Ephes Blog

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)

Out of Context Images

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)

Out of Context Images

Got sick with some gastrointestinal infection: Not as bad as covid, but still no recommendation.

Got the stable diffusion model running on my MacBook Air. Installing grpcio only worked after setting some environment variables:

CFLAGS="-I /opt/homebrew/opt/openssl/include" LDFLAGS="-L /opt/homebrew/opt/openssl/lib" GRPC_PYTHON_BUILD_SYSTEM_OPENSSL=1 GRPC_PYTHON_BUILD_SYSTEM_ZLIB=1 pip install -r requirements.txt

Maybe I'm just bad at coming up with interesting prompts, but I would guess about 10% of the generated images are interesting in some sense. I put some examples below in the out of context images section.

Articles

• Template Fragments | Render a block from a template instead of the whole template
• 4.2 Gigabytes, or: How to Draw Anything | Someone is using the img2img.py script from the stable diffusion model to create an impressing image
• Stable Diffusion is a really big deal
• It's time for AI-first products! | Hmm, now I only need a product 😏
• Why Crypto Debates are So Pointless | Doing it anyway 😋
• Johannes Weeklog | Images!
• An AI-Generated Artwork Won First Place at a State Fair Fine Arts Competition, and Artists Are Pissed
• Grandpa’s Silly Mustache
• Tip - Use fetchpriority=high to load your LCP hero image sooner

Twitter

• A super-simple dispatch of command line arguments to functions.
• Oldie
• My most common usage of Python's walrus operator is in defining related constants like this:
• Dont eat the compass
• 1/ Today we're thrilled to announce DocQuery, a new #opensource query engine for analyzing documents using large language models (LLMs).
• i often think about about the guy at the bar who upon hearing that i studied philosophy said “i’m sorry to hear that” and walked away
• We released details of CVE-2020-10735 in CPython and are getting patches merged.
• In an agile dev system, everybody's in all the code all the time. Touch whatever you need to touch to get value into the customers hands, and don't wait around for somebody else to do the work for you. Multiple repos are a HUGE impediment to that way of working. Just don't.

Software

• Announcing Poetry 1.2.0
• termshare
• Wagtail 4 release
• Best practices for images - Repository to collect best practices for web images | This should be interesting for Johannes, too.
• termshare - Quick and easy terminal sharing for getting quick help or pair sysadmin'ing
• Django + htmx patterns | By Luke Plant
• django-htmx-fun | A small Django application to advertise the fun htmx can bring you by Thomas Güttler
• A really cool notebook explaining stable diffusion

Videos

• Achtung Beuys – Aktionskünstler, Visionär, Provokateur (Sternstunde Philosophie)

Podcasts

• Was ist eigentlich eine PCA? (Ailionauten)
• CRE224 Elektronisches Geld 2 (CRE Technik Kultur Gesellschaft) 
• #67 Swallowed by a Python with Luciano Ramalho (Happy Path Programming) | Good episode
• Uncle Bob Martin // The Clean Coder (Alphalist CTO Podcast) | Hmm, feels a little bit dated... not all of this clean code stuff aged well. Still, he has a point on professionalism etc.
• pipx - Installable, Isolated Python Applications (Talk Python To Me)

Out of Context Images

Back to normal work, which is fun, too.

Started a mouse delivery side business. The catching part works great and now I'm looking for new customers. Do you need some mice? I already talked to a bird of prey at a nearby park. Maybe there's an arbitrage opportunity.

Created a new repository holding a template for new Django projects / apps.

Articles

• Digitizing 55,000 pages of civic meetings | Hmm, I should really try out s3-ocr
• Use partial() With Django’s transaction.on_commit() to Avoid Late-Binding Bugs | Always used lambda for that, but partial sounds great, too
• Weeklog for Week 33: August 15 to August 21 | Johannes Weeklog
• Experimental Demonstration of the tomatotopic organization in the soprano (Cantatrix sopranica L.) | More research needed..
• iOS Privacy: Instagram and Facebook can track anything you do on any website in their in-app browser | Didn't know it was possible to inject Javascript into an in app webview. This was what shop.co did for their universal shopping basket, but they needed a browser extension for that which are not allowed on iOS. Cool, should be technically possible now to do things like that on mobile devices 😁.
• Understanding async Python for the web | Good article, saw it last week already but forgot to add it to weeknotes
• The Jupyter+git problem is now solved | For nbdev2 - I would really like something to see like this as a precommit hook
• Exploring ScotRail Audio Clips using Ibis-Datasette | Need a random excuse?
• Opening the Pandora’s Box of AI Art | A lot of interesting sources in the article, but I don't care this whole copyright stuff etc.. seems like it's time to have a way to deploy some models for fun and profit 😎
• Science and Technology links (August 7 2022)
• Top Programming Languages 2022 Python’s still No. 1, but employers love to see SQL skills | Still perplexed that Python comes out on top

Twitter

• oh you have underlying issues? that’s cool mine are all overlaying issues. incredibly obvious issues. just out there for the world to see
• There are two ways to make a #Python object convertible to a dictionary: 1) Define .keys() and .__getitem__() 2) Make it iterable producing key/value pairs
• Exciting news: #Parti and #Imagen teamed up to create a hybrid system with Parti creating 256x256 images which then recieve Imagen super resolution to produce 1024x1024 pixels! See the diagram below for how it works.
• Boiling JFrogs ("Why is Artifactory slow") | Thread on MySQL performance optimization
• It was never safe to turn off your computer.
• There is no "product team" in an Agile shop. There is just a dev team that makes product decisions as they work. A product silo is a waterfall phase. You can't sluff that work off onto somebody else.

Design

• Poster, chuck berry / steve miller band | This whole website is great: all the links, annotations, the emoji timeline (omg)

Podcasts

• Kathryn Koehler // Director of Developer Productivity Engineering @ Netflix (Alphalist CTO Podcast)
• Flet: Flutter apps in Python (Talk Python To Me)
• WR1393 Die Pataphysik der Delfine (WRINT Wissenschaft)
• Bits und so #806 (Buffer Underrun) (Bits und so) 
• Caleb Porzio on Alpine.js, Laravel Livewire & more (Remote Ruby)

Out of Context Images
 

On the road holding a Python training course. Didn't do much else.

Bugs

• There's an annoying bug making tracebacks unreadable in JupyterLab for me when using `%load_ext rich`. Maybe it's this one? 

Twitter

• Competition in the tech industry
• Python developers react to John Carmack Podcast Episode

Software

• AWX Project | Upstream of things like Ansible Tower, etc..
• Liquid Safe, customer-facing template language for flexible web apps
• Behave is behaviour-driven development, Python style
• Welcome to Pytest-BDD’s documentation!

Podcasts

• Alternativlos, Folge 50
• Ich nunge dich! - Von der Macht der Anerkennung und Anerkenntnissen (Was denkst du denn?)
• WR1394 Metropolis (Geschichtsunterricht)

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