Ephes Blog

I run my own Mastodon instance because I don't trust random admins to fuck up what I am perfectly capable of fucking up on my own. --moliver

Another busy week at work. Learned that creating PDFs from web pages is a little less difficult than expected. Using a headless Chromium actually works quite well, and it's not that difficult to deploy either.

Looking forward to having some time off. Maybe look a bit more into the LLM / machine learning direction, which suffered a bit from my recent deep dive into frontend stuff (htmx, alpine.js).

Updating mastodon and takahē were the only non work related computer activities I managed to do this week, hope this will get better soon.

Articles

• Rebuilding a featured news section with modern CSS: Vox news
• Container Query Units and Fluid Typography
• Two Ways to Turbo-Charge tox
• CLI tools hidden in the Python standard library

Mastodon / Twitter

• PyScript NEXT Tech-Preview Release!
• wellp. python 3.12 `type x = ...` aliases won't be auto-rewritable because they can't be used equivalently :(
• I have never seen anybody put forward a convincing argument against this theory | Webcomic
• People believe that if they could somehow walk into a research lab, they could then 'steal the knowledge'. | Yep
• Apple advertisements that look surprisingly good
  • no1
  • no2
• web development being surprisingly deep | webcomic
• Wow. Meta commits to dedicate three engineer-years to implement the removal of the GIL from #Python and fix upcoming compatibility and performance issues with it.
• Overview over funding sources for open source development

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 26: June 26 to July 02 | Johannes
• Week in Review 2023-07-03 | Luis
• Writing After Twitter, Conference Life, and Turbo-Charging tox | Hynek

Videos

• LangChain: Chat with Your Data
• DjangoCon Europe 2023 | Keynote: A speedrunning guide to software development | Great talk

Software

• Karabiner-Elements A powerful and stable keyboard customizer for macOS

Podcast

• Privilegien- Quartett Ein Spiel, aus dem wir nicht aussteigen können (Was denkst du denn?) | Nice
• Episode 94: Progress (Hotel Bar Sessions) | Always good
• #128 - generative search, GPU black market, GPT-4’s Secret, Sam Altman’s World Tour (Last Week in AI)
• Things I Wish Someone Had Explained To Me Sooner About Python (Talk Python To Me) | Meh.
• #387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God (Lex Fridman Podcast) | The episodes here are either ok or batshit crazy. Usually I try to avoid the conspiracy theory / techbro bootlicking / snake oil selling stuff. But this episode is both: sometimes interesting and sometimes batshit crazy.
• Season 3 Episode 13 Stephen Balaban (The robot brains) | Nice one.

I find OOP philosophically unsound. It claims that everything is an object. Even if it is true it is not very interesting — saying that everything is an object is saying nothing at all. --Alexander Stepanov

Using Django, htmx, alpine.js and tailwind for work, which is a very powerful combination. Did some vacation planning and misplaced my keys. Discovered that it's super easy to replace an AirTag battery.

Articles

• Vectors are the new json in postgresql

Software

• Shrinkpdf: shrink PDF files with Ghostscript
• There's a public roadmap for Wagtail
• Pydantic V2 Is Here!
• Modern CSS Solutions - for Old CSS Problems | Really cool site by Stephanie Eckles

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 25: June 19 to June 25 | Johannes - I still have to play catch up a bit 😅
• Week in Review 2023-06-26 | Luis
• Science and Technology links (June 25 2023)

Mastodon / Twitter

• added a http://hyperscript.org powered copy button

Videos

• Demo of morph swap for HTMX 2.0 | Oh this is so cool! Maybe it will be possible to have an audio player keep running while navigating the podcast page without having to use an SPA!

Podcasts

• 30% Faster, UUID Downsides, Growing WAL, Processes vs. Threads | Scaling Postgres 271 (Scaling PostgreSQL) | There was also a poll on Twitter recently where the majority of people said they use UUIDs as primary keys. Which seems completely crazy to me..
• UKW112 Ukraine: Abteilung für Infarkte und Defenestration (Unsere kleine Welt) | Nothing is known for sure..
• Revision 575: Code meets Design: Frontend-Entwicklung (Working Draft) | Meh
• #385 – Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia (Lex Fridman Podcast)
• Noam Brown (The Robot Brains) | On solving Poker and Diplomacy - interesting.
• #386 – Marc Andreessen: Future of the Internet, Technology, and AI (Lex Fridman Podcast) | The first part was surprisingly strong. Good episode.

Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason. — John Harrington (1561-1612).

Took a closer look at neapolitan and liked it. But imho it's not so much about reusing code from CRUDView as a template for how to structure a couple of views that all share some common logic. Found out the hard way that it's surprisingly difficult to convert html to pdf.

Then the preschoolers said goodbye, but not much else happened besides work.

Articles

• You Can Have It All | via web technologies
• Bringing Locality of Behaviour to Django Views and URLs
• Combinatorial coordinates for the aperiodic Spectre tiling | via Claudio - really cool, too bad our apartment is rented

Videos

• PyConDE & PyData Berlin 2023 - YouTube-Playlist

Software

• Commandeer is deprecated 😢 | In favor of click which is excellent, indeed
• Prince 15 - Convert HTML to PDF | Commercial tool for converting html to pdf (no variable fonts etc, but much better CSS support than free alternatives)

Mastodon / Twitter

• Modern physics put men on the moon. But physics created weapons of mass destructions, has benefitted only some people, and uses mathematical models with counterintuitive assumptions like time is relative. New scholars are pushing back with easy to explain physics without math... | Thread...
• Martyn Turner on #climatecrisis

Podcasts

• Web Components mit Adam Bien (programmier.bar) | Hmm, seems like it's time to play around with web components more
• Angst vor’m Knacks – Dominik Angerer (neu•gierig) | I'm more into wagtail, but this whole CMS topic is also interesting for me..
• Über afrikanische Philosophie und Vergessenwerden (Sein und Streit) | Wow, this website is pretty slow..
• Revision 568: 100 Days Of More Or Less Modern CSS (Working Draft) | Good episode!
• #79 Domain-Driven Design and Moduliths with Oliver Drotbohm (Happy Path Programming) | Yep.

Interviewer: do you have an example of projects you spent too much effort on?

Me: I suppose the work on Mambo 1 to 4 was a bit of a waste... --Chris Heilmann

Wrote my first UI Tests using Playwright as a pytest plugin, because the UI I'm currently working on is quite javascript heavy. Overall it was a good experience. But it's hard to get the test browser to behave like the real one:

• Drag and drop just looks different (I have no idea why).
• Clicking on a link in the test browser results in href navigation, while clicking on the link in the real browser triggers hx-get

One of the projects I worked on last year went live: Plastic IQ tool launched in Brazil and Indonesia (link goes to Linkedin).

Articles

• UGH | Webcomic - I feel attacked..
• Žižek and the game of life | Well I suspected something like this going on for a long time
• Citogenesis in science and the importance of real problems | Yup

Software

• django-template-partials - Reusable named inline partials for the Django Template Language
• Adding template fragments or partials for the DTL | Interesting discussion about template partials..
• Playwright for Python | There's a pytest plugin, too
• pytest-base-url is a simple plugin for pytest that provides an optional base URL
• Tutorial: Web Testing with Playwright in Python
• django-passkeys - An extension to Django ModelBackend backend to support passkeys
• PyPy v7.3.12: release of python 2.7, 3.9, and 3.10 | Python 3.10!

Videos

• DjangoCon Europe 2023 | Yak-shaving to Where the Puck is Going to Be.
• DjangoCon Europe 2023 | Good form: How Django’s form rendering improved during the 4.x series
• Why All the Best Cocktail Bars in NYC Buy Their Ice From Richard Boccato

Podcasts

• Revision 571: TypeScript 5.1 (Working Draft)
• Wie verändert KI unsere Welt? (Das philosophische Radio) | Surprisingly good (modulo using the term "artificial intelligence" very naively)
• Was bedeutet Ihnen Erich Fromm für die heutige Zeit? (Das philosophische Radio)
• Rocky Duan, from OpenAI to Covariant (The Robot Brains Podcast)
• End-to-End Web Testing with Playwright (Talk Python To Me) | There's even a pytest-plugin 🥳
• Ernährung - Wie wir essen, ist wichtiger als was wir essen (Hörsaal) | A very long list of things that won't work..
• Technikphilosophie - Künstliche Intelligenz und Verantwortung (Hörsaal) | Meh, kind of boring...
• Der sanfte Wellengang des Lebens - Über Hedonismus und Anhedonismus (Was denkst du denn?) | Good episode
• Future of Pydantic and FastAPI (Talk Python To Me) | OpenAI is using FastAPI / Pydantic for their APIs? Cool!

"I was born in 1994"

- boring

- heard it before

- tells you nothing

"I was born in the year of Cotton Eye Joe"

- arouses curiosity

- who was Cotton Eye Joe

- where did he come from?

- where did he go?

- Cotton Eye Joe

-- snart

A deep dive into htmx and Alpine.js. Mixing hyperscript in weird htmx attributes with javascript in even weirder alpine attributes embedded in already weird Django template syntax is often too much for PyCharm and djhtml. But it still works - so far I can't complain. A while ago, my printer broke down. I got a new one this week. I had to deal with some bureaucracy because the refund went to a bank account that no longer exists.

Another WWDC was held and some weird hardware got announced. But on the plus side, PWAs on Apple platforms finally seem to be getting interesting. So, yay for that. I went to a meeting of the local Python user group, which was a lot of fun. And finally, summer is here, so I spent a lot of time out in the sun, barbecuing, etc.

Articles

• ChatGPT is Not a Technological Singularity
• Using Django’s template loaders to configure Tailwind
• A new tutorial for Neapolitan
• LLMs are good at playing you

Books

• “Boost Your Git DX” available in early access

Videos

• DjangoCon Europe 2023 Edinburgh Videos Are Up!
• GO GO GOLEMS - COMPUTERS SHOULD COMPUTE | Talk by Manuel - strong recommendation - handout

Podcasts

• WR1494 Rezession, Gierflation, Industriestromspreis (Wirtschaftskunde) | Solid.
• UKW111 Ukraine: Die Gegenoffensive (unsere kleine welt)