getting rid of extra mkdir commands in Makefile

Copy a file and create destination directory

Replace a mkdir and cp with install using the -D option to create the destination directory if needed. Before:

public/i/% : i/%
    mkdir -p public/i
    cp $< $@
    chmod 644 $@

After:

public/i/% : i/%
    install -m 644 -D $< $@

Create destination directory in a Python script

This is one extra line, using pathlib

Before opening the output file for writing,

    Path(outfile).parent.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)

This creates a Path object for the intended pathname of the output file, gets its parent directory, and makes that directory and all parents if it does not exist.

So I know this blog still starts a lot of processes to rebuild, but I got rid of a few.

Bonus links

Community Gardens in Jean Sweeney Open Space Park by Margie Siegal. (My prediction is that the nutritional benefit will be dwarfed by the people skills building benefit. Any cooperative project is good for getting better at any other cooperative project.)

The Company That Published Fake Journalists in Sports Illustrated is Collapsing Dramatically After Massive AI Rebrand by Maggie Harrison Dupré. (People are obviously getting off the slop and touching grass. Or rutabagas or whatever they’re growing in their community garden plots.)

CEO of Palantir Says AI Will Seize Power Away From College-Educated Women by Frank Landymore. (Oh, never mind, I heard this dude is progressive now?)

Apple suddenly shutters its Support Community forums for no clear reason by David Price. (The reason is clear if you read the forums. A lot of regular people’s questions about Apple products are stuff like, what’s this confusing, creepy-looking advertising feature or “how do I turn off this AI slop that started showing up? Apple had to decide whether to pay attention to real customer concerns and fix the stuff that forum posters are on about, invest a bunch of moderator hours in a Potemkin village makeover, or just shut the forums down.)

Creators quit pro-AI platforms, summary by Thomas McKinlay of a paper by Huang, H., Fu, R., & Ghose, A. If you work in social media (e.g. influencer marketing), pay attention to the AI stance of the platforms you’re investing in. The platforms that are investing the most in AI (e.g. X, Quora) will likely see decreasing engagement from creators. (Human YouTubers are trying to stand out from the slop by doing AI-free collabs and encouraging users to rely on subscriptions more, algorithms less. Related: cleaning up YouTube)

THE FIRST LESSON IS: NO ONE’S EVEN LOOKING by Dave Trott. I think most people in our business believe ordinary people will notice every ad and study each ad carefully….[W]e are each exposed to roughly 1,000 ads per day. Of that, 4% are remembered favourably and 7% are remembered unfavourably. But the important number is – 89% of advertising isn’t noticed or remembered.