So, while working with caching and scrapping, I understood the difference between immutable and mutable objects/datatypes very clearly. I had a scenario, where I am webscraping an API, the code looks like this.
soumyatheman
@soumyatheman:matrix.org
GSoCfrom aiocache import cached
@cached(ttl=7200)
async def get_forecast(station_id: str) -> list[dict]:
data: dict = await scrape_weather(station_id)
# doing some operation
return forecasts
and then using this utility tool in the endpoint.
async def get_forecast_by_city(
param: Annotated[StationIDQuery, Query()],
) -> list[UpcomingForecast]:
forecasts_dict: list[dict] = await get_forecast(param.station_id)
forecasts_dict.reversed()
forecasts: deque[UpcomingForecast] = deque([])
for forecast in forecasts_dict:
date_delta: int = (
date.fromisoformat(forecast["forecast_date"]) - date.today()
).days
if date_delta <= 0:
break
forecasts.appendleft(UpcomingForecast.model_validate(forecast))
return list(forecasts)
But, here is the gotcha, something I was doing inherently wrong. Lists in python are mutable objects. So, reversing the list modifies the list in place, without creating a new reference of the list. My initial approach was to do this
Welcome to a new issue of This Week in Plasma!
This week we put the finishing touches on Plasma 6.6! It’s due to be released in just a few days and it’s a great release with tons of impactful features, UI improvements, and bug fixes. I hope everyone loves it!
Meanwhile, check out what folks were up to this week:
Moved System Settings’ “Remote Desktop” page to the “Security & Privacy” group in System Settings. (Nate Graham, krdp MR #139)
Improved the way loop devices are handled in the Disks & Devices widget. (Bogdan Onofriichuk, plasma-workspace MR #6260)
Reduced visual jagginess in the split image effect of wallpaper previews that show both a light and dark version. (Fushan Wen, plasma-workspace MR #6283)
The Kicker Application Menu widget now supports using a non-square icon for its panel button, just like Kickoff does. (Christoph Wolk, plasma-desktop MR #3522)
Added a dedicated global action for un-tiling a quick-tiled window. It doesn’t have a keyboard shortcut by default, but you can assign one yourself. (Kevin Azzam, KDE Bugzilla #500636)
Videos in SDDM login screen themes can now be previewed in System Settings. (Blue Terracotta, sddm-kcm MR #99)
Improved the appearance of various dialogs created by KWin. Read more here! (Kai Uwe Broulik, kwin MR #8702)
You can now configure how long it takes the window switcher to appear after you start holding down Alt+Tab. (Guilherme Soares, KDE Bugzilla #486389)
In Kirigami-based apps, hovering the pointer over buttons that can be triggered with keyboard shortcuts now shows the shortcuts. (Joshua Goins, kirigami MR #2040)
Setting up a Samba share for one of your folders so people can connect to it over the network now turns on the Samba service (on systemd-based distros) if needed. This completes the project to make Samba sharing relatively painless! (Thomas Duckworth, KDE Bugzilla #466787)
Monitor names shown in the Brightness & Color widget now update as expected if you connect or disconnect them while the system is asleep. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #495223)
Fixed multiple issues that caused custom-tiled windows on screens that you disconnect to move to the wrong places on any of the remaining screens. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #7999)
Hardened KWin a bit against crashing when the graphics driver resets unexpectedly. (Vlad Zahorodnii, kwin MR #8769)
Fixed a case where Plasma could crash when used with the i3 tiling window manager. (Tobias Fella, KDE Bugzilla #511428)
Fixed a potential “division by 0” issue in system monitoring widgets and apps that messed up the display percentage of Swap sensors on systems with no swap space. (Kartikeya Tyagi, libksysguard MR #462)
Worked around a Wayland bug (yes, an actual Wayland bug — as in, a bug in one of its protocol definitions!) related to input method key repeat. Why work around the bug instead of fixing it? Because it’s already fixed in a newer version of the protocol, but KWin needs to handle apps that use the old version, too. (Xuetian Weng, kwin MR #8700)
Unified the appearance of HDR content in full-screen windows and windowed windows. (Xaver Hugl, KDE Bugzilla #513895)
Fixed a layout glitch in the System Tray caused by widgets that include line breaks (i.e. \n characters) in their names. (Christoph Wolk, KDE Bugzilla #515699)
The Web Browser widget no longer incorrectly claims that every page you visit tried to open a pop-up window. (Christoph Wolk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1003)
Fixed a layout glitch in the Quick Launch widget’s popup. (Christoph Wolk, kdeplasma-addons MR #1004)
You can now launch an app in your launcher widget’s favorites list right after overriding its .desktop file; no restart of plasmashell is required anymore. (Alexey Rochev, KDE Bugzilla #512332)
Fixed an issue that made inactive windows dragged from their titlebars get raised even when explicitly configured not to raise in this case. (Vlad Zahorodnii, KDE Bugzilla #508151)
When a battery-powered device is at a critically low power level, putting it to sleep and charging it to a normal level no longer makes it incorrectly run the “oh no, I’m critically low” action immediately after it wakes up. (Michael Spears, powerdevil MR #607)
The overall app ratings shown in Discover now match a simple average of the individual ratings. (Akseli Lahtinen, KDE Bugzilla #513139)
Searching for Activities using KRunner and KRunner-powered searches now works again. (Simone Checchia, KDE Bugzilla #513761
Worked around a Qt bug that caused extremely strange cache-related issues throughout Plasma and Kirigami-based apps that would randomly break certain components. (Tobias Fella, kirigami MR #2039)
Added support for setting custom modes for virtual screens. (Xaver Hugl, kwin MR #8766)
Added GPU temperature monitoring support for additional GPUs. (Barry Strong, ksystemstats MR #123)
Scrolling in scrollable views spawned by KWin (not Plasma, just KWin itself) no longer goes 8 times slower than it ought to. Thankfully there are very few such views, so almost nobody noticed the issue. However fixing it facilitates adding a “scroll to switch virtual desktops” feature to the Overview effect for Plasma 6.7! (Kai Uwe Broulik, kwin MR #8800)
Moving a file to the trash is now up to 50 times faster and more efficient. (Kai Uwe Broulik, kio MR #2147)
KDE has become important in the world, and your time and contributions have helped us get there. As we grow, we need your support to keep KDE sustainable.
Would you like to help put together this weekly report? Introduce yourself in the Matrix room and join the team!
Beyond that, you can help KDE by directly getting involved in any other projects. Donating time is actually more impactful than donating money. Each contributor makes a huge difference in KDE — you are not a number or a cog in a machine! You don’t have to be a programmer, either; many other opportunities exist.
You can also help out by making a donation! This helps cover operational costs, salaries, travel expenses for contributors, and in general just keep KDE bringing Free Software to the world.
Push a commit to the relevant merge request on invent.kde.org.
Hey everyone!
I am Siddharth Chopra, a second year engineering student at the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee. I'm really excited to be working on Marknote as a part of the Season of KDE program this year, under the mentorship of Carl Schawn.
Marknote, as it is aptly named, is KDE's own markdown based note taking app. The aim of my project is to improve Marknote by adding the much requested source mode, alongside other enhancements.
3 weeks into the project, I have been successful in adding a working source mode functionality to the editor. When source mode is activated, the contents of the source markdown file are allowed to be edited directly, instead of showing the rendered markdown. This is incredibly useful, in cases where the user needs manual control over the contents of the note, or in case there is some glitch in the rendering (which unfortunately still happens often).
The main editor of Marknote comes from the file EditPage.qml. As part of my initial approach, I added a global property here to check if source mode was enabled, and then conditionally changed components of this editor. Although this worked, but it brought along some of its own issues. First of all it made the code unnecessarily complex. It also meant that components like the formatting bar now needed to be repurposed to work with source mode, which is a challenge in itself.
So, my mentor suggested to move the raw editor into a new file, to keep the code maintainable. This led to the original EditPage being split into RichEditPage and RawEditPage. Similarly, the respective backends were also split in two, as the needs of both the editors are significantly distinct.
Additionally, I had to consider specially the source mode for images. Because when loaded, image URL's are not kept intact, instead they are replaced with a hash, that maps to the image in memory. Also, the editor internally uses html for rendering images, which I also had to convert back to markdown for source mode.
And someone who is not a designer by any means, deciding the form and placement of the mode toggle button was in itself a mini lesson in UI design ;) Initially I went with a toggle switch. But when I shared that for feedback, I learnt that a checkable button is the ideal UI element here.
My proposal mentions features apart from the source mode, which I plan to complete. While working on the current feature, I noticed multiple bugs in the app, which I intend to fix as well.
It has been a great experience working with the KDE community, and really exciting to be able to contribute to an app that so many users around the world use every day! I would also like to express my gratitude towards my mentor, for being there for whatever issue I faced!
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2026-07.
Tags: tech, politics, journalism, business
There’s really a problem with journalism at this point. How come when covering the tech moguls they keep leaving out important context and taking their fables at face value?
https://karlbode.com/the-press-is-still-propping-up-elon-musks-supergenius-engineer-mythology/
Tags: tech, literature, scifi, business, politics
Indeed, don’t assume they misunderstood the sci-fi and fantasy they read and you know. Clearly they just got different opinions about it because their incentives and world views are different from your.
https://tante.cc/2026/02/12/but-they-did-read-it/
Tags: tech, game, dmca, copyright, law
Automated DMCA take downs have been a problem for decades now… They still bring real damage, here is an example.
Tags: tech, web, browser, interoperability
This is a very important initiative. For a healthy web platform we need good interoperability between the engines. I’m glad they’re doing it again.
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2026/02/launching-interop-2026/
Tags: tech, foss, messaging
Clearly early days… Could that become a good place to land for people fleeing off Discord?
https://blog.fluxer.app/how-i-built-fluxer-a-discord-like-chat-app/
Tags: tech, messaging, irc
It’s nice to still see some activity around IRC.
https://libera.chat/news/new-and-upcoming-features-3
Tags: tech, hardware, embedded, ntp, time
This is definitely a cool hack. Now I feel like doing something like this to every clock I encounter.
https://github.com/jim11662418/ESP8266_WiFi_Analog_Clock
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, copilot, foss, codereview
Clearly Free Software projects will have to find a way to deal with LLM generated contributions. A very large percentage of them is leading to subtle quality issues. This also very taxing on the reviewers, and you don’t want to burn them out.
https://discourse.llvm.org/t/concerns-about-low-quality-prs-beeing-merged-into-main/89748
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, copilot, foss, commons
I guess when you unleash agents unsupervised their ethos tend to converge on the self-entitled asshole contributors? This raise real questions, this piece explains the situation quite well.
https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/
Tags: tech, browser, security, attention-economy, spy
Oh this is bad! The amount of data exfiltrated by those malicious extensions. Data brokers will do anything they can to have something to resell. This is also a security and corporate espionage hazard.
https://qcontinuum.substack.com/p/spying-chrome-extensions-287-extensions-495
Tags: tech, tools, security
Accidents can happen in life. This might come in handy if you loose memory for some reason. It requires planning ahead though.
https://eljojo.github.io/rememory/
Tags: tech, tools, data-visualization
Looks like a nice option for visualisations.
Tags: tech, programming, language, statistics, type-systems
Interesting experiment even though some of the results baffle me (I’d have expected C# higher in the ranking for example). Still this gives some food for thought.
https://boyter.org/posts/boilerplate-tax-ranking-popular-languages-by-density/
Tags: tech, c++, optimisation
If you needed a reminder that inlining functions isn’t necessarily an optimisation, here is a fun little experiment.
https://lemire.me/blog/2026/02/08/the-cost-of-a-function-call/
Tags: tech, graphics, blur, mathematics
Wondering if blurs can really be reverted? There’s some noise introduced but otherwise you can pretty much reconstruct the original.
https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/its-all-a-blur
Tags: tech, graphics, vulkan, api, complexity
There are lessons and inspirations to find in how the Vulkan API is managed. The extension system can be unwieldy, but with the right approach it can help consolidate as well.
https://www.khronos.org/blog/simplifying-vulkan-one-subsystem-at-a-time
Tags: tech, data, architecture, system, type-systems, functional, complexity
Interesting essay looking at how systems evolve their schemas over time. We’re generally ill-equipped to deal with it and this presents options and ideas to that effect. Of course, the more precise you want to be the more complexity you’ll have to deal with.
Tags: tech, architecture, modules, microservices, services, complexity
No, modularity doesn’t imply micro services… You don’t need a process and network barrier between your modules. This long post does a good job going through the various architecture options we have.
https://binaryigor.com/modular-monolith-and-microservices-modularity-is-what-truly-matters.html
Tags: tech, engineering, note-taking, memory, cognition
I used to do that, fell into the “taking notes on the computer”. And clearly it’s not the same, I’m thinking going back to paper notebooks soon.
https://ntietz.com/blog/using-an-engineering-notebook/
Tags: tech, engineering, organisation, team, communication, failure
Everyone makes mistakes, what matters is how you handle them.
https://www.seangoedecke.com/screwing-up/
Tags: physics, colors
Excellent piece which explains the physics behind the atmospheric colours. Very fascinating stuff.
https://explainers.blog/posts/why-is-the-sky-blue/
Bye for now!
Friday, 13 February 2026
KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 6.23.0.
This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.
This release brings improvements to generators, better build system integration and several bugfixes.
As always, big thanks to everyone who reported issues and contributed to QCoro. Your help is much appreciated!
The biggest improvement in this release is that QCoro::AsyncGenerator coroutines now support
directly co_awaiting Qt types without the qCoro() wrapper, just like QCoro::Task coroutines
already do (#292).
Previously, if you wanted to await a QNetworkReply inside an AsyncGenerator, you had to
wrap it with qCoro():
ngraham
QCoro::AsyncGenerator<QByteArray> fetchPages(QNetworkAccessManager &nam, QStringList urls) {
for (const auto &url : urls) {
auto *reply = co_await qCoro(nam.get(QNetworkRequest{QUrl{url}}));
co_yield reply->readAll();
}
}
Starting with QCoro 0.13.0, you can co_await directly, just like in QCoro::Task:
QCoro::AsyncGenerator<QByteArray> fetchPages(QNetworkAccessManager &nam, QStringList urls) {
for (const auto &url : urls) {
auto *reply = co_await nam.get(QNetworkRequest{QUrl{url}});
co_yield reply->readAll();
}
}
.end() method is now const (and constexpr), so it can be called on const generator objects (#294).GeneratorIterator can now be constructed in an invalid state, allowing lazy initialization of iterators (#318).qcoro.h now only includes QtNetwork and QtDBus headers when those features are actually enabled, resulting in cleaner builds when optional modules are disabled (#280).If you enjoy using QCoro, consider supporting its development on GitHub Sponsors or buy me a coffee on Ko-fi (after all, more coffee means more code, right?).
The world of free and open-source software (FOSS) is full of big-hearted, altruistic people who love serving society by giving away their labor for free. It’s incredible. These folks are supporting so many people by providing the world with high quality free software, including in KDE, my FOSS community of choice.
But while they do it, who’s supporting them? We don’t talk about this as much.
A recent Reddit post by a volunteer developer burning out reminded me of the topic, and it’s not the first one. Denis Pushkarev of core-js wrote something similar in 2023, and we’re probably all familiar with this XKCD comic:
The topic is also not limited to the FOSS world; it’s broadly applicable to all volunteer activities. Can’t feed the homeless in a soup kitchen if you’re sick and sneezing into the soup! Can’t drive to the library to teach adult reading classes if your car’s broken down.
In order to support others, you need support yourself! Who can provide that support? Here are a bunch of cases that work:
All these cases work. They provide enough money to live, and you still get to work on FOSS!
There are lots of other good options, but here are some of the bad ones that don’t work:
We must always answer for ourselves the question of how we’re going to be supported while we continue to contribute to the digital commons. If you don’t do it for a living, it’s a critically important question. Never let anyone guilt-trip you into doing volunteer work you don’t have the time or money for! It’s a sure road to burnout or worse.
Airplane safety briefings tell people to “put on your mask before helping others.” Why? Same reason as what we’re talking about here: you can’t support others if you’re not first supported yourself. If you try, you’ll fail, either immediately, or eventually. You must be properly supported yourself before you can be of use to others.
We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 19 Beta2.
