Ephes Blog

When the karens saw jesus girl dinnering with simps and pick-mes, they said to his disciples, "why does he yap with simps and pick-mes? sus." Hearing this, Jesus said to them, "It is not the sigmas who need a vibe check, but the betas. I have not come to rizz the based, but the cringe." --NowWeAreAllTom

I couldn't squeeze in any open source work this week. But I did manage to check out some impressive dinosaur models. That's all!

Articles

• The Rise Of Competitive Authoritarianism | I'm sorry, but you all have to read this
• Building Websites With LLMS | Nice idea 😄
• My sales pitch for TypeScript | Meh, still not sold, but good to know about the arguments.
• 1.5KB Single-File Wiki | I should probably steal the md2html function
• DSF member of the month - Cory Zue
• The "think" tool: Enabling Claude to stop and think in complex tool use situations | Whoa

Software

• Docs / Source | EU-based Notion alternative built with Django and Next.js. The instructions immediately dive into K8s cluster deployment. Yeah, right. The attitude (and tech stack) are pretty off the mark, but whatever. We'll probably need several more attempts to get it right. At least it's a start.

Websites

• Modern Font Stacks - System font stack CSS organized by typeface classification for every modern OS

Out of Context Images

I didn't get much done on my open source projects last week. I'm considering reusing the Auphonic transcript editor for the transcript detail page. I've been thinking about how to handle transcripts with speaker annotations, but that's going to take at least another week of work. I spent a lot of time outdoors though, so I don't regret it.

Articles

• Here’s how I use LLMs to help me write code
• Building effective agents | Article from anthropic containing kind of a definition for "agents" vs "agentic workflows". I like the "LLM in a loop" definition 😁.
• A litmus test for AI agents | Also interesting definition: "Does the AI system perform actions under its own identity?"
• Creating Open Graph Images in Django for Improved Social Media Sharing
• Book Recommendations | Those books are good, yep

Tools

• Provides two healthcheck endpoints for your Django application
• Better Project And App Structure for Django | There's a new version with uv support 🥳

Out of Context Images

On behalf of the United Kingdom, I would like to welcome the United States of America into the select club of countries that have voted to impose economic sanctions on themselves. --David Chisnall

Carnival is finally over and the weather's improving! I just released an update to django-cast where transcript models for the feed are now retrieved through a repository, and the feed is primarily generated from cacheable data. This turned out to be more challenging than I expected.

There are still four queries I haven't been able to eliminate yet: one because caching the site object is difficult, two because podcasts have additional fields compared to blogs that prevent me from using the cached blog object, and one query that fetches a post model for reasons I can't figure out. For now, I'm satisfied with the progress - eliminating those remaining queries isn't worth the effort at this point. I might work on transcript detail pages next week.

Articles

• LLMs and stuff
  • 🤖 "Agents" are Cheat Codes | Yep, "agent" is definitely a loaded term. Right now it basically means: software that processes information both before sending a query to an LLM and after receiving a response, plus any supporting infrastructure needed to make that happen.
  • Headroom for AI development | Yep, it's all pretty wild
• Software
  • Trunk Based Development | Agree
  • How Core Git Developers Configure Git
  • freelancing: How I got clients, part 1 (7min read) | I recently started looking for new clients for the first time in over 10 years of freelancing. Naturally, the first thing I did was write a tool to manage my resume 😄
  • EdgeDB is now Gel and Postgres is the Future | Cool new website 😎
  • Who's Afraid of a Hard Page Load? | Yep
• Stuck | webcomic
• WeekNotes
• Back to the writing board | Luis

Tools

• A TypeScript chess library for chess move / chessboard.js - the easiest way to embed a chess board on your site | My son wants to learn chess, but I would like to teach programming 😄
• Neobrutalism components | Actually looking quite good!
• TypingMind
• CrewAI - Fast and Flexible Multi-Agent Automation Framework

Videos

• Algorithms are breaking how we think |It's pretty ironic that a video warning about the dangers of complacency comes from a perspective of cultural pessimism. I'd say the video itself is guilty of the very complacency it criticizes. Still entertaining though 😄.
• Choosing Wisely: SPA vs. HTMX for Your Next Web Project with Chris May | Yup

Out of Context Images

just putting this out there but: the technology has emerged. it is no longer "emerging technology." the technology is now a seeping ooze --allison

I managed to avoid going overboard with carnival festivities. Finally published the podcast episode about Auphonic that had been sitting in the queue for over two months. I'm hoping to prevent such long delays going forward. I had planned to release a new django-cast update with properly cacheable transcript data, but it turned out to be more challenging than anticipated - hopefully I can get to it next week.

Articles

• My LLM codegen workflow atm
• Not so fast, Mr. Fourier! | Nice!
• Hallucinations in code are the least dangerous form of LLM mistakes | Yep, I'm also annoyed by people always bringing this up
• Small tech | Hmm, good to hear from Maciej again 😀

Fediverse

• 💡 CSS Tip! - How to remove spaces above and below uppercase text
• Recently I discovered it's possible to directly run assembler code on the VideoCore IV co-processor of the #RaspberryPi 3... | nice
• Found my spirit animal | 🐓

Software

• Awesome CursorRules

Hardware

• framework | Nice, but maybe I'm waiting a bit for the new mac studios?

Videos

• My 2025 uv-based Python Project Layout for Production Apps | uv has a builtin build backend - cool!
• The Future of Rust Web Applications - Greg Johnston | Ok, being able to use the same code on frontend (via webassembly) and backed is an advantage for rust, cool!