Ephes Blog

Technology is the art of arranging the world so we don't have to experience it. --Max Frisch

Back from vacation, still catching up.

Articles

• Prompt caching with Claude | Cool!
• The area element
• Drawing boundaries | Unexpected relation between software design and philosophy
• Reckoning | Four-part series of posts arguing against excessive Javascript-First-Frontends

Books

• Now Available: “Rote Learning HTML & CSS,” the Most Boring Free Ebook Ever | Beware, this book is kind of short 😅

Fediverse

• Homeoffice | Webcomic
• Because of the tag string PEP, I probably will be talking about HTML templating a bit. | 🧵 about making html templating in Python more component like as in the JS world
• We started using #htmx at work with #django. We have a table view that includes a form in a modal to add data to that table.

Out of Context Images

It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of giants standing on the shoulders of other giants. It has also been said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on the toes of other midgets.

--Alan Cooper

Failed to avoid reading things despite being still on vacation.

Articles

• Python
  • Tracing the evolution of a Python function with git log | Nice, didn't know it's possible to trace functions directly
  • Three month suspension for a Core Developer | Welp. Getting trolled by the SC for trolling the board seems kind of fair.
• Frontend Stuff
  • Vanilla CSS and efficiencies over Sass
  • The anchor element | Entertaining despite nothing new for me here 😄
  • The Performance Inequality Gap, 2024 - Frontend is haunted by 2013's Great Branch Mispredict
  • Styling Tables the Modern CSS Way | Cool, didn't know about caption and scope let alone all the CSS tricks..
  • Riffing on the latest CSS fit text approach
• Video
  • Adding sound wave overlays to videos and pictures using FFMPEG
  • Video with alpha transparency on the web
• Don't Lie To Me About Web 2.0
• My weeks of reading hornily: steamy book sales have doubled – and I soon found out why | Hrhr
• GPT-4o System Card | Interesting writeup

Software

• Bookmarking
  • Betula is a free federated self-hosted single-user bookmarking software for the independent web | Cool, bookmarking software is always interesting to me
  • linkding is a bookmark manager that you can host yourself
• RustPython - A Python-3 (CPython >= 3.12.0) Interpreter written in Rust 🐍 😱 🤘 | Heard of it a few years ago, glad to see it's still alive.
• Public Work is a search engine for public domain content | Nice interface!
• Datasette 1.0a14: The annotated release notes
• Python 3.12.5 | New Release
• The Ultimate Collection of CSS-only Shapes
• Django 5.1 released | 🥳

Fediverse

• CSS scroll-driven animation + scroll snap events synchronized with a number input
• How it started. How it's going. | Webcomic - Happy Sisyphus keeps on rollin!
• Gave up and hand coded the #XML files for #SAML2 metadata. | This is only the beginning.
• 1990s internet culture was quite different from 2020s internet culture. | Sigh, those were the times
• This has been passed down in our family for generations | Webcomic - it's not always goodies
• What are examples of fantastic *home pages* of personal websites? 😍 Any site that really stuck with you? And why? | Great examples!
• If a machine accomplishes cognitive tasks in a way that is dissimilar from the way our brain does it, do we call the machine intelligent in this domain, or not? | Nice 🧵

Videos

• How HTMX is changing the web, with Carson Gross | Jeremy Howard speaks with Carson Gross, cool!
• TOY DOLLS-Toccata in D minor

Weeknotes

• Weeknotes: a staging environment, a Datasette alpha and a bunch of new LLMs | Simon Willison

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Prevent the next Crowdstrike outage! Our company offers an innovative kernel-mode agent that uses advanced cloud-delivered AI to detect EDR malfunctions and correct them on the fly --lcamtuf

More vacation and then a slight vacation from the vacation. Had to move some files from spotify to a mobile speaker for which spotdl worked quite well, but skipped some tracks for unknown reasons.

Articles

• Fit-to-Width Text: A New Technique
• Aider | LLMs in the terminal
• Growing your Business Logic with Django | Article is behind paywall but worth it
• Default To Large Modules
• FastHTML: Modern web applications in pure Python

Fediverse

• Python conference speaker pro tip: If the CFP asks for your past speaking experience, you can share your pyvideo.org speaker page | Now this lonely 1 is staring at me, dang.
• okay, I finally found a good use for an LLM. no, really.
• Luck | War and Peas Webcomic

Videos

• Curlhacker | Daniel Stenberg streaming curl development

Software

• FastHTML - Modern web applications in pure Python
• New in Wagtail 6.2 | 6.2 was released!
• DinkyDash is a simple, customizable dashboard designed to display family-oriented information such as recurring tasks, countdowns to special events, and daily rotations.
• New attrs release!

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 30: July 22 to July 28 | Johannes

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'If you bite it and you die it's poison, but if it bites you and you die, that's venom' #lastboost ☝️ --neingeist

During the first week of our vacation, I spent a lot of time outdoors in nature. Didn’t do anything else ☀️.

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I think we all learned a valuable lesson from this: Never ship. --Tyler Hillsman

With vacation just around the corner, work has been pretty light. I attended the Django Cologne Meetup and watched an interesting talk about Django background tasks. It’s great to think about not having to deal with Celery anymore. I also recorded and published a podcast episode on the Python Data Model. Then, I wrote a piece on implementing Django with SSO and managed to release a new version of django-cast (though there aren’t many updates).

I encountered a strange issue where some command line tools written in Rust (bat, exa) stopped working, showing error messages like this:

Calling brew reinstall bat fixed it.

Articles

• Microsoft Research Introduces AgentInstruct: A Multi-Agent Workflow Framework for Enhancing Synthetic Data Quality and Diversity in AI Model Training | A single GPU model outperforming GPT3.5? Cool!
• Imitation Intelligence, my keynote for PyCon US 2024
• Friday Deploy Freezes Are Exactly Like Murdering Puppies | Seems about the right time to repost this
• The PSF Board Election Results For 2024: What I Think
• Physics Simulations in Bevy
• Mining JIT traces for missing optimizations with Z3

Videos

• I tried using AI. It scared me. | Hmm, it does not scare me. And Napster also didn't. I'm always happy about new stuff you can use to do cool stuff.
• DjangoCon Europe 2024 | Fast on my machine: How to debug slow requests in production
• DjangoCon Europe 2024 | Data Oriented Django Deux

Software

• aseprite - Animated Sprite Editor
• django-readers - A lightweight function-oriented toolkit for better organisation of business logic and efficient selection and projection of data in Django projects
• Zettlr - Your One-Stop Publication Workbench

Fediverse

• When I worked at a cloud infrastructure company I evaluated some “endpoint management” security agent software | Thread on this crowdstrike disaster
• Any sufficiently advanced "endpoint protection" software is indistinguishable from malware.

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 28: July 08 to July 14 | Johannes
• Weeknotes: GPT-4o mini, LLM 0.15, sqlite-utils 3.37 and building a staging environment | Simon Willison
• Months in Review | Luis 😄