Ephes Blog

Not much interesting stuff going on besides work.

Articles

• The Lesson to Unlearn | Well, there's at least one mistake I didn't make
• The Illustrated Stable Diffusion | Earned a reputation for "The Illustrated Transformer" - this is good, too
• Software engineering practices
• Reasoning about asyncio.Semaphore

Twitter

• This is a f**king waste of public healthcare money during a pandemic. And it creates tons of electronic waste during an urging #ClimateCrisis. I hope you are proud of yourselves, @MLeyckDieken , @CGMeHealth and @gematik1 !
• perfect status image
• One painting from every year of the 20th century, in chronological order. 1900: Sunbeams by Vilhelm Hammershøi 1/100
• We need a website that explains the arguments for/against the "should you pin your upper bound for dependencies" question. | Upper bounds on dependencies have bitten me first using the django cookiecutter template and then again by being the default in poetry. I don't do this anymore, but it was quite a painful lesson.

Weeknotes

• Luis Weeklog
• Weeknotes: Datasette Cloud preview invitations
• Weeklog for Week 39: September 26 to October 02

Software

• 🚀 Just released version 2 of my heroicons package
• I’ve been playing with using GPT-3 to control a browser the last couple days. Here’s a quick demo. As you can see it's pretty neat! But also quite flakey. | This is really cool - maybe the shop.co idea becomes finally possible

Podcasts

• #325 – Michael Levin: Biology, Life, Aliens, Evolution, Embryogenesis & Xenobots (Lex Fridman Podcast) | Fascinating stuff going on in biology..
• Die Nerven (Reflektor) | New album is out. It's good.
• Scaling Postgres Episode 235 Postgres 15 RC1, ICU Collations, Listen & Notify, Understanding TOAST (Scaling PostgreSQL)
• Stuart Russell: The Foundations of Artificial Intelligence (The Gradient Podcast)
• Was fasziniert Sie an Montaigne? (Das philosophische Radio)
• Episode #303: This title is required or is it optional? (Python Bytes)
• #69 Polymorphism Unbound (Happy Path Programming) | Good episode

   
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Got not much done besides work. Attended a in person meeting of the local Python user group.

Articles

• 7 things I've learned building a modern TUI framework
• Johannes Weeklog
• I can't even | Charles Stross about the recent "Bank of England had to step in and save the day" fuckup.
• Software Development Attitude | Yep, enabling it is..
• 11 Laws of Software Estimation for Complex Work 

Twitter

• Restriktive Geldpolitik = (Massen)Arbeitslosigkeit? So lautet die Klage, ja Anschuldigung vieler Linken. Ein etwas längerer Thread dazu.
• The hard truth is that 100% of people who confuse correlation with causation will die.
• Microservices grug wonder why big brain take hardest problem factoring system correctly, and introduce network call too seem very confusing to grug
• The programmer's credo (JFK voice): we do this, and the other things, not because they are easy... but because we _thought_ they were _going to be_ easy. | via What's your favourite software engineering quote? 👇
• Humans. Yeast. Eating sugar, farting gas, dying from too much alcohol. Pretty much the same, tbh.
• DevOps engineer explaining why we need to use Kubernetes
• “The role of management is to change the system rather than badgering individuals to do better.” W. Edwards Deming
• im gonna say it: i don't care which numbers are prime

Software

• Stable Diffusion is now available directly in KerasCV!
• Welcome to django-startproject 👋 | Django project template by Jeff Triplett - pros: pip-tools cons: docker?
• Model Bakery: Smart fixtures for better tests | For Django
• Django Click | click command line library for Django management commands.. I use typer and a separate script for that, but maybe this is an alternative..

Meetups

• Python Meeting Düsseldorf - 2022-09-28 (Alle Vorträge)

Books

• Designing Data-Intensive Applications

Videos

• why I will never use python-poetry | Whoa

Podcasts

• WR1407 Kommissar Bayer jagt den Heterogenen Agenten (Wirtschaftskunde) | Great to learn about economic basics casually
• Bits und so #811 (Präzisionsstart) (Bits und so) 
• Episode 69: Fear (Hotel Bar Sessions)
• UKW103 Ukraine: Atomkrieg nicht vor Weihnachten (Unsere kleine Welt) | Not good, but I cannot find good content on this topic :(
• DjangoCon Europe 2022 - Kojo Idrissa (Django Chat) | Really important to recognize.non-code contributions, but how? Sales is important, but: „For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. Richard Feynman, Rogers Commission Report“
• Von Verstecken, Katzentischen, Ferien und Büchern (Was denkst du denn?)
• #316 – Noam Chomsky: Putin, Ukraine, China, and Nuclear War (Lex Fridman Podcast) | Noam Chomsky is one of the people you should listen to, even if he's wrong.
• #68 The End of Ivory Tower Architecture with Andrew Harmel-Law (Happy Path Programming) | Didn't know about the advice process, sounds interesting. Nice episode.
• #318 – Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness Audio Player (Lex Fridman Podcast) | This whole biology thing is fascinating!

 
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Mainly work, didn't had time to listen to a lot of podcasts this week. Went to a school reunion on the weekend. Slow week.

Articles

• How I’m a Productive Programmer With a Memory of a Fruit Fly
• Johannes Weeklog
• Stable Diffusion based Image Compression
• Article Spotlight: “The End of History” by Hanno Sauer | Should read more philosophy articles, even the comments were entertaining 😊

Twitter

• "a generous welfare state makes people not want to work" (united states is the line on the bottom)
• Get in the car, we're exploring databases and finding friends
• You have the flew
• Ludwig Boltzmann, who spent much of his life studying statistical mechanics, died in 1906, by his own hand. Paul Ehrenfest, carrying on the work, died similarly in 1933. Now it is our turn to study statistical mechanics.

Software

• Squoosh | Compress images via webapp
• Whisper | ASR model demo from openAI
• yFiles | Just wanted to display a little graph on a website *sigh*

Videos

• Exception Groups and except: Irit Katriel | Python 3.11 preview

Podcasts

• Bits und so #809 (The Secret of Dynamic Island) (Bits und so)
• Sonderfolge: Hybridimmunität (Das Coronavirus-Update)

 
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Mostly work, since I was on a business trip to Munich for a few days. Got tickets for next years beyond tellerrand conference, hope to see you there 😁. Someone opened the first issue on django-fileresponse 🍾 requesting to be able to use it for uploads, too. There were also some discussions and mails around the Python Podcast.

Articles

• Johannes Weeklog
• Science and Technology links (September 12 2022)
• Why do domain names sometimes end with a dot?
• Quality Is Systemic
• Working locally with GitHub PRs
• Photography for geeks (WIP) | Great article
• WDRL 303 from 16.9.2022 Container query lab, default exports, disabled browser features and Openring

Twitter

• it's a little-known fact that god actually didn't die until the widespread use of pseudorandom number generators by modern computers, each use a small act of divination, exhausted god's ability to respond to all divination. god was killed mostly by microsoft in the 90s
• Nervously calculating the Kullback–Leibler divergence between me and a bot that just tweets "it's only getting worse from here" in response to any major event.
• “this meeting could have been an email” yeah but look on the bright side, this meeting also could have been a musical
• Turn the light on
• There must have been a meeting to review proposals including the online timed ticketing system when someone said ‘No. They must be seen to queue. For miles. For days”. That person’s a political-marketing genius with 17thC style insight into the mystificatory needs of state power.

Software

• Fork - A fast and friendly git client
• PyMC4 which is now just called PyMC - a probabilistic programming library for Python that allows users to build Bayesian models with a simple Python API and fit them using Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods
• This release, 3.11.0rc2, is the last preview before the final release of Python 3.11.0 on October 24th
• uvloop 0.17 is here |  This release adds Python 3.11 support, updates bundled libuv to 1.43.0 and fixes a handful of issues
• Safari 16.0 was released | Glad to see the new IE is catching up a bit

Videos

• Google’s New AI: Fly INTO Photos! 🐦

Books

• Wagtail CMS in Action | Not much there yet. Learn from my mistake and buy it when it's finished next year or so..

Podcasts

• 17 Libraries You Should Be Using in Django (Talk Python To Me) | Nothing new for me here..
• Habermas‘ „Neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit“ - Digitale Plattformen: Manipulation statt Diskussion? (Sein und Streit) | Ouch, really bad, especially the moderation. Why are there so few good podcasts on topics like this? Dont make me start one! 
• UKW102 Ukraine: Russki Go Home (unsere kleine welt) | Meh, also not much good content on this topic available either..
• WR1398 Die Fruchtfliege der Botanik (WRINT: Wissenschaft)
• WR1403 Auf frischen fotografischen Wegen (WRINT: Fotografie)
• Muff Potter (Thorsten Nagelschmidt) (Reflektor)

 
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Just got back home after a long day at the being me factory, and as always, it was a long and arduous shift.
-- @AbiShuuwi on Twitter

Work was good this week. Recorded and produced a podcast episode about crypto (yes, the BitCoin and BlockChain stuff, not cryptography).

Articles

• TIL: You Can Build Portable Binaries of Python Applications
• Partials in Django
  • 3 uses for functools.partial in Django
  • Three more uses for functools.partial() in Django

Twitter

• Spielberg was only 26 when he made Jaws. Michael Jackson was only 24 when he recorded Thriller. SE Hinton was only 19 when The Outsiders was published. It’s too late. You need to give up. | I didn't get much done this week, too..
• Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Program Better
• GitHub copilot is incredibly useful tool for writing technical blog posts. In this case it read the previous paragraph where I explained what I'm about to demonstrate and it wrote down the right Rust code including the necessary reStructuredText bits.
• Spider man delivers pizza.

Videos

• 2007 commencement speech Judea Pearl gave at the University of Toronto
• The spelled-out intro to language modeling: building makemore | By Andrej Karpathy

Podcasts

• Michael Stipe (Design Matters) | Poor audio quality, but interesting content
• Die psychotische Gesellschaft (Hörsaal) | Wow, this was bad.
• WR1401 Quick & Dirty: Das dritte Entlastungspaket (Wirtschaftskunde)
• UKW101 Ukraine: Die Dritte Phase (Unsere kleine Welt)
• Bits und so #809 (The Secret of Dynamic Island) (Bits und so)

 
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