Ephes Blog

Mainly work, didn't had time to listen to a lot of podcasts this week. Went to a school reunion on the weekend. Slow week.

Articles

• How I’m a Productive Programmer With a Memory of a Fruit Fly
• Johannes Weeklog
• Stable Diffusion based Image Compression
• Article Spotlight: “The End of History” by Hanno Sauer | Should read more philosophy articles, even the comments were entertaining 😊

Twitter

• "a generous welfare state makes people not want to work" (united states is the line on the bottom)
• Get in the car, we're exploring databases and finding friends
• You have the flew
• Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.

Software

• Squoosh | Compress images via webapp
• Whisper | ASR model demo from openAI
• yFiles | Just wanted to display a little graph on a website *sigh*

Videos

• Exception Groups and except: Irit Katriel | Python 3.11 preview

Podcasts

• Bits und so #809 (The Secret of Dynamic Island) (Bits und so)
• Sonderfolge: Hybridimmunität (Das Coronavirus-Update)

Out of Context Images

Mostly work, since I was on a business trip to Munich for a few days. Got tickets for next years beyond tellerrand conference, hope to see you there 😁. Someone opened the first issue on django-fileresponse 🍾 requesting to be able to use it for uploads, too. There were also some discussions and mails around the Python Podcast.

Articles

• Johannes Weeklog
• Science and Technology links (September 12 2022)
• Why do domain names sometimes end with a dot?
• Quality Is Systemic
• Working locally with GitHub PRs
• Photography for geeks (WIP) | Great article
• WDRL 303 from 16.9.2022 Container query lab, default exports, disabled browser features and Openring

Twitter

• it's a little-known fact that god actually didn't die until the widespread use of pseudorandom number generators by modern computers, each use a small act of divination, exhausted god's ability to respond to all divination. god was killed mostly by microsoft in the 90s
• Nervously calculating the Kullback–Leibler divergence between me and a bot that just tweets "it's only getting worse from here" in response to any major event.
• “this meeting could have been an email” yeah but look on the bright side, this meeting also could have been a musical
• Turn the light on
• There must have been a meeting to review proposals including the online timed ticketing system when someone said ‘No. They must be seen to queue. For miles. For days”. That person’s a political-marketing genius with 17thC style insight into the mystificatory needs of state power.

Software

• Fork - A fast and friendly git client
• PyMC4 which is now just called PyMC - a probabilistic programming library for Python that allows users to build Bayesian models with a simple Python API and fit them using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods
• This release, 3.11.0rc2, is the last preview before the final release of Python 3.11.0 on October 24th
• uvloop 0.17 is here |  This release adds Python 3.11 support, updates bundled libuv to 1.43.0 and fixes a handful of issues
• Safari 16.0 was released | Glad to see the new IE is catching up a bit

Videos

• Google’s New AI: Fly INTO Photos! 🐦

Books

• Wagtail CMS in Action | Not much there yet. Learn from my mistake and buy it when it's finished next year or so..

Podcasts

• 17 Libraries You Should Be Using in Django (Talk Python To Me) | Nothing new for me here..
• Habermas‘ „Neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit“ - Digitale Plattformen: Manipulation statt Diskussion? (Sein und Streit) | Ouch, really bad, especially the moderation. Why are there so few good podcasts on topics like this? Dont make me start one! 
• UKW102 Ukraine: Russki Go Home (unsere kleine welt) | Meh, also not much good content on this topic available either..
• WR1398 Die Fruchtfliege der Botanik (WRINT: Wissenschaft)
• WR1403 Auf frischen fotografischen Wegen (WRINT: Fotografie)
• Muff Potter (Thorsten Nagelschmidt) (Reflektor)

Out of Context Images

Just got back home after a long day at the being me factory, and as always, it was a long and arduous shift.
-- @AbiShuuwi on Twitter

Work was good this week. Recorded and produced a podcast episode about crypto (yes, the BitCoin and BlockChain stuff, not cryptography).

Articles

• TIL: You Can Build Portable Binaries of Python Applications
• Partials in Django
  • 3 uses for functools.partial in Django
  • Three more uses for functools.partial() in Django

Twitter

• Spielberg was only 26 when he made Jaws. Michael Jackson was only 24 when he recorded Thriller. SE Hinton was only 19 when The Outsiders was published. It’s too late. You need to give up. | I didn't get much done this week, too..
• Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Program Better
• GitHub copilot is incredibly useful tool for writing technical blog posts. In this case it read the previous paragraph where I explained what I'm about to demonstrate and it wrote down the right Rust code including the necessary reStructuredText bits.
• Spider man delivers pizza.

Videos

• 2007 commencement speech Judea Pearl gave at the University of Toronto
• The spelled-out intro to language modeling: building makemore | By Andrej Karpathy

Podcasts

• Michael Stipe (Design Matters) | Poor audio quality, but interesting content
• Die psychotische Gesellschaft (Hörsaal) | Wow, this was bad.
• WR1401 Quick & Dirty: Das dritte Entlastungspaket (Wirtschaftskunde)
• UKW101 Ukraine: Die Dritte Phase (Unsere kleine Welt)
• Bits und so #809 (The Secret of Dynamic Island) (Bits und so)

Out of Context Images

Got sick with some gastrointestinal infection: Not as bad as covid, but still no recommendation.

Got the stable diffusion model running on my MacBook Air. Installing grpcio only worked after setting some environment variables:

CFLAGS="-I /opt/homebrew/opt/openssl/include" LDFLAGS="-L /opt/homebrew/opt/openssl/lib" GRPC_PYTHON_BUILD_SYSTEM_OPENSSL=1 GRPC_PYTHON_BUILD_SYSTEM_ZLIB=1 pip install -r requirements.txt

Maybe I'm just bad at coming up with interesting prompts, but I would guess about 10% of the generated images are interesting in some sense. I put some examples below in the out of context images section.

Articles

• Template Fragments | Render a block from a template instead of the whole template
• 4.2 Gigabytes, or: How to Draw Anything | Someone is using the img2img.py script from the stable diffusion model to create an impressing image
• Stable Diffusion is a really big deal
• It's time for AI-first products! | Hmm, now I only need a product 😏
• Why Crypto Debates are So Pointless | Doing it anyway 😋
• Johannes Weeklog | Images!
• An AI-Generated Artwork Won First Place at a State Fair Fine Arts Competition, and Artists Are Pissed
• Grandpa’s Silly Mustache
• Tip - Use fetchpriority=high to load your LCP hero image sooner

Twitter

• A super-simple dispatch of command line arguments to functions.
• Oldie
• My most common usage of Python's walrus operator is in defining related constants like this:
• Dont eat the compass
• 1/ Today we're thrilled to announce DocQuery, a new #opensource query engine for analyzing documents using large language models (LLMs).
• i often think about about the guy at the bar who upon hearing that i studied philosophy said “i’m sorry to hear that” and walked away
• We released details of CVE-2020-10735 in CPython and are getting patches merged.
• In an agile dev system, everybody's in all the code all the time. Touch whatever you need to touch to get value into the customers hands, and don't wait around for somebody else to do the work for you. Multiple repos are a HUGE impediment to that way of working. Just don't.

Software

• Announcing Poetry 1.2.0
• termshare
• Wagtail 4 release
• Best practices for images - Repository to collect best practices for web images | This should be interesting for Johannes, too.
• termshare - Quick and easy terminal sharing for getting quick help or pair sysadmin'ing
• Django + htmx patterns | By Luke Plant
• django-htmx-fun | A small Django application to advertise the fun htmx can bring you by Thomas Güttler
• A really cool notebook explaining stable diffusion

Videos

• Achtung Beuys – Aktionskünstler, Visionär, Provokateur (Sternstunde Philosophie)

Podcasts

• Was ist eigentlich eine PCA? (Ailionauten)
• CRE224 Elektronisches Geld 2 (CRE Technik Kultur Gesellschaft) 
• #67 Swallowed by a Python with Luciano Ramalho (Happy Path Programming) | Good episode
• Uncle Bob Martin // The Clean Coder (Alphalist CTO Podcast) | Hmm, feels a little bit dated... not all of this clean code stuff aged well. Still, he has a point on professionalism etc.
• pipx - Installable, Isolated Python Applications (Talk Python To Me)

Out of Context Images