Ephes Blog

@beecycling Don't chase your dreams. Humans are persistence predators. Follow your dreams at a moderate pace until they become too exhausted to flee further or fight back. --Athena L.M.

Very short work week. Went to the beyond tellerrand conference and it was as great as always. Fixed two small bugs in django-cast (1, 2), but didn't have time to release a new version. Right now I'm working on a really weird bug found by some unsolicited software testers (thanks!) that only happens on postgres not on sqlite. But when you see a "DataError: PostgreSQL text fields cannot contain NUL (0x00) bytes" caused by some garbage in a filter parameter, something is probably not quite right.

Articles

• Trends in Software Development
  • Learning from the object-oriented mania | Yep
  • Big Data is Dead | Ok, now it's official!
• Frontend
  • Look Mum, No Breakpoints! Have to play around with this
  • Just Speculating: You May Not Need a SPA framework | Ah, htmx has something similar in Javascript, nice to see the browser vendors adopting it
  • Recent CSS Bookmarks 16 | Didn't follow all of the links there, but really interesting!
• Python: Mock an inner import | Cool!
• Zero-to-the-Zero and the Do-Nothing Machine

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 19: May 06 to May 12 | Johannes

Videos

• Safe Space or Trap? Creating Software like DuckDB in Academic Institutions | Great talk. "You know this one weird trick VCs hate? Bootstrapping!" - I think he's 100% right here.

Fediverse

• "What radicalized you?"
• Apple’s new pencil / attention to detail | It casts a shadow 😮?

Software

• blacknoise is an ASGI app for static file serving inspired by whitenoise and following the principles of low maintenance software | Not just static files like whitenoise, but also media

Everyone seems to be obsessed with passive income but I’m set on passive-aggressive income, so you should probably pay me back if you care even the slightest amount about our friendship and how much I thought it meant to you. --Alice McFlurry

Short work week. Normally, I just sport a Neandertal look at work, but last week I decided to go full method-acting by working directly from the actual Neandertal!

Released a new version of django-cast that introduces cover images for posts. For podcasts, the iTunes artwork is used as a fallback. There are also some bugfixes and documentation improvements.

Articles

• Writing
  • Knowledge Graph Extraction & Visualization with local LLM from Unstructured Text: a History example | One of the projects worked on at the 2024 spring sprint of PyDDF Düsseldorf
  • On Opening Essays, Conference Talks, and Jam Jars
  • Writing with AI
  • Slop is the new name for unwanted AI-generated content
• Design
  • Masonry Layouts in CSS
  • The evolution of Figma’s mobile engine: Compiling away our custom programming language
  • Adobe abandons $20 billion acquisition of Figma | Didn't know about this, whoa!
• The Night Watch | I devolved from systems programming to machine learning to web development, but I saw it as an arbitrary, random mutation. Now I'm beginning to suspect it was inevitable. I also like scarves. Classic 🏛️ post.
• Peer review is not the gold standard in science | I think this lab leak stuff is bullshit, but that science has to be against gatekeeping? Full ack.

Weeknotes

• Own Your Web – Issue 14: Webmentions | Matthias Ott - hmm, I should implement Webmentions in django-indieweb, no?
• Weeknotes: more datasette-secrets, plus a mystery video project | Simon Willison
• Weeklog for Week 18: April 29 to May 05 | Johannes

Videos

• NOX vs TOX – WHAT are they for & HOW do you CHOOSE? 🐍 | Great video!

Software

• Cohere Toolkit - is a collection of prebuilt components enabling users to quickly build and deploy RAG applications
• btop++ - Resource monitor that shows usage and stats for processor, memory, disks, network and processes | c++ continuation of bpytop

Podcasts

• Self-Hosted Open Source - Michael Kennedy | Yep, the vibe is mostly right. Personally I go a step further and ditch Docker as well (Michael made the argument that using Docker increases security somehow, which is false, of course ).

Out of Context Images

Journalism is making the same mistake with AI that they made with bloggers. They jumped to the incorrect conclusion that we were trying to do what they do. --Dave Winer

Made some solid progress on django-cast. It now has support for Podlove Web Player version 5. Although it still works, version 4 is no longer officially supported. I wanted to switch to version 5 for a long time, mainly because I see it as a prerequisite for adding a transcripts feature. What is also possible now is to heavily customize the appearance of the audio player. For example, if you go to my Python Podcast site, click on the little 'B' in the menu bar, and then select the 'Python Podcast' theme, you get a completely different looking player. This is also important because it might be possible to have a good looking podcast template (yes, I'm finally working on one).

And then there's support for the new Wagtail 6.1 release. All I had to do was to implement the new expand_db_attributes_many method in my custom PageLinkHandler to avoid database queries.

It's really warm in the great outdoors, so I spent some time there. And I enjoyed watching a ballet performance at the nearby opera house.

Articles

• My approach to HTML web components
• The new old: Jamstack and MACH's journey towards traditional CMS concepts Yep, monolith does not mean "not modular"
• An alternative proposal for CSS masonry
• Passkeys: A Shattered Dream | Hmm...

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 17: April 22 to April 28 | Johannes
• 📔 Week notes for week 18: A week to mostly forget | Oliver Andrich

Software

• Wagtail 6.1 release notes / Get even more organized with Wagtail 6.1
• dj-notebook - Django + shell_plus + Jupyter notebooks made easy | Ha, this is an alternative to using "jupyter-server < 2" and "traitlets < 5.10.0" - yeah, finally! 🎉
• pyinstrument - is a Python profiler

Out of Context Images

Languages that try to disallow idiocy become themselves idiotic. — Rob Pike

For the first time I paid to have a work of art professionally framed. For django-cast, the work on separating the data fetching from rendering the content is almost done, so I moved on to the next interesting problem. As the saying goes: To make an easy change, first make the change easy (which was really difficult) and then forget about the easy change and do something completely different because it's not challenging anymore. At least I managed to get the changes I made so far into a new release.

Articles

• Efficient finetuning of Llama 3 with FSDP QDoRA | Oh I desperately need a use case for fine-tuning 🤗
• Styling an Django RSS Feed | Interesting idea, dunno if I want to risk breaking my feed, but fair enough!
• Django Developers Survey 2023 | Interestingly the number of people using SPAs goes down, wouldn't have expected that

Weeknotes

• Weeknotes: Llama 3, AI for Data Journalism, llm-evals and datasette-secrets | Simon Willison
• Weeklog for Week 16: April 15 to April 21 | Johannes

Videos

• DJANGO REINHARDT: What every guitarist should know (beginner to pro) | The other Django 🤓
• 10 Key Questions Every Company Should Ask Before & While Using Al Responsible Al | PyConDE Keynote Ricardo Baeza-Yates - very good!

Software

• django-translated-fields - Django model translation without magic-inflicted pain.

Fediverse

• One of the things about charlatans is that we—oops, “they”—are an uninformed person’s idea of a genius 🧵
• Today at @answerdotai we've got something new for you: FSDP/QDoRA. We've tested it with @AIatMeta Llama3 and the results blow away anything we've seen before. I believe that this combination is likely to create better task-specific models than anything else at any cost. 🧵

Einstein repeatedly argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer. --Fred Brooks

I had a lot of fun recording a podcast episode about DevOps. Then there was this month's Django Cologne user group meeting and I talked to a lot of nice people. Somebody has to build a RAG website for the Django documentation, please! The next day the Python User Group Düsseldorf met, which was also really interesting.

During the week I worked a bit on django-cast, trying to cleanly separate database access from template rendering, which is still going on and more difficult than I expected. But I got some comfort from listening to a Django Chat episode about Kraken where Çağıl talked about how they use dataclasses (or some other kind of value objects) to render their templates to avoid having database operations going on during template rendering. Seems they face similar problems over there.

Articles

• On the critical path to implant backdoors and the effectiveness of potential mitigation techniques: Early learnings from XZ | Branch protection + reviews, clarifying contributor identity and a lot of handwaving. There are probably no silver bullets...
• Help us invent CSS Grid Level 3, aka “Masonry” layout | Maybe I can adopt this for my image gallery stuff? Looks quite nice.
• Vision for W3C | Brief document, but at least there is one, now 🤓.
• Build the future of AI with Meta Llama 3 | Llama3 is out 🎉

Weeknotes

• Science and Technology links (April 13 2024) | Daniel Lemire
• Week in Review 2024-04-15 | Luis
• Weeknotes for Week 16 | Oliver Andrich

Mastodon

• Are you interested in Masonry layout?? Graphic design on the web?
• I 😬 CSS Grid
• @sarajw yeah, but for me that argument doesn't count anymore for new websites. Removing default button styles used to be annoying, but today it's easy.
• Discover 14229 superb devs from across the Fediverse! | Nice site!

Software

• New release of MyST out!