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!

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