Ephes Blog

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.

The adjective for metal is metallic.

Not so for iron, which is ironic. --Dgar

Peak Home Improvement! Got sick with a nasty virus, glad it didn't take long to recover. Work was nice, doing more stuff combining Alpine.js and htmx. For my open source stuff, I fixed another pydantic 2 compatibility issue with kptncook and released a new version. A first text classification tutorial is available in my data science tutorial repository, which is currently being rebuilt 👷‍♂️.

Articles

• Visual Studio Code is designed to fracture | welp
• Decision time | I'm all onboard doing it "the the long hard stupid way" 🫡
• PEP 703 (Making the Global Interpreter Lock Optional in CPython) acceptance | Ok, interesting times ahead 😅
• Now add a walrus: Prompt engineering in DALL-E 3 | Playing around with DALL-E 3 myself and it's great!
• Bullets of vaguely silvery hue | Great article - I don't use docker but honcho and Procfiles to replace docker-compose, but otherwise: agree

Mastodon / Twitter

• thread about our papers investigating the verification and self-critiquing inabilities of GPT4 | Ok, this a serious critique, finally!

Weeknotes

• Weeknotes: PyBay, AI Engineer Summit, Datasette metadata and JavaScript plugins | Simon Willison
• Weeklog for Week 42: October 16 to October 22 | Johannes
• Week in Review 2023-10-24 | Luis

Videos

• McKinsey: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) | Hrhr

Podcasts

• Publish yourself (E) (Akimbo) | He has a point...
• Mastodon Anleitung - So klappt der Mastodon Einstieg! (MeTacheles)
• SE Radio 583: Lukas Fittl on Postgres Performance (Software Engineering Radio) | Interesting
• #94 Die Realität des Freelancings: Zwischen Selbstbestimmung und Unsicherheit mit Index out of bounds (Engineering Kiosk) | Heard the term "body leasing" for the first time here. I usually refer to the work I'm doing as "staff or team augmentation".

Open source AI models will soon become unbeatable. Period. --Yann LeCun

Home improvement is still going strong. Painting furniture is more time consuming and difficult than expected 🛠️ 🖌️🎨.

At work I used a combination of Alpine.js and htmx to make a chart drawn by apexcharts react smoothly to form change events (input change -> hx-trigger="change" on form -> get request -> swap html with chart data serialized by jsonscript tag -> response triggers htmx event after swap -> alpinejs component updates chart data on htmx event -> chart animation to new state). This is a lot of fun!

And somehow I also managed to do some open source stuff this week. My fastdeploy project is now Python 3.12 compatible thanks to the uvloop 0.18.0 release. There was a bug in the urljoin method of kptncook that is now fixed, and I got some information about additional kptncook api endpoints that may lead to new commands that can be used to search for recipes. There will be a new wagtail 5.2 release in November that adds proper picture and srcset_image template tags. Maybe my wagtail_srcset project will become obsolete? We'll see, I have to try out the new template tags next week. Then I released a new django-cast version, adding Python 3.12 support and dropping Python 3.9 support. And finally I started to dust off my old data science tutorial project because someone wanted to use it and had to realize that it did not work anymore. Maybe I can use this as an excuse to get back into that whole data science topic (LLM fine / instruction tuning, oh yeah?).

Articles

• The Web Is For User Agency | MUST (BUT WE KNOW YOU WON'T), hrhrhr
• The Compass of Mourning Judith Butler writes about violence and the condemnation of violence | Colonialism does not seem so bad compared to what's happening in the world right now, no?

Videos

• A Hackers' Guide to Language Models | Really good high level overview about all the stuff you can do with LLMs at the moment
• TDD Training Courses DON'T WORK - Try THIS Instead | Interested in this because I also occasionally do TDD / PyTest trainings - asking people why they adopted something is probably a good idea 😎
• HTMx: Building modern web applications without JS (with Carson Gross) | Really great talk

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 41: October 09 to October 15 | Johannes

Software

• uvloop v0.18.0 | Support for Python 3.12 🎉
• Alpine.js Test Utils | Yes, I cranked up the complexity of my alpinejs components to such a level I now have to think about how to test them 🤪
• The Mathematical Playground | cool UI
• Nougat: Neural Optical Understanding for Academic Documents | Ok, interesting
• Node.js 21 is now live!

Books

• Hypermedia Systems | This book is a good tutorial about htmx!

Mastodon / Twitter

• snow shovel

Podcasts

• Folge #76 Wie wir auf die Sahelzone blicken (sollten) | Musk, Starlink, Ukraine: Was ist los im Weltraum? (Sicherheitshalber) | Still searching for podcasts explaining this whole "world politics gone fubar" to me
• WR1531 Nobelpreis – BRICS – China (Wirtschaftskunde) | Solid episode!
• PyCharm's Year of Django - Paul Everitt (Django Chat) | Always great. Curious who this new Jetbrains sponsored Djangonaut will be?
• Episode #85 Thomas Dohmke // CEO @ GitHub (Alphalist CTO Podcast) | Cool - hmm, would also be a great guest for our Python podcast, no?
• Episode 1 - Core Sprint in Brno & Python 3.13.0 alpha 1 (core.py) | New podcast by Łukasz Langa and Pablo Galindo Salgado, yay!
• Barry Warsaw (Python People) | Nice
• WR1535 Der Wahnsinn in der USA (Zum Thema) | I still don't understand it

The challenge I'm doing this month is called October and it's where I just try to get through every day of October --Erin McGuire Olson

There's some kind of home improvement going on in our apartment, so I'm a little stressed at the moment. Released the podcast episode on Kubernetes. The increased podcast activity has led to some really nice feedback emails, which has been helpful. For example, there is this fluentcomments incompatibility with bootstrap 4 and 5 that I discovered. For django-cast, I added this CSS workaround.

Articles

• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Must Know About Unicode in 2023 (Still No Excuses!) | Great stuff!
• McKinsey Developer Productivity Review | Much better than the original 🙃
• Step into the light (DOM) | I have to do more with web components. Should be great for things like audio players (the podlove player I'm using now is based on Vue 2 and held by a gorilla pulling in the whole jungle) - or maybe start with something more simple like the subscribe button?
• Speeding up the JavaScript ecosystem - The barrel file debacle | Oh wow
• Revisiting PJAX | Interesting alternative to htmx I didn't know about
• Building The Next Web | First of a series of articles about the web
• 1000 hours of ChatGPT: here are the best 3 techniques to become a better prompt engineer! | Just a reminder to tinker around more often

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 40: October 02 to October 08 | Johannes

Mastodon / Twitter

• Was meint ihr, Bitches? | Webcomic

Software

• GitHub Résumé - A service that creates a résumé based on your GitHub repos/activity
• Copier - A library and CLI app for rendering project templates | from podcast feedback
• vim-ai - This plugin adds Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities to your Vim and Neovim | Yes, neovim ftw!
• Psycopg features - psycopg3 should be the default by now | Using psycopg3 by default for all my personal projects already
• The Easiest Way to Preview and Generate Open Graph Meta Tags | Hmm, django-cast needs some polish regarding

Videos

• What Are Accessibility Overlays? | Hrhr
• Tested: Where Does The Tone Come From In A Microphone? | Aha!

Podcasts

• (118) Empowerment: Mit dem Virus leben lernen (Das Coronavirus-Update) | Nothing new for me here...
• Django and iOS - Filip Němeček (Django Chat) | Good

If you remember having to get off the internet because your parents or a sibling wanted to use the phone, now is a good time to schedule a colonoscopy. Michelle Catherine Marcó

Work week shortened by a little bit of vacation and a cold I caught. Released the podcast episode about environments and packaging tools in Python that we recorded the week before last. Recorded a new podcast episode on Kubernetes. Upgraded a second project to pydantic > 2, and again it was more trouble than expected. On the other hand, upgrading my projects to Python 3.12 went pretty smoothly. There was a minor issue where the configure script preferred openssl@1.1 instead of 3 when both were installed (on M1 based Macs). And the built-in venv module does not install setuptools by default, which broke some packages trying to import something from distutils (uh oh) or something like that.

Articles

• Tailwind, and the death of web craftsmanship | Well, I probably fall into this "backend engineer forced to do frontend stuff" (I just paste my html into chatGPT and ask it to move the button a little bit to the right, which works), but maybe I should have a look at real CSS
• Programming Sucks | Still valid even after ten years
• Web server ‘hello world’ benchmark : Go vs Node.js vs Nim vs Bun | I don't know. Benchmarking is hard, and you have to be really careful about what you measure. For example: I would highly doubt any hello world benchmark that reports lower numbers for Python than for NodeJS, because you should be using exactly the same code in both cases (libuv). If you use something different, you measured something different against libuv, not NodeJS vs. Python (I got almost the same numbers in my own benchmarks...).

Books

• “Boost Your Git DX” out now | Really good.

Videos

• Sarah C. M. Paine - WW2, Taiwan, Ukraine, & Maritime vs Continental Powers | Hmm dunno..
• Wagtail CMS release 5.1, dark mode, performance improvements and more | What’s New in Wagtail (ep8)
• Die Wahrheit vor Gericht (Prof. Dr. Thomas Fischer) | Entertaining
• Politiken der Wahrheit (Prof. Dr. Bernhard Kleeberg)
• Fake News und Wahrheit im politischen Diskurs (Dr. Jana Laura Egelhofer)

Software

• Python 3.12 Release 🎉
• Comprehensive Python Cheatsheet

Mastodon / Twitter

• New batched function in 3.12 itertools | I have a function like that in almost every one of my projects
• You could take the resize trick from last week and use it to create one of those sliding image components 👀
• You can create this Apple-style photo scroller by combining CSS scroll-driven animations and CSS scroll-snap 😍
• Interruption Hell | Webcomic
• If you'd asked me a year ago, superposition would have been by far the reason I was most worried that mechanistic interpretability would hit a dead end. | Interesting
• Who needs in-flight entertainment when you can...idk, port uvloop to Python 3.12... | Hope it will be released soon, so I can upgrade my fastAPI based projects... 😎

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 39: September 25 to October 01 | Johannes

Podcasts

• Politik und Wahrheit - Wissenschaft als Mittel gegen eine "postfaktische" Welt? (Hörsaal) | Really good talk (badly introduced as always)
• Populismus - Fake News als politischer Kampfbegriff (Hörsaal) | Okish

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