#469 Commands, out of the terminal

Topics covered in this episode:

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New app from Michael
Command Book App is a native macOS app for developers, data scientists, AI enthusiasts and more.
This is a tool I've been using lately to help build Talk Python, Python Bytes, Talk Python Training, and many more applications.
It's a bit like advanced terminal commands or complex shell aliases, but hosted outside of your terminal. This leaves the terminal there for interactive commands, exploration, short actions.
Command Book manages commands like "tail this log while I'm developing the app", "Run the dev web server with true auto-reload", and even "Run MongoDB in Docker with exactly the settings I need"
I'd love it if you gave it a look, shared it with your team, and send me feedback.
Has a free version and paid version.
Build with Swift and Swift UI
Check it out at https://commandbookapp.com

by Giampaolo Rodola
The standard library's subprocess module has relied on a busy-loop polling approach since the timeout parameter was added to Popen.wait() in Python 3.3, around 15 years ago
The problem with busy-polling
- CPU wake-ups: even with exponential backoff (starting at 0.1ms, capping at 40ms), the system constantly wakes up to check process status, wasting CPU cycles and draining batteries.
- Latency: there's always a gap between when a process actually terminates and when you detect it.
- Scalability: monitoring many processes simultaneously magnifies all of the above.
- + L1/L2 CPU cache invalidations
It’s interesting to note that waiting via poll() (or kqueue()) puts the process into the exact same sleeping state as a plain time.sleep() call. From the kernel's perspective, both are interruptible sleeps.
Here is the merged PR for this change.

Brian #4: monty: A minimal, secure Python interpreter written in Rust for use by AI

Samuel Colvin and others at Pydantic
Still experimental
“Monty avoids the cost, latency, complexity and general faff of using a full container based sandbox for running LLM generated code. “
“Instead, it lets you safely run Python code written by an LLM embedded in your agent, with startup times measured in single digit microseconds not hundreds of milliseconds.”

Extras

Brian:

Expertise is the art of ignoring - Kevin Renskers
- You don’t need to master the language. You need to master your slice.
- Learning everything up front is wasted effort.
- Experience changes what you pay attention to.
I hate fish - Rands (Michael Lopp)
- Really about productivity systems
- And a nice process for dealing with email

Michael:

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