Ephes Blog

The thing most people don't remember about Prometheus is that humans already had fire, but then Zeus locked it up behind a paywall, because Zeus was a petty little bitch. Prometheus stole it *back*. In this essay about DRM I will --jwz

I was just going through my weeknotes from last year and decided to take it a bit easier on myself with the weekly updates 😇. Not much else has changed though - I'm still juggling too many things at once. Despite being busy, I did manage to write a TIL post about including extra data in Python packages, and I published a quick hot take on why I think Big Data might be on its way out (which actually started as a comment in a discussion that I had Claude help me reshape into a blog post). Still working on the latest podcast episode, but on a brighter note, we got to take a lovely trip to Maastricht.

Stuff

• Constraints are Good: Python's Metadata Dilemma | Yep, but at least uv seems to be a step in the right direction
• Web apps have client and server state (plus realtime and LiveView) | Maybe you can skip those complexities by skipping realtime and complex client state for most use cases? 😇
• dear santa, I'm writing to tell you I've been naughty and it was worth it. | webcomic
• Python 3.13.1 Release
• Subclassing, Composition, Python, and You — Hynek Schlawack | Very good talk

Out of Context Images

When I die please mix my ashes with concrete, then turn me into a brick and throw me at an Amazon Warehouse --Erik Uden

Yep, it’s been a stressful week, just as expected. Somehow, we managed to record a podcast episode, but now I need to find the time to get it published.

Fediverse

• tl;dr: If you do a lot with timezones or other heavy dt-manipulation, you probably want Luxon or similar. Otherwise, plain JS is just fine these days. | Good to know!
• As of Chrome 131 you have more options to style `<details>` and `<summary>`.
• Dasz soltu wōl gestaten, swanne er sînen knappen von der mære herab abcontrefeiet, sintemālen so er im steickbeugel stehet. Solt aber dasz imāgo mit helff von fuci rotoris erzeuget seyn, sō dults nimmer, denn dîselben seind des teuffels.

Software

• Model Context Protocol | Open protocol for LLMs to talk to services with tools and extra context by Anthropic

Videos

• Hidden gems of Django 5.x with Sarah Boyce
• The Rising Sea - Matthew Drury (PyCascades 2024)

Don't use a big word when a singularly unloquacious and diminutive linguistic expression will satisfactorily accomplish the contemporary necessity. --Dgar

This week brought some improvements and a new release for podcast-transcripts. Overall, though, it was more work and less play than usual—a pattern I suspect will continue through the end of the year.

Articles

• Playground Wisdom: Threads Beat Async/Await | I agree that it's all very confusing 😵‍💫
• Don't Look Down on Print Debugging | Yep, using print debugging all the time - ftw!

Weeknotes

• Weeknotes: asynchronous LLMs, synchronous embeddings, and I kind of started a podcast | Simon Willison
• Weeklog for Week 46: November 11 to November 17 | Johannes

Software

• django-removals - a maintainer's best friend for finding removed features in your Django project | Fediverse 🧵
• Proposal for a Django project template

Videos

• jamellebouie tiktok

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I learned all my HTML<br>
From a code camp held yearly in hell<br>
We started on `<s>`<br>
Then striked through the rest<br>
Now I have a career in DevRel --Heydon Pickering

Published a new podcast episode discussing Python 3.13. I’ve been using Jupyter notebooks to generate transcripts for the episodes and have started consolidating that workflow into a dedicated Python command-line application.

Articles

• The br element
• return in finally considered harmful
• Three Django wishes
• Qwen2.5-Coder-32B is an LLM that can code well that runs on my Mac

Books

• Boost Your Django DX updated again | Cool! Great book!

Software

• Recraft V3. Recraft are a generative AI design tool startup based out of London who released their v3 model a few weeks ago | It does SVG, too
• Mesa: Agent-based modeling in Python

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AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH --Endless Screaming

This is fine 🔥.

In other news, I attended the PyDDF autumn sprint! After putting off the transcripts feature for django-cast for quite some time, I finally started working on it. You can already see some transcript functionality in the web player on my podcast website. There’s still plenty to do, but at least it’s underway now.

Articles

• The button element
• HTML link, or button, that is the question
• Don't return named tuples in new APIs
• Der Prototype Fund geht weiter – und wie! | Great news!
• My IndieWeb Journey
• We've moved to Hetzner
• Ten simple rules for writing a technical book

Videos

• When and how to start coding with kids [PyCon DE & PyData Berlin 2024]
• I bought a freeze dryer so you don't have to

Software

• Optuna: A hyperparameter optimization framework
• Beacon v0.1 and the Future | CMS for elixir
• dsd-flyio - A plugin for deploying Django projects to Fly.io, using django-simple-deploy
• Rails 8.0: No PaaS Required | Rails seems do do quite well

Fediverse

• The VERDAD prompts are pretty complex - Rajiv shared this example of a conversation he had with Claude 3.5 Sonnet to further iterate on the existing prompt

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