Ephes Blog

Everyone seems to be obsessed with passive income but I’m set on passive-aggressive income, so you should probably pay me back if you care even the slightest amount about our friendship and how much I thought it meant to you. --Alice McFlurry

Short work week. Normally, I just sport a Neandertal look at work, but last week I decided to go full method-acting by working directly from the actual Neandertal!

Released a new version of django-cast that introduces cover images for posts. For podcasts, the iTunes artwork is used as a fallback. There are also some bugfixes and documentation improvements.

Articles

• Writing
  • Knowledge Graph Extraction & Visualization with local LLM from Unstructured Text: a History example | One of the projects worked on at the 2024 spring sprint of PyDDF Düsseldorf
  • On Opening Essays, Conference Talks, and Jam Jars
  • Writing with AI
  • Slop is the new name for unwanted AI-generated content
• Design
  • Masonry Layouts in CSS
  • The evolution of Figma’s mobile engine: Compiling away our custom programming language
  • Adobe abandons $20 billion acquisition of Figma | Didn't know about this, whoa!
• The Night Watch | I devolved from systems programming to machine learning to web development, but I saw it as an arbitrary, random mutation. Now I'm beginning to suspect it was inevitable. I also like scarves. Classic 🏛️ post.
• Peer review is not the gold standard in science | I think this lab leak stuff is bullshit, but that science has to be against gatekeeping? Full ack.

Weeknotes

• Own Your Web – Issue 14: Webmentions | Matthias Ott - hmm, I should implement Webmentions in django-indieweb, no?
• Weeknotes: more datasette-secrets, plus a mystery video project | Simon Willison
• Weeklog for Week 18: April 29 to May 05 | Johannes

Videos

• NOX vs TOX – WHAT are they for & HOW do you CHOOSE? 🐍 | Great video!

Software

• Cohere Toolkit - is a collection of prebuilt components enabling users to quickly build and deploy RAG applications
• btop++ - Resource monitor that shows usage and stats for processor, memory, disks, network and processes | c++ continuation of bpytop

Podcasts

• Self-Hosted Open Source - Michael Kennedy | Yep, the vibe is mostly right. Personally I go a step further and ditch Docker as well (Michael made the argument that using Docker increases security somehow, which is false, of course ).

Out of Context Images

Journalism is making the same mistake with AI that they made with bloggers. They jumped to the incorrect conclusion that we were trying to do what they do. --Dave Winer

Made some solid progress on django-cast. It now has support for Podlove Web Player version 5. Although it still works, version 4 is no longer officially supported. I wanted to switch to version 5 for a long time, mainly because I see it as a prerequisite for adding a transcripts feature. What is also possible now is to heavily customize the appearance of the audio player. For example, if you go to my Python Podcast site, click on the little 'B' in the menu bar, and then select the 'Python Podcast' theme, you get a completely different looking player. This is also important because it might be possible to have a good looking podcast template (yes, I'm finally working on one).

And then there's support for the new Wagtail 6.1 release. All I had to do was to implement the new expand_db_attributes_many method in my custom PageLinkHandler to avoid database queries.

It's really warm in the great outdoors, so I spent some time there. And I enjoyed watching a ballet performance at the nearby opera house.

Articles

• My approach to HTML web components
• The new old: Jamstack and MACH's journey towards traditional CMS concepts Yep, monolith does not mean "not modular"
• An alternative proposal for CSS masonry
• Passkeys: A Shattered Dream | Hmm...

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 17: April 22 to April 28 | Johannes
• 📔 Week notes for week 18: A week to mostly forget | Oliver Andrich

Software

• Wagtail 6.1 release notes / Get even more organized with Wagtail 6.1
• dj-notebook - Django + shell_plus + Jupyter notebooks made easy | Ha, this is an alternative to using "jupyter-server < 2" and "traitlets < 5.10.0" - yeah, finally! 🎉
• pyinstrument - is a Python profiler

Out of Context Images