Ephes Blog

"Stealing “quietly a bit crap” for my bio." --@GunnarBj

First work week of the year. Had less time for my projects but got some stuff done nonetheless:

• Fixed the Podlove Player share sheet for Python Podcast
• Added code blocks for django-cast and recorded the implementation of those two points in a stream
• Did also some refactoring and removed the old analytics code I had in django-cast
• Published New release 0.2.2.

A business idea I thought about for some time seems to be implemented by Adobe: Enhance voice recordings for free (via Adobe Podcast Enhance: KI macht vollautomatischen Audio-Cleanup). It's about taking crappy audio and improving it by passing it through some ML-model. What makes this idea more interesting than other applications is that training data comes for free in this case. Just take good-quality audio and re-record it using a phone or a bad room. Now you have a pair of bad audio input with a good audio target. It's even possible to parallelize this training data generation.

Articles

• I always recommend Modern Pandas when people ask me about how to do things with pandas and now there's a similar series of articles for polars: Modern Polars
• DjangoConEU is coming to Edinburgh | Haven't yet decided whether to go...
• Why static site generation? | Long form article about the question raised on our last podcast episode
• 15-Minute Cities: Leveraging Software and Location Intelligence to Reimagine Urban Mobility | via Luis newsletter

Videos

• Wie scheitern IT-Projekte garantiert? von Alexander Bernhardt | Just the basics, but it's surprising how often this simple stuff is causing big problems

Weeklogs

• Weeklog for Week 1: January 02 to January 08 | Johannes
• Week in Review 2023-01-09 | Luis

Software

• Polars - User Guide | New dataframe library written in rust
• Learn Responsive Design | Online responsive design course by Jeremy Keith
• There's a PR for CPython PEP 703 which makes the GIL optional. Here's a link to the discussion.
• Python Packaging Strategy Discussion - Part 1

Podcasts

• WR1438 Physikalische Zumutungen (WRINT: Wissenschaft)
• Episode 78: Revolutionary Mathematics (with Justin Joque) (Hotel Bar Sessions) | Bah, don't talk about topics I know something about, please!
• Philosophie der Dummheit - Gegen Denkfaulheit und Ignoranz (Sein und Streit)
• Senior-Entwickler brauchen keine Frameworks … oder? – mit PHP-Legende Stefan Priebsch (Super Duper Developers Club) | Good episode. I don't share the preference for microservices, but all in all solid advice
• Bits und so #825 (Prevents Voice Leakage) (Bits und so)
• WR1449 Bazillen, Braunellen, Beten (WRINT: Wissenschaft)
• Bits und so #825 (Prevents Voice Leakage) (Bits und so)
• WR1450 Inflation für Doofe und Wachstumsgeschichte(n) (WRINT: Wirtschaftskunde) | Great stuff. I constantly hear people claiming that capitalism requires constant growth, glad to hear that this is not economic mainstream. Also, that splitting between functional and causal responsibility for inflation are different things etc.

in 2023 i have decided to become worse and more unhinged and more of a hater. maybe i will start yelling and biting. i am going chihuahua mode --@punished_cait

Still on vacation. Fixed some bugs in django-cast:

• The slim version of jQuery broke the comments feature
• API overview was broken due to a broken reverse lookup for 'image_list'
• Fixed a bad spam filter bug and recorded a stream fixing it. This was the first programming stream I recorded after about a year and it was surprisingly difficult to get the whole setup up and running again 😆. And it worked: No false positive "ham" comments since 2023-01-04 (should make a badge out of this..)
• New django-cast release 0.2.1

Other packages:

• Made the frontend tests work again for fastdeploy. Had to remove vue3-jest from jest.config.js and I have no clue why.
• New release for django-indieweb adding a missing migration

Articles

• Infinite AI Array | Very fun idea
• My new all-purpose excuse for when I'm not doing something | I'm in the control group, too 👈
• Just Use Postgres for Everything
• Histograms, Gradient Boosted Trees, Group-By Queries and One-Hot Encoding
• Fork My Brain (example of a well organized obsidian vault) | Maybe I have to look at this obsidian thing again...

Mastodon / Twitter

• In 1977, media prophet Marshall McLuhan discussed CIA and FBI surveillance, and then turned it into one of the most mind-bending riffs on identity in the digital age I've ever heard.
• Nothing much, ChatGPT.

Books

• Hypermedia Systems | Book about htmx etc..

Software

• Nativefier is a command-line tool to easily create a “desktop app” for any web site with minimal fuss
• Pillow release 9.4.0
• I want to wish you a happy new year with MariaDB 11.0! | MariaDB got a new optimizer 😎

Podcasts

• Yuval Noah Harari Thinks Life is Meaningless and Amazing (Freakonomics Radio) | Great episode
• Russland - System der Angst: Die "Z-Gesellschaft" (Hörsaal)
• Helmut Lethen zur Faszination des Bösen - Muss Politik unmoralisch sein? (Sein und Streit) | Also great, thanks for this music recommendation: Das Berliner Requiem: Großer Dankchoral
• Philosoph Jens Soentgen über Staub: Alles kommt zu uns zurück (Sein und Streit)
• WR1442 Die Wrintheit über Poppe Breitarsch (Wrintheit)
• Renaud Visage // Co-Founder & ex-CTO at Eventbrite (Alphalist CTO Podcast)
• Sentry - David Cramer (Django Chat)
• Episode 76: HBS Goes to the Movies: Casablanca (Hotel Bar Sessions)
• WR1447 Atemwegsinfektionen: Eine Handreichung (WRINT) | Confirmed my biases
• Episode 77: Human Nature (Hotel Bar Sessions) | "I'm always surprised how easy people, and by people I mean students, refer to human nature as...", hrhr. Great fun!

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Kelber‘s Law: Wann immer es heisst „irgendwas Sinnvolles geht nicht, wegen Datenschutz“ liegt es NICHT am Datenschutz. --@padeluun@digitalcourage.social

Been on vacation, so no work. Produced and published an end-of-year podcast episode. This was the first episode published by the new wagtail-powered version of django-cast and I had to kick it a little bit to make it work. Generated five new bug reports 😬.

Articles

• The Overlords Finally Showed Up | Yes, spam will be bad. But it is already, isn't it?
• Notes Against Note-Taking Systems | "-Shun the useless adoption of the aesthetic of the useful. When something can be like work or like play, never make it work" - good article
• A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart | I don't know if I had this already, but if you have some time, maybe read it again 😄
• Stepping Down as Fellow | Carlton Gibson
• MAY – AUGUST 2021 166 photos – Published on Dec 31, 2022 | Nice photojournal
• Disability, privilege, tone-policing, and mastodon | Has some solid points
• How To Make The Fediverse Your Own | A little bit dry, but I'm glad someone put up a list

Mastodon / Twitter

• I hate this so much. So very, very much. | Webcomic about palindromes
• Light installation
• I experimented with video scripts on ChatGPT and cracked the code on how to do it right Here are the results (You can do this too):

Weeklogs

• Weeklog for Week 51: December 19 to December 25 | Johannes
• Weeklog for Week 52: December 26 to January 01 | Johannes - be careful what you wish for.
• Science and Technology links (December 25 2022) | Daniel Lemire

Papers

• Transformers learn in-context by gradient descent via this thread

Videos

• Deconstructing Privilege - Patricia Aas | One of the best talks about this topic I've seen so far

Software

• Never write a Bash command again (with the help of GPT-3) | Great idea 😅 - had to set up billing for OpenAI to make it work, but whatever...
• Experimental feature gate proposal interoperable_abi #105586
• Fixed #18468 -- Added support for comments on columns and tables. | This has been open for a long time. Glad to see this coming to Django 4.2.
• Tufte CSS
• Querying the GitHub archive with the ClickHouse playground
• Sonic Pi is a code-based music creation and performance tool

Podcasts

• Bits und so #823 (Takeshi’s Challenge) (Bits und so)
• OK Jazz Episode #150 Parts 1 & 2 (OK Jazz Podcast)

'Man goes to doctor. Says he is CEO of AI startup but has no idea how to become profitable. Doctor says solution is simple. Advanced model GPT-4 is in town. Ask it how to profit, and it will surely know the answer. Man bursts into tears. “But doctor” he says “you are GPT-4”' --@utsu__kun

Lots of Christmas preparations and the usual work stuff. Attended the Django Meetup Cologne in person for the first time in a while and it was great. Reported a bug on takahē discord and saw this PR 9 minutes later 😮. This PR for Django 4.2 looks great! Maybe I can get rid of the monkey-patching stuff I do in django_fileresponse 🥳. Wrote a TIL about how to deploy takahē without docker.

Someone implemented a business model very similar to one I also think about implementing for a while: Just let people rent software deployed somewhere for an hourly/daily/monthly fee (mastodon, jupyterhub server, ...): Replace expensive per-seat SaaS with tap-to-install open-source apps - I just have to set up a landing page and collect some email addresses, no?

Using a time machine backup from an intel-based MacBook to restore it on a new M2-based MacBook led to some unexpected consequences:

• Printing didn't work anymore (printing is always the first thing to stop working btw). The printer queue complained about a paper jam, but this was just a mismatched error code, I guess. The real problem was the intel-based printer driver didn't work on ARM. Installing the old intel-based printer driver from the manufacturer's website (the latest was for a macOS version a few years ago) triggered the rosetta installation and then it worked.
• GnuPG stopped working because of the same problem and then installing a native version via homebrew didn't work because now the new version couldn't read the old version's keys. Solved by creating a new key and copying the sensible data in plain text, meh.

Articles

• mastodon is not a good social network
• Boring Python: code quality
• Speech-to-text with Whisper: How I Use It & Why | I need to deploy a whisper server now 😬

Twitter / Mastodon

• You have 3 wishes... | Webcomic

Newsletters

• Test Selectors in CSS, image() functions, readable typo, and speeding up JavaScript libraries. | wdrl
• Postgres Weekly

Weeklogs

• Weeklog for Week 50: December 12 to December 18 | Johannes
• Week in Review 2022-12-19 | Luis
• Weeknotes: Datasette 0.63.3, datasette-ripgrep | Simon

Software

• coverage.py 7.0 released
• PHP 8.2 Released!
• Ruby 3.2.0 Released

Podcasts

• Episode 74: The Last Dance (Hotel Bar Sessions)

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modern js frameworks are only possible in a negative real interest rate environment --htmx.org

Got more stuff done last week - getting better I guess 😀:

• Merged a PR avoiding death by unintentional yield reduction for kptncook.
• Wrote a TIL about changing the owner of objects in a Postgres database after restore
• Wrote a TIL about how to flush the dns cache of a fritz box
• Deployed Takahē and it works 🥳. Now powering @show@python-podcast.de
• Did some work on fastdeploy after quite some time to bring it up to date with Python 3.11 and the latest Vue.js version. Had to fix some bugs (message bus for command line entry points , CORS headers for local development had the wrong port (yay, Vue.js update)). Initially, I didn't want to update Vue.js but it broke on the npm run build during deployment 🙄. After updating all of the dependencies to their latest versions, it magically worked again. Bonus points for the npm error message being completely unrelated (something about failing imports). This has to be the terrific developer experience I constantly hear people getting excited about.
• Now using furo as the sphinx template for django-cast
• Updated the commands.py script for django-cast
• Released django-cast 0.2.0 which includes all the changes made in the last few weeks (since I'm now sure enough it will probably work)

Articles

• Enums vs Check Constraints in Postgres | ChoiceField uses Python enums in Django, but there aren't any constraints checked. How hard could it be to add check constraints to ChoiceFields?
• Life Sentence | Webcomic
• Riffusion | Somebody fine-tuned the stable diffusion model to generate images of spectrograms which then can be converted into an audio clip 😳
• Scaling Mastodon is Impossible
• I Wish I Could Tell You This One Is Not All About Twitter | This escalated quickly

Weeklogs

• Weeklog for Week 49: December 05 to December 11 | Johannes
• Week in Review 2022-12-12 | Luis

Videos

• Async Django: The practical guide you've been **awaiting** for with Carlton Gibson - DCUS 2022 | The use cases are good, but it does not go beyond the basics.

Mastodon / Twitter

• “LIFE MOOD I have just returned from a party of which I was the life and soul; witty banter flowed from my lips, everyone laughed and admired me-but I came away, indeed that dash should be as long as the radii of the earth's orbit——————————wanting to shoot myself.” -- Søren Kierkegaard

Software

• [ANNOUNCE] Git v2.39.0
• pedalboard is a Python library for working with audio | from Spotify
• Django 4.2 supports Psycopg 3 📢 💥 Thanks to Daniele Varrazzo, @apollo13 and Simon Charette for their humongous work 🌟 🌟 🌟 | Yay 🥳!
• 🆕🦀 Just an hour ago, #rustlang 1.66.0 was released! As usual, here's a thread with some of the highlights. 🧵 1/12
• django-request is a statistics module for Django | I built something similar (analytics module for django-cast) but trying to move it out of django-cast for some time. Maybe use this instead, or self-host plausible

Podcasts

• Postgres - Craig Kerstiens (Django Chat)
• Yoshua Bengio: The Past, Present, and Future of Deep Learning (The Gradient Podcast)
• Episode 75: Podcasting and Philosophy (Hotel Bar Sessions)
• Bits und so #822 (Pablo Escobear) (Bits und so)
• Wie kann für Sie ein kollektiver Weg aus der Klimakrise aussehen? (Das philosophische Radio) | Brr, I hate it when someone sounds eloquent and reasonable and then makes some really obvious mistake (easy translation error from billions in English to german which is less by a factor of 1000). It's not the mistake that annoys me, but then just going on as if nothing happened assuming something is true which for me is obviously impossible. Bah. And people complain about ChatGPT? This is far worse.

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