Python’s True Superpower Python appears to be everywhere nowadays! How did it happen, that a language that almost died in the Python 2 to 3 process is now the lingua franca a default choice when people talk about programming? There must be some secret superpower and I think I found it!

ok so newsletter is out, and i've finally posted my PyCon UK keynote with additional material to my homepage.

if you wanna know what took me so long: check out my latest newsletter ;)

back to sauna!

hynek.me/talks/python-superpo...

As a modern reimplementation of Jupyter server, I hope `jupyverse` gains traction, and I think this will really help with that! 🚀

@github.com - you need to get on top of this. It's a big problem and will only get worse if you don't give maintainers the tools to deal with it.

Don't let GitHub descend into a AI/bot cesspit.

Identify AI accounts and give maintainers the ability to block.

Everybody is talking about secure Python sandboxes for LLM code execution, but what about using the browser sandbox?

Quick demo using JupyterLite and the Pyodide kernel 💡

[PERF] Replace np.column_stack with np.vstack().T by crabby-rathbun · Pull Request #31132 · matplotlib/matplotlib This PR addresses issue #31130 by replacing specific safe occurrences of np.column_stack with np.vstack().T for better performance. IMPORTANT: This is a more targeted fix than originally proposed. ...

When they said AI was coming for programming jobs, I didn't think they meant creating stupid, conflict-driven drama too: github.com/matplotlib/m...

Seriously, launch all this AI-driven bullshit into the sun. Or give us a way to hold those behind these agents and their generated idiocy accountable.

We're continually updating our website. Here are recent highlights

Sigstore attestations and provenance information are much more visible.

This now makes sense to me! 😭

I just made a sidecar viewer of output you can run in jupyter console or even a regular ipython terminal to get rich interactives without a notebook.

pip install runtimed

import runtimed
runtimed.sidecar()

Seeking Reproducible Research Software: How the UW Scientific Software Engineering Center Adopted Pixi At the University of Washington Scientific Software Engineering Center (SSEC), our mission is to enhance our partners software development capabilities to bolster their research. In scientific researc...

The @uwssec.bsky.social team wrote up why they switched to Pixi for all their research software engineering: "Pixi has allowed us to remove the friction of package management to focus on what matters: writing better, reproducible scientific software."

prefix.dev/blog/seeking...

The new engine in Python-Blosc2 4.0 delivers quite awesome performance results. Processing a 400 MB array can be up to 9.6x faster than NumPy 🤯

The best part is that it fully supports NumPy's array and ufunc interfaces. High performance with zero friction! 🏎️💨

ironarray.io/blog/miniexp...

Enjoy!

Clean desktop showing Pixi GUI app window listing build tasks and a terminal window displaying compilation logs on a bright yellow background

We're excited to announce Pixi GUI, developed by our working student Felix Häcker! With the goal to make Pixi accessible to a wider audience while also empowering expert users.

Find out more in Felix's blog post: prefix.dev/blog/introd...

Written by an AI?

Introducing notebook.link: The Future of Notebook Sharing Reimagining how you share, collaborate, and run Jupyter notebooks — all in your browser.

🧪 Awesome announcement from the @quantstack.bsky.social team! Introducing notebook.link, share your computational notebook and have them run directly in the browser with no setup, powered by Jupyterlite and the xeus stack.

#datascience #scientificcomputing

New open source: cuthbert 🐛

State space models with all the hotness: (temporally) parallelisable, JAX, Kalman, SMC

The Signal app icon.

When it comes to private communications, I trust Signal over everything else.

Toad-Pythonic Universal Terminal Interface for AI Agents-"
Wouldn't it be great to have an interface that could work with any AI agent? #Toad is #Python 's answer to a unified front-end for the many #AI #coding agents out there"
cutt.ly/ytxPsRR2

@willmcgugan.bsky.social @pythonhub.dev

Zero infrastructure sharing of Jupyter notebooks! 🤯

I think JupyterLite and emscripten-forge could revolutionise collaboration, particularly in places without large devops / infrastructure teams.

Release 0.0.10 · zensical/zrx Summary This version includes a large refactoring of Iterator impls across various Store decorators, enhancing code clarity and maintainability. Additionally, almost all impl Iterator return-positi...

Making great progress on ZRX, the foundation for the module system that we're cooking up for @zensical.org – it'll offer several degrees of freedom, and allow for type-safe composition (= plugin interop) – something that MkDocs (now dead) never delivered.

github.com/zensical/zrx...

Why Package Installs Are Slow (And How to Fix It) | Towards Data Science How sharded indexing patterns solve a scaling problem in package management

New article alert! 🌟 "Why Package Installs Are Slow (And How to Fix It)" explains how sharded repodata (CEP-16) delivers 10x faster installs and 90% less bandwidth for conda and Pixi on conda-forge: buff.ly/Zhj0Yxd

Release 0.0.17 · zensical/zensical Summary This version brings support for automatic and manual API cross-references. Symbol names on pages that include auto-generated API documentation now automatically link to the relevant section...

Zensical 0.0.17 brings support for automatic and manual API cross-references! Symbol names in your auto-generated API documentation will now link to the relevant section in your documentation.

github.com/zensical/zen...

A bit of polish to Toad's shell.

AI prompts and the shell can be interleaved. It's a remarkably natural workflow. You can even run the Python REPL from within Toad.

github.com/batrachianai...

Worth a ☆ ?

#Python #Toad

How we made Python's packaging library 3x faster Along with a pip (and now packaging) maintainer, Damian Shaw, I have been working on making packaging, the library behind almost all packaging related tools, faster at reading versions and specifiers,...

On behalf of the packaging maintainers, I’d like to announce packaging 26.0rc1 is out! Please try it out, as it's a huge release. If you'd like to read about the performance work making this the fastest version of packaging ever, see my post:
iscinumpy.dev/post/packagi...

The State Of LLMs 2025: Progress, Progress, and Predictions A 2025 review of large language models, from DeepSeek R1 and RLVR to inference-time scaling, benchmarks, architectures, and predictions for 2026.

Uploaded my State of LLMs 2025 report for this year:
magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/state-of-l...

I planned to just write a brief overview, but yeah, it was an eventful year so it was impossible to keep it below 7000 words :D.

The official @NVIDIA cuda-python project now also uses Pixi!

#pixi #CUDA #NVIDIA

Will McGugan Will McGugan’s essays

And the blog post...

willmcgugan.github.io

Alrighty. The Toad is out of the bag. 👜🐸

Install toad to work with a variety of #AI coding agents with one beautiful terminal interface.

I've been told I'm very authentic on camera. You just can't fake that kind of awkwardness.

#AI #Python #Toad

www.youtube.com/shorts/ZLhct...

JupyterLite now supports any-llm-gateway as a backend for its AI static front-end.

any-llm-gateway routes LLM requests through a single gateway rather than tying usage to one provider.

Integration details: link.mozilla.ai/jupyterlite-...

But, but... it won't scale to petabytes of data!!

Not my problem. Never will be.

I'm bullish on DuckLake for the same reason I'm bullish on DuckDB itself - it will scale to all data sizes I care about, and for those data sizes it's both faster and simpler.

Is DuckLake a Step Backward? Examining the new open table format’s return to relational metadata management

An interesting writeup on how ducklake compares to existing lakehouse table formats:

www.pracdata.io/p/is-ducklak...