Ephes Blog

Progress on having a landing page where people can create podcasts/blogs:

• Wrote some tests for cast_registry
• Fixed some deprecation warnings
• Enabled a custom admin url for production
• I wanted to add a "remove this blog"-feature to cast_registry to make it easier for me to test deployments. My time estimate for this feature would have been "just a few hours". But this story kept spawning sub-issues and getting bigger and bigger. The initial estimation would have been far off. What would be more valuable: Stick to the original estimate and promise myself to fx it later or fix it now and forget about my estimation? My lesson from situations like this is that estimates are pretty worthless. I just try to maximize the value of the thing I'm working on and don't do any estimations. Below are some of the sub-issues 😅.
  • Just store the last seen deployment in the session and compare it with a newly fetched one to determine new steps to show to the client
  • Move deployment metadata into its own model | I tried to be more verbose on my thought process here, let's see whether it helps

Articles

• He Dropped Out to Become a Poet. Now He’s Won a Fields Medal
• Using GPT-3 to explain how code works

YouTube

• Hyperscript and HTMX - Form Examples with Django
• Lisa Eckhart – Ist das lustig? (Sternstunde Philosophie)

Websites

• StackExchange: Seasoned Advice | There's a stackoverflow site for cooking 🍲
• Use GPT-3 to turn english description of a regex into an actual regex

Twitter

• isinstance() can check for multiple types. Python 3.10 makes it more convenient with pipes for unions
• starting the day like
• Operators in #Python can be implemented with dunder methods. >> is __rshift__, << is __lshift__, etc. They can even do strange things like modify the object!
• An ancient and unspeakable horror from the dawn of OOP.
• Too many ppl seem to use Jira's breathtakingly incorrect definitions of story, epic, task—one way that using Jira distorts your process away from agility. What are they really? 1/7
• The point of agile ways of working is to deliver more value. Not more value faster. More value period.
• everything about this is so quotable
• A simple lexical analyer (tokenizer) with #Python regular expressions. Uses regex verbose mode "(?x)", and match.lastgroup to know what kind of token was found.
• When people say they can estimate accurately, here's what usually happens
• As you can guess, this #Python program prints "Hello, world!". But how!? 🤯 😎 Also: don't do this! 😡

Books

• Das Ultraschall-Handbuch

Podcasts

• Tetra: A Full Stack Web Framework That Doesn't Make You Write Everything Twice - Episode 369 (Podcast.__init__) | It's very closely related to laravels livewire, but for django
• One of the master artists of our time, Richard Tuttle joins to talk about his 60+ year career that has revolutionized the landscape of temporary art (Design Matters) | Interesting definition of art: It's the thing you are able to care the most about
• Episode 60: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics (Hotel Bar Sessions) | Good episode, but the hosts demonstate by themselves how hard it is to distinguish between mistakes and damned lies, because it contained two points which could be counted as both:
  • Leigh stated that we do not know about the long term effects of vaccination. This is wrong. We know that vaccinations do not have long term effects (how should this even be possible?). In past vaccination campaigns it took time to be able to see the short term effects, because the events were rare and sample size was small (only a fraction of people got vaccinated). In the covid case the sample size is huge and we should have seen the effects immediately if there were any.
  • Switching from transmission to hospitalization statistics was criticized. But you have to do it at some point. Transmission does not tell you much about risk if most of the people getting infected are vaccinated or were previously infected. The case fatality ratio has dropped about an order of magnitude. Investing in warning people about transmission now only pays off in moral appearance but does not help (thoughts and prayers).
• Wie bleiben Sie integer? (Das philosophische Radio) | Good content, but poor audio quality.
• Engineering Stack Overflow with Roberta Arcoverde (The Hanselminutes Podcast) | Strong recommendation. Stack overflow is a rare example of a good system built on top of the microsoft stack. Checks many points on my list of things that are actually the right thing to do, but most people wont believe if you told them: No cloud, no microservices, just 9 webservers + good networking and a database with 1.5TB of memory on prem.

Progress on having a landing page where people can create podcasts:

• Made cast_registry use postgres instead of sqlite, mainly because it's easier to integrate into existing backup / monitoring.
• Automated deployment / removal for cast_registry
• Created a service for fastdeploy to be able to deploy / remove single cast hosting instances (a podcast or blog)
• Being able to deploy a podcast / blog via a cast_registry instance running on my staging environment 🥳

Articles

• Der Juni 2022 im Chaosdorf | Kind of a monthlog of my local hackerspace
• Fossil Versus Git
• PHP The Right Way | Since I have to take a look at php anyway (deploying wordpress) it would be helpful to do it the right way, for sure 🤓

Twitter

• This is really smart, especially the second part which borders on genius. | Asking this question would have saved me from serious pain
• MINNEAPOLIS GOTHIC
• Python makes it easy to take a flat list of key/value data and turn them into a real dictionary / Personally prefer to make an iterator and zip over it twice, no need to have multiple lists
• It's summer and I want an icecream!
• List slices in #Python can have a step: a third number to include every Nth element. You can assign to these also. Let's find primes with them! 😎
• This is a mathematics joke
• A comic making fun of python using 'if __name__ == "main"'

Software

• PyWebIO | Hmm, is this an alternative to plotly dash?

Podcasts

• Peter Sloterdijk zum 75. Geburtstag „Es braucht eine neue Ethik für das Zusammenleben mit der Erde“ (Sein und Streit)
• Kunsthistoriker Matthias Müller - Frühe Neuzeit wie heute: Pracht und Luxus sozialer Aufsteiger (Hörsaal)
• attrs and dataclasses - Hynek Schlawack (Test & Code in Python)
• Joscha Bach on AI, Cosmology, Existence and the Bible (Singularity Podcast)
• WR1372 Pfützen für die Wissenschaft (WRINT: Wissenschaft)
• Read The Docs - Eric Holscher (Django Chat)
• Ansible: config management & deploying code with James Cammarata from Red Hat (The Syscast podcast)
• Episode #290: Sentient AI? If so, then what? (Python Bytes) | I like that someone else is reading all the python news and I just have to listen to a podcast to stay up to date. I also like the topics and even the hosts. But sometimes the content quality of this podcast is kind of bad (almost as bad as journalistic publications). This AI story is complete bullshit and it took me about 5 minutes of using google to find out.
• Revision 532: Infrastructure as Code (Working Draft)

Tried to use this new 9€ Ticket for a trip we would normally use a car for and it was possible, but not comfortable :).

Not much work this week due to covid. But I started to work on my own projects again and got a lot of deployment stuff done:

• Automated the deployment of a JupyterHub server to be able to give attendees of a python training just a username/password-combination and an url. This caused more work than expected, but at least I'm pretty sure now covid didn't rob me of my admin-mojo. Thanks jupyterhub. Things that turned out kind of unexpected:
  • The jupyterhub package did not require pycurl, jupyter_server and jupyterlab, but wouldn't work correctly without them being installed (for example getting a 404 on starting a users jupyterlab server)
  • Adding system users via jupyterhub admin UI adds system users, but removing them via admin UI removes them only from the jupyterhub sqlite, not the system, whoa. It also adds a valid login-shell to added users, which is not needed for jupyterhub, but makes forgetting to remove deleted users especially dangerous (ok, skipped jupyerhub useradding, just using ansible)
  • Had to set c.Spawner.cmd = ['/path/to/venv/bin/jupyterhub-singleuser'] in the config, dunno why (probably because of the venv, but it's the one jupyterhub itself is running from, well)
  • There are two attempts to provide a simplified installation for jupyterhub: The Littlest JupyterHub and Zero to JupyterHub with Kubernetes - for me, they caused more confusion than help. Just installing jupyterhub via pip and playing around til it showed a notebook worked for me, finally.
• Automated the deployment of WordPress
  • Automated the deployment of MariaDB. The trickiest part was how to set the initial root password.
  • After being able to deploy MariaDB, it was only a small step to be able to deploy WordPress on my own infrastructure. Never thought I would do something like this. The trickiest part was to get wordpress to run behind a ssl terminating reverse proxy (had to set some additional request headers at the loadbalancer + some variables in wp-config.php). Why is there this weird installation script greeting you after you installed wordpress? This whole wordpress environment feels really strange and quirky. Didn't managed to get podlove publisher to work, maybe next week :).

Articles

• Moving from Svelte to HTMX | Resonates with me
• The Grug Brained Developer A layman's guide to thinking like the self-aware smol brained | Very good
• “Don’t Mock What You Don’t Own” in 5 Minutes
• First impressions of DALL-E, generating images from text

Twitter

• fundamental axioms that are false
• Well I REALLY don't like how similar all these pictures of "Crungus", a made up word I made up. Why are they all the same man? Is the Crungus real? Have I discovered a secret cryptid?
• ich mag auch dass da der apostroph gesetzt ist | Hegel's Angels! Where do I have to sign?
• The next() #python built-in lets you work with iterators directly. It has a default value to return if there are no more values in the iterator. This is extra-useful if you expect one or none:

Websites

• Daily Nous | News for and about the philosophy profession
• AI model drawing images from any prompt!

Books

• Safe Haven: Investing for Financial Storms | Main point is that risk mitigation is not a tradeoff against profit, but instead it should be cost effective (increase  profit while reducing risk)
• The Art of PostgreSQL

Podcasts

• WR1374 Wrintheit in the Middle (Wrintheit)
• LOV022 podlove.org Relaunch mit Martin Fischer (Podlovers Podcast)
• Sonderfolge: Hybridimmunität (Das Coronavirus-Update)
• Testing PyPy - Carl Friedrich Bolz-Tereick (Test & Code in Python)
• Episode 153: Single Page Application vs Multi Page Application with Rich Harris (Web Rush) | Rich Harris is a great guest, but I don't like the podcast (too many hosts, lame jokes etc).
• Episode 57: Philosophers on the Internet (Hotel Bar Sessions) | Lots of great resources
• Leben zwischen Beharrlichkeit und Veränderung (Was denkst du denn?)

Finally got covid, felt like shit for three days, getting better now. Not much besides covid and some work this week.

Articles

• Johannes Weeklog
• Money and Finance in the Macro-Economic Process
• The best vision models for fine-tuning | Jeremy Howard latest work on finetuning with image models.. applied to a kaggle competition: First Steps: Road to the Top, Part 1 | including videos Walkthru 8 Walkthru 9 Walkthru 10 Walkthru 11 Walkthru 12 Walkthru 13

Twitter

• If you want to generate a tree view of a specific structure such as files in a directory, use rich.tree. rich also allows you to add color to each branch
• I would be much more proud of this new t-shirt had it not been recommended to me by Amazon
• Just learned about the unittest.mock.ANY object in Python. Super useful for assertions: >>> assert f() == (42, ANY) # ignore the second item
• renting and returning ten books a day from my local library while subtlety increasing the size of my cranium with latex and makeup until they say something | Hrhr
• Women's Pockets are Inferior | If you ever needed some data about this, here it is..

Software

• Tetra: Full stack reactive component framework for Django using Alpine.js
• drf-spectacular - Sane and flexible OpenAPI 3.0 schema generation for Django REST framework
• OpenAPI Generator | OpenAPI Generator allows generation of API client libraries (SDK generation), server stubs, documentation and configuration automatically given an OpenAPI Spec 

YouTube

• Why π^π^π^π could be an integer (for all we know!)

  >>> math.pi ** math.pi ** math.pi ** math.pi
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "", line 1, in 
  OverflowError: (34, 'Result too large')
  

  Worth a shot 🙃
• Slavoj Žižek – Die Revolution und das Reale | Sternstunde Philosophie | SRF Kultur

Podcasts

• Bits und so #796 (Messy by Default) (Bits und so)
• (114) Mit BA.4 und BA.5 in den Sommer (Das Coronavirus-Update) | Listening to this episode while staying in bed because of covid (probably BA.5)
• Porno in geil – Passen Feminismus und Pornografie zusammen? – mit Paulita Pappel (Sexindustrie 1/2) (Lila Podcast) | Thought this might be entertaining while having to stay in bed. Meh. I don't believe that banning some content would  magically improve the remaining stuff. Most movies are bad, most books are not really good - hell, even most source code is crap. It might sound pessimistic, but imho the best we can hope for is that most content will stay esthetically unsatisfying with some rare exceptions. Making those exceptions possible is the best we can do.
• Geoffrey Hinton (Part Two) (The Robot Brains Podcast) | Big recommendation

Spent lots of time on the road. But also went outsides and enjoyed the great weather. Met a lot of people and attended a circus performance. Covid hit very very close.. still unsure whether it missed. Finished the post-production of a podcast episode about databases.

Articles

• Johannes Weeklog
• How to play with the GPT-3 language model
• Adding a dunder to an object | How to spy on attribute changes
• Python Type Hints - How to Use TypedDict | For runtime type checking on dicts see trycast
• Speed Needs Design, or: You can’t delight users you’ve annoyed | This whole article series is great. It's about building a version of the Kroger e-commerce site that works on the slow phones they are selling over there - via Simon Willison

Twitter

• Here's a PDF for a #Python #PyConIT2022 talk: Structural Pattern Matching in the Real World: New tooling, real code, problems solved | Great presentation
• If you need a simple ad-hoc #Python object, you can use types.SimpleNamespace

YouTube

• PyCon 20220 Keynote - Łukasz Langa | How to use type annotations - great talk!
• Miroslav Šedivý: There Are Python 2 Relics in Your Code | Catch up with PyCon DE talks
• Adam Serafini: Speeding up Python with Zig | Catch up with PyCon DE talks
• 1000x faster data manipulation: vectorizing with Pandas and Numpy

Books

• Einführung in Python3 | Hmm

Podcasts

• FG094 Vulkanologie (Forschergeist) | Really nice, didn't know the Eifel-vulcans were still active.
• WR1370 The Aging Hypothesis, Übergewinne und Zölle (Wirtschaftskunde)
• Bits und so #795 (Expect Delays) (Bits und so)