Ephes Blog

The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome. He knows there is no such thing as a fearless warrior or a dread-free artist. —Steven Pressfield

Wrapping things up at work for the holiday season. Recorded and produced a podcast episode about PyTest, my favorite testing framework for Python, which was a lot of fun 🎙️.

Then I went a little deeper down this web component rabbit hole. I built a component from scratch for the image gallery stuff on this site. At first I put the Javascript for the component in the head of the html, because why not, but then I couldn't see the html in the custom element that was rendered on the server. After finding out that this was because the Javascript was executed before the content of my custom element was added to the DOM, I used a MutationObserver to detect when the html of my element was added to the DOM and then added the event listeners etc.. A little later I found out that this was complete overkill and I just need to move the Javascript for the component a little further down in the html to fix this. It's a little embarrassing to share my stupid mistakes here, but maybe this will be helpful for someone else googling for it (or asking a LLM - we still have to come up with a proper verb here, right?).

Next week I try to maybe have some tests for my component and a way to integrate Javascript and Django with maybe django-vite? We'll see 😁.

Articles

• A settings pattern for reusable Django apps
• Django: Sanitize incoming HTML fragments with nh3

Software

• Python 3.12.1 Release
• Alternative implementation of the Bitwarden server API written in Rust | I'm searching for an alternative to 1Password - not sure yet
• Web Component GitHub starter template
• Motion is a website that showcases the power of UI/UX animation

Mastodon / Twitter

• Warum liegt hier überhaupt Stroh rum? | Webcomic
• You can use mask-composite and some JavaScript to create this pointer proximity following glow border ✨
• All you need in AlpineJS to smoothly fade in images on load is to use the following classes and a simple on load statement
• How brands talk these days

Podcasts

• Kolo for Django - Lily Foote (Django Chat) | Good episode!
• Episode 5 - Cinder with Carl Meyer (core.py) | Nice!
• Revision 596: Neues in Safari, Teil 1 von 2 (Working Draft) | I just listen to people talking frontend and hope something will stick. Yeah, I know.
• Revision 597: Neues in Safari, Teil 2 von 2 (Working Draft) | Same thing, but I get the impression PWA might be hot now?

god: i have made a Single page webapp

angels: you fucked up a perfectly good website is what you did. look at it. it’s got dependency injections.

--Eric Meyer

Normal "omg there's only so much time left in the year and we're all sick" work week. Speaking of sick: Last week I caught the latest COVID variant, but what a letdown! It seems like COVID's lost its edge, turning into a mundane, almost commercialized version of its former fearsome self. It's like everyone's getting it these days – hardly the exclusive experience it used to be!

The sync renditions command for django-cast is done -> new release. Upgrading my projects to Django 5.0 and Wagtail 5.2.2 went smoothly. And there's a new version of ktpncook that fixes some minor issues. Nice progress, but my current mood is more like:

Articles

• Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution | How could I have missed this one? This is great stuff.
• Long context prompting for Claude 2.1 | Ok, this thing about adding just one sentence to the prompt making that much of a difference is just really wild
• Safer, Not Later | Move fast and break things revisited - good article
• Sharing Pictures of Code | Just to be aware of the options..
• Ext4 data corruption in stable kernels | Uh oh, make sure your servers don't get updated automatically 😱
• Real-world match/case | I had some use cases in the meantime and it's really cool, yep

Videos

• One big fat sound | Perfect answer to: Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
• Sierra Hull - Mad World (Tears For Fears) - DelFest - Cumberland, MD - 5/28/22 | Cheesy song but the mandolin solo is superb!
• Jeremy Keith – Of Time And The Web – border:none 2023 | Easy to forget how much progress we made, yep
• What's new in Django 5.0! | Nice summary video!
• Tobias Baldauf – [mɑːkt] – border:none 2023 | Also interesting. Personally I often think I'm a bit too much into self-reflection and should just do more and think less, but maybe I should reflect a bit more on that (oh no).

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 48: November 27 to December 04 | Johannes
• Week in Review 2023-12-04 | Luis
• Weeknotes: datasette-enrichments, datasette-comments, sqlite-chronicle | Simon Willison

Software

• FastUI - is a new way to build web application user interfaces defined by declarative Python code | react via pyscript?
• Django 5.0 released | 🥳
• Great LLM visualization | And it's available as open source 😎
• Awesome Systematic Trading | Have to do something about this, meh

Podcasts

• Revision 595: „HTML over the Wire“ und Unpoly (Working Draft) | I'm more team htmx, but unpoly seems to be really interesting, too
• Alternativlos, Folge 52 mit Joscha Bach (Alternativlos) | Ok (and it's called naive bayes!)

It’s really a shame how Cyber Monday has become so commercialized. --Max Leibman

Christmas season is heating up. Work went well, no issues there. For open source, I assumed I'd just add a little management command to django-cast to help me regenerate renditions when I change something about image sizes or formats. But this turned out to be much harder than I expected. I wasn't able to test my management command, because I kept running into strange race conditions / data persistence issues with image.get_renditions. Maybe it's because of the multi-threaded implementation in Wagtail, or a combination of multi-threading and the non-threadsafe nature of sqlite that I use for testing, but it didn't work and I couldn't figure out why. So I put all the rendition logic in another module to be able to test it without using the database. But it's still not in a releasable state - maybe next week 😅.

Mastodon / Twitter

• In der aktuellen @freakshow mache ich ein Live-Experiment: welche Qualität erreicht man binnen 20 Minuten mit KI-Bildgeneratoren wie #StableDiffusion (hier mit der iOS-App #DrawThings) und dem trainieren von LoRAs, wenn man als Grundlage einen 20 Sekunden Clip Wackelvideo hat? Seht und hört selbst - das wird Folgen haben
• Chrome is shipping <img sizes="auto"> support 🥳 | Wow, this would make responsive images much easier!
• 2 llm benchmarking papers published!

Videos

• How We're Building AI Search Engines using LLM Embeddings | Not much content here, but Django!
• Making Large Language Models Uncool Again | Hrhr, very cool Interview!

Software

• Midjourney
  • Explore unconventional aesthetics with the experimental --weird or --w parameter
  • Permutation Prompts
• Unpoly 3.6.0 released
• drawfast | Sketch -> image via stable diffusion, awesome!
• Faster Whisper transcription with CTranslate2 | Oh, I really need to add transcripts to django-cast

Podcasts

• xLSTM - "I am almost exploding" (Industrial AI Podcast) | Ok, you heard it here first: I predict this will turn out to be BS. No good technical arguments but marketing FOMO fluff. And all this weird IP talk you usually only get from snake oil salesmen.
• SE Radio 591: Yechezkel Rabinovich on Kubernetes Observability (Software Engineering Radio) | Meh, still unsure why people use this (for example minute 30 on deploying a service behind 3 chained single points of failure (loadbalancers) is described as "great" while it sounds horrible to me, but ok - maybe I just haven't seen the light yet)
• #9 Thomas Metzinger: Reines Bewusstsein/Beobachtungen beobachten/Meditation (Songs & Argumente) | Well done, this podcast is not bad at all!
• #1 - Joscha Bach: Computation/Bewusstsein/Nerds/DDR(Songs & Argumente) | Also good - oh no, now I have to listen to all episodes 🥶 (only issue is that I have to use the crappy spotify app to listen to this)
• #2 - Philipp Hübl: Moralpsychologie/Aufgeregte Gesellschaft(Songs & Argumente) | Nice!
• WR1546 Argentinien, Schuldenbremse, Ungleichheit
  (WRINT - Wissenschaft) | Very good!

Out of Context Images

When you lock the laboratory door, you always lock out more than you lock in. --John Wheeler

I had an interesting work week as I spent two days in Amsterdam - fancy. And I made significant progress on implementing responsive images in django-cast. Maybe I should use a web component for this image gallery stuff? Or just plain htmx? Maybe both to figure out which is easier to use? We'll see 🙃.

Articles

• Hobbitos™ | Webcomic
• The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation | It always seemed a little bit too good to be true
• CSS
  • Learn CSS | Do it! (just a reminder for myself..) and in related news: Learn to write better, resilient CSS
  • Getting started with CSS container queries
• Web Components
  • The elevator pitch for Web Components | Ok, fine
  • HTML Web Components: An Example | Web components can render stuff before any javascript is executed

Software

• This is a phenomenal web demo. Enabled by window.getScreenDetails() which provides basic live info (size, position etc) from all screens on the device. Ok, so a lot of people have been asking me for code/writeup of this so I made a stripped down example (works with an infinite amount of windows) so that you can look at to get the basic gist of it (that's all I have time for now, sorry!). | Whoa
• 🦝Tanuki - The easiest way to build scalable, LLM-powered functions and applications that get cheaper and faster the more you use them
• Draw Things | Really cool, let's you use a zoo of fine tuned models for different purposes

Weeknotes

• Weeknotes: DevDay, GitHub Universe, OpenAI chaos | Simon Willison
• Week in Review 2023-11-20 | Luis
• Weeklog for Week 46: November 13 to November 19 | Johanns

Podcasts

• Afrika - "Der Westen redet, China investiert" (Hörsaal) | Interesting..
• FS271 Ich glaube das wird ein bisschen mehr Aufwand im Schnitt | Good, how did I not know about Draw Things?

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. --Carl Jung

Normal work week. Didn't have much time for open source, but had a closer look into this whole responsive image topic / issues. And I have some ideas on how to handle them, but nothing is done, yet. All my Read the Docs integrations now use a secret for their webhook calls, which is probably good. And I've had some trouble with flit when it's installed via pipx, because it now installs local packages in the flit-pipx virtualenv when I run flit install -s whereas before it installed them into the projects virtualenv. Or maybe something in my fish shell broke? Dunno.

Articles

• I should have loved biology | Great post!
• GitHub Actions: Faster Python runs with cached virtual environments | Ok, nice that this works, but it's probably to complicated for my workflows
• What fonts to use for coding | Didn't know about Fira Code - cool!
• HTML web components | Sounds reasonable, yep!
• PyPI has completed its first security audit | Kind of ok I guess
• New goodies in Django 5.0 | Oh, there's a way to add created and modified attributes using the database? Cool!
• Ornament - Eine Web-Component-Microlibrary | Hmm, I probably will stick using lit
• HTML First | Also pretty reasonable

Mastodon / Twitter

• Artificial intelligence as “making a computer do something that if a human were to do it we would colloquially consider intelligent” works pretty well. | Thread
• Let’s predict and make the web fast with the new Speculation Rules API. Here’s how to debug it with #ChromeDevTools. 👉🏽
• That could easily be me. | Death is coming for indoor plants..
• I defragged my zebra ...
• Interesting developments in subquadratic alternatives to self-attention based transformers for large sequence modeling (32k and more).
• "Design can change the world" | Hrhrhr
• Oh crap! It's a Thesaurus!

Weeknotes

• Week 43 of 2023 | Juha-Matti Santala
• Weeklog for Week 45: November 06 to November 12 | Johannes
• Week in Review 2023-11-13 | Luis

Software

• Sample size calculator - Question: How many subjects are needed for an A/B test?
• screenshot-to-code - This is a simple app that converts a screenshot to HTML/Tailwind CSS | GPT-4 Vision access required...

Videos

• Omri Boehm, lässt sich ohne Hass über Nahost sprechen?
• Brandt Bucher – A JIT Compiler for CPython
• Jon Lovett Rant on 7/2/22 Lovett or Leave It | Didn't age well 😢

Podcasts

• Contributing to Django - Sarah Boyce | Good episode!
• Metriken, Hypothesen und Fehler: A/B-Testing in der Praxis mit Philipp Monreal | Finally someone that correctly explains how p-values work 😅. Great episode!
• Lorraine Daston: Ohne Regeln keine Kultur (Sein und Streit) | I was tricked into listening to this episode , because I have a soft spot for Wittgenstein and my podcatcher was promising me something about him. Well, now I have another example of people talking about a topic (algorithms) with high confidence while being completely wrong. Meh.