Ephes Blog

At work I used htmx and Alpine.js again and I think this is a really powerful combination. I hope the view transition api, which is currently only implemented in Chrome, will be available in other browsers soon. I also did some thinking about how to display PDFs on web pages using PDF.js.

For my personal site, I had to fix the image rendition deletion incident from last week, and I thought a bit about wagtail_srcset and new image formats like AVIF. Maybe I should keep it simple and assume that all devices are now high pixel density devices and always use images that are three times the logical pixel size, and then use AVIF as the file format? I don't know yet.

And since Postgres 16 was released, I upgraded all my stuff to the new version and wrote a TIL post about it. And I also did some non-computer related activities this week: I participated in the local #klimastreik and moved a lot of furniture (whatever it takes to do that all day - I don't have it and like to take a bath in Voltaren now).

Articles

• Async Rust Is A Bad Language | Good article
• Eine neue Runde Open-Source-Förderung | New prototype fund round, need to apply..
• Death by a thousand microservices | Well you might have guessed that I'm not the biggest fan of microservices

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 36: September 04 to September 10 | Johannes

Mastodon / Twitter

• One of my favourite Python tricks

Podcasts

• Revision 583: Kann man Rust für Cross-Plattform Frontend-Entwicklung verwenden? (Working Draft) | Ok, interesting..
• FS268 /dev/stdnrd (Freakshow) | Meh
• Episode 107: Forgiveness (Hotel Bar Sessions) | Yup

It was the best of times. It was the worst of terms and conditions. --Nein

At work, setting up Single Sign-On (SSO) via Azure AD for a Django project was easier than expected, thanks to django-saml2-auth. I also found that ChatGPT was surprisingly effective at generating code to create a simplified Excel file, which I then could use to test the effectiveness of the existing pandas code for Excel parsing.

Doing open source, I fixed a bug in the theme-selector feature of django-cast. The bug occurred because Django handles the HTML rendering for SPA-themes and exposes it via a JSON API. I chose this method to avoid rendering a Wagtail streamfield in JavaScript. However, it used the theme from the database instead of the session template, which broke the Vue.js theme. After addressing this, I updated django-stubs and fixed a minor issue that made mypy pass again. I also improved the documentation for the themes feature. While reviewing the request-handling code, I found a simpler method using APIField and wrote a 'Today I Learned' (TIL) post about it. And finally, I broke most of the images on my site by accidentally deleting all the Wagtail renditions. Well, something to do for next week.

Articles

• Can LLMs learn from a single example? | Oooh, I have to start fine tuning now!
• Next.js, just why? | Because it's new and exciting? Call me old fashioned, but I rather go with stable and boring instead..
• Embedding paragraphs from my blog with E5-large-v2

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 35: August 28 to September 03 | Johannes
• Science and Technology links (September 2 2023) | Daniel Lemire

Software

• A simpler deployment story: Button is deployment, without the fuss. | Deployment for Django applications - already very excited
• XTuner is a toolkit for efficiently fine-tuning LLM
• Pandas release - What’s new in 2.1.0

Mastodon / Twitter

• STFU - It's TGV Tuesday!
• Over the years as a software developer I've had projects where I spent intensely collaborating in a team, and projects where I work by myself. I feel the tension between the two | Interesting thread...
• Casually running a 180B parameter LLM on M2 Ultra | Uh oh, GAS starting to kick in
• What's your current favorite local LLM model right now?
• Here's the most effective GPT-4 prompt I've developed for writing tasks

Videos

• Vorstellung Lona Moderne Web-Entwicklung in Python, ohne JavaScript | Hmm, interesting...
• #NoEstimates (Allen Holub) | Hmm, projection and "just count" sounds a lot like estimation to me, but it has the right vibe...
• Build an AI app with FastAPI and Docker - Coding Tutorial with Tips

Podcasts

• Stevan Harnad: AI's Symbol Grounding Problem (The Gradient Podcast) | Very good (but I still think John Searle is just wrong!)
• Django Trends in 2023 (Talk Python To Me) | Solid episode, yep, Django is still cool!
• WR1520 Leben im Albtraum (WRINT: Zum Thema) | Also good, very interesting approach
• Alphatier- und Chefgebaren - lassen sich da Rückschlüsse auf die Natur des Menschen ziehen? (Das philosophische Radio) | Meh, too much talking about apes and boring stuff, not enough about theory of science and ideology (which got me hooked)
• WR1521 Deutschlands Schwäche, Austerität, Kindergrundsicherung (WRINT: Wirtschaftskunde) | Always good
• Folge 176 - Domain-driven Design - Konzepte und Fallstricke (Software Architektur im Stream) | Not bad
• Episode 96: Gatekeeping (Hotel Bar Sessions)

UIs are big, messy, mutable, stateful bags of sadness. --Josh Abernathy

Usual work week. Finally upgraded my Debian boxes from bullseye to bookworm and had no problems. Wow 🤯. Found a workaround for a long-standing PyCharm limitation: If you use a German keyboard layout, it's not possible to switch windows or comment out lines of code using keyboard shortcuts. Just install the Keymap Nationalizer Plugin and select your actual keyboard layout.

Didn't have much time for open source last week, but nonetheless managed to add a theme chooser for django-cast. You can now choose your theme and save the result in the session. So now it's possible for all users to try out new themes. Now I have a reason to polish the other themes a bit 😅. If you want to try it, just click on the B in the menu bar.

Articles

• Making Large Language Models work for you | The WordCamp talk is also worth watching
• Anti-hype LLM reading list | No bullshit, just how stuff works - good resource
• Wikipedia search-by-vibes through millions of pages offline | Very good!
• Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models: A Survey | Ok, I'm finally about to try fine tuning for LLMs, so I need to read some stuff to get in shape
• Python packages with pyproject.toml and nothing else | Great to see this is possible now

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 34: August 21 to August 27 | Johannes
• Datasette 1.0a4 and 1.0a5, plus weeknotes | Simon Willison

Software

• nanoGPT - a rewrite of minGPT
• View Transitions bring seamless transition animations to the browser. Chrome is excited to see official support in Astro 3.0 | Cool demo!

Mastodon / Twitter

• Finally someone that dares to say it. I've never seen any estimates or project management actually work. It's just creating distractions and extra work that'd be much better spent actually doing the work | Full ack.
• Bad vs worse | Webcomic
• How to save $300 on a pro studio microphone with a pop filter | Dunno, but cool idea

Videos

• Using Django 4.2's StreamingHttpResponse and HTMX SSE to provide real time notifications | Solid talk

Podcasts

• AI Criticism Has a Decades-Long History (Tech Won’t Save Us) | Good episode about Joseph Weizenbaum
• UKW113 Ukraine: Die Denazifizierung des russischen Luftraums (Unsere kleine Welt)
• Axel Honneth : Theorie der Arbeit (Das philosophische Radio) | Meh

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool." (Feynman)

Started working on a new project, which is always exciting. Refactored django-cast filters.py -> it's almost readable now 😆. Facet counts are now available via the API, so cast-vue got an update showing filters for categories and tags.

Articles

• Composition over inheritance: The case for function-based views | Hmm, I don't have a strong preference for function based views over class based ones. It depends, I guess 😇.
• Building a blog in Django | Quite minimalistic, but if you don't have a lot of requirements, doing something like this seems perfectly fine
• CSS Selectors: A Visual Guide | Visual!
• Supercharge Your Django App: 7 Sneaky Tricks to Crush Slow Database Queries | I need to look into db performance for django-cast, too. Maybe write a blog post about it later...

Mastodon / Twitter

• ok but does this come in human sizes | Toot showing an image of a dog wearing a "not friendly do not touch" warning west
• If you haven't tried fine tuning yet drop everything and do it. It's a magical experience. | About fine tuning open source LLMs - yes, have to try that, but drop everything else 🥶?
• Cost: Summarizing 100x 1,000-word passages costs ~$5.48 with GPT-4 but only 19 cents with Llama-2-70b using Anyscale Endpoints. | Stop trying to convince me to drop everything else, plz!

Software

• Djangonaut Program / djangonaut.space | Cool project!
• Finetuning Large Language Models | Online course
• Announcing Python in Excel: Combining the power of Python and the flexibility of Excel | I knew something like this was coming, so not really a surprise - but cool to see it launched!
• Hemingway is now Hemingw-AI! My favourite writing tool just got an AI upgrade and it’s great | Personally, I use a combination of GPT-4, deepL write and grammarly - but maybe I should try Hemingway too.
• List of a UI toolkits for vue so I can search for it later..
  • Quasar - The enterprise-ready cross-platform VueJs framework
  • NuxtUI - Fully styled and customizable components for Nuxt
  • Anu - Build better interfaces faster
  • Vuestic - Vue 3 UI Framework
  • Vuetify - Vue Component Framework
  • Windi UI - Build Accessible Apps 10x faster
  • Radix - Start building your app now
  • shadcn - Build your component library

Podcasts

• Making Parsing I/O Bound with Daniel Lemire (Software Unscripted)
• Wirtschaft - Warum nachhaltiger Kapitalismus nicht funktioniert (Hörsaal) | This was surprisingly good!
• SE Radio 577: Casey Muratori on Clean Code, Horrible Performance? (Software Engineering Radio) | Yep, good one
• Revision 581: TypeScript 5.2 (Working Draft)

Just as most people are not going to stop eating fast food because home cooking is better, they’re not going to abandon social media because blogging is awesome. But that doesn’t mean you have to line up for a Big Mac. And it doesn’t mean your internet experience has to suck --Mike Grindle

Normal working week. Improved media file backup for django-cast (#99) and wrote a TIL blog post about how to test Django management commands with pytest. Attended a rust meetup for the first time and am now looking for a use case for rust as it seems to be really cool (I learned static typing via Java and got burned, but static typing in rust is much better - might be time to revisit that).

Articles

• CPython without a global interpreter lock
• Things you forgot (or never knew) because of React
• [Idiomatic Rust] Making Illegal States Unrepresentable
• Budgeting for software projects in “scrum team years.”
• What’s Next? | hrhr
• Classic articles about the web
  • The Web’s Grain
  • A Dao of Web Design

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 31: July 31 to August 06 | Johannes

Mastodon / Twitter

• Blood Red Flags | Webcomic
• I need to upload this to my voicemail | Audio-snippet
• A recent paper claimed that "GPT 4 Can't Reason". Using the custom instructions below, here are the (all correct) responses to the first 3 examples I tried from that paper | Custom instructions are pretty powerful

Software

• ZIO | Async done right?
• Python 3.12.0 release candidate 1 released | Well, I guess I have to start testing now...

Books

• Programming Rust, 2nd Edition | Looks very good

Podcasts

• Revision 578: Host Context: Schepp (Working Draft)
• RZ113 CERN: Der ALICE-Detektor (raumzeit)
• #82 The Future of Programming (Happy Path Programming)