Weeknotes 2022-05-30
,Short work week, but didn't get much done besides work. Spent a lot of time outsides which is good.
Articles
- Johannes Weeklog
- The Python GIL: Past, Present, and Future | I quite don't get why async and GIL are often talked about together.. I suspect this is very confusing especially for beginners
- Arc Note: Datasette - Simon Willison
- Völkerstrafrecht: Eine neue Weltordnung | Surprise, it's the old one 😁
- daily reminder that htmx isn't the only game in hypermedia town
- Scrum is quite reasonable once you get rid of Sprints and SMs and POs and Backlogs and Sprint Reviews and certificates and org-wide standardization on a rigid framework. A few minor tweaks, and it's perfectly Agile. | 😇
- Just two tapirs being brushed
- One single type of payment terminal (the Verifone H5000), a rather old platform, officially announced End of Life 2018 with some sort of support until 2023, brought down big parts of card payment all over Germany as one of the embedded certificates expired unnoticed on Tuesday. | Ran into this on Saturday
- Woah. I just learned that HTML file inputs can access photos, videos, and audio captured directly by the device's camera and microphone like this | Regular reminder about awesome things you can do using just html
YouTube
Podcasts
- UKW098 Ukraine: Der Kot des Präsidenten ist ein Staatsgeheimnis (unsere kleine welt)
- #791 (Mehrspaßdennje) (Bits und so)
- #792 (Casino Taxi Royale) (Bits und so)
- Geistiges Eigentum und Gemeinwohl - Die Moral der Kopie (Sein und Streit)
- 47 - OpenTelemetry with Ted Young (Software at Scale)
- European XFEL - Röntgenlaser mit Python (Python Podcast)
- Kabarett, Performancedruck, Erfrischungstücher (Schroeder & Somuncu)
- Philosophin Nancy Fraser: „Wir leben in einer Zeit morbider Symptome“ (Sein und Streit) | If you can only listen to one episode listed here: Listen to this one.
Weeknotes 2022-05-23
,Haven't done much besides work and spending leasure time outside due to the good weather. Managed to record a podcast episode about European XFEL X-ray laser. Went to Japantag, wow, where have all those people been? In the evening Charan-Po-Rantan with Kankan Balkan played on the main stage. This was the first live concert I attended after more than two years and it was great.
Articles
- Johannes Weeklog
- Unfinished Business with Postgres | Great article about the history of postgres at heroku
- How we reduced 502 errors by caring about PID 1 in Kubernetes | This is one good example why I don't like kubernetes: people use it to avoid having to care about those pesky details, but in the end have to wrestle with even peskier stuff.
- The balance has shifted away from SPAs | It's about time.
- Introducing Accelerated PyTorch Training on Mac | PyTorch got some support for Apple Silicon
- What is #dataviz animation good for? A thread with examples
- 10 iPhone hacks I guarantee you don't know | I didn't now about 4 of them, still worth to read it :)
- The older I get, the more I believe in people over process | Same here.
YouTube
- Full talk for our PLDI 2021 paper- High performance Correctly Rounded Math Libraries
- Stefan Behnel: Fast native data structures: C/C++ from Python | Being fast using Python might be easier than you think
Podcasts
- David Chalmers on AI and Consciousness (The Gradient Podcast)
- Politik - Liberale Demokratie – eine Verteidigung (Hörsaal)
- RZ100 Raumzeit und Gravitation (raumzeit)
- Episode 54: Algorithms (Hotel Bar Sessions) | Ok, listening to people talk about a topic where I have some expertise still does not spark joy. There are just so many errors in the assumptions, you can't conclude anything (or everything). For example: Algorithm != Model / No, you don't need more complex algorithms if you collect more data, paradoxically it's the other way around (The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data) / ...
- Sonderfolge: Achtet auf die Kinder! (Das Coronavirus-Update)
- WR1361 Nubsiversand für 18 (WRINT Realitätsabgleich)
- K#393 Millionen Gewürze von Just Spices mit Florian Falk (Kassenzone | CEO Interviews) | I can't stand this businessspeak.
Weeknotes 2022-05-16
,Trying to export a HDR video from my phone led to unexpected results. The colors were really washed out and the video was slightly overexposured. Using HandBrake I finally got a good looking mp4, but then someone uploaded this file to dropbox, and it looked bad for people downloading it from there. Strange.
Docker Desktop on Mac just broke during update and I couldn't restart it. Had to re-download it. Wow, this is some next level brokenness.
My PR to fix a bug in jupyterlab was merged. I couldn't find a solution to the "you cant mock a function which you call from another function in the same module" problem. Instead Frédéric Collonval circumvented the issue by using a test helper that dismisses the openen dialog instead of trying to mock it, thanks a lot.
Articles
- Johannes Weeklog
- Mechanical Watch | Really impressive animations
- An entire generation of traders and investors have never experienced what we are about to see over the next few weeks. Buckle up buttercup! | Yeah, well..
- 1. Buy expired NPM maintainer email domains -> 2. ? -> 3. Profit
- Multiple loops can sometimes be replaced by one itertools.product() from the #python stdlib
- Iterable unpacking (star in a #python list) makes a list from multiple iterables | Those tutorial tweets from Ned Batchelder are really great
- Pictures of the public pension fund building CNPS (1967) in Yaoundé
- François Chollet on the excessive math notation for simple concepts often used in ML | Math notation is just another abstraction. For programming problems, actual programming languages might be a better fit. But people tent to view math notation as being closer to the real thing. Puzzles me.
- Raise your hand if you are familiar with selection bias | 😏
- What is #dataviz animation good for? A thread with examples
- Twitter thread about an angled section
YouTube
- Videos for the PyCon DE & PyData Berlin 2022 conference are up 🤩
- Videos for beyond tellerrand - Düsseldorf 2022 are up, too 🥳
Software
- I'm All-In on Server-Side SQLite | Via Claudio
- How I fell in love with low-js | Via Claudio
- Boring Python: dependency management | Pretty solid advise. I also use poetry, which unfortunately is not boring at all. And for packages I use flit instead of setup.py.
Papers
- Note on Distributed Computing | Someone posted this on a twitter thread discussing why HATEOAS is a newer and more innovative concept than all this "modern" SPA solution being basically good old client/server/RPC architecture which attempted to compete with the web several times (CORBA, SOAP, etc), but failed each time.
Podcasts
- #282 – David Buss: Sex, Dating, Relationships, and Sex Differences (Lex Fridman Podcast) | Some nice anecdotes
- Über Können, Nichtkönnen und den Weg dazwischen (Was denkst du denn?)
- Revision 529: Richtig schätzen (Working Draft) | Hmm, there are quite some areas where I would respectfully disagree. For example: This notion of avoiding to spend too much time on optimizing your code. In reviews I rarely see code that is "too optimal" or has "too few bugs". In my experience people often say things like that when they mean to say: Optimizing this code is just not worth the effort. Which is a business decision. And if programmers make those decisions without telling a soul they make it impossible for the business to adapt (yes, this is bad). The same problem arises if you optimize for being correct on your estimations (good for you) by just doing small or simple stuff (bad for business). Of course, when your customer is never ever talking to you - maybe because it's a pharao resting peacefully in a pyramid - it might pay off to cut some corners 😉.
- Warum Java für die Cloud so gut ist, mit Adam Bien (programmier.bar) | Rather funny episode starting with the question: Why is Java so popular? Making a really long lived entity like a programming language (if successful) depend on a rather ephemeral entity like a company never resonated with me. Even before oracle hit the fan. But good marketing can do wonders. And I never got this whole serverless thing. The best explanation I saw is: serverless means pay by usage. Which might appeal to the needs of people coming from the host world, because hosts are so fucking expensive you have to be able to assign the blame. But there's a reason why hosts are dead. Personally I would prefer to make a service cheap enough you dont have to care instead of paying magnitudes more to be able to write more detailed bills. And there's always on premise, which I like too. But kubernetes and rancher being "perfect for on premise"? Wow, I think there's another marketing wonder in progress.
- WR1362 Ernergiespeicher, Schwarze Löcher und Sex (WRINT Wissenschaf)
- Episode 1 - Origin Story (Sad Python Girls Club) | New Python Podcast 🤩, lets see how it goes..
Weeknotes 2022-05-09
,Attended Beyond Tellerrand 2022 which was a lot of fun. The wather was really nice this week, so I spent a fair amount of time outside. The new macro-capabilities of my phone camera are really nice (or scary, depending on the motive):
I finally started fixing the jupyterlab rename bug I stumbled upon the week before. The main problem implementing the fix is how to mock the shouldOverwrite function in the dialog.ts module. It's easy to mock functions with jest if you just want to mock the function you are calling in a test. But if you call a function that calls a function from the same module which you then want to mock, things get complicated. I commented on this issue two years ago, let's see how often I have to revisit it, until finding a fix 😌.
And then I released kptncook 0.0.7 increasing mealie login timeout.
Articles
- Johannes weeklog | Worth reading it
- How To Host Multiple Websites Securely With Nginx And Php-fpm On Ubuntu 14.04 | Maybe I can deploy different worpress / podlove instances running just one nginx but keeping the processes running as different users
- Das Comeback der Tonfrequenz mit DJ Hell, Jan Delay und Richard Dorfmeister | Opportunity to go out in Düsseldorf
Design
- Drastically Improve Your UI Designs With This Technique | Use checklists to make sure you won't forget empty states etc..
- Designing Better Navigation With Navigation Queries | The homepage of the city of Düsseldorf is mentioned in a positive way in an article about webdesign? This branch of reality is definitely not ready for production..
- CSS Parent Selector
- The Future of CSS: CSS Toggles
- Under-Engineered Multi-Selects
- Nuclear weapons might be dangerous
- Thread about pyscript
- Great thread about grades from a philosophical perspective | Yes, they are bullshit :)
- In defence of the Single Page Application | Hrhr
- I got Datasette working in WebAssembly via @pyodide!
Software
- Python f-string cheat sheets
- Routing: I’m not smart enough for a SPA
- 33 JavaScript Concepts Every Developer Should Know 🤓️💯️
Podcasts
- Navigating midlife with Kieran Setiya (Re:Considering) | New podcast I learned about via #btconf
- Philosophie der Identität - Auf der Suche nach dem Selbst (Sein und Streit)
- Bits und so #789 (Web 3.0) (Bits und so)
- Star Wars and Django (Django Chat)
- WR1359 Inflation, EZB, Energie (WRINT: Wirtschaftskunde) | Lots of valuable information
- UKW097 Ukraine: Er hat das Memo nicht gelesen (Unsere kleine Welt)
Beyond Tellerrand 2022
,Went to my second conference this year 🥳. The first one was PyCon DE & PyData Berlin 2022 a few weeks ago and it was great. But beyond tellerrand has a very different vibe to it which I would describe as being more comfy and stylish at the same time. It's also a lot smaller. The talk videos will arrive bit by bit in this channel, I think.
This was the first beyond tellerrand I attended which had a live stream running for the complete event. Which turned out to be really great, because I was watching over our kids every second talk. It only occurred to me on day two that I just could use my phone to listen to the live stream of the talks while parenting (at least partially) and then being able to participate in the discussions after the talk. Really cool.
One of the main topics this time was accessibility. I was surprised by how bad the user experience of screen reeders still is. Coming from a machine learning background I expected screen readers to be able to just generate descriptions for images. But the state of the art seems to be still "don't forget to put alt tags on your images". I understand that building self driving cars is more rewarding than trying to fix screen readers, but there's a lot of potential for improvement.
Maybe there's also a business opportunity: Amazon makes a ton of money for improving the accessibility of buying stuff online. They already have all the required data so they can reduce the effort to just clicking the "buy" button. For most other shops, you have to jump to a lot of hoops to finally buy something. Reducing that to clicking a button or saying "buy x via shop y" is a very similar task from a technical perspective. Hmm, I guess I have to revisit this whole shopco idea at some point in the future 😉.