~ephes

"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.

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.

Video

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

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! 🌳

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

Cool Websites

• personalsit.es
• localghost.dev

Out of Context Images

While preparing a screencast with Manuel, we searched for real-time collaboration tools for Jupyter notebooks. JetBrains' "Code With Me" proved unsuitable, displaying only raw JSON. Here are two practical alternatives:

1. Visual Studio Code's "Live Share" extension
2. Launching JupyterLab server like this: jupyter-lab --collaborative

If you're aware of other collaboration tools for Jupyter notebooks suited for screencasts, please drop me a note 😄!

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.

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!