Ephes Blog

I'm tall. I have been asked innumerable times to help a stranger get something off a high shelf in a store. I've even offered to help once or twice, though I only do so in dire circumstances. Usually it's something right there, but occasionally I've been summoned from another aisle. This is the code of the tall person. I am bound to help you by my giant blood, in payment of some long-past debt of my people to yours. Don't worry. The pact will always be honored. --Venial Trinities

It's been a hectic week, though not much to report here. Made some progress on django-cast, but haven't pushed out a new release yet. I really need to put together some basic documentation and tutorials for django-resume, but haven't found the time. Hopefully next week!

Articles

• Rendering form fields as group in Django | Ok, nice
• Better unit-tests for your emails with Django 5.2 | Cool
• The UK's Demands for Apple to Break Encryption Is an Emergency for Us All | Groundhog day, again?

Books

• Inclusive Components | Blog / Book

Software

• FawltyDeps is a dependency checker for Python that finds undeclared and/or unused 3rd-party dependencies in your Python project
• Pearcleaner - A free, source-available and fair-code licensed Mac app cleaner

Fediverse

• The best, most cogent and elegantly simple explanation into the inexplicably destructive negotiating processes of the president,by Prof. David Honig of Indiana University.
• If someone suggests to you that you should use the "Prisma ORM" in your project, don't listen.

Recipes

• December 24th Lasagna | Some interesting details there..

A - DNS record

AA - battery

AAA - battery

AAAA - DNS record

--Kevin P. Fleming

Made it to FOSDEM 2025 in Brussels this year. Great to see some old friends and catch up while hopping between talks. I also gave a presentation about django-resume, a small Django app I wrote for CV management. You can check out both the slides and the video recording of the talk:

Articles

• Making the new Salter Cane website | Nice
• How I Use Home Assistant in 2025 | Hmm, adaptive lighting sounds interesting..
• So You Want To Remove The GVL? | Whoa, ruby now has their own nogil discussion? Arguments sound all too familiar 😄
• On DeepSeek and Export Controls | There are a few data point nuggets in there, but remember who wrote this..
• Programmer time and the pitfalls of wasteful work | Yep, now I'm feeling guilty

Software

• llm-anthropic. I've renamed my llm-claude-3 plugin to llm-anthropic
• Mastering RAG: Techniques for Improved Retrieval and Generation
• boltons should be builtins

Fediverse

• coffee | 🌊
• Bloomberg's Matt Levine—an ardent capitalist who loves making money without creating value—mused over this question: | 🧵 This is a really cool idea. Does anyone want to pay me doing open source to be able to short sell SAP or something like that?

You all died in 2016. And yes, this is Hell. --God

I went to a PyDDF meetup and had a great time! I also managed to get my video setup working again, so I might create more video content soon. I've been experimenting with storing code and plugin templates for a Django project in database models - it's somewhat working, though still a work in progress. I've also been playing around with generating context for few-shot learning in LLMs.

Articles

• Django
  • Push notifications without a mobile app: an experiment (with Django) | might come in handy 🔨
  • How to check if a Django template has been overridden
• Python / AI
  • Anthropic’s new Citations API | Interesting
  • The Vision of a new World | Linked data would be really valuable. We might be able to leverage LLMs' need for context to make this happen. Could be an interesting approach! 🤔
  • What I've learned about writing AI apps so far | Yep, trying to use LLMs in apps atm and I have much to learn
• Frontend
  • The ten Most Popular Codepens 2024
  • 6 CSS Snippets Every Front-End Developer Should Know In 2025
  • CSS Wishlist for 2025
  • How would you share state between Web Components?
  • Browsing with a keyboard
• Build the abstraction first | True
• A Definitive Guide to External Displays on macOS | Just to be able to find this article later...
• Static Full Text Search

Software

• Pure CSS 3D Cat | Just 1.5k lines of CSS 😅
• Holy shit it's actually done — we just tagged Tailwind CSS v4.0
• PydanticAI - Agent Framework / shim to use Pydantic with LLMs
• Robyn is a High-Performance, Community-Driven, and Innovator Friendly Web Framework with a Rust runtime
• Oh Shit, Git!?! | Surprisingly useful 😁

Fediverse

• Just a reminder... it's certainly my life. ;)

Videos

• Classic Design Patterns: Where Are They Now - Brandon Rhodes - code::dive 2022 | Ah, missed this one - good talk!
• SQLite: How it works, by Richard Hipp | SQLite is just awesome!

therapist: it’s normal for painful memories to soften over time

me: but what if they don’t? what if they only hurt more as i age?

therapist: do you have any memories in particular you’re thinking of?

me: yes, it’s… *sobs* the end of google reader --April King

Normal week (in the mathematical sense). Just a few links.

Articles

• Python / AI
  • Agents | The term is famously ill defined, but this article brings some clarity
  • o1 isn’t a chat model (and that’s the point) | Yep, different models need different prompting techniques
• Frontend
  • Misconceptions about view transitions | View Transitions A collection of demos to show off View Transitions | Nice demos
  • :hover > :not(:hover), sorry not sorry | Cool, never used this one
  • Say goodbye to resource-caching across sites and domains | Ah interesting
  • Relatively New Things You Should Know about HTML Heading Into 2025
  • Element: animate() method
• Why we use our own hardware at Fastmail | Yes

Software

• spacer is a simple CLI tool to insert spacers when command output stops
• Easing Wizard CSS easing functions made easy
• jc JSONifies the output of many CLI tools, file-types, and common strings for easier parsing
• superwhisper - dictate to text iOS and mac..

Fediverse

• Hits a little too close to home… | ADHDinos web comic

Come, let's take anti-inflammatory pain medicine together 🫴 --CatSalad

Just wrapped up my first work week of the year. While it was pretty routine, I did manage to push out an update to podcast-transcripts. The big changes: you can now do transcription locally using mlx-whisper (which works particularly well on Macs), without needing to rely on any external APIs. I also added support for local audio files, so you're no longer limited to just audio URLs - though that option's still there if you prefer it. Plus, thanks to FFmpeg, the tool now automatically converts any recognized audio format to 16kHz mono MP3, so you're not restricted to MP3s anymore.

Articles

• Should I Use React For That? | To sum it up 😀, basically. But there are lots of good sources linked.
• Principles Of Web Accessibility | Nice writeup! Agree!
• Django: render JavaScript import maps in templates | Cool, lots of stuff I didn't know about here.
• My AI/LLM predictions for the next 1, 3 and 6 years, for Oxide and Friends

Software

• TabPFN is a foundation model for tabular data / Accurate predictions on small data with a tabular foundation model (Paper) | Wow, there are models now that perform better than XGBoost & co? Cool!

Fediverse

• i’m going to start sending out emails that start: “Hostile reminder:”
• #TIL about the #column command and I cant believe that I missed this gem since... forever? | Didn't know about this too 😳
• TIL about rtss: a handy command line tool for seeing the relative timestamps of each line of output from a process. | What's up with all those command line utils I don't know about? I worked as a sysadmin 20 years ago. I thought I know them all wtf..
• i'm sure anyone who has ever done some serious plotting can relate :)
• This is proof i have the patience to stab something 1000 times | Stitching
• YES, BUT - catsinabox

Videos

• Self Models of Loving Grace | Great talk!