Ephes Blog

It was the best of times. It was the worst of terms and conditions. --Nein

At work, setting up Single Sign-On (SSO) via Azure AD for a Django project was easier than expected, thanks to django-saml2-auth. I also found that ChatGPT was surprisingly effective at generating code to create a simplified Excel file, which I then could use to test the effectiveness of the existing pandas code for Excel parsing.

Doing open source, I fixed a bug in the theme-selector feature of django-cast. The bug occurred because Django handles the HTML rendering for SPA-themes and exposes it via a JSON API. I chose this method to avoid rendering a Wagtail streamfield in JavaScript. However, it used the theme from the database instead of the session template, which broke the Vue.js theme. After addressing this, I updated django-stubs and fixed a minor issue that made mypy pass again. I also improved the documentation for the themes feature. While reviewing the request-handling code, I found a simpler method using APIField and wrote a 'Today I Learned' (TIL) post about it. And finally, I broke most of the images on my site by accidentally deleting all the Wagtail renditions. Well, something to do for next week.

Articles

• Can LLMs learn from a single example? | Oooh, I have to start fine tuning now!
• Next.js, just why? | Because it's new and exciting? Call me old fashioned, but I rather go with stable and boring instead..
• Embedding paragraphs from my blog with E5-large-v2

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 35: August 28 to September 03 | Johannes
• Science and Technology links (September 2 2023) | Daniel Lemire

Software

• A simpler deployment story: Button is deployment, without the fuss. | Deployment for Django applications - already very excited
• XTuner is a toolkit for efficiently fine-tuning LLM
• Pandas release - What’s new in 2.1.0

Mastodon / Twitter

• STFU - It's TGV Tuesday!
• Over the years as a software developer I've had projects where I spent intensely collaborating in a team, and projects where I work by myself. I feel the tension between the two | Interesting thread...
• Casually running a 180B parameter LLM on M2 Ultra | Uh oh, GAS starting to kick in
• What's your current favorite local LLM model right now?
• Here's the most effective GPT-4 prompt I've developed for writing tasks

Videos

• Vorstellung Lona Moderne Web-Entwicklung in Python, ohne JavaScript | Hmm, interesting...
• #NoEstimates (Allen Holub) | Hmm, projection and "just count" sounds a lot like estimation to me, but it has the right vibe...
• Build an AI app with FastAPI and Docker - Coding Tutorial with Tips

Podcasts

• Stevan Harnad: AI's Symbol Grounding Problem (The Gradient Podcast) | Very good (but I still think John Searle is just wrong!)
• Django Trends in 2023 (Talk Python To Me) | Solid episode, yep, Django is still cool!
• WR1520 Leben im Albtraum (WRINT: Zum Thema) | Also good, very interesting approach
• Alphatier- und Chefgebaren - lassen sich da Rückschlüsse auf die Natur des Menschen ziehen? (Das philosophische Radio) | Meh, too much talking about apes and boring stuff, not enough about theory of science and ideology (which got me hooked)
• WR1521 Deutschlands Schwäche, Austerität, Kindergrundsicherung (WRINT: Wirtschaftskunde) | Always good
• Folge 176 - Domain-driven Design - Konzepte und Fallstricke (Software Architektur im Stream) | Not bad
• Episode 96: Gatekeeping (Hotel Bar Sessions)