Ephes Blog

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!

Out of Context Images

When you lock the laboratory door, you always lock out more than you lock in. --John Wheeler

I had an interesting work week as I spent two days in Amsterdam - fancy. And I made significant progress on implementing responsive images in django-cast. Maybe I should use a web component for this image gallery stuff? Or just plain htmx? Maybe both to figure out which is easier to use? We'll see 🙃.

Articles

• Hobbitos™ | Webcomic
• The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation | It always seemed a little bit too good to be true
• CSS
  • Learn CSS | Do it! (just a reminder for myself..) and in related news: Learn to write better, resilient CSS
  • Getting started with CSS container queries
• Web Components
  • The elevator pitch for Web Components | Ok, fine
  • HTML Web Components: An Example | Web components can render stuff before any javascript is executed

Software

• This is a phenomenal web demo. Enabled by window.getScreenDetails() which provides basic live info (size, position etc) from all screens on the device. Ok, so a lot of people have been asking me for code/writeup of this so I made a stripped down example (works with an infinite amount of windows) so that you can look at to get the basic gist of it (that's all I have time for now, sorry!). | Whoa
• 🦝Tanuki - The easiest way to build scalable, LLM-powered functions and applications that get cheaper and faster the more you use them
• Draw Things | Really cool, let's you use a zoo of fine tuned models for different purposes

Weeknotes

• Weeknotes: DevDay, GitHub Universe, OpenAI chaos | Simon Willison
• Week in Review 2023-11-20 | Luis
• Weeklog for Week 46: November 13 to November 19 | Johanns

Podcasts

• Afrika - "Der Westen redet, China investiert" (Hörsaal) | Interesting..
• FS271 Ich glaube das wird ein bisschen mehr Aufwand im Schnitt | Good, how did I not know about Draw Things?

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. --Carl Jung

Normal work week. Didn't have much time for open source, but had a closer look into this whole responsive image topic / issues. And I have some ideas on how to handle them, but nothing is done, yet. All my Read the Docs integrations now use a secret for their webhook calls, which is probably good. And I've had some trouble with flit when it's installed via pipx, because it now installs local packages in the flit-pipx virtualenv when I run flit install -s whereas before it installed them into the projects virtualenv. Or maybe something in my fish shell broke? Dunno.

Articles

• I should have loved biology | Great post!
• GitHub Actions: Faster Python runs with cached virtual environments | Ok, nice that this works, but it's probably to complicated for my workflows
• What fonts to use for coding | Didn't know about Fira Code - cool!
• HTML web components | Sounds reasonable, yep!
• PyPI has completed its first security audit | Kind of ok I guess
• New goodies in Django 5.0 | Oh, there's a way to add created and modified attributes using the database? Cool!
• Ornament - Eine Web-Component-Microlibrary | Hmm, I probably will stick using lit
• HTML First | Also pretty reasonable

Mastodon / Twitter

• Artificial intelligence as “making a computer do something that if a human were to do it we would colloquially consider intelligent” works pretty well. | Thread
• Let’s predict and make the web fast with the new Speculation Rules API. Here’s how to debug it with #ChromeDevTools. 👉🏽
• That could easily be me. | Death is coming for indoor plants..
• I defragged my zebra ...
• Interesting developments in subquadratic alternatives to self-attention based transformers for large sequence modeling (32k and more).
• "Design can change the world" | Hrhrhr
• Oh crap! It's a Thesaurus!

Weeknotes

• Week 43 of 2023 | Juha-Matti Santala
• Weeklog for Week 45: November 06 to November 12 | Johannes
• Week in Review 2023-11-13 | Luis

Software

• Sample size calculator - Question: How many subjects are needed for an A/B test?
• screenshot-to-code - This is a simple app that converts a screenshot to HTML/Tailwind CSS | GPT-4 Vision access required...

Videos

• Omri Boehm, lässt sich ohne Hass über Nahost sprechen?
• Brandt Bucher – A JIT Compiler for CPython
• Jon Lovett Rant on 7/2/22 Lovett or Leave It | Didn't age well 😢

Podcasts

• Contributing to Django - Sarah Boyce | Good episode!
• Metriken, Hypothesen und Fehler: A/B-Testing in der Praxis mit Philipp Monreal | Finally someone that correctly explains how p-values work 😅. Great episode!
• Lorraine Daston: Ohne Regeln keine Kultur (Sein und Streit) | I was tricked into listening to this episode , because I have a soft spot for Wittgenstein and my podcatcher was promising me something about him. Well, now I have another example of people talking about a topic (algorithms) with high confidence while being completely wrong. Meh.

I’m really into writing short fiction, mainly to-do lists. --Emma Willmann

Normal work week. Started looking into this whole responsive images topic again. I'm still surprised at how complicated it is. After thinking about it for a while, I'm still not sure if the new responsive image features in Wagtail 5.2 are enough for my use case. Maybe next week 🤷.

Articles

• Should AVIF be the dominant image format on the web? | Well it depends 🙄
• Science and Technology links (November 12 2023)

Videos

• OpenAI DevDay, Opening Keynote | Watched this because of FOMO

Software

• Introducing MechGPT 🦾🤖 | More Llama fine tuning...
• NextCloud Cookbook | PHP recipe app I didn't know about
• monaspace - An innovative superfamily of fonts for code | Oh cool, I'm using MonoLisa atm, but this looks interesting, too

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 44: October 30 to November 05 | Johannes

Podcasts

• An Unbiased Evaluation of Environment and Packaging Tools | Great guest 😅
• Episode 100: What’s YOUR Philosophy? | Good one!
• Krisen, Konflikte, Kriege: Ist Chaos das neue Normal? (Sicherheitshalber) | Good content about this topic is hard to find, audio quality is really bad...
• Neues in HTML und Co, Teil 3 von 3 (Working Draft) | Wow, there's so much stuff in HTML I know nothing about..
• John Schulman (The robot brains) | Dev lead of ChatGPT, insightful..
• HTMX for Django Developers (And All of Us) (Talk Python To Me) | Ok, I was already sold long ago. You also don't have to sell it that hard for my taste.

The B in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stands for Benoit B. Mandelbrot. Steve Lord

Home Improvement almost done 😅. Short work week, but didn't get much done on my own projects due to a cold and other distractions. Another round of fixing kptncook - thanks to ca-dmin for pointing out the issue. There were also some minor issues with the Python podcast page, thanks to neingeist for reporting them. And the new data science tutorial repository that's currently under construction got its first PR 😎, thanks David.

Articles

• Embeddings: What they are and why they matter | Cool!
• Homebrew Python Is Not For You | Yep, I'm using pyenv for that
• My User Experience Porting Off setup.py | Yep, it's a mess
• Seniority and self-management: you don’t have to do this alone
• Unauthorized Access to Okta's Support Case Management System: Root Cause and Remediation | This is terrible. At least oktas customers now no longer are able to pretend they didn't know how bad things are over there. Do you know a good password manager (my current one is an okta customer 😫)?
• Frontend-Stuff
  • When to use CSS text-wrap: balance; vs text-wrap: pretty;
  • Words of Type
  • Stellar visual identity inspiration gallery
  • De-extinction
  • Reality Check #1: Building out a furniture site from Dribbble
  • My Custom CSS Reset
  • normalize.css / About normalize.css

Mastodon / Twitter

• Every single person who confuses correlation and causation ends up dying!
• This is a really impressive piece of AI-assisted game development - the live demo (desktop only) is at https://bestaiprompts.art/angry-pumpkins/index.html

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 43: October 23 to October 29 | Johannes
• DALL-E 3, GPT4All, PMTiles, sqlite-migrate, datasette-edit-schema | Simon Willison

Software

• Forgejo is a self-hosted lightweight software forge
• Gitea is a lightweight DevOps platform
• SVB, Inverted Curve And Bond Risk | Notebook on Colab with an analysis why SVB was going down
• htmx 1.9.7 has been released!

Podcasts

• FS270 Computer im Regen | Hmm, using Python for doing stuff close to the metal seems really interesting
• PEP 703: Removing the GIL (core.py) | Great episode!
• Becoming a Django Fellow - Natalia Bidart (Django Chat) | Seems like the new Django Fellow is a great fit, good episode!
• Positive Psychiatrie - Warum ein Sinn im Leben uns motiviert (Hörsaal) | Bad moderation intro and awful title as always, but ok content although kind of obvious stuff..
• Carlton Gibson - Django, Spain, Parenting, and Open Source (Python People) | Also good!
• History of Philosophy without any gaps | Did not listen to this, add link just to be able to find it later...
• Joscha Bach: 7 Stages Meme/Wahrheit/Metaphysik (Songs & Argumente) | Really great episode. Read about Tononi in one of the books by Markus Gabriel (not recommended) and immediately thought: You are kidding me, right? That's obviously bullshit! You are not that easy to fool, are you? But maybe it's only obvious when you have a computer science background? Really heartwarming to see other people having the same experience.