Ephes Blog

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.

I’m really into writing short fiction, mainly to-do lists. --Emma Willmann

Normal work week. Started looking into this whole responsive images topic again. I'm still surprised at how complicated it is. After thinking about it for a while, I'm still not sure if the new responsive image features in Wagtail 5.2 are enough for my use case. Maybe next week 🤷.

Articles

• Should AVIF be the dominant image format on the web? | Well it depends 🙄
• Science and Technology links (November 12 2023)

Videos

• OpenAI DevDay, Opening Keynote | Watched this because of FOMO

Software

• Introducing MechGPT 🦾🤖 | More Llama fine tuning...
• NextCloud Cookbook | PHP recipe app I didn't know about
• monaspace - An innovative superfamily of fonts for code | Oh cool, I'm using MonoLisa atm, but this looks interesting, too

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 44: October 30 to November 05 | Johannes

Podcasts

• An Unbiased Evaluation of Environment and Packaging Tools | Great guest 😅
• Episode 100: What’s YOUR Philosophy? | Good one!
• Krisen, Konflikte, Kriege: Ist Chaos das neue Normal? (Sicherheitshalber) | Good content about this topic is hard to find, audio quality is really bad...
• Neues in HTML und Co, Teil 3 von 3 (Working Draft) | Wow, there's so much stuff in HTML I know nothing about..
• John Schulman (The robot brains) | Dev lead of ChatGPT, insightful..
• HTMX for Django Developers (And All of Us) (Talk Python To Me) | Ok, I was already sold long ago. You also don't have to sell it that hard for my taste.