Ephes Blog

"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

Me, walking up to the front desk of the hotel: I have a weird question

Clerk: there are no weird questions

Me: I have an NFC chip implanted in my hand, and I was wondering whether you'd be willing to enroll it as a new key for my room

Clerk: you want me to do what?? I need to see this. What room?

Didn't even ask for ID.--Quinn Wilton

This past week was quite eventful 😅. On Monday morning, I had an emergency dental appointment due to a broken tooth crown 😬. Following that, I attended the Beyond Tellerrand conference on Monday and Tuesday, which proved to be an excellent experience filled with inspiring talks and engaging conversations with fellow attendees. A special shoutout and warm greetings to the hosts of the WWSIV podcast 🎙️!

Throughout the week, I attempted to make django-cast compatible with the upcoming Wagtail 5 release, but faced challenges mainly due to the usage of modules from 'wagtail.core' in migrations 🐛 and the removal of 'image_node.filter_spec' attribute. Additionally, I had to resolve an issue with old comments being invisible on python-podcast.de as a result of the migration to Wagtail and changes to the Django episode model's primary keys 🔧 - thanks to Norbert for the heads up. Unfortunately, there was no django-cast release this week 😞.

In my spare time, I delved into my new LLM hobby by starting to read the "Natural Language Processing with Transformers" book 📚. On Friday morning, I attended a Creative Mornings talk discussing ChatGPT and midjourney, though it didn't present much new information for me 🤷‍♀️ but the room was packed and there seems to be a lot of buzz around this topic. Later that day, I attempted to record a screencast with Manuel about the "nlp with transformers"-book and some LLM implementation stuff, but we faced technical difficulties with real-time collaboration on Jupyter notebooks. I subsequently wrote a TIL post about the experience, hoping that for our next screencast, it will work better 🤞.

Lastly, I managed to take some time and enjoy the outdoors – very good! 🌳

Articles

• The /now page movement | Great idea, didn't know about this! Will probably adopt this.
• Ruleset interpolation Explainer | Useful CSS stuff
• Statement from the listed authors of Stochastic Parrots on the “AI pause” letter | Ok, not so bad
• Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500,000 group chat messages
• Why I am excited about ChatGPT | "Calculator for writing" - yup...
• How Shadow DOM and accessibility are in conflict
• Using Unpoly with Django
• The AI Economist: Optimal Economic Policy Design via Two-level Deep Reinforcement Learning
• Scaffolded LLMs as natural language computers

Weeknotes / Newsletter

• Weeklog for Week 15: April 10 to April 16 | Johannes
• Week in Review 2023-04-17 | Luis
• Science and Technology links (April 22 2023) | Daniel Lemire
• css-layout issue 343: Asking for help and use cases for a CSS layout accessibility issue. Also, lots of exciting things landing in browsers over the past few weeks. | Rachel Andrew
• Introducing Neapolitan | Carlton Gibson

Software

• GREASE - Grease is a website starter that makes building performant, accessible, aesthetic websites fast & frictionless
• Node.js 20 Now Available
• you.com - The AI Search Engine You Control
• Wavelength Messenger
• I know this has been around a bit, but the Netlify drop interface is rad
• recursive.design - A typographic palette for vibrant code & UI

Cool Websites

• personalsit.es
• localghost.dev

Podcasts

• #118 - Anthropic vs OpenAI, AutoGPT, RL at Scale, AI Safety, Memeworthy AI Videos (Last Week in AI) | Last Week in AI is one of the best AI news podcasts I discovered so far
• Revision 565: Quo vadis Frontend-Tooling? (Working Draft)
• AI – mehr als ChatGPT? mit Philipp Schmid von Hugging Face (programmier.bar) | Meh
• S3 E6 Richard Socher joins Host Pieter Abbeel: LLMs, Search, You.com, AGI, Metamind, AIX Ventures (The Robot Brains) | Great episode! Didn't know Richard Socher was one of the first investors in huggingface...
• WR1479 Bank Run, Klimageld und Spitzensteuer (Wirtschaftskunde) | Always great!
• #111 - Julian asks Bob about his use of ChatGpt (PyBites Podcast) | Meh
• „Jetzt kommt das goldene KI-Zeitalter“ (Künstliche Intelligenz) | Well, what I take away from this episode is that good consulting is in high demand right now 😇 (I'm available, just saying..).

Out of Context Images

While preparing a screencast with Manuel, we searched for real-time collaboration tools for Jupyter notebooks. JetBrains' "Code With Me" proved unsuitable, displaying only raw JSON. Here are two practical alternatives:

1. Visual Studio Code's "Live Share" extension
2. Launching JupyterLab server like this: jupyter-lab --collaborative

If you're aware of other collaboration tools for Jupyter notebooks suited for screencasts, please drop me a note 😄!