Under twitter post people write nice answers, best wishes, stories, & support for her to see.

Thank you very much Ewa, for the wonderful work you have done at Python Software Foundation and for the whole Python community. Best wishes on your new projects and I wish you the best for your future :)

I created this package because I needed to turn on and off some features on my personal projects. I mainly use it in GeoSearch.dev, where I can control the flow of matching engine at runtime. I don't think anyone needs to explain how feature flags work.

I already use the package in production, but there is still room for improvement. I hope you will like it.

Just WOW! I am very fascinated by how nature has perfected it, in some aspects.

Yeah the design doesn't even seem like a gliding type eg. albatross or something. 10 days, what is its metabolism like.

The article says they don’t glide, they are actively flying the whole time. That is mind boggling.

Don’t they need sleep?

How do they know to start on the exact same day every year? Fly to the exact same place?

I am a bit jealous of the scientists who get to work with such amazing creatures :)

I think I read something about some birds being able to sleep with only one hemisphere of their brain at a time, similar to dolphins. The common swift often spends months at a time without touching ground.

And lots of birds perform marvelous feats of long-range navigation, storks, for example, travel thousands of kilometers each year to return to their nest for breeding.

They are amazing creatures.

I would suppose that they don’t “know” they just feel compelled.

There are dragon flies that migrate from India to Africa. It takes three generations to complete the round trip. So how do they know? It must be just a feeling.

I guess that a long time ago when India and Aftrica were adjacent parts of Gondwana land, the migration must have been quite short. But as the continents drifted apart the dragoon flies had to adapt to the longer route.

Isn't it the same with Monarch Butterflies, they make the trip from Canada to Mexico and it also includes a few breeding cycles.

It is still possible to be knowledge that is passed on from generation to generation one way or another.

Pure guess, but maybe they recognise position of stars in the sky? that could provide both calendrical and navigational utility

I completely forgot about this issue :) I'm glad someone was interested in looking at how those backups work. Perhaps my complaints also contributed to this investigation :)))

These look like messages being re-sent from the service to the client.

This is not surprising - when you ask someone else to route messages for you, even encrypted messages, you are giving them the (encrpyted) payload and asking them to route it for you.

If you have a large network with billions of users, it's reasonable that some of the users' phones may be offline some of the time.

Should the service just drop messages on the floor when that happens, or buffer them in some queue (recall, they're E2EE) that gets emptied every so often?

Now assume all your infra has a hiccup (outage) and goes offline, and then comes online again.

Probably the retry logic didn't synch correctly and attempted to retransmit encrypted messages that had already been delivered.

In short, for distributed computing at scale, it is surprisingly difficult to ensure a message is delivered exactly once.

I'm not sure if that explains why deleted messages from months ago are being resurrected. That would imply that there is a persistence framework that has multi-month readback capability.

The oldest message from the twitter screenshot looks ~8 days old.

In the second tweet the user says "3 chats before the outage and now 15+ or more chats which I deleted before the week or two."

Two weeks (and in screenshots, only 8 days shown) does not seem surprising. Especially given the increasing rate of internet shutdowns across the globe [1].

E2EE is too important to play fast and loose with.

[1] "In 2020, Access Now and the #KeepItOn coalition documented at least 155 internet shutdowns in 29 countries." (https://www.accessnow.org/keepiton/)

Transform any unstructured text data into meaningful geo data. Get geolocation data such as Country, State, City, Coordinates, or Timezone.

The service is not perfect and is still being worked on. But I think it can help someone.

Like it too! Thanks for sharing :)

Nice article, well written. I like Alex's approach and I like that I have found all the information I wanted to know about this new shiny board :) Keep up the good work alexellisuk :)

Absolutely agree with you, 5 users here, 5 there and you will have hundreds in 1 year, 500 after 2 years and so on... This happened to me with my side project hostbeat.info. I have started it bcs some of my friends wanted this kind of service. Then I have realized that I can do it as a multi-user SaaS. I was expecting thousands of users in the first month, still don't know why :) (perhaps I made it free of charge?) Made a post on 3-4 forums/discussions, etc... scaled my server to handle load almost to 10.000 daily active users. And.... 2 registrations happened in the first month. This was not expected and hit me hard. But later on, as you write, it started to gain some traction. One user per week, 2, then 3 users. Sometimes 2 new per day, the other day or week or month nothing. Sometimes I am surprised that some big player on the IT market has registered and is also actively using it (2 largest telco operators in DE and AT fe.) I don't care anymore about profit or userbase. I'm happy with it as is and sometimes users are sending me emails and thanking me for such service.

So, do your friends use it? :)

Yes, they do. I did admin work a long time ago and mostly it was planned to have information about the connection, in case they have a dynamic IP. It works reliably to this day.

Not bad. Runtime protection of the data is really good/useful. Lets see where this project will go :)