Ephes Blog

I think we all learned a valuable lesson from this: Never ship. --Tyler Hillsman

With vacation just around the corner, work has been pretty light. I attended the Django Cologne Meetup and watched an interesting talk about Django background tasks. It’s great to think about not having to deal with Celery anymore. I also recorded and published a podcast episode on the Python Data Model. Then, I wrote a piece on implementing Django with SSO and managed to release a new version of django-cast (though there aren’t many updates).

I encountered a strange issue where some command line tools written in Rust (bat, exa) stopped working, showing error messages like this:

Calling brew reinstall bat fixed it.

Articles

• Microsoft Research Introduces AgentInstruct: A Multi-Agent Workflow Framework for Enhancing Synthetic Data Quality and Diversity in AI Model Training | A single GPU model outperforming GPT3.5? Cool!
• Imitation Intelligence, my keynote for PyCon US 2024
• Friday Deploy Freezes Are Exactly Like Murdering Puppies | Seems about the right time to repost this
• The PSF Board Election Results For 2024: What I Think
• Physics Simulations in Bevy
• Mining JIT traces for missing optimizations with Z3

Videos

• I tried using AI. It scared me. | Hmm, it does not scare me. And Napster also didn't. I'm always happy about new stuff you can use to do cool stuff.
• DjangoCon Europe 2024 | Fast on my machine: How to debug slow requests in production
• DjangoCon Europe 2024 | Data Oriented Django Deux

Software

• aseprite - Animated Sprite Editor
• django-readers - A lightweight function-oriented toolkit for better organisation of business logic and efficient selection and projection of data in Django projects
• Zettlr - Your One-Stop Publication Workbench

Fediverse

• When I worked at a cloud infrastructure company I evaluated some “endpoint management” security agent software | Thread on this crowdstrike disaster
• Any sufficiently advanced "endpoint protection" software is indistinguishable from malware.

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 28: July 08 to July 14 | Johannes
• Weeknotes: GPT-4o mini, LLM 0.15, sqlite-utils 3.37 and building a staging environment | Simon Willison
• Months in Review | Luis 😄

somehow instead of saying “as a treat”, I’ve started using the phrase “for morale”, as if my body is a ship and its crew, and I (the captain) have to keep us in high spirits, lest we suffer a mutiny in the coming days.

and so I will eat this small block of fancy cheese, for morale. I will take a break and drink some tea, for morale. I will pick up that weird bug, for morale.

I’m not sure if it helps, but it does entertain me --Second Beat Songs

Started writing an article about SSO with Django, which I'll likely publish next week. Unfortunately, no time for open source projects this week.

I'm also getting used to my new camera. While the basic handling and lenses are the same, the post-processing is quite different. I’ve been using Apple Photos for the past few years and was quite happy with it. However, the new Nikon raw files aren't supported, so I have to decide between using a raw to DNG converter, as I discussed last week, or Nikon NX Studio. Currently, I'm trying the latter, but Nikon's software is somewhat odd. In some ways, it's fantastic — colors are great, you can use the same picture control settings as on your camera, and even upload custom looks to the camera. On the downside, it has serious memory leaks, quickly consuming all of my 32GB of RAM, and is also quite slow, requiring frequent restarts.

Articles

• Locality of Behaviour | Yep, nice description.
• Accessing 1Password items from the terminal
• Finding Simple Rewrite Rules for the JIT with Z3

Weeknotes

• Weeknotes for Week 27: July 1 to 7 | Jeff Triplett
• Weeklog for Week 27: July 01 to July 07 | Johannes

Videos

• Home-cooked Software and Barefoot Programmers: Maggie Appleton (Local-First Conf) | Barefoot Programmer 😆
• DjangoCon Europe 2024 Vigo | YouTube playlist of all talks 🥳
• DjangoCon Europe 2024 | API Maybe: Bootstrapping a Web Application circa 2024 | Yes
• Kasey Chambers - Lose Yourself (Eminem Cover) LIVE @ Civic Theatre, Newcastle AU | Whoa, what did I just see?

Fediverse

• Carl Sagan about military budget | If all people were playing the longest possible game, this would be true, but...
• I’m not trying to start a religious war, but what’s the community consensus these days on overriding Django’s built-in User model vs OneToOneField to it from a separate Profile model? | Yep, standard user model with unique email...
• I have a weird #ADHD lifehack that has been so effective that it's a little embarrassing, so I feel like I need to share it. | Always share your ADHD lifehacks, plz!
• In other words: 2024 reality, if you’re a SaaS provider, infostealers and cyber crime groups are a competitor - you have to be shit hot at authentication (even if it inconveniences the customer) | AT&T lost some data..

Out of Context Images

ZIZEK: that AI will be the death of learning & so on; to this, I say NO! My student brings me their essay, which has been written by AI, & I plug it into my grading AI, & we are free! While the 'learning' happens, our superego satisfied, we are free now to learn whatever we want --Zack Brown

Workwise, last week was quite busy. However, I managed to attend a meeting of PyDDF, our local Python user group, which was great. I also recorded and published a podcast episode about the DjangoCon Europe 2024 conference. Then I had to roll out a security update for Mastodon, which usually requires minimal maintenance, and updated Takahē along with it. There was also a new release of django-cast, which includes some bug fixes and a new feature: subtitles for blogs.

Here's a tip I discovered while trying to import pictures from my new camera: If you use Apple Photos to manage your pictures and it doesn't read RAW files from newer cameras, you can use the free Adobe DNG Converter to convert RAW files to DNG and then import them into Apple Photos. Unfortunately, it's not possible to preserve changes made in Nikon NX Studio, which has the best RAW support for Nikon cameras, when converting the RAW files to DNG.

Articles

• With Fifth Busy Beaver, Researchers Approach Computation’s Limits | Cellular automata are similar: It’s astonishing how a few simple rules can create incredibly complex structures. Or we are just bad at deducting the simple rules behind complicated fluff.
• The 2024 PSF Board Election is Open!

Weeknotes

• Weeknotes: a livestream, a surprise keynote and progress on Datasette Cloud billing | Simon Willison
• Weeklog for Week 26: June 24 to June 30 | Johannes

Videos

• Bevy Engine 0.14 - Open Source ECS-based game development in Rust | New release!

Fediverse / Twitter

• ▲ + 🐍 | Hehe, look who caught the htmx bug..

Software

• Python Polars 1.0.0 | 1.0 Release 🥳
• Psycopg 3.2 released
• eGenix PyRun is an Apache licensed, open-source, compressed, single file Python compatible run-time, which fits into merely 5-6 MB on disk | Now on github!
• Runwayml - A new frontier for high-fidelity, controllable video generation | Has a little bit more focus on the artist perspective, interesting.
• Bevycation of Brackeys First Game in Godot Tutorial | A bit more sophisticated compared to the platformer example from bevy_ecs_ldtk
• LLMs for the working programmer | LLM workshop by Manuel Odendahl

Out of Context Images

ACARS Message From: C-FWJS/WS0456

Message: HI. I JUST ACCIDENTLY CLEARED AN ACARS MESSAGE BEFORE WE COULD READ IT. DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT WAS ABOUT..... --ACARS Drama

I made numerous small fixes and improvements to django-cast. I also dabbled in Rust game development again and can now draw 2D maps in LDtk and load them into a game. It's just a small step forward, but I didn't struggle with the compiler as much as I anticipated - I'm starting to like Rust.

The weather has been lovely lately, so we bought a barbecue and visited a nearby zoo.

Articles

• How Neanderthal language differed from modern human – they probably didn’t use metaphors
• The time for designers to learn to code is now | Do it.
• Situational Awareness- The Decade Ahead | Overly optimistic in my opinion, because trendlines can just stop for all kinds of reasons (GANs are not stable and kind of dead by now, there are good reasons to believe that generative models have some fundamental limitations, and semisupervised learning does not yet work for anything but textual data...). But still interesting.

Videos

• Language models on the command-line | Fantastic talk
• Whole Earth Flashbacks | Whole Earth Catalog documentary
• Web Design Engineering With the New CSS | Matthias Ott | CSS Day 2024 | Solid talk - and yes, I'm looking into CSS for the same reason atm.

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 25: June 17 to June 23 | Johannes
• Weeknotes for Week 25: June 17 to 23 | Jeff Triplett

TIL

• Unwrapping functools.wraps: How to Remove Decorators from a Python Function

Fediverse

• Periodic reminder that NIST does not approve of expiring passwords.

Software

• LLM - A CLI utility and Python library for interacting with Large Language Models, both via remote APIs and models that can be installed and run on your own machine
• files-to-prompt - Concatenate a directory full of files into a single prompt for use with LLMs
• ttok - This tool can count tokens, using OpenAI's tiktoken library.
• Django 5.1 beta 1 released

Out of Context Images

I really hate these new "Dyson Airblade" urinals --Souvlaki Space Station

Still battling this stomach bug. Managed to get some work done but didn't have much time for anything else. Filed a PR to fix last week's Wagtail issue and got the alt text for cover images working. Visited old friends near Stuttgart over the weekend for a party.

Articles

• Claude 3.5 Sonnet | Nice

Music

• The Aristocrats - Get it like that (Culture clash tour - Tokyo) | wow

Software

• htmx 2.0.0 has been released! | 🥳
• NumPy 2.0: an evolutionary milestone

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 24: June 10 to June 16 | Johannes
• Weeknotes: Datasette Studio and a whole lot of blogging | Simon Willison

TILs

• Python String Capitalization

Fediverse

• I've been bitten by yet another bug in #Celery. What are my options in a #Django world if I would potentially move away?
• person: "you should write a zine about X!" me: "unfortunately I don't really understand X!" person: "well you could learn about it, that could be cool!" | This is also a nice explanation why journalism cannot work
• a $INSTANCE$host$ user walks into a bar. the bartender says $INSTANCE$description$ | Hrhr
• This is possibly my least (most?) favorite #PythonOddity | Oh wow!