Weeknotes 2023-05-01

I'm a normal person, in the mathematical sense. --Johannes Spielmann

Last week, I worked on updating django-cast to support Wagtail 5 (which is set to release tomorrow) and Django 4.2:

Released version 0.3.0 of wagtail_srcset, which includes a workaround for the image_node.filter_spec -> image_node.filter_specs renaming in Wagtail 5, along with some tox fixes and test image cleanup after testing.
Released version 0.2.14 of django-cast , adding support for Wagtail 5 and Django 4.2.
Ran python-podcast.de and wersdoerfer.de on the Wagtail 5 release candidate and Django 4.2 for a week to identify any potential issues (none found).

Another topic I focused on last week was Vue.js. I attended the revived Vue.js Cologne meetup, which was enjoyable, and began developing a Vue theme for django-cast. I even managed to record a live-stream about it. Integrating Vue.js into Django proved easier than anticipated, perhaps due to assistance from my LLM robot friends. While I'm not a huge fan of single-page applications (SPAs) and frontend frameworks in general, I want to keep my options open and be able to justify my preferences.

In terms of meetups, I attended a Java User Group Düsseldorf event to see the talk "Die Welt vor 10 Jahren mit Stefan Tilkov / Eberhard Wolff - live von der RheinJUG". I found it quite interesting. However, despite attending numerous local meetups, I didn't recognize any of the attendees. It's fascinating how disjunct various IT-related communities can be.

In "Slavoj Žižek: „Paradoxien der Mehrlust“ - Ein gegenwartskritischer Rundumschlag" (starting at 06:00), an amusing moment arises as Žižek discusses LLM creativity. He claims that human creativity stems from our ability to harness contingency in random mistakes, referencing Heinrich von Kleist. Ironically, his poetic description of what LLMs can't do is spot-on for how they function technically. The 'temperature' parameter even allows for adjustable creativity by controlling how much contingency is added. Although I have often expressed my disdain for uninformed discussions about topics I am knowledgeable in, this instance has proven that they can be surprisingly entertaining, and I stand corrected.