Python 3.12 on AWS Lambda

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The Python 3.12 runtime is now available in AWS Lambda. You can now leverage the new features and performance improvements in your serverless workloads. Useful new features in Python 3.12:

• Comprehension inlining
• Typing changes and
• Formalization of f-strings.

An extensive list of new features can be found here.

Another artefact of the new Python runtime is that Unicode characters (rather than their escape sequences) are now returned in JSON responses.

Python 3.12.1

— Staying on the topic of Python 3.12, a new maintenance release (3.12.1) is now available. This release contains numerous bug fixes and documentation updates (see the changelog for details). Not surprisingly, updated Docker images are already available.

Best Novels Visualised

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The clever people at Information is Beautiful have produced an interactive consensus cloud visualisation which shows the best novels from 2023. The visualisation aggregates data from 20 distinct “Books of the Year” lists (so it really is more-or-less a consensus). The data (both raw and processed) is freely available (for 2023, 2022, 2021 and 2020 too!).

Space Typography

xkcd
— Haven’t had the time to validate the proportions, but it looks about right. Damn this is clever! Take a look at the explanation for further discussion.