~ephes

There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. --Frank Wilhoit - the composer, not the political scientist..

On vacation. Didn't do anything computer related.

Out of Context Images

I run my own Mastodon instance because I don't trust random admins to fuck up what I am perfectly capable of fucking up on my own. --moliver

Another busy week at work. Learned that creating PDFs from web pages is a little less difficult than expected. Using a headless Chromium actually works quite well, and it's not that difficult to deploy either.

Looking forward to having some time off. Maybe look a bit more into the LLM / machine learning direction, which suffered a bit from my recent deep dive into frontend stuff (htmx, alpine.js).

Updating mastodon and takahē were the only non work related computer activities I managed to do this week, hope this will get better soon.

Mastodon / Twitter

• PyScript NEXT Tech-Preview Release!
• wellp. python 3.12 `type x = ...` aliases won't be auto-rewritable because they can't be used equivalently :(
• I have never seen anybody put forward a convincing argument against this theory | Webcomic
• People believe that if they could somehow walk into a research lab, they could then 'steal the knowledge'. | Yep
• Apple advertisements that look surprisingly good
  • no1
  • no2
• web development being surprisingly deep | webcomic
• Wow. Meta commits to dedicate three engineer-years to implement the removal of the GIL from #Python and fix upcoming compatibility and performance issues with it.
• Overview over funding sources for open source development

Podcast

• Privilegien- Quartett Ein Spiel, aus dem wir nicht aussteigen können (Was denkst du denn?) | Nice
• Episode 94: Progress (Hotel Bar Sessions) | Always good
• #128 - generative search, GPU black market, GPT-4’s Secret, Sam Altman’s World Tour (Last Week in AI)
• Things I Wish Someone Had Explained To Me Sooner About Python (Talk Python To Me) | Meh.
• #387 – George Hotz: Tiny Corp, Twitter, AI Safety, Self-Driving, GPT, AGI & God (Lex Fridman Podcast) | The episodes here are either ok or batshit crazy. Usually I try to avoid the conspiracy theory / techbro bootlicking / snake oil selling stuff. But this episode is both: sometimes interesting and sometimes batshit crazy.
• Season 3 Episode 13 Stephen Balaban (The robot brains) | Nice one.

I find OOP philosophically unsound. It claims that everything is an object. Even if it is true it is not very interesting — saying that everything is an object is saying nothing at all. --Alexander Stepanov

Using Django, htmx, alpine.js and tailwind for work, which is a very powerful combination. Did some vacation planning and misplaced my keys. Discovered that it's super easy to replace an AirTag battery.

Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason. — John Harrington (1561-1612).

Took a closer look at neapolitan and liked it. But imho it's not so much about reusing code from CRUDView as a template for how to structure a couple of views that all share some common logic. Found out the hard way that it's surprisingly difficult to convert html to pdf.

Then the preschoolers said goodbye, but not much else happened besides work.

Interviewer: do you have an example of projects you spent too much effort on?

Me: I suppose the work on Mambo 1 to 4 was a bit of a waste... --Chris Heilmann

Wrote my first UI Tests using Playwright as a pytest plugin, because the UI I'm currently working on is quite javascript heavy. Overall it was a good experience. But it's hard to get the test browser to behave like the real one:

• Drag and drop just looks different (I have no idea why).
• Clicking on a link in the test browser results in href navigation, while clicking on the link in the real browser triggers hx-get

One of the projects I worked on last year went live: Plastic IQ tool launched in Brazil and Indonesia (link goes to Linkedin).