Ephes Blog

Don't work harder or smarter.
Work darker.
Use your knowledge of black magic to call upon the old gods.
Turn all CEOs into newts & ferns.
Cover all office buildings in moss & wildflowers and let the raccoons have them.
You deserve a rest. --Edmonds_Scanner

On vacation, so no work this week. Did some open source, but not much. Released django-cast 0.2.26, which includes the new web component based image gallery as well as an htmx variant, to be able to see which one is simpler.

Articles

• Data scientists need to learn about significant digits | Yep
• Science and Technology links (December 30th 2023) | Asch replicates? I am not convinced, even if everyone else disagrees! 😇
• 12 Days of Web: Container Style Queries
• History of 20th century R&D labs | cool!

Mastodon / Twitter

• What password manager do you all recommend for a family plan? | Good question, interesting discussion
• Here are 10 beautifully designed websites for you to enjoy | Ok, clickbait alert, but I like nice websites, so..

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 51: December 18 to December 24 | Johannes
• Last weeknotes of 2023 | Simon Willison

Videos

• Room Tone 2023 | Nice idea
• Managing Content with Django with Michael Trythall | Wagtail vs Django CMS - django-cast is based on Wagtail, so this is kind of interesting to me

Software

• Ruby 3.3.0 Released | Still impressed by how much is going on in Ruby land
• Simple web app that renders minimalist CV with print-friendly layout

Out of Context Images

Web component version below:

And this is the htmx version - a little bit slower, but at least working!

why concern yourself with "developer experience" when you ought to be concerned with "the human experience"? what is autocompletion in the face of the exquisite, spectral agony of realizing you’re falling out of love? what is a “build time” under the glare of impending, relentless mortality?

one day, you will die, and your legacy will be washed away when someone forgets to renew the DNS. --stillness.digital

Short work week, Christmas is culminating. The new image gallery component for django-cast is working now and it's properly integrated via django-vite and even has a unit test. I also added a layout parameter to the gallery block to be able to choose different layouts for a gallery. But the first use case for this parameter will be an "htmx" layout to experiment with just replicating the gallery functionality using only htmx. I already have an idea on how to implement this and it will probably be ready by next week

Articles

• 10 Tips For Building SSR/HDA applications | Yep
• Alternate Futures for “Web Components” | Hmm
• 12 days of web
  • View Transitions Animating DOM state changes no longer requires a mountain of code thanks to the new View Transitions API
  • Web Components Learn how to build custom HTML elements that manage their own lifecycle, state and behaviors, both with and without shadow DOM
• lobste.rs | A bit like hn

Software

• django-unique-user-email - Enable login-by-email with the default User model for your Django project by making auth.User.email unique
• Tailwind CSS v3.4: Dynamic viewport units, :has() support, balanced headlines, subgrid, and more
• suno.ai song generation

Videos

• Björn Ommer: Generative AI, Stable Diffusion, and the Revolution in Visual Synthesis
• [1hr Talk] Intro to Large Language Models

Podcasts

• Simon Willison (Part One): Breaking Down OpenAI's New Features & Security Risks of Large Language Models (Newsroom Robots)
• Simon Willison (Part Two): How Datasette Helps With Investigative Reporting (Newsroom Robots) | Both episodes were really good!

Out of Context Images

The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome. He knows there is no such thing as a fearless warrior or a dread-free artist. —Steven Pressfield

Wrapping things up at work for the holiday season. Recorded and produced a podcast episode about PyTest, my favorite testing framework for Python, which was a lot of fun 🎙️.

Then I went a little deeper down this web component rabbit hole. I built a component from scratch for the image gallery stuff on this site. At first I put the Javascript for the component in the head of the html, because why not, but then I couldn't see the html in the custom element that was rendered on the server. After finding out that this was because the Javascript was executed before the content of my custom element was added to the DOM, I used a MutationObserver to detect when the html of my element was added to the DOM and then added the event listeners etc.. A little later I found out that this was complete overkill and I just need to move the Javascript for the component a little further down in the html to fix this. It's a little embarrassing to share my stupid mistakes here, but maybe this will be helpful for someone else googling for it (or asking a LLM - we still have to come up with a proper verb here, right?).

Next week I try to maybe have some tests for my component and a way to integrate Javascript and Django with maybe django-vite? We'll see 😁.

Articles

• A settings pattern for reusable Django apps
• Django: Sanitize incoming HTML fragments with nh3

Software

• Python 3.12.1 Release
• Alternative implementation of the Bitwarden server API written in Rust | I'm searching for an alternative to 1Password - not sure yet
• Web Component GitHub starter template
• Motion is a website that showcases the power of UI/UX animation

Mastodon / Twitter

• Warum liegt hier überhaupt Stroh rum? | Webcomic
• You can use mask-composite and some JavaScript to create this pointer proximity following glow border ✨
• All you need in AlpineJS to smoothly fade in images on load is to use the following classes and a simple on load statement
• How brands talk these days

Podcasts

• Kolo for Django - Lily Foote (Django Chat) | Good episode!
• Episode 5 - Cinder with Carl Meyer (core.py) | Nice!
• Revision 596: Neues in Safari, Teil 1 von 2 (Working Draft) | I just listen to people talking frontend and hope something will stick. Yeah, I know.
• Revision 597: Neues in Safari, Teil 2 von 2 (Working Draft) | Same thing, but I get the impression PWA might be hot now?

god: i have made a Single page webapp

angels: you fucked up a perfectly good website is what you did. look at it. it’s got dependency injections.

--Eric Meyer

Normal "omg there's only so much time left in the year and we're all sick" work week. Speaking of sick: Last week I caught the latest COVID variant, but what a letdown! It seems like COVID's lost its edge, turning into a mundane, almost commercialized version of its former fearsome self. It's like everyone's getting it these days – hardly the exclusive experience it used to be!

The sync renditions command for django-cast is done -> new release. Upgrading my projects to Django 5.0 and Wagtail 5.2.2 went smoothly. And there's a new version of ktpncook that fixes some minor issues. Nice progress, but my current mood is more like:

Articles

• Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution | How could I have missed this one? This is great stuff.
• Long context prompting for Claude 2.1 | Ok, this thing about adding just one sentence to the prompt making that much of a difference is just really wild
• Safer, Not Later | Move fast and break things revisited - good article
• Sharing Pictures of Code | Just to be aware of the options..
• Ext4 data corruption in stable kernels | Uh oh, make sure your servers don't get updated automatically 😱
• Real-world match/case | I had some use cases in the meantime and it's really cool, yep

Videos

• One big fat sound | Perfect answer to: Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
• Sierra Hull - Mad World (Tears For Fears) - DelFest - Cumberland, MD - 5/28/22 | Cheesy song but the mandolin solo is superb!
• Jeremy Keith – Of Time And The Web – border:none 2023 | Easy to forget how much progress we made, yep
• What's new in Django 5.0! | Nice summary video!
• Tobias Baldauf – [mɑːkt] – border:none 2023 | Also interesting. Personally I often think I'm a bit too much into self-reflection and should just do more and think less, but maybe I should reflect a bit more on that (oh no).

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 48: November 27 to December 04 | Johannes
• Week in Review 2023-12-04 | Luis
• Weeknotes: datasette-enrichments, datasette-comments, sqlite-chronicle | Simon Willison

Software

• FastUI - is a new way to build web application user interfaces defined by declarative Python code | react via pyscript?
• Django 5.0 released | 🥳
• Great LLM visualization | And it's available as open source 😎
• Awesome Systematic Trading | Have to do something about this, meh

Podcasts

• Revision 595: „HTML over the Wire“ und Unpoly (Working Draft) | I'm more team htmx, but unpoly seems to be really interesting, too
• Alternativlos, Folge 52 mit Joscha Bach (Alternativlos) | Ok (and it's called naive bayes!)

It’s really a shame how Cyber Monday has become so commercialized. --Max Leibman

Christmas season is heating up. Work went well, no issues there. For open source, I assumed I'd just add a little management command to django-cast to help me regenerate renditions when I change something about image sizes or formats. But this turned out to be much harder than I expected. I wasn't able to test my management command, because I kept running into strange race conditions / data persistence issues with image.get_renditions. Maybe it's because of the multi-threaded implementation in Wagtail, or a combination of multi-threading and the non-threadsafe nature of sqlite that I use for testing, but it didn't work and I couldn't figure out why. So I put all the rendition logic in another module to be able to test it without using the database. But it's still not in a releasable state - maybe next week 😅.

Mastodon / Twitter

• In der aktuellen @freakshow mache ich ein Live-Experiment: welche Qualität erreicht man binnen 20 Minuten mit KI-Bildgeneratoren wie #StableDiffusion (hier mit der iOS-App #DrawThings) und dem trainieren von LoRAs, wenn man als Grundlage einen 20 Sekunden Clip Wackelvideo hat? Seht und hört selbst - das wird Folgen haben
• Chrome is shipping <img sizes="auto"> support 🥳 | Wow, this would make responsive images much easier!
• 2 llm benchmarking papers published!

Videos

• How We're Building AI Search Engines using LLM Embeddings | Not much content here, but Django!
• Making Large Language Models Uncool Again | Hrhr, very cool Interview!

Software

• Midjourney
  • Explore unconventional aesthetics with the experimental --weird or --w parameter
  • Permutation Prompts
• Unpoly 3.6.0 released
• drawfast | Sketch -> image via stable diffusion, awesome!
• Faster Whisper transcription with CTranslate2 | Oh, I really need to add transcripts to django-cast

Podcasts

• xLSTM - "I am almost exploding" (Industrial AI Podcast) | Ok, you heard it here first: I predict this will turn out to be BS. No good technical arguments but marketing FOMO fluff. And all this weird IP talk you usually only get from snake oil salesmen.
• SE Radio 591: Yechezkel Rabinovich on Kubernetes Observability (Software Engineering Radio) | Meh, still unsure why people use this (for example minute 30 on deploying a service behind 3 chained single points of failure (loadbalancers) is described as "great" while it sounds horrible to me, but ok - maybe I just haven't seen the light yet)
• #9 Thomas Metzinger: Reines Bewusstsein/Beobachtungen beobachten/Meditation (Songs & Argumente) | Well done, this podcast is not bad at all!
• #1 - Joscha Bach: Computation/Bewusstsein/Nerds/DDR(Songs & Argumente) | Also good - oh no, now I have to listen to all episodes 🥶 (only issue is that I have to use the crappy spotify app to listen to this)
• #2 - Philipp Hübl: Moralpsychologie/Aufgeregte Gesellschaft(Songs & Argumente) | Nice!
• WR1546 Argentinien, Schuldenbremse, Ungleichheit
  (WRINT - Wissenschaft) | Very good!

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