Ephes Blog

Come, let's take anti-inflammatory pain medicine together 🫴 --CatSalad

Just wrapped up my first work week of the year. While it was pretty routine, I did manage to push out an update to podcast-transcripts. The big changes: you can now do transcription locally using mlx-whisper (which works particularly well on Macs), without needing to rely on any external APIs. I also added support for local audio files, so you're no longer limited to just audio URLs - though that option's still there if you prefer it. Plus, thanks to FFmpeg, the tool now automatically converts any recognized audio format to 16kHz mono MP3, so you're not restricted to MP3s anymore.

Articles

• Should I Use React For That? | To sum it up 😀, basically. But there are lots of good sources linked.
• Principles Of Web Accessibility | Nice writeup! Agree!
• Django: render JavaScript import maps in templates | Cool, lots of stuff I didn't know about here.
• My AI/LLM predictions for the next 1, 3 and 6 years, for Oxide and Friends

Software

• TabPFN is a foundation model for tabular data / Accurate predictions on small data with a tabular foundation model (Paper) | Wow, there are models now that perform better than XGBoost & co? Cool!

Fediverse

• i’m going to start sending out emails that start: “Hostile reminder:”
• #TIL about the #column command and I cant believe that I missed this gem since... forever? | Didn't know about this too 😳
• TIL about rtss: a handy command line tool for seeing the relative timestamps of each line of output from a process. | What's up with all those command line utils I don't know about? I worked as a sysadmin 20 years ago. I thought I know them all wtf..
• i'm sure anyone who has ever done some serious plotting can relate :)
• This is proof i have the patience to stab something 1000 times | Stitching
• YES, BUT - catsinabox

Videos

• Self Models of Loving Grace | Great talk!

My New Year’s resolution? 3840 × 2160 --nixCraft

It's the first week of 2025 and the last week of my holiday break. I've mostly been lounging around, alternating between eating, sleeping, and building Lego sets. I tried getting back into django-cast by pushing out a small release (0.2.41), but quickly hit a roadblock. After using uv these past few months, I'd completely forgotten how to handle non uv virtualenvs and package building with flit. So first I had to switch everything from flit to uv. Once I finished that bit of yak shaving, I discovered some forgotten mypy issues lurking in the code. To top it off, I remembered I'd worked on some transcript features a few weeks back but never finished writing the tests.

I took a deep breath and hit the release button anyway, despite the test coverage not being at 100%. My OCD might keep me tossing and turning tonight, but hey - we've got a new release! I'd actually put the transcript feature on the back burner when groq started throwing internal server errors. No point polishing a feature when I couldn't even generate new transcripts. The good news is that groq support has sorted out the issue, so expect a flood of new podcast transcripts soon!

Articles

• Frontend
  • Boost website speed with prefetching and the Speculation Rules API
  • Smooth Multi-Page Experiences with Just a Few Lines of CSS
  • Next-level frosted glass with backdrop-filter
  • TIL (well, over the last few days) how to create nice looking forms with `form`. `fieldset`, `legend` and `label` instead of tables and a bit of CSS
• Python / AI
  • Show Django flash messages as toasts with Htmx
  • Things we learned about LLMs in 2024 | Great writeup! 🎉
  • Python: spy for changes with sys.monitoring
  • THINKING ABOUT USING AI? Here’s what you can and (probably) can’t change about its environmental impact.
• Git: undo a pull
• Problems I no longer have by using Server-side rendering
• My Default Apps at the End of 2024
• Databases in 2024: A Year in Review | How could I have missed this in the previous years?

Videos

• rambling about programming with #llms #llm on twitch.tv/wesen3000 for a bit | Want to see what people mean by LLMs boosting productivity? This is a perfect example! Thanks @mnl for giving me such a clear demonstration to point to!

Weeknotes

• Weeknotes: Starting 2025 a little slow | Simon Willison

Fediverse

• Etm. (abbr.) Latin abbreviation for the literal translation of "and shit", specifically "et merda*. | Might come in handy
• 'Tokyo-based architect & artist Hajime Narukawa won Japan's prestigious Good Design Award for developing the AuthaGraph World Map, a groundbreaking projection that preserves the true proportions of continents & oceans
• For new #rust folks coming from #python - if you find yourself thinking "Surely Rust has a pprint like prettyprinter for data structures?"
• Sushi Etiquette
• I have to take this call.. | webcomic
• #tinyCSSsnippet I've been shocked 🙀 to learn has been slept on | Stack all the things

Out of Context Images

Days of the week no longer exist. There is only thinking of what to eat, eating, and dreaming of eating --Dave

During the final week of 2024, I had to battle with Traefik to enable larger video uploads. Honestly, I'm tempted to go on a rant about this - Traefik is easily the most challenging piece of software to configure in my entire web stack.

Articles

• Frontend
  • CSS margin-trim and line height units
  • How to Use Baseline Data
• Python / AI
  • Finally, a Replacement for BERT: Introducing ModernBERT | Cool!
  • What We’ve Learned From A Year of Building with LLMs
• Home Assistant Voice | Tempting
• Fish 4.0: The Fish Of Theseus | Fish shell rewrite in Rust
• Stagnation With Chinese Characteristics
• on neuschwanstein castle (part 1)
• Open Data Düsseldorf | Some open data about my home town. Maybe I can do something with that?

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 51: December 16 to December 22 | Johannes - you should hire him!

Software

• Ghostty | Nice new terminal emulator. I'm using kitty most of the time, but it's nice to have options.
• Scrapy & JavaScript integration through Splash | Used splash last time in 2016, almost forgot how nice it was 😁
• lichess.org

Fediverse

• here's a demo of what can be done in CSS WITHOUT JavaScript | Wow!

Out of Context Images

I have been asked to stop referring to LinkedIn as "Grindr for Business" --ncl

It's the final work week of the year. There were some exciting LLM releases last week, with impressive benchmark scores - particularly o3's performance on ARC-AGI, FrontierMath, and SWE-bench. 2025 is shaping up to be an interesting year, and I'm planning to spend more time exploring how to put these models to practical use.

Articles

• Frontend
  • CSS text-wrap
  • Declarative shadow DOM enables seamless server-side rendering for the web platform
  • CSS light-dark()
  • BroadcastChannel API
• Python / AI
  • Essential Python web security
  • OpenAI o3 Breakthrough high Score on arc-agi-pub | I honestly didn't expect it to happen so soon. It really changes my expectations of what can be done. Big deal. 🍾
  • Gemini 2.0 Flash “Thinking mode”
  • Building Python tools with a one-shot prompt using uv run and Claude Projects
  • Is AI progress slowing down?
• Judith Butler, philosopher: ‘If you sacrifice a minority like trans people, you are operating within a fascist logic’

Weeknotes

• December in LLMs has been a lot | Simon Willison

Software

• Minimizing Rust Binary Size
• MarkItDown is a utility tool for converting various files to Markdown
• django-js-asset -- script tag with additional attributes for django.forms.Media
• Bodo: High-Performance Python Compute Engine for Data and AI

i still think my favourite thing that's ever happened to me on the internet is the time a guy said "people change their minds when you show them facts" and I said "actually studies show that's not true" and linked TWO sources and he said "yeah well I still think it works" --Catherine na Nollag

Our washer/dryer broke down. My wife tried to repair it, but it turned out to be completely dead. During our repair attempts, we had to shut off the water supply to the kitchen, which basically made the kitchen unusable too. On the plus side, I did manage to get some productive doomscrolling done while anxiously waiting to see if the new machine would drain properly. Word of advice: try not to deal with this kind of hassle right before Christmas.

Articles

• AI and ML
  • Gemini 2.0 Flash: An outstanding multi-modal LLM with a sci-fi streaming mode
  • AI’s Transformative Impact On Web Design: Supercharging Productivity Across The Industry | Pretty upbeat article with lots of sources
• Frontend
  • Web Almanac 2024 published
  • The Lowdown on Dropdowns in HTML & CSS | How to do standard UI stuff without Javascript
  • View Transitions API: Single Page Apps Without a Framework
  • New CSS that can actually be used in 2024
  • Your CSS reset should be layered
• 3 shell scripts to improve your writing, or "My Ph.D. advisor rewrote himself in bash | good advice

Fediverse

• Doing a (brief) presentation Monday on long term software development (>10 years). Things you regret in year 8. I'd love to hear things you found out and wished you'd done differently. Or conversely, what worked out really well. Will turn this into a public presentation & blog post. To kick it off: PLEASE KEEP YOUR CODE AS SIMPLE AS POSSIBLE. | Good 🧵
• OpenAI Sora is out | Runway works in EU

Stuff

• The Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group : A Database of Synthetic Taxonomy
• Fair fashion basics
• Introducing Limbo: A complete rewrite of SQLite in Rust | Interesting
• An official logo for CSS | CSS has a new logo

Out of Context Images