def shipFast() -> ShippingOptions:
    return ShippingOptions(_RealShipOpts("fast"))

def shipNormal() -> ShippingOptions:
    return ShippingOptions(_RealShipOpts("normal"))

def shipSlow() -> ShippingOptions:
    return ShippingOptions(_RealShipOpts("slow"))

As a snapshot in time, this is not all that interesting; we could have just exposed _RealShipOpts as a public class and saved ourselves some time. The fact that this exposes a constructor that takes a string is not a big deal for the present moment. For an initial quick and dirty implementation, we can just do checks like if options._speed == "fast" in our shipping and estimation code.

However, the main thing we are doing here is preserving our flexibility to evolve the related APIs into the future, so let's see how we might do that. For example, let's allow the shipping options to contain a concrete and specific carrier and freight method:

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from dataclasses import dataclass
from enum import Enum, auto
from typing import NewType

class Carrier(Enum):
    FedEx = auto()
    USPS = auto()
    DHL = auto()
    UPS = auto()

class Conveyance(Enum):
    air = auto()
    truck = auto()
    train = auto()

@dataclass
class _RealShipOpts:
    _carrier: Carrier
    _freight: Conveyance

ShippingOptions = NewType("ShippingOptions", _RealShipOpts)

def shipFast() -> ShippingOptions:
    return ShippingOptions(_RealShipOpts(Carrier.FedEx, Conveyance.air))

def shipNormal() -> ShippingOptions:
    return ShippingOptions(_RealShipOpts(Carrier.UPS, Conveyance.truck))

def shipSlow() -> ShippingOptions:
    return ShippingOptions(_RealShipOpts(Carrier.USPS, Conveyance.train))

def shippingDetailed(
    carrier: Carrier, conveyance: Conveyance
) -> ShippingOptions:
    return ShippingOptions(_RealShipOpts(carrier, conveyance))

As a NewType, our public ShippingOptions type doesn't have a constructor. Since _RealShipOpts is private, and all its attributes are private, we can completely remove the old versions.

Anything within our shipping library can still access the private variables on ShippingOptions; as a NewType, it's the same type as its base at runtime, so it presents minimal¹ overhead.

Clients outside our shipping library can still call all of our public constructors: shipFast, shipNormal, and shipSlow all still work with the same (as far as calling code knows) signature and behavior.

If you need to build and convey some state within your public API, while avoiding breakages associated with compatibility churn, hopefully this technique can help you do that!

Acknowledgments

Thanks for reading, and thank you to my patrons who are supporting my writing on this blog. If you like what you've read here and you'd like to read more of it, or you'd like to support my various open-source endeavors, you can support my work as a sponsor.

22 May 2026 12:33am GMT