Ephes Blog

"The worst thing that ever happened in software engineering was when Kirk asked Scotty how long something would take and Scotty said thirty minutes and Kirk said you’ve got five and Scotty got it done in five and impressionable children watched this and grew up to become managers." --Isaac Freeman

Had a busy week. I have been working on a Vue.js theme for django-cast. It's not finished yet, but enough to see how it works. Hope to get back to it soon. Then we produced a new podcast episode about building GUI applications with Python and miaplan. It was a lot of fun. And then I did a stream about the reading of the nlp with transformers book. Doing so many different things and making meaningful progress is kind of hard. Speaking of which: I also had to do some more preparation for the upcoming pytest course.

Articles

• Social media cards generated with shot-scraper
• Color Formats in CSS
• The Math Behind Nesting Rounded Corners
• Carl Braun’s Writing Lessons for Clear Thinking and Productive Communication
• Building a combined CSS-aspect-ratio-grid
• CSS :has( ) A Parent Selector Now
• Crafting the Next.js Website
• Google "We Have No Moat, And Neither Does OpenAI" | Really fascinating article
• Mojo may be the biggest programming language advance in decades | Maybe not
• Modern CSS Solutions

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 17: April 24 to April 30
• Weeknotes: Miscellaneous research into Rye, ChatGPT Code Interpreter and openai-to-sqlite

Mastodon / Twitter

• "I don't know how the gods feel, but sacrificing financial advisors makes me feel happy." | web comic

Software

• Wagtail 5.0 release notes
• Architectural Decision Records (ADRs)
• Mojo 🔥 — a new programming language for all AI developers
• Darts - Time Series Made Easy in Python
• Phind - The AI search engine for developers
• kagi - Fast, accurate, and ad-free. The search engine you deserve

Books

• Make Something Wonderful - Steve Jobs in his own words

Videos

• The A.I. Dilemma - March 9, 2023 | Just to have it seen, it's well produced but often wrong
• Possible End of Humanity from AI? Geoffrey Hinton at MIT Technology Review's EmTech Digital | Hmm, I don't know

Podcast

• "Software Architecture Matters" mit Stefan Tilkov (programmier.bar)
• Being a Productive Developer - Nick Janetakis (Django Chat)
• Testing Django Web Applications (Test & Code)

I'm a normal person, in the mathematical sense. --Johannes Spielmann

Last week, I worked on updating django-cast to support Wagtail 5 (which is set to release tomorrow) and Django 4.2:

• Released version 0.3.0 of wagtail_srcset, which includes a workaround for the image_node.filter_spec -> image_node.filter_specs renaming in Wagtail 5, along with some tox fixes and test image cleanup after testing.
• Released version 0.2.14 of django-cast , adding support for Wagtail 5 and Django 4.2.
• Ran python-podcast.de and wersdoerfer.de on the Wagtail 5 release candidate and Django 4.2 for a week to identify any potential issues (none found).

Another topic I focused on last week was Vue.js. I attended the revived Vue.js Cologne meetup, which was enjoyable, and began developing a Vue theme for django-cast. I even managed to record a live-stream about it. Integrating Vue.js into Django proved easier than anticipated, perhaps due to assistance from my LLM robot friends. While I'm not a huge fan of single-page applications (SPAs) and frontend frameworks in general, I want to keep my options open and be able to justify my preferences.

In terms of meetups, I attended a Java User Group Düsseldorf event to see the talk "Die Welt vor 10 Jahren mit Stefan Tilkov / Eberhard Wolff - live von der RheinJUG". I found it quite interesting. However, despite attending numerous local meetups, I didn't recognize any of the attendees. It's fascinating how disjunct various IT-related communities can be.

In "Slavoj Žižek: „Paradoxien der Mehrlust“ - Ein gegenwartskritischer Rundumschlag" (starting at 06:00), an amusing moment arises as Žižek discusses LLM creativity. He claims that human creativity stems from our ability to harness contingency in random mistakes, referencing Heinrich von Kleist. Ironically, his poetic description of what LLMs can't do is spot-on for how they function technically. The 'temperature' parameter even allows for adjustable creativity by controlling how much contingency is added. Although I have often expressed my disdain for uninformed discussions about topics I am knowledgeable in, this instance has proven that they can be surprisingly entertaining, and I stand corrected.

Articles

• Django Build To Last | Deployment is still hard, but maybe it would be a good idea t have some async stuff in the core like RoR has?
• Meditations on Moloch | Re-read this article because of the podcast episode with Max Tegmark about the letter
• The Dual LLM pattern for building AI assistants that can resist prompt injection
• Requiring an active virtual environment for pip
• Using Django’s template loaders to configure Tailwind
• Performance Excuses Debunked | I keep hearing about this hotspot stuff...

Software

• Vue Macros | via vue-js-cologne
• statamic | CMS for laravel - via vue-js-cologne, too - one of the developers attended
• Crispy-Tailwind - A Tailwind CSS template pack for the wonderful django-crispy-forms | Hmm, I don't think crispy-forms is wonderful, but maybe I should give this a try
• There's a new Pythonista release! 🎉

Mastodon / Twitter

• May I present to you, my photographic documentation of #btconf 2023 in Düsseldorf
• Chatting with Django’s documentation using langchain, Chroma & OpenAI APIs
• "I've realised there are literally three genres of British music"
• still blown away that not only did someone make a drum & bass remix of Colin Hay, but it's *fucking brilliant*.
• Another @code keyboard shortcut I'd loved to have known earlier.
• I'm seeing a lot of people confused about this - asking: what exactly is the problem here? That's a great question! Let's use this as a learning opportunity and dig in. 🧵
• The fancy fancy new infoscreens in the computer science building at #tudortmund make me irrationally angry. | That's not irrational at all!

Weeknotes

• Week in Review 2023-04-24 | Luis - all the best wishes for your new endeavor
• An Exhausting Week | J. Martin
• Weeklog for Week 16: April 17 to April 23 | Johannes
• sqlite-history: tracking changes to SQLite tables using triggers (also weeknotes) | Simon Willison
• Science and Technology links (April 29 2023) | Daniel Lemire

Video

• Felix Klock - Subtyping in Rust and Clarke's Third Law

Papers

• Fast and Precise Type Checking for JavaScript

Podcast

• Beyond. #btconf (Wo wir sind ist vorne) | SEPA!
• #371 – Max Tegmark: The Case for Halting AI Development (Lex Fridman Podcast) | Good episode, helped me a lot to better understand what the letter is about...
• EU AI-Act: Bahnbrechende KI-Regulierung oder jetzt schon überholt? – KI-Recht #3 (Rechtsbelehrung) | Ok, nice
• Disclaimer und andere Urban Law Legends – Rechtsbelehrung Folge 11 (Rechtsbelehrung) | Confirmed my biases
• Was schulden wir unseren Kindern? (Sein und Streit) | Meh
• Slavoj Žižek: „Paradoxien der Mehrlust“ - Ein gegenwartskritischer Rundumschlag (Sein und Streit) | For comment: see above
• #119 - Open Source GPTs, X.AI, Auto-GPT, China’s Censorship of AI, Fake Drake+The Weeknd Colab (Last Week in AI)
• 20 Years of Python - Brett Cannon (Django Chat) | Good as always

Out of Context Images

Me, walking up to the front desk of the hotel: I have a weird question

Clerk: there are no weird questions

Me: I have an NFC chip implanted in my hand, and I was wondering whether you'd be willing to enroll it as a new key for my room

Clerk: you want me to do what?? I need to see this. What room?

Didn't even ask for ID.--Quinn Wilton

This past week was quite eventful 😅. On Monday morning, I had an emergency dental appointment due to a broken tooth crown 😬. Following that, I attended the Beyond Tellerrand conference on Monday and Tuesday, which proved to be an excellent experience filled with inspiring talks and engaging conversations with fellow attendees. A special shoutout and warm greetings to the hosts of the WWSIV podcast 🎙️!

Throughout the week, I attempted to make django-cast compatible with the upcoming Wagtail 5 release, but faced challenges mainly due to the usage of modules from 'wagtail.core' in migrations 🐛 and the removal of 'image_node.filter_spec' attribute. Additionally, I had to resolve an issue with old comments being invisible on python-podcast.de as a result of the migration to Wagtail and changes to the Django episode model's primary keys 🔧 - thanks to Norbert for the heads up. Unfortunately, there was no django-cast release this week 😞.

In my spare time, I delved into my new LLM hobby by starting to read the "Natural Language Processing with Transformers" book 📚. On Friday morning, I attended a Creative Mornings talk discussing ChatGPT and midjourney, though it didn't present much new information for me 🤷‍♀️ but the room was packed and there seems to be a lot of buzz around this topic. Later that day, I attempted to record a screencast with Manuel about the "nlp with transformers"-book and some LLM implementation stuff, but we faced technical difficulties with real-time collaboration on Jupyter notebooks. I subsequently wrote a TIL post about the experience, hoping that for our next screencast, it will work better 🤞.

Lastly, I managed to take some time and enjoy the outdoors – very good! 🌳

Articles

• The /now page movement | Great idea, didn't know about this! Will probably adopt this.
• Ruleset interpolation Explainer | Useful CSS stuff
• Statement from the listed authors of Stochastic Parrots on the “AI pause” letter | Ok, not so bad
• Replacing my best friends with an LLM trained on 500,000 group chat messages
• Why I am excited about ChatGPT | "Calculator for writing" - yup...
• How Shadow DOM and accessibility are in conflict
• Using Unpoly with Django
• The AI Economist: Optimal Economic Policy Design via Two-level Deep Reinforcement Learning
• Scaffolded LLMs as natural language computers

Weeknotes / Newsletter

• Weeklog for Week 15: April 10 to April 16 | Johannes
• Week in Review 2023-04-17 | Luis
• Science and Technology links (April 22 2023) | Daniel Lemire
• css-layout issue 343: Asking for help and use cases for a CSS layout accessibility issue. Also, lots of exciting things landing in browsers over the past few weeks. | Rachel Andrew
• Introducing Neapolitan | Carlton Gibson

Software

• GREASE - Grease is a website starter that makes building performant, accessible, aesthetic websites fast & frictionless
• Node.js 20 Now Available
• you.com - The AI Search Engine You Control
• Wavelength Messenger
• I know this has been around a bit, but the Netlify drop interface is rad
• recursive.design - A typographic palette for vibrant code & UI

Cool Websites

• personalsit.es
• localghost.dev

Podcasts

• #118 - Anthropic vs OpenAI, AutoGPT, RL at Scale, AI Safety, Memeworthy AI Videos (Last Week in AI) | Last Week in AI is one of the best AI news podcasts I discovered so far
• Revision 565: Quo vadis Frontend-Tooling? (Working Draft)
• AI – mehr als ChatGPT? mit Philipp Schmid von Hugging Face (programmier.bar) | Meh
• S3 E6 Richard Socher joins Host Pieter Abbeel: LLMs, Search, You.com, AGI, Metamind, AIX Ventures (The Robot Brains) | Great episode! Didn't know Richard Socher was one of the first investors in huggingface...
• WR1479 Bank Run, Klimageld und Spitzensteuer (Wirtschaftskunde) | Always great!
• #111 - Julian asks Bob about his use of ChatGpt (PyBites Podcast) | Meh
• „Jetzt kommt das goldene KI-Zeitalter“ (Künstliche Intelligenz) | Well, what I take away from this episode is that good consulting is in high demand right now 😇 (I'm available, just saying..).

Out of Context Images

I use keming as an adjective to describe bad kerning --Xe

Worked a little bit on the upcoming pytest-course. My wife made a website for Thomy Saurk which was going live last week. Then there was a new django-cast release. It provides some fixes for the podcast_audio field (if it's not set there's no twitter-card and the episode is not showing up in the feed) and it's now possible to add custom templates for error views (for 404, 500, 403 etc HTTP status codes) if you create a theme for django-cast.

And after two or three years of using PyCharm or vs code for writing Python almost exclusively, I started to use vim and neovim again and spent already a significant amount of time on their configuration 😅. But I missed using vim for sure.

Articles

• Set Studio: respecting the fabric of the internet | Case study
• Top 10 Django Third-Party Packages | No surprises here...
• PostgreSQL® JSONB Cheatsheet: Complete & Fast Lookup Guide
• An example of LLM prompting for programming
• Science and Technology links (April 11 2023)
• Deploying key transparency at WhatsApp
• We must slow down the race to God-like AI | Despite the clickbait title, this article is actually good
• Running Tasks Concurrently in Django Asynchronous Views
• Reduce - The Power of a Single Python Function
• Prompt injection: what’s the worst that can happen?
• Color Theme Switcher

Video

• Sparks of AGI: early experiments with GPT-4 | I wouldn't call it AI leave alone AGI, but there's something, yep
• Modern Web Development: Centering DIVs in new exciting wrong ways with AI!

Books

• Natural Language Processing with Transformers Book

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 14: April 03 to April 09 | Johannes
• April Week 14 | Bithive
• Week in Review 2023-04-10 | Luis

Mastodon / Twitter

• Gene Hackman would be the perfect name for a CRISPR engineer.
• I remember Max Keiser calling this the most revolutionary graph he'd ever seen
• Fantastic #TomLehrer content in today's FT

Software

• htmx release 1.9.0
• httpx release 0.24.0
• Neapolitan - easy crud views for Django
• List of LLaMA models | Lots of interesting links...
• Python 3.11.3
• fedifeed - Display Mastodon Posts in a curated feed with an user-customisable algorithm
• Paperless-ngx is a document management system that transforms your physical documents into a searchable online archive so you can keep, well, less paper
• The RWKV Language Model (and my LM tricks)
• DeepSpeed Chat: Easy, Fast and Affordable RLHF Training of ChatGPT-like Models at All Scales
• Unpoly - The unobtrusive JavaScript framework for server-side web applications
• Enhance - The HTML first full stack web framework
• Image BPP Calculator
• zola (né Gutenberg) - A fast static site generator in a single binary with everything built-in
• Running Jupyter notebooks online | Cool list of sites where you can run your notebooks

Podcasts

• LWiAI Podcast #117 - Google’s Bard Rush, BloombergGPT, ChatGPT King, Balenciaga Harry Potter (Last Week in AI) | Trying to keep up with all this buzz
• #370 – Edward Frenkel: Reality is a Paradox – Mathematics, Physics, Truth & Love (Lex Fridman Podcast)
• The End of Mediocrity (part 2) (Akimbo - A podcast from Seth Godin) | Yup
• ChatGPT Is Not Intelligent w/ Emily M. Bender (Tech Won't Save Us) | Well, I agree with the analysis of why the letter is more of a marketing move and misleading. And I also think there're some valid critical points considering the social implications etc (I'm not an expert on this stuff, but it sounds plausible to me). But most of the technical assumptions and arguments are just wrong. And I have a problem with the structure of the presented arguments (yes, it's that bad). I use this LLM stuff for some time now and it has been really useful for stuff I'm an expert on. Dismissing this utility based on theoretical grounds gives me some strong "Pope vs Galileo - I don't have to look" vibes. TLDR: for this to be considered the strongest criticism, it is pretty weak.
• FS264 Die Große Elchwanderung (Freak Show) | After 1.5 years, finally! 🎉

"for legal reasons this is a joke" --julia, serial project starter

Lots of colored eggs. Short work week where I was collecting some material for an upcoming pytest-course and did some research about this whole shiny new LLM field which is completely wild atm. Recorded a podcast episode about LLMs. Released a new django-cast version with some minor improvements. Fixed a 500 error on this site caused by the csrf-middleware raising an error and context-processors weren't run so the custom error template didn't get its base template (this needs more fixing).

Articles

• Django: Avoid database queries in template context processors | Probably I should get rid of the db query in my theme context processor for django-cast
• Ban 1+N in Django
• Thoughts on a Crazy Week in AI News
• Slack | Martin Fowler on including slack in your iterations
• CAN Injection: keyless car theft | Ahahaha...
• Exclusive: OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic | Well, just to be able to find the link again. This article does not look credible at all (as well as the whole time.com site, meh).
• Thinking About Code Review | Yep, PRs make sense in an open-source context. Otherwise, not so much...
• What are we going to do about ChatGPT? | More reasonable than the letter
• Programming-language popularity by GitHub pull requests

Mastodon / Twitter

• Everyone needs a break | Webcomic about the need to get away from everything
• Brain vs Sleep webcomic - "pacific ocean"

Freelance

• Double Your Freelancing | Ok, maybe I have to do some marketing...
• 030 | The Side Hustle | The Unspoken Lever of FI | Fixed income would be nice, too

Papers

• Eight Things to Know about Large Language Models | Fascinating

Weeknotes

• Weeknotes: A new llm CLI tool, plus automating my weeknotes and newsletter | Simon Willison
• Weeklog for Week 13: March 27 to April 02 | Johannes

Software

• Django Playwright and Pytest example
• unittest-parametrize | Works like the @pytest.mark.parametrize decorator from pytest
• Django 4.2 released
• Let it be free! Open-sourcing “Baby AGI”, a paired down version of the “Task-Driven Autonomous Agent” at 105 lines of code. Three task agents (execution, creation, prioritization) work in harmony… forever.
• Just been informed that #AutoGPT is ranked #1 trending in the entire world on @Github !🤯
• SentencePiece is an unsupervised text tokenizer and detokenizer mainly for Neural Network-based text generation systems
• Slint 1.0: The Next-Generation Native GUI Toolkit Matures | Native UIs in rust
• pinecone.ai - Long-term Memory for AI
• babyagi - This Python script is an example of an AI-powered task management system | Twitter thread
• Libraries.io monitors 7,144,509 open source packages across 32 different package managers, so you don't have to | Used this to track how many packages depend on packages I wrote...
• Tabby - Self-hosted AI coding assistant. An opensource / on-prem alternative to GitHub Copilot
• opentalk.eu - video conference software which allows self-hosting

Podcasts

• What AI can do for you on Theory of Change (no link to original podcast, since the feed is broken) | Really good episode!
• Soumith Chintala: PyTorch On the past and present of machine learning frameworks, and the story of PyTorch and its creator (The Gradient Podcast) | Interesting
• The Story of Visual Studio Code with Erich Gamma and Kai Maetzel (The Hanselminutes Podcast) | Surprising how early and small vscode started...
• Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO of Cohere joins Host Pieter Abbeel to discuss transformers, large language models, command and instruct models, prompt engineering, LLMs competitive landscape (The robot brains)