Ephes Blog

'Man goes to doctor. Says he is CEO of AI startup but has no idea how to become profitable. Doctor says solution is simple. Advanced model GPT-4 is in town. Ask it how to profit, and it will surely know the answer. Man bursts into tears. “But doctor” he says “you are GPT-4”' --@utsu__kun

Lots of Christmas preparations and the usual work stuff. Attended the Django Meetup Cologne in person for the first time in a while and it was great. Reported a bug on takahē discord and saw this PR 9 minutes later 😮. This PR for Django 4.2 looks great! Maybe I can get rid of the monkey-patching stuff I do in django_fileresponse 🥳. Wrote a TIL about how to deploy takahē without docker.

Someone implemented a business model very similar to one I also think about implementing for a while: Just let people rent software deployed somewhere for an hourly/daily/monthly fee (mastodon, jupyterhub server, ...): Replace expensive per-seat SaaS with tap-to-install open-source apps - I just have to set up a landing page and collect some email addresses, no?

Using a time machine backup from an intel-based MacBook to restore it on a new M2-based MacBook led to some unexpected consequences:

• Printing didn't work anymore (printing is always the first thing to stop working btw). The printer queue complained about a paper jam, but this was just a mismatched error code, I guess. The real problem was the intel-based printer driver didn't work on ARM. Installing the old intel-based printer driver from the manufacturer's website (the latest was for a macOS version a few years ago) triggered the rosetta installation and then it worked.
• GnuPG stopped working because of the same problem and then installing a native version via homebrew didn't work because now the new version couldn't read the old version's keys. Solved by creating a new key and copying the sensible data in plain text, meh.

Articles

• mastodon is not a good social network
• Boring Python: code quality
• Speech-to-text with Whisper: How I Use It & Why | I need to deploy a whisper server now 😬

Twitter / Mastodon

• You have 3 wishes... | Webcomic

Newsletters

• Test Selectors in CSS, image() functions, readable typo, and speeding up JavaScript libraries. | wdrl
• Postgres Weekly

Weeklogs

• Weeklog for Week 50: December 12 to December 18 | Johannes
• Week in Review 2022-12-19 | Luis
• Weeknotes: Datasette 0.63.3, datasette-ripgrep | Simon

Software

• coverage.py 7.0 released
• PHP 8.2 Released!
• Ruby 3.2.0 Released

Podcasts

• Episode 74: The Last Dance (Hotel Bar Sessions)

Out of Context Images

modern js frameworks are only possible in a negative real interest rate environment --htmx.org

Got more stuff done last week - getting better I guess 😀:

• Merged a PR avoiding death by unintentional yield reduction for kptncook.
• Wrote a TIL about changing the owner of objects in a Postgres database after restore
• Wrote a TIL about how to flush the dns cache of a fritz box
• Deployed Takahē and it works 🥳. Now powering @show@python-podcast.de
• Did some work on fastdeploy after quite some time to bring it up to date with Python 3.11 and the latest Vue.js version. Had to fix some bugs (message bus for command line entry points , CORS headers for local development had the wrong port (yay, Vue.js update)). Initially, I didn't want to update Vue.js but it broke on the npm run build during deployment 🙄. After updating all of the dependencies to their latest versions, it magically worked again. Bonus points for the npm error message being completely unrelated (something about failing imports). This has to be the terrific developer experience I constantly hear people getting excited about.
• Now using furo as the sphinx template for django-cast
• Updated the commands.py script for django-cast
• Released django-cast 0.2.0 which includes all the changes made in the last few weeks (since I'm now sure enough it will probably work)

Articles

• Enums vs Check Constraints in Postgres | ChoiceField uses Python enums in Django, but there aren't any constraints checked. How hard could it be to add check constraints to ChoiceFields?
• Life Sentence | Webcomic
• Riffusion | Somebody fine-tuned the stable diffusion model to generate images of spectrograms which then can be converted into an audio clip 😳
• Scaling Mastodon is Impossible
• I Wish I Could Tell You This One Is Not All About Twitter | This escalated quickly

Weeklogs

• Weeklog for Week 49: December 05 to December 11 | Johannes
• Week in Review 2022-12-12 | Luis

Videos

• Async Django: The practical guide you've been **awaiting** for with Carlton Gibson - DCUS 2022 | The use cases are good, but it does not go beyond the basics.

Mastodon / Twitter

• “LIFE MOOD I have just returned from a party of which I was the life and soul; witty banter flowed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me-but I came away, indeed that dash should be as long as the radii of the earth's orbit——————————wanting to shoot myself.” -- Søren Kierkegaard

Software

• [ANNOUNCE] Git v2.39.0
• pedalboard is a Python library for working with audio | from Spotify
• Django 4.2 supports Psycopg 3 📢 💥 Thanks to Daniele Varrazzo, @apollo13 and Simon Charette for their humongous work 🌟 🌟 🌟 | Yay 🥳!
• 🆕🦀 Just an hour ago, #rustlang 1.66.0 was released! As usual, here's a thread with some of the highlights. 🧵 1/12
• django-request is a statistics module for Django | I built something similar (analytics module for django-cast) but trying to move it out of django-cast for some time. Maybe use this instead, or self-host plausible

Podcasts

• Postgres - Craig Kerstiens (Django Chat)
• Yoshua Bengio: The Past, Present, and Future of Deep Learning (The Gradient Podcast)
• Episode 75: Podcasting and Philosophy (Hotel Bar Sessions)
• Bits und so #822 (Pablo Escobear) (Bits und so)
• Wie kann für Sie ein kollektiver Weg aus der Klimakrise aussehen? (Das philosophische Radio) | Brr, I hate it when someone sounds eloquent and reasonable and then makes some really obvious mistake (easy translation error from billions in English to german which is less by a factor of 1000). It's not the mistake that annoys me, but then just going on as if nothing happened assuming something is true which for me is obviously impossible. Bah. And people complain about ChatGPT? This is far worse.

Out of Context Images

Due to personal reasons, I've decided to replace my hair with snakes & turn people who stare at me into stone. @roxiqt@mastodon.social

Had a stressful week due to private turmoil and couldn't get anything done.

Articles

• Understanding A Protocol | Hmm, maybe I should try to deploy Takahē next week just to play around with it a little bit?
• A neophyte's introduction to video | I didn't bother to cut or add sound to my videos until now. But maybe I should 👀..
• Test factory functions in Django | Lots of nice tips over there. I would use Iterator instead of Generator[T, None, None] as return value annotation, but maybe I haven't been hurt badly enough by type annotations to reach an appropriate level of passive aggressiveness. Bonus points for good arguments against factory boy.
• Playing with ActivityPub
• The Origins of Python

Videos

• DjangoCon US and Europe 2022 Talks Available Online
• In a new Prodigy Short, @koaning explains how this works by building a custom interface to annotate *and* transcribe audio.

Weeklogs

• Weeklog for Week 48: November 28 to December 04 | Johannes
• Week in Review 2022-12-05 | Luis

Mastodon / Twitter

• I remember well when Google was first released. I felt confident that it would become a critical tool that we'd all rely on. I haven't felt that way again, until now: ChatGPT. In just a few days I've gotten so much out of it. | Resonates with me
• This modified version of the famous ‘turn #chatGPT into a pretend Linux system’ prompt is also my prototype for a product that will sell millions.
• ok. which one | I like to use this exact argument against agnosticism: how to be agnostic without assuming there's only one true religion? How to be agnostic about things you don't even know about?

Software

• Python 3.11.1, 3.10.9, 3.9.16, 3.8.16, 3.7.16, and 3.12.0 alpha 3 are now available
• tox 4 was released
• Mona Sans | a font by GitHub
• showcode | create beautiful code snippets

Podcasts

• Folge 7: Die Krise des Allgemeinen (Andreas Reckwitz im Gespräch: Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten)
• Yoshua Bengio: The Past, Present, and Future of Deep Learning (The Gradient Podcast)
• Bits und so #821 (Hipster/Lobster) (Bits und so)

Out of Context Images

my work is terrible, and if *you* like it, well that says more about you than it does about me @carnapping

Worked the whole week with sick kids at home and finally got sick, too. Using the new Wagtail-based django-cast in production revealed lots of little bugs I tried to fix:

• Fixed the title tag for post detail pages - thanks to Johannes for reporting this
• Fixed gallery.html images to link to the original image source image (not relevant for this site, but sometimes relatives are trying to print out photos, etc: now they get at least a fair chance to print decent-looking images)
• Lazy loading for gallery images (the image sizes are not quite right, yet this is just a mitigation)
• Increased Gunicorn timeout to 10 minutes -> it's now possible to upload big videos
• Fixed the size of the feed logo for my homepage (the python-podcast logo is inside a javascript blob called subscribe button, I have no idea how to put a size on that)
• Upgraded from raven to sentry_sdk for my homepage and python-podcast (depleted my sentry transaction immediately, I have no idea why)
• Fixed traefik config for mastodon: removed the separate config file for streaming
• Fixed x-forwarded-for logging for Gunicorn for django-template, homepage, and python-podcast.de
• Updated bootstrap and jquery for my homepage and python-podcast, removed popper
• Added Plausible to my homepage and python-podcast (my own analytics stuff is still broken, maybe someone fixed this in the meantime by providing a suitable SaaS?)
• Fixed a small bug in django-cast causing wagtail preview to fail

Merged a PR to my little kptncook command line scraper. More about this in Kptncook and Mealie.

Articles

• Git Notes: Git's Coolest, Most Unloved­ Feature | it would be great to have all the relevant information directly in the repository. what happens to the history of a project when GitHub goes away? We should plan for that.
• Thoughts on my first machine learning project | One of the creators of Django in ML land 😁- insightful
• Energieflussdiagramm für Deutschland 2020 | I’m sure there’s a lot of valuable information, but the UI makes it hard to find
• A quote from Will Larson | hint: do whatever works for you
• An Interactive Guide to Flexbox
• Prioritizing Pragmatic Performance for Dask | Most data processing is IO bound, don't loop in Python, it's not the GIL
• The Essential Django Deployment Guide | It's hard to find useful information about this topic out there. This article is long but unclear in the details (whitenoise won't serve your media files). Personally, I would go with real servers (not virtual, no docker, etc) and a bunch of ansible playbooks.
• Python Type Hints: case study on parsy | Good article. It's far from clear to me whether the trade-offs involved justify the effort. It probably depends.

Fediverse / Indieweb

Seems this should get its own category by now 😎.

• Scaling Mastodon: The Compendium | I really like the attitude here
• Scaling the Mastodon | Article by Leah, one of the admins of chaos.social
• The fediverse and the indieweb
• moving to the fediverse and indieweb
• Fediverse
• Mastodon
• The IndieWeb for Everyone

Twitter / Mastodon

• In 1951, Adelbert Ames created the mind-boggling ‘Ames Window’. It’s so effective that even when you know how it works you can’t break the illusion [video from The Curiosity Show: https://buff.ly/36DvRNs]
• I am impressed. | chat.openai.com writing a poem
• OK it's hard to over-emphasize quite how much fun this new OpenAI chat Interface is
• So, a horse walks into a bar and orders a pint. The barkeep says, "You're in here pretty often lately. Do you think you might be an alcoholic?" The horse replies, "I don't think I am," and then vanishes from existence. You see, the joke is really about Descartes' famous quote, "I think; therefore, I am." but if I had explained this before the joke, I would've been putting Descartes before the horse. ... I'll show myself out now.
• OK so @OpenAI 's new #ChatGPT can basically just generate #AIart prompts. I asked a one-line question, and typed the answers verbatim straight into MidJourney and boom. Times are getting weird...🤯
• You can add a “Mastodon” link in your project_urls now and it will get the Mastodon icon on PyPI 😇

Software

• Movetodon: Find your Twitter Followers on Mastodon
• django-syzygy - Django application providing database migration tooling to automate their deployment
• SeaweedFS | like min.io but easier to extend, but maybe not as compatible to s3

Podcasts

• Butter CMS - Jake Lumetta (Django Chat) | Ranting about WordPress is always appreciated 😆
• Kunstgeschichte - Von Kunst, guter Form und schlechtem Geschmack (Hörsaal)
• Folge 2: Über die spätmoderne Gesellschaft sprechen (Andreas Reckwitz im Gespräch: Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten)
• #341 – Guido van Rossum: Python and the Future of Programming (Lex Fridman Podcast)
• WR1431 Zeitenwende bei den Wirtschaftsweisen (Wirtschaftskunde)
• Folge 3: Die Ökonomie der Singularitäten (Andreas Reckwitz im Gespräch: Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten)
• Folge 4: Der Wandel der Arbeitswelt (Andreas Reckwitz im Gespräch: Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten)
• Folge 5: Digitalisierung als Singularisierung (Andreas Reckwitz im Gespräch: Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten)
• Folge 6: Der Wandel der Sozialstruktur (Andreas Reckwitz im Gespräch: Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten)