Ephes Blog

Come, let's take anti-inflammatory pain medicine together 🫴 --CatSalad

Just wrapped up my first work week of the year. While it was pretty routine, I did manage to push out an update to podcast-transcripts. The big changes: you can now do transcription locally using mlx-whisper (which works particularly well on Macs), without needing to rely on any external APIs. I also added support for local audio files, so you're no longer limited to just audio URLs - though that option's still there if you prefer it. Plus, thanks to FFmpeg, the tool now automatically converts any recognized audio format to 16kHz mono MP3, so you're not restricted to MP3s anymore.

Articles

• Should I Use React For That? | To sum it up 😀, basically. But there are lots of good sources linked.
• Principles Of Web Accessibility | Nice writeup! Agree!
• Django: render JavaScript import maps in templates | Cool, lots of stuff I didn't know about here.
• My AI/LLM predictions for the next 1, 3 and 6 years, for Oxide and Friends

Software

• TabPFN is a foundation model for tabular data / Accurate predictions on small data with a tabular foundation model (Paper) | Wow, there are models now that perform better than XGBoost & co? Cool!

Fediverse

• i’m going to start sending out emails that start: “Hostile reminder:”
• #TIL about the #column command and I cant believe that I missed this gem since... forever? | Didn't know about this too 😳
• TIL about rtss: a handy command line tool for seeing the relative timestamps of each line of output from a process. | What's up with all those command line utils I don't know about? I worked as a sysadmin 20 years ago. I thought I know them all wtf..
• i'm sure anyone who has ever done some serious plotting can relate :)
• This is proof i have the patience to stab something 1000 times | Stitching
• YES, BUT - catsinabox

Videos

• Self Models of Loving Grace | Great talk!

My New Year’s resolution? 3840 × 2160 --nixCraft

It's the first week of 2025 and the last week of my holiday break. I've mostly been lounging around, alternating between eating, sleeping, and building Lego sets. I tried getting back into django-cast by pushing out a small release (0.2.41), but quickly hit a roadblock. After using uv these past few months, I'd completely forgotten how to handle non uv virtualenvs and package building with flit. So first I had to switch everything from flit to uv. Once I finished that bit of yak shaving, I discovered some forgotten mypy issues lurking in the code. To top it off, I remembered I'd worked on some transcript features a few weeks back but never finished writing the tests.

I took a deep breath and hit the release button anyway, despite the test coverage not being at 100%. My OCD might keep me tossing and turning tonight, but hey - we've got a new release! I'd actually put the transcript feature on the back burner when groq started throwing internal server errors. No point polishing a feature when I couldn't even generate new transcripts. The good news is that groq support has sorted out the issue, so expect a flood of new podcast transcripts soon!

Articles

• Frontend
  • Boost website speed with prefetching and the Speculation Rules API
  • Smooth Multi-Page Experiences with Just a Few Lines of CSS
  • Next-level frosted glass with backdrop-filter
  • TIL (well, over the last few days) how to create nice looking forms with `form`. `fieldset`, `legend` and `label` instead of tables and a bit of CSS
• Python / AI
  • Show Django flash messages as toasts with Htmx
  • Things we learned about LLMs in 2024 | Great writeup! 🎉
  • Python: spy for changes with sys.monitoring
  • THINKING ABOUT USING AI? Here’s what you can and (probably) can’t change about its environmental impact.
• Git: undo a pull
• Problems I no longer have by using Server-side rendering
• My Default Apps at the End of 2024
• Databases in 2024: A Year in Review | How could I have missed this in the previous years?

Videos

• rambling about programming with #llms #llm on twitch.tv/wesen3000 for a bit | Want to see what people mean by LLMs boosting productivity? This is a perfect example! Thanks @mnl for giving me such a clear demonstration to point to!

Weeknotes

• Weeknotes: Starting 2025 a little slow | Simon Willison

Fediverse

• Etm. (abbr.) Latin abbreviation for the literal translation of "and shit", specifically "et merda*. | Might come in handy
• 'Tokyo-based architect & artist Hajime Narukawa won Japan's prestigious Good Design Award for developing the AuthaGraph World Map, a groundbreaking projection that preserves the true proportions of continents & oceans
• For new #rust folks coming from #python - if you find yourself thinking "Surely Rust has a pprint like prettyprinter for data structures?"
• Sushi Etiquette
• I have to take this call.. | webcomic
• #tinyCSSsnippet I've been shocked 🙀 to learn has been slept on | Stack all the things

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