Ephes Blog

I frequently copy titles from websites to use as anchor texts for links. However, these titles are often in all caps, and I don’t want to seem like I’m shouting. Previously, I would paste the all-caps title into a Python REPL, convert it to lowercase, and then manually capitalize the necessary words to make it look like a proper title. But today, I discovered a much simpler built-in solution:

I had no idea about this function! 😅

oh: neurotypicals should really learn to mask better. I know you want to talk about the weather but please just pretend you have a favorite lizard or something, it's not that hard --nota

It was a normal, almost boring work week. For open source, I released a new version of django-cast, now compatible with Wagtail 6.1. The fix turned out to be surprisingly simple: just define window.chooserUrls = {} before using it like this window.chooserUrls.audioChooser = '/cms/audio/audio/chooser/';.Perhaps some Wagtail JavaScript defined window.chooserUrls previously, and version 6.1 no longer does this? Additionally, I added cover images for blogs. For episodes the podcasts iTunes artwork is used as a fallback when a cover image is missing. But what about normal blog posts? And even for podcast episodes, the iTunes artwork might not be appropriate in every situation. Adding a cover image to the blog makes the behavior consistent. I also fixed a bug, where the Podlove player stopped working after HTMX navigation. Finally, I discovered the cause of the mysterious "DataError: PostgreSQL text fields cannot contain NUL (0x00) bytes" errors in the logs. It seems that Wagtail APIViewSets don't validate user input properly.

And then we caught a stomach bug that ruined our weekend.

Articles

• Thoughts on the WWDC 2024 keynote on Apple Intelligence | Really curious how they'll be dealing with those prompt injection risks..
• News from WWDC24: WebKit in Safari 18 beta | View transitions! Finally!
• Generative AI Is Not Going To Build Your Engineering Team For You
• The empty brain - Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer | I find the article confusing. How exactly does human cognition transcend computation? Are we talking about computers from the 1960s, today’s computers, or all possible future computers? The article seems to target the last one, but that makes ‘computer’ an overly broad term, which might indeed render it useless as a metaphor. Paradoxically, the article also argues it’s too narrow. This seems contradictory.
• PostgreSQL 17: Two Small Improvements That Will Have a Major Impact | JSON_TABLE seems to be really convenient
• Statically Typed Functional Programming with Python 3.12

Videos

• Your dishwasher is better than you think (tips, tricks, and how they work) | Interesting 🧐
• Beyond the Basics of Retrieval for Augmenting Generation

Weeknotes

• Weeknotes (2024 week 23) | Matthias Kestenholz
• Weeklog for Week 23: June 03 to June 09 | Johannes

Fediverse

• git add -p (this is #bonuscomic #4 for "How Git Works")
• Railway Journey To Capital of Georgia | Part 1

Software

• SVG Circle generator
• pgvector-python

If you want to do good, make sure the people who tell you you're doing good are actually good. --Chris McDonough

It was a busy work week, leaving little time for anything else. I did manage to procrastinate a bit by diving deeper into the Rust programming language. I might even write a small game - let's see how it goes. Voting this time didn't feel great at all. This is not going to end well.

Articles

• PyCon US 2024 Recap
• Level up your Tailwind game
• A Link Blog in the Year 2024 | Yep, link blogs are doing great 😅
• Your Node is Leaking Memory? setTimeout Could be the Reason | Uh oh
• webcomics
  • The good knight | See above for matching quote
  • Brushed

Software

• VideoPad Video Editor | Create post / shorts etc from video automagically
• ScreenFlow | Create demo screen recordings
• Scratch is the world’s largest coding community for children and a coding language with a simple visual interface
• A refreshingly simple data-driven game engine built in Rust | Hmm, seems to best rust gaming engine atm...

Fediverse

• What are some of the best Python tutorial videos you've seen? | 🧵

Out of Context Images

A bad metaphor is like a wet carrot --donni saphire

Short work week. Didn't get anything done besides work because I was sick more than half of the week.

Articles

• Should I Use jwts For Authentication Tokens? | tldr: no
• Instead of "auth", we should say "permissions" and "login" | Probably something like that, yes - the whole thread is interesting.
• Confronting Another Axis? History, Humility, and Wishful Thinking
• An intuitive journey through memory management 🎒 | In Mojo

Videos

• Michael Hladky - CSS Rendering Performance

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 21: May 20 to May 26 | Johannes
• Weeknotes: PyCon US 2024 | Simon Willison
• Science and Technology links (May 25 2024) | Daniel Lemire

Fediverse

• Just a quick reminder that there's a scripting media feature.

Software

• django-cool-urls - django template tag to replace broken links with an archived version of a website | 😎
• Podcast hosting for $5 | Interesting since I might offer something similar 🧐

Out of Context Images

OH: “Or, as Randall Munroe once said: «This quote is taken out of context»” --hukl

Normal work week, nothing to see here. Fixed a nasty bug in django-cast. Having a lot of state attached to the feed instance in combination with caching caused posts from blog A to be served to the feed of blog B 🫢. Big thanks to Niklas for reporting this. Johannes also pointed it out and, to add insult to injury, suggested I switch to his static site generator for blogging. If there's any truth to the sunk cost fallacy, it's too late for me now. That ship has sailed. Managed to release an update for django-cast with some additional fixes. Notably, I had to pin “wagtail < 6.1” again because I found out that the audio and video chooser are now broken, and fixing them seems quite challenging.

Over the weekend, I went to watch a kids’ bouldering competition because of reasons.

Articles

• Django / Python
  • Django: Getting a full model instance from a Subquery
  • How Python Asyncio Works: Recreating it from Scratch
  • Django Commons - A home for community-maintained Django packages
  • ✨ What's new in Django 5.1
• CSS
  • contrast-color() is a good thing, but also solving the problem at the wrong layer
  • Why UI designers should understand Flexbox and CSS Grid
  • We’ve Got Container Queries Now, But Are We Actually Using Them?
• Rust's iterators optimize nicely—and contain a footgun
• htmx sucks | 2.0.0 beta 4 got released a few days ago..
• Reclaiming Agility with Simple Principles | Considering the effort invested over the past 20 years, the results of the entire agile movement are quite underwhelming. I’m almost ready to admit that my bet on agile didn’t pay off. On the other hand, my bets on Python and Machine Learning have been wildly successful, so overall, I’m net positive. However, my bets against the cloud and SPAs are still undecided. Let’s wait and see 😇.
• On Fire Drills and Phishing Tests | These phishing tests are nuts. How can you be a serious company with a letter box and tax accountants and then perform obviously crazy shit like this?

Fediverse

• The pencil test | What really creeps me out isn’t that we’re great at imagining non-conscious things as people - that’s just a harmless quirk. It’s that we might be just as mistaken about actual people, and we’re stuck in a cosmic horror plot.
• I brought beer! | Webcomic
• Git cheat sheet by Julia Evans | Oh, this is great. Can't wait for the "How Git Works" article! 🎉

Videos

• I Read The Most Misunderstood Philosopher in the World | Unexpectedly, this was really good!

Software

• eGenix Micro Benchmark
• WezTerm is a powerful cross-platform terminal emulator | I was using iTerm2 for a long time and now running kitty - haven't looked into WezTerm yet, but save it here to remember to try it later 😅

Out of Context Images