UIs are big, messy, mutable, stateful bags of sadness. --Josh Abernathy

Usual work week. Finally upgraded my Debian boxes from bullseye to bookworm and had no problems. Wow 🤯. Found a workaround for a long-standing PyCharm limitation: If you use a German keyboard layout, it's not possible to switch windows or comment out lines of code using keyboard shortcuts. Just install the Keymap Nationalizer Plugin and select your actual keyboard layout.

Didn't have much time for open source last week, but nonetheless managed to add a theme chooser for django-cast. You can now choose your theme and save the result in the session. So now it's possible for all users to try out new themes. Now I have a reason to polish the other themes a bit 😅. If you want to try it, just click on the B in the menu bar.

Articles

• Making Large Language Models work for you | The WordCamp talk is also worth watching
• Anti-hype LLM reading list | No bullshit, just how stuff works - good resource
• Wikipedia search-by-vibes through millions of pages offline | Very good!
• Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models: A Survey | Ok, I'm finally about to try fine tuning for LLMs, so I need to read some stuff to get in shape
• Python packages with pyproject.toml and nothing else | Great to see this is possible now

Weeknotes

• Weeklog for Week 34: August 21 to August 27 | Johannes
• Datasette 1.0a4 and 1.0a5, plus weeknotes | Simon Willison

Software

• nanoGPT - a rewrite of minGPT
• View Transitions bring seamless transition animations to the browser. Chrome is excited to see official support in Astro 3.0 | Cool demo!

Mastodon / Twitter

• Finally someone that dares to say it. I've never seen any estimates or project management actually work. It's just creating distractions and extra work that'd be much better spent actually doing the work | Full ack.
• Bad vs worse | Webcomic
• How to save $300 on a pro studio microphone with a pop filter | Dunno, but cool idea

Videos

• Using Django 4.2's StreamingHttpResponse and HTMX SSE to provide real time notifications | Solid talk

Podcasts

• AI Criticism Has a Decades-Long History (Tech Won’t Save Us) | Good episode about Joseph Weizenbaum
• UKW113 Ukraine: Die Denazifizierung des russischen Luftraums (Unsere kleine Welt)
• Axel Honneth : Theorie der Arbeit (Das philosophische Radio) | Meh