Urgent.News

What's breaking now, across thousands of outlets.

Tech

My safety check was an assert. Five lines made the module refuse to load without it.

assert isinstance(flag, bool) reads like a check. Under python -O it is not there at all, and nothing at the call site says so. The usual advice is to stop writing safety checks as asserts. There is a better answer: let the module refuse to be imported in the mode where its checks evaporate. if not __debug__ : raise RuntimeError ( " this module ' s checks are asserts; refusing to run with -O " )…

The safety check implemented by five lines of code in a module resolves the issue where the module would refuse to load when executed with the optimization flag -O. This safety measure ensures that the module cannot be imported in a mode where its checks are essentially ignored. By raising a RuntimeError, the module refuses to run when executed with -O, preventing any potential problems that might arise due to the safety checks being disabled.

This approach addresses two different questions: the question of which image the module was imported under, and the question of what process is running at the moment. The safety check leverages the sys.flags.optimize setting and the __debug__ variable to determine the correct behavior. By using this method, the module ensures that it is safe to run under -O and avoids any unexpected behavior or issues that may arise from relying solely on asserts.

Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.

Read the original at dev.to →

More in Tech

Bulk URL Checker – Batch HTTP Status & Redirect Tracking for 100 URLs, SSRF-Protected

## Why I built this Checking URLs one at a time during a site migration or relaunch is tedious, and the tools that do it in bulk for free — Ahrefs, SEMrush, Screaming Frog — gate that behind a paid…

  • Bulk URL Checker aids site migrations with 100 URL checks per run
  • Tool checks redirects up to 20 hops, streaming real-time results
  • SSRF protection validates redirect destinations against private IPs

I built a pay-per-call image processing API that AI agents can pay for with USDC

I keep experimenting with the x402 protocol — HTTP 402 payment-gated APIs where AI agents pay per call in USDC on Base, no accounts or API keys. Yesterday it was QR codes; today it's image processing.

  • Image Toolkit API allows AI agents to pay for image processing services in USDC on Base blockchain.
  • Four operations (resize, convert, compress, thumbnail) available at $0.01 USDC per call.
  • API built with Python, Pillow, and Caddy server on $4 VPS, awaiting community feedback.

OpenRig - Peer to Peer donation based hardware sharing platform

This is a submission for Weekend Challenge: Generosity Edition What I Built I grew up teaching myself to code in Pakistan on hardware that struggled to run modern dev tools.

  • OpenRig is a peer-to-peer compute sharing platform built in 48 hours.
  • Donors register idle hardware to enable recipients to access resources.
  • Google Gemini AI matches recipients with hardware based on impact.

More from Sunday 6 September →