Ephes Blog

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)

Out of Context Images

Recorded and produced a new Podcast Episode about Ansible. Had to learn that streaming 48Khz 24bit FLAC audio to AirPods is too much for the Bluetooth bandwidth. At first, I thought the recording was broken, but then realized it was just a Bluetooth glitch, phew.

Did some preparation for a Python training course next week (setting up a JupyterHub instance, preparing a HedgeDoc installation).  Also, normal work as usual until we got evacuated because of a bomb disposal (a 500kg bomb from the second world war was found a few hundred meters down the street).

Progress on having a landing page where people can create podcasts/blogs:

• Did some infrastructure work to be able to use a Python installation via pyenv on production
• ...

Articles

• Falling for Kubernetes | I tend to disagree, but maybe sometime someone will prove me wrong, so I have to keep listening
• How SQLite Helps You Do ACID
• “Autistic people can't acknowledge when they are wrong” | Very familiar vibe 😬
• Putting SOLID into Perspective | SOLID, CUPID, etc. - I don't know. It's not possible to give clear advice on how things should be done. But it could be helpful to know how things tend to go wrong, just to be able to recognize them when it happens 🤓.

Courses

• Databases - Stanford School of Engineering

Twitter

• One of my all-time favourites. Stare at the red dot on the woman's nose for 30 seconds, then look at an empty wall while blinking quickly.
• wife: "we should babyproof the—" me: "there are already other orgs handling baby safety, here we mainly focus on baby capabilities research.
• #AgileMaxim 1: It is in the doing of the work that we discover the work that we must do. Doing exposes reality. | Good thread.

Software

• HedgeDoc | write and share markdown
• Excalidraw | Virtual whiteboard for sketching hand-drawn like diagrams. Collaborative and end-to-end encrypted.
• Donut on Hugging Face / Donut on GitHub | I've done things like this with tesseract getting much better results. But I'm really happy to see people starting to use transformers for problems like this. Very promising.

Podcasts

• WR1392 Strukturwandel ist teuer (WRINT Wirtschaftskunde) | Instead of raising the base rate (making investments to lower gas comsumption more difficult) or artificially lowering the gas price (providing an incentive to consume more gas) the rational economic way to handle a gas shortage would be to tax gas consumption. Of course this is not possible politically, but..
• #309 – John Carmack: Doom, Quake, VR, AGI, Programming, Video Games, and Rockets (Lex Fridman Podcast) | Good episode
• Pydantic v2 - The Plan (Talk Python To Me) | pydantic-core is completely written in rust, leading to smaller binaries compared to cython
• WR1390 China (Wer redet ist nicht tot) | Interesting, media coverage about Chinas social scoring is mainly creating a myth, etc..
• Jochen Distelmeyer (Reflektor) | Trying to listen to more music instead of podcasts - maybe I can start by just listening to podcasts about music, no?

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