Ephes Blog

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool." (Feynman)

Started working on a new project, which is always exciting. Refactored django-cast filters.py -> it's almost readable now 😆. Facet counts are now available via the API, so cast-vue got an update showing filters for categories and tags.

Articles

• Composition over inheritance: The case for function-based views | Hmm, I don't have a strong preference for function based views over class based ones. It depends, I guess 😇.
• Building a blog in Django | Quite minimalistic, but if you don't have a lot of requirements, doing something like this seems perfectly fine
• CSS Selectors: A Visual Guide | Visual!
• Supercharge Your Django App: 7 Sneaky Tricks to Crush Slow Database Queries | I need to look into db performance for django-cast, too. Maybe write a blog post about it later...

Mastodon / Twitter

• ok but does this come in human sizes | Toot showing an image of a dog wearing a "not friendly do not touch" warning west
• If you haven't tried fine tuning yet drop everything and do it. It's a magical experience. | About fine tuning open source LLMs - yes, have to try that, but drop everything else 🥶?
• Cost: Summarizing 100x 1,000-word passages costs ~$5.48 with GPT-4 but only 19 cents with Llama-2-70b using Anyscale Endpoints. | Stop trying to convince me to drop everything else, plz!

Software

• Djangonaut Program / djangonaut.space | Cool project!
• Finetuning Large Language Models | Online course
• Announcing Python in Excel: Combining the power of Python and the flexibility of Excel | I knew something like this was coming, so not really a surprise - but cool to see it launched!
• Hemingway is now Hemingw-AI! My favourite writing tool just got an AI upgrade and it’s great | Personally, I use a combination of GPT-4, deepL write and grammarly - but maybe I should try Hemingway too.
• List of a UI toolkits for vue so I can search for it later..
  • Quasar - The enterprise-ready cross-platform VueJs framework
  • NuxtUI - Fully styled and customizable components for Nuxt
  • Anu - Build better interfaces faster
  • Vuestic - Vue 3 UI Framework
  • Vuetify - Vue Component Framework
  • Windi UI - Build Accessible Apps 10x faster
  • Radix - Start building your app now
  • shadcn - Build your component library

Podcasts

• Making Parsing I/O Bound with Daniel Lemire (Software Unscripted)
• Wirtschaft - Warum nachhaltiger Kapitalismus nicht funktioniert (Hörsaal) | This was surprisingly good!
• SE Radio 577: Casey Muratori on Clean Code, Horrible Performance? (Software Engineering Radio) | Yep, good one
• Revision 581: TypeScript 5.2 (Working Draft)

We begin in admiration and end by organizing our disappointment. --Gaston Bachelard

Attended a local Django meetup in Cologne and had to learn that the one in Cologne is unfortunately the last active Django meetup in Germany 😢. The topic was django CMS which I knew nothing about, and I was surprised how similar it is to Wagtail which I use a lot.

Added a categories/tags feature (beta) to django-cast, which I postponed because I was afraid that messing with the faceted navigation code in filters.py (based on django-filter) would be hard. It turned out to be as hard as I expected, but now it's done 😅.

On Saturday we went hiking in the Neandertal 🥾, because that's where I live. And we managed to leave it the way you want to find it: as a fascinating puzzle for archaeologists. We did this by throwing a baby carriage (without the baby) into the Düssel (the river that formed the valley).

Articles

• AI Tools for the distracted developer | Cool stuff!

Websites

• Are we web yet?
• AreWeRustYet

Videos

• FrOSCon 2023 Videos dropped

Books

• The Little Typer | Trying to wrap my head around this type theory thing

Just as most people are not going to stop eating fast food because home cooking is better, they’re not going to abandon social media because blogging is awesome. But that doesn’t mean you have to line up for a Big Mac. And it doesn’t mean your internet experience has to suck --Mike Grindle

Normal working week. Improved media file backup for django-cast (#99) and wrote a TIL blog post about how to test Django management commands with pytest. Attended a rust meetup for the first time and am now looking for a use case for rust as it seems to be really cool (I learned static typing via Java and got burned, but static typing in rust is much better - might be time to revisit that).

Articles

• CPython without a global interpreter lock
• Things you forgot (or never knew) because of React
• [Idiomatic Rust] Making Illegal States Unrepresentable
• Budgeting for software projects in “scrum team years.”
• What’s Next? | hrhr
• Classic articles about the web
  • The Web’s Grain
  • A Dao of Web Design

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 31: July 31 to August 06 | Johannes

Mastodon / Twitter

• Blood Red Flags | Webcomic
• I need to upload this to my voicemail | Audio-snippet
• A recent paper claimed that "GPT 4 Can't Reason". Using the custom instructions below, here are the (all correct) responses to the first 3 examples I tried from that paper | Custom instructions are pretty powerful

Software

• ZIO | Async done right?
• Python 3.12.0 release candidate 1 released | Well, I guess I have to start testing now...

Books

• Programming Rust, 2nd Edition | Looks very good

Podcasts

• Revision 578: Host Context: Schepp (Working Draft)
• RZ113 CERN: Der ALICE-Detektor (raumzeit)
• #82 The Future of Programming (Happy Path Programming)

Mit so radikalen Aktionen wird das Klima absolut nichts erreichen. --Christoph Dolna-Gruber

The new Wagtail 5.1 release broke the video and audio choosers in django-cast so there's a new release 0.2.17 that fixes that. While I was at it, I also added some more documentation for the video and audio features. Lots of distractions this week with school and kindergarten stuff, but hopefully things will pick up soon 😅.

Last week I picked up a musical instrument for the first time in over two years. I hadn't been able to play before because I just didn't have the time. Now I'm thinking about getting back into the habit.

Articles

• On Being Useful | Yeah, struggle with that one too
• Taming the beast: Python Package Maintenance Made Simple | Interesting - I still do not have a good solution for this problem..
• Large language models, explained with a minimum of math and jargon | Good article!
• Catching up on the weird world of LLMs
• Message from the family of Bram Moolenaar | Sad news: the creator of vim has died (my editor of choice for the last 25 years..)
• Emergent Deception and Emergent Optimization

Software

• Software Engineering Body of Knowledge (SWEBOK) | Ok, didn't know about that one 😬
• View Transitions + Drag n Drop | Pure CSS in latest Chrome
• NewHope: Harnessing 99% of GPT-4's Programming Capabilities | Open source LLM based on llama2 for coding

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 30: July 24 to July 30 | Johannes
• Science and Technology links (August 6 2023) | Daniel Lemire
• Weeknotes: Plugins for LLM, sqlite-utils and Datasette | Simon Willison

Videos

• 2023 – Podlove - Neuerungen 4 | Interesting, podlove now uses tailwind UI, auphonic plugin is new etc
• python 3.12 release highlights (beginner - advanced) anthony explains
• So sieht Quantenphysiker Anton Zeilinger die Welt | Sternstunde Religion | SRF Kultur | Ok

Podcasts

• FS267 Gesichtsmuffe (Freakshow) | More about Apple -> not bad
• Mit smarter Planwirtschaft gegen die Probleme unserer Zeit (Sein und Streit) | Oh boy. Why are people from the humanities often so naive and sloppy with their terms? Especially AI? And how could you call yourself a journalist if you don't manage to ask one critical question when your interview partner constantly makes fringe claims? A really low point.
• Welche Bedeutung schreiben Sie der Null zu? (Das philosophische Radio) | Is this the week of weak podcast episodes? Another really bad one. If you have some basic mathematical understanding listening to this is pure cringe.
• Ein Blick auf die Publisher 4 Beta (Podlovers) | Cool! This podcast is not dead yet 🎉
• Joscha Bach: Life, Intelligence, Consciousness, AI & the Future of Humans (Lex Fridman Podcast) | So much better. At 1:38 the possibility of having less formal languages that then are translated into "real" programming languages by a LLM is discussed. At 1:50 golems are pointed out as a useful metaphor for LLMs. Spot on.