TIL: Local development against “S3”
I had to update a Django service to use S3 instead of local file storage recently. Here's how I set up Minio (a self-hostable S3-compatible data store) for local development.
Reflections, diversions, and opinions from a progressive ex-physicist programmer dad with a sore back.
I had to update a Django service to use S3 instead of local file storage recently. Here's how I set up Minio (a self-hostable S3-compatible data store) for local development.
#til #llms #claude #modelcontextprotocol
I was checking out the Model Context Protocol, a spec from Anthropic that lets you expose external programs to an LLM, and discovered that you can extend the Claude desktop app in this way. There are a bunch of enterprisey tools (and you can write your own, more interesting stuff), but out-of-the box you can enable URL-fetching, which lets you grab and process arbitrary information with Claude.
#python #llm #embeddings #release #simonwillison
I just released version 0.1 of a plugin for Simon Willison's llm called llm-questioncache. It lets you send questions to your default LLM with a system prompt that elicits short, to-the-point answers. It also maintains a cache of answers locally so that you only have to hit the LLM once for each bit of esoteric knowledge.
#til #django #djangorestramework #python
On a recent project I found myself needing one classic form-and-template style page in an otherwise API-driven project. I could, of course, [just do it] with a regular view function, but I had a bunch of authentication and suchlike set up for DRF APIViews.
Turns out it's actually pretty easy to make an APIView kick it oldschool!
One way that folks talk about “transparency” is as “organizations should share details of their operations with the people they affect” (employees, customers, the public, etc.). This kind of transparency is good! Being able to see things lets people make informed decisions; not being able to hide things prevents bad behaviour.
However, in computer systems transparency tends to mean something like “replacing a component with a different one that has the same interface but a different implementation”. It's a seductive notion: systems that are designed this way can sometimes have one component change without breaking others, or add capabilities by inserting new components that mesh with what's already there.
#rust #functionalprogramming #numericalprogramming
[Functional Pearl: Enumerating the Rationals] is a paper that's been on my “to-read” list for a long time. I finally got around to reading it a while back, and ended up implementing the algorithm it describes and publishing it as a [crate]. This article briefly describes that algorithm and some of the Rust-specific details of implementing it.
#selfhosting #mastodon #fediverse #hachyderm
As the trajectory of the bird site got clearer and nastier late last year I decided to migrate to the fediverse. I didn't want to end up on another platform controlled by a petulant tinpot dictator, so I decided to see if I could host my own ActivityPub server. Mastodon looked pretty intimidating, but GotoSocial is a smaller, lighter, program that (approximately) inter-operates with Mastodon (yay, federation!).
#selfhosting #fediverse #mastodon #gotosocial #sqlite
This article describes how to migrate your subscriptions from GotoSocial to Mastodon. I recently made this migration; I talk about my motivations here.
This procedure doesn't handle getting folks over to your new account. It will get you a list of your subscriptions that you can import with Mastodon's data import feature so you don't have to re-follow everyone by hand.
I'm not aware of an account migration or user-facing data export feature in GotoSocial, so you'll need access to your instance's database (or help from someone who has it, anyways). With those caveats out of the way, here's the procedure.
#codemirror #webdev #vanillajs #esbuild
When you write an HTML form, textarea is the standard way to support multi-line input, but it's not suitable for every application. CodeMirror describes itself as a “code editor component for the web”, and might be a suitable replacement for a textarea if you want something more like a code editor.
This article describes how to replace a textarea with a CodeMirror editor in under 30 lines of code and (hopefully) under 30 minutes of effort. It uses some very basic tooling to create an artifact that's no harder to deploy than vanilla JavaScript and HTML.
You can also jump straight to the source code if you prefer.