May 04, 2026

#478 Iodine tablets and potable water

40 minutes

Topics covered in this episode:

profiling-explorer

Reverting the incremental GC in Python 3.14 and 3.15

VSCode AI Co-author defaults to on, then off

django freeze

Extras

Joke

Watch on YouTube

About the show

Sponsored by us! Support our work through:

Our courses at Talk Python Training

The Complete pytest Course

Patreon Supporters

Connect with the hosts

Michael: @[email protected] / @mkennedy.codes (bsky)

Brian: @[email protected] / @brianokken.bsky.social

Show: @[email protected] / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky)

Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 11am PT. Older video versions available there too.

Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it.

Brian #1: profiling-explorer

Adam Johnson

And intro post Python: introducing profiling-explorer

“profiling-explorer is a tool for exploring profiling data from Python’s built-in profilers, which are stored in pstats files. ”

Features

Dark mode

Click the calls, internal ms, or cumulative ms column headers to sort by that column.

Use the search box to filter by filename or function name.

Hover by a filename + line number pair to reveal the copy button, which copies the location to your clipboard for faster opening.

Click the callers or callees links on the right of a row (not pictured above) to see the callers or callees of that function.

Michael #2: Reverting the incremental GC in Python 3.14 and 3.15

Python 3.14 shipped with a new incremental garbage collector, but production reports of severe memory pressure (Neil Schemenauer measured up to 5× peak RSS on pathological cyclic workloads) have pushed the core team and Steering Council to revert it in both 3.14 and 3.15 - returning to the 3.13-era generational GC.

This is the second time the inc GC has been pulled back: it was also reverted right before 3.13.0 final, and it shipped in 3.14 without going through the PEP process.

The tradeoff is real: Neil's benchmarks showed max GC pause times of 1.3ms with inc GC versus 26ms with the generational one - great for latency-sensitive apps, terrible for memory-constrained ones.

Release manager Hugo van Kemenade will ship 3.14.5 early with the revert, and Gregory Smith floated the idea of a 3.14.5rc1 - the first patch-release RC since 3.9.2 back in 2021.

Tim Peters spent the thread doing live forensics on Windows, running a toy deque program that should cap at 1GB and watching it balloon to 15.6GB on a 16GB machine - and discovered the gen0 collector effectively never fires under the new scheme.

Tim's bigger meta-point: CPython has a chronic shortage of real-world GC benchmarks, pyperformance has "basically no interesting" cyclic workloads, and users almost never share real data - so core devs keep flying blind on changes like this.

Django maintainer Adam Johnson published a blog post mid-thread documenting a real memory "leak" in Django's migration system caused by inc GC, with a manual gc.collect() workaround - the listener-facing receipt that this wasn't just theoretical.

If the inc GC comes back for 3.16, it'll go through a proper PEP, and the discussion is already shifting toward keeping both collectors available via a startup flag - which Neil and Sergey Miryanov have both prototyped.

Brian #3: VSCode AI Co-author defaults to on, then off

VSCode merges Enabling ai co author by default - 3 week ago

Ton’s of “why would you do this” and related comments

VSCode merges Change default for git.addAICoAuthor to off - yesterday

Take-away, don’t rely on default, set addAICoAuthor to off yourself

Michael #4: django freeze

Convert your dynamic django site to a static one with one line of code.

Just run python manage.py generate_static_site :)

Features

Generate the static version of your Django site, optionally compressed .zip file

Generate/download the static site using urls (only superuser and staff)

Follow sitemap.xml urls

Follow internal links founded in each page

Follow redirects

Report invalid/broken urls

Selectively include/exclude media and static files

Custom base url (very useful if the static site will run in a specific folder different by the document-root)

Convert urls to relative urls (very useful if the static site will run offline or in an unknown folder different by the document-root)

Prevent local directory index

Extras

Brian:

Thinking Less, Trusting More: GenAI’s Impacts on Students’ Cognitive Habits

Michael:

Vercel breached, employee to blame

Introducing the new Talk Python web player

GitHub uptime (a couple of views 1, 2)

Joke: Friends in tech

...more

View all episodes

By Michael Kennedy and Brian Okken

4.7

212212 ratings

May 04, 2026

#478 Iodine tablets and potable water

40 minutes

Topics covered in this episode:

profiling-explorer

Reverting the incremental GC in Python 3.14 and 3.15

VSCode AI Co-author defaults to on, then off

django freeze

Extras

Joke

Watch on YouTube

About the show

Sponsored by us! Support our work through:

Our courses at Talk Python Training

The Complete pytest Course

Patreon Supporters

Connect with the hosts

Michael: @[email protected] / @mkennedy.codes (bsky)

Brian: @[email protected] / @brianokken.bsky.social

Show: @[email protected] / @pythonbytes.fm (bsky)

Join us on YouTube at pythonbytes.fm/live to be part of the audience. Usually Monday at 11am PT. Older video versions available there too.

Finally, if you want an artisanal, hand-crafted digest of every week of the show notes in email form? Add your name and email to our friends of the show list, we'll never share it.

Brian #1: profiling-explorer

Adam Johnson

And intro post Python: introducing profiling-explorer

“profiling-explorer is a tool for exploring profiling data from Python’s built-in profilers, which are stored in pstats files. ”

Features

Dark mode

Click the calls, internal ms, or cumulative ms column headers to sort by that column.

Use the search box to filter by filename or function name.

Hover by a filename + line number pair to reveal the copy button, which copies the location to your clipboard for faster opening.

Click the callers or callees links on the right of a row (not pictured above) to see the callers or callees of that function.

Michael #2: Reverting the incremental GC in Python 3.14 and 3.15

This is the second time the inc GC has been pulled back: it was also reverted right before 3.13.0 final, and it shipped in 3.14 without going through the PEP process.

The tradeoff is real: Neil's benchmarks showed max GC pause times of 1.3ms with inc GC versus 26ms with the generational one - great for latency-sensitive apps, terrible for memory-constrained ones.

Release manager Hugo van Kemenade will ship 3.14.5 early with the revert, and Gregory Smith floated the idea of a 3.14.5rc1 - the first patch-release RC since 3.9.2 back in 2021.

Brian #3: VSCode AI Co-author defaults to on, then off

VSCode merges Enabling ai co author by default - 3 week ago

Ton’s of “why would you do this” and related comments

VSCode merges Change default for git.addAICoAuthor to off - yesterday

Take-away, don’t rely on default, set addAICoAuthor to off yourself

Michael #4: django freeze

Convert your dynamic django site to a static one with one line of code.

Just run python manage.py generate_static_site :)

Features

Generate the static version of your Django site, optionally compressed .zip file

Generate/download the static site using urls (only superuser and staff)

Follow sitemap.xml urls