Ephes Blog

can't wait to quit my day job and start my new landscaping company, Move Fast and Rake Things --Annika Backstrom

Holiday week. Didn't do much except for some light programming in the morning, working on the comment feature of the Vue.js theme for django-cast.

Articles

• All the Hard Stuff Nobody Talks About when Building Products with LLMs

Software

• Improve how you architect webapps

Mastodon

• "Sure, the abyss is great for staring into. But if screaming is your thing, you'll want to go with the void."

Podcasts

• Bits und so #844 (Cook Time) (Bits und so)
• Gayatri Spivak: Wie gelingt guter Fortschritt? (Sein und Streit)
• Revision 567: Design Patterns in der Webentwicklung (Working Draft) | I think there's some truth to this old "design patterns are a workarounds for missing language features" saying. Yes, you probably won't need most of the design patterns in a language like Typescript. Same for Python.

Out of Context Images

"sorry about that, i wasn’t making a strange face because of what you said on the team sync meeting, but because i’ve been watching my own camera the whole time, and at all times i am nothing but a horse discovering his own reflection" --henry ✷

Less busy week, good. Created a first release for cast-vue, a Vue.js theme for django-cast. It's a weird mix of pre-rendered html via Django and classic http API based SPA. I like it 😆. To support cast-vue, some changes had to be made to django-cast, so there's a new release for it too. The only major feature that is missing from cast-vue in comparison to the bootstrap ones is comments.

Articles

• Even Amazon can't make sense of serverless or microservices | The prices of all this cloud stuff are absolute crazy compared to rolling your own hardware, I still don't get why this is so popular
• Real Multithreading is Coming to Python - Learn How You Can Use It Now | Using subinterpreters
• How China’s hottest social media app turned Düsseldorf into a foodie destination | Düsseldorf? Time to re-explore my hood..
• The Sauce That Survived Italy’s War on Pasta
• llm, ttok and strip-tags—CLI tools for working with ChatGPT and other LLMs | Need to try to use more of them more regularily
• vWriting a chat application in Django 4.2 using async StreamingHttpResponse, Server-Sent Events and PostgreSQL LISTEN/NOTIFY

Software

• Below are the major highlights in JupyterLab 4.0.0 | JupyterLab 4.0 Release!
• Weights & Biases - The developer-first MLOps platform | Somehow I didn't notice it until now
• Tandoor Recipes | Recipe management using Django!

Podcasts

• (117) Long Covid: Das Rätsel nach der Pandemie (Das Coronavirus-Update) | Interesting: If you watch a group of people the risk to catch long covid increases with every new infection while the absolute count of long covid cases goes down. Why? Because it's correlation instead of causation: The people you detect as reinfected have a higher risk of catching long covid (because you only detect symptomatic cases).
• Geoff Hinton Returns (The Robot Brains Podcast) | Ok, this gets me a little bit worried, too.
• Was ist kritisch an der Kritischen Theorie? (Sein und Streit)
• 100 Jahre Frankfurter Schule - Ist unsere Lebensweise unvernünftig? (Sein und Streit)
• Yejin Choi - Teaching ai common sense and morality (The Robot Brains Podcast) | Good episode!
• UKW110 Ukraine: Balance des Schreckens (unsere kleine welt)

"Adam Smith's invisible hand — the idea that free markets lead to efficiency as if guided by unseen forces — is invisible, at least in part, because it is not there." --Joseph Stiglitz

Another busy week for me. Time for a regular week, I think. Or vacation or something. The pytest workshop was a lot of fun and we used a simple mastodon client as a sample application. Mastodon.py is great and now I have to fight the urge to build some mastodon bots by connecting GPT-4 (yay, got API access) to the fediverse (what could possibly go wrong?). Since we used bootstrap5 for the pytest sample app, I thought: How hard could it be to create a bootstrap5 theme for django-cast? So now this site and python-podcast are both bootstrap5. Also some health issues - the kids were sick with scarlet fever and some serious dental work 🦷 for me. Fun.

Software

• community.general.django_manage module | Manage django applications with ansible - didn't know about that, cool!

Podcasts

• FS265 Mansplaining as a Service (Freakshow) | Elixir is interesting but not magical, those concepts are well established in other languages, too. In fact, the most interesting thing about phoenix liveview is, that it is not a singular feature, but part of a broad trend. The LLM discussion is only interesting on a meta level for me..
• Solving the pain-points of ai researchers and practitioners - Lukas Biewald (The robot brains) | Good episode!
• Scott Aaronson: Against AI Doomerism (The Gradient Podcast) | There are really interesting connections between complexity theory and AI safety

"The worst thing that ever happened in software engineering was when Kirk asked Scotty how long something would take and Scotty said thirty minutes and Kirk said you’ve got five and Scotty got it done in five and impressionable children watched this and grew up to become managers." --Isaac Freeman

Had a busy week. I have been working on a Vue.js theme for django-cast. It's not finished yet, but enough to see how it works. Hope to get back to it soon. Then we produced a new podcast episode about building GUI applications with Python and miaplan. It was a lot of fun. And then I did a stream about the reading of the nlp with transformers book. Doing so many different things and making meaningful progress is kind of hard. Speaking of which: I also had to do some more preparation for the upcoming pytest course.

Articles

• Social media cards generated with shot-scraper
• Color Formats in CSS
• The Math Behind Nesting Rounded Corners
• Carl Braun’s Writing Lessons for Clear Thinking and Productive Communication
• Building a combined CSS-aspect-ratio-grid
• CSS :has( ) A Parent Selector Now
• Crafting the Next.js Website
• Google "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI" | Really fascinating article
• Mojo may be the biggest programming language advance in decades | Maybe not
• Modern CSS Solutions

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 17: April 24 to April 30
• Weeknotes: Miscellaneous research into Rye, ChatGPT Code Interpreter and openai-to-sqlite

Mastodon / Twitter

• "I don't know how the gods feel, but sacrificing financial advisors makes me feel happy." | web comic

Software

• Wagtail 5.0 release notes
• Architectural Decision Records (ADRs)
• Mojo 🔥 — a new programming language for all AI developers
• Darts - Time Series Made Easy in Python
• Phind - The AI search engine for developers
• kagi - Fast, accurate, and ad-free. The search engine you deserve

Books

• Make Something Wonderful - Steve Jobs in his own words

Videos

• The A.I. Dilemma - March 9, 2023 | Just to have it seen, it's well produced but often wrong
• Possible End of Humanity from AI? Geoffrey Hinton at MIT Technology Review's EmTech Digital | Hmm, I don't know

Podcast

• "Software Architecture Matters" mit Stefan Tilkov (programmier.bar)
• Being a Productive Developer - Nick Janetakis (Django Chat)
• Testing Django Web Applications (Test & Code)

I'm a normal person, in the mathematical sense. --Johannes Spielmann

Last week, I worked on updating django-cast to support Wagtail 5 (which is set to release tomorrow) and Django 4.2:

• Released version 0.3.0 of wagtail_srcset, which includes a workaround for the image_node.filter_spec -> image_node.filter_specs renaming in Wagtail 5, along with some tox fixes and test image cleanup after testing.
• Released version 0.2.14 of django-cast , adding support for Wagtail 5 and Django 4.2.
• Ran python-podcast.de and wersdoerfer.de on the Wagtail 5 release candidate and Django 4.2 for a week to identify any potential issues (none found).

Another topic I focused on last week was Vue.js. I attended the revived Vue.js Cologne meetup, which was enjoyable, and began developing a Vue theme for django-cast. I even managed to record a live-stream about it. Integrating Vue.js into Django proved easier than anticipated, perhaps due to assistance from my LLM robot friends. While I'm not a huge fan of single-page applications (SPAs) and frontend frameworks in general, I want to keep my options open and be able to justify my preferences.

In terms of meetups, I attended a Java User Group Düsseldorf event to see the talk "Die Welt vor 10 Jahren mit Stefan Tilkov / Eberhard Wolff - live von der RheinJUG". I found it quite interesting. However, despite attending numerous local meetups, I didn't recognize any of the attendees. It's fascinating how disjunct various IT-related communities can be.

In "Slavoj Žižek: „Paradoxien der Mehrlust“ - Ein gegenwartskritischer Rundumschlag" (starting at 06:00), an amusing moment arises as Žižek discusses LLM creativity. He claims that human creativity stems from our ability to harness contingency in random mistakes, referencing Heinrich von Kleist. Ironically, his poetic description of what LLMs can't do is spot-on for how they function technically. The 'temperature' parameter even allows for adjustable creativity by controlling how much contingency is added. Although I have often expressed my disdain for uninformed discussions about topics I am knowledgeable in, this instance has proven that they can be surprisingly entertaining, and I stand corrected.

Articles

• Django Build To Last | Deployment is still hard, but maybe it would be a good idea t have some async stuff in the core like RoR has?
• Meditations on Moloch | Re-read this article because of the podcast episode with Max Tegmark about the letter
• The Dual LLM pattern for building AI assistants that can resist prompt injection
• Requiring an active virtual environment for pip
• Using Django’s template loaders to configure Tailwind
• Performance Excuses Debunked | I keep hearing about this hotspot stuff...

Software

• Vue Macros | via vue-js-cologne
• statamic | CMS for laravel - via vue-js-cologne, too - one of the developers attended
• Crispy-Tailwind - A Tailwind CSS template pack for the wonderful django-crispy-forms | Hmm, I don't think crispy-forms is wonderful, but maybe I should give this a try
• There's a new Pythonista release! 🎉

Mastodon / Twitter

• May I present to you, my photographic documentation of #btconf 2023 in Düsseldorf
• Chatting with Django’s documentation using langchain, Chroma & OpenAI APIs
• "I've realised there are literally three genres of British music"
• still blown away that not only did someone make a drum & bass remix of Colin Hay, but it's *fucking brilliant*.
• Another @code keyboard shortcut I'd loved to have known earlier.
• I'm seeing a lot of people confused about this - asking: what exactly is the problem here? That's a great question! Let's use this as a learning opportunity and dig in. 🧵
• The fancy fancy new infoscreens in the computer science building at #tudortmund make me irrationally angry. | That's not irrational at all!

Weeknotes

• Week in Review 2023-04-24 | Luis - all the best wishes for your new endeavor
• An Exhausting Week | J. Martin
• Weeklog for Week 16: April 17 to April 23 | Johannes
• sqlite-history: tracking changes to SQLite tables using triggers (also weeknotes) | Simon Willison
• Science and Technology links (April 29 2023) | Daniel Lemire

Video

• Felix Klock - Subtyping in Rust and Clarke's Third Law

Papers

• Fast and Precise Type Checking for JavaScript

Podcast

• Beyond. #btconf (Wo wir sind ist vorne) | SEPA!
• #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development (Lex Fridman Podcast) | Good episode, helped me a lot to better understand what the letter is about...
• EU AI-Act: Bahnbrechende KI-Regulierung oder jetzt schon überholt? – KI-Recht #3 (Rechtsbelehrung) | Ok, nice
• Disclaimer und andere Urban Law Legends – Rechtsbelehrung Folge 11 (Rechtsbelehrung) | Confirmed my biases
• Was schulden wir unseren Kindern? (Sein und Streit) | Meh
• Slavoj Žižek: „Paradoxien der Mehrlust“ - Ein gegenwartskritischer Rundumschlag (Sein und Streit) | For comment: see above
• #119 - Open Source GPTs, X.AI, Auto-GPT, China’s Censorship of AI, Fake Drake+The Weeknd Colab (Last Week in AI)
• 20 Years of Python - Brett Cannon (Django Chat) | Good as always

Out of Context Images