Didn't yet go through the content, but having a AI generated image that you didn't even bother to at least touch-up a bit to fix the text does not give me a lot of confidence about the effort that went into this.
I came to this comment section to say exactly that.
At my work (university research lab) the Ph.D. students have to publish their thesis as a book to defend their degree. They are free to make the image for the cover, which is a very nice touch ang give you artistic freedom in what was supposed to be one of the most important moments of your career (I went for a picture of the chip I designed during my research).
For the past 3 years or so all we have are generic AI generated sciency-looking figures at the cover and it is depressing.
Adds nothing, they could just picked a totally unrelated stock photo if they wanted to add something there. It just immediately halo effects the whole thing as something put together without effort. Stop doing this!
I’m an occasional listener of the Talk Python podcast, and I’ve also taken Michael’s pytest course. It’s clear that he puts considerable effort into his content.
In which case it is very infuriating and sad. Honestly if he just did not put that AI art on every page, the whole thing would look way more serious. Presentation and first impression sadly do matter.
Put a pile of trash in a museum and people will think it's art, put art next to a pile of garbage and people will think it's trash.
These days I feel like a stick figure drawing in MS Paint even if crude denotes that an actual effort was made compared to "Generate an image of XYZ that includes blah blah blah..." sadly.
In my mind both are first steps to something more "proper" but one is at least hand-crafted artisan-ish compared to the other.
I have no qualms about using AI generated images as placeholder stuff or as a first step in an iterative process but when someone just slaps the image without the least bit of retouching it ends up looking kitsch.
I think you're going to realize that as time passes and this becomes more normalized, your opinion is going to become the minority. That might be a good thing, or maybe not.
Just not enough to actually record a podcast, but generate a script and send it to an API to generate a (very recognisable) AI voiced podcast. It's literally called "Talk Python" with no humans talking.
Not sure if you're confusing with something else? "Talk Python to Me" is a long running podcast that has had a lot of definitely real humans on the show[0].
I agree with everyone! Michael's name is a big stamp of "this will be high quality" for me, but if I didn't previously know that and saw an AI generated cover, there's a good chance I'd assume the content inside was AI generated slop, and might tune out without looking any further.
Isn't this overly critical ?. The content matters far more than the image and the chapters are good. I didn't even register the image - I think most folks today have eyes that auto-skip images after being pattern-trained to ignore ads.
I don't even understand why they do that, surely putting even a low quality something together would make it much better, and with actual font rendering.
I clicked on the link and was greeted by AI slop instantly. I checked the comments, saw this, am writing this and will probably not look at it ever again. Guess I am just not the target audience. I wish them that their AI slop strategy works out just for the sake of good vibes, though. If everyone does it it can't be bad, right? I'm the issue here, clearly.
Yeah, immediately off-putting, even though I actually enjoy the podcast. Not for like "AI bad" reasons, it's just ugly. Micheal, if you are reading this - please fix, it should take 5 minutes.
ngirx and granian are my favorite technologies to work with! Completely agree, this trend of putting a completely useless and ugly AI image on top of your page, I despise. You could have searched the web for an actual diagram, if you wanted one here. These images provided negative values to your articles.
Unrelated to the content: why on earth is super-light grey a good "bold" colour for a white background? I'm having to highlight each of the bolded parts of the text just to understand it :/
edit: console command for anyone else struggling to read this `document.documentElement.style.setProperty('--bulma-strong-color', '#000');`
Is this some new trend where websites include @media (prefers-color-scheme: light) and @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) in their css, but it just breaks the site?
This site doesn't even have two themes, that css is just there to break the bold text!
Haha, came here to mention the light grey text on white background as well. This is a great example of poor accessibility. It should be obvious to a human eye that this is bad; but in case it weren't, one could open up Chrome dev tools, find the styles for this text, click on the color picker, and observe that Chrome reports the contrast ratio for that text to be 1.17, whereas a comfortable (accessible) contrast ratio starts at 4.5.
The main text is black yes, but anything that's bold is light grey as per the CSS, which is near unreadable (even if you're not as colourblind as me I suspect)
The idea of the book is to pull away a lot of the hype of big cloud providers, show practical steps how we run things over at Talk Python (podcast, courses, e-commerce, and more).I hope some of you find this refreshing!
You can read the first 1/3 online for free. The rest is available DRM free.
Seems interesting, read the online summary. I am curious to read about your part on Chapter 14 (I am part of Litestar maintainer). Thank you for the book anyway !
I recently compared AWS and Hetzner, not only in terms of raw compute costs but also by factoring in the personnel costs required for operation. I found this perspective particularly interesting: https://beuke.org/hetzner-aws/
The book needs to remove the AI images. They are actively hurting the eyes with the wrong and weird perspective.
It is pretty light reading, name dropping a lot of software without going into details.
As always with Python: These books do not tell you the downsides, and the future of Python is uncertain because the governance has been taken over by a bunch of mediocre weirdos. Python core has always suffered from the problem that occasionally smart people implement something and then leave, but the majority of core devs are pretty dumb and they can now vote in their own after van Rossum left.
You can and probably should go thinner than this, with uv we effectively have a workflow comparable to deploying static binaries in other language stacks. You don't need the complexity of docker for this book's goal.
Presumably just directly on whatever system they are using. If you have something that can be plopped on whatever linux distro and run reliably then you've already got what docker is supposed to give you.
I don't know, but the "Read Online" button leads me to "https[://]talkpython.fm/books/python-in-production/#read-online", and that URL then tries to redirect to "https[://]talkpython.fm/books/python-in-production#read-online". (Notice how the last slash of the path is missing).
This forced my browser to reload the page, and it beats the entire purpose of anchoring and fragment-based navs.
"Have you heard the phrase "You're not Google, you're not Facebook, and you're not Netflix"? The TL;DR; is those tech giants that have 1M+ concurrent users. They have a hard requirement for no downtime."
Actually, one of the more interesting parts of the Google SRE book was that they don't try to aim for 0 downtime. They consider the background error rate of any network request and optimising much beyond this is counter productive.
Even for individual services they make a point of not trying to make them perfectly available, as this means downstream services are less likely to build in adequate provision for failure.
I don't think I've seen a cloud-first company that spent less engineering time on managing their infrastructure. You just replace one set of work with another.
A lot are getting ripped off. To what degree depends on their tech capabilities and business savvy (i.e. what would it cost them to do it themselves and what kind of discount can they negotiate from the cloud provider. If you're paying the listed rates you are getting ripped of).
At which monthly spend should we negotiate with AWS for example? And will they check if we are using 25 of their services instead of easily migratable VM-hosted apps?
At my work (university research lab) the Ph.D. students have to publish their thesis as a book to defend their degree. They are free to make the image for the cover, which is a very nice touch ang give you artistic freedom in what was supposed to be one of the most important moments of your career (I went for a picture of the chip I designed during my research).
For the past 3 years or so all we have are generic AI generated sciency-looking figures at the cover and it is depressing.
In my mind both are first steps to something more "proper" but one is at least hand-crafted artisan-ish compared to the other.
I have no qualms about using AI generated images as placeholder stuff or as a first step in an iterative process but when someone just slaps the image without the least bit of retouching it ends up looking kitsch.
[0] https://talkpython.fm/
I had the same initial thought, but I was skimming the page and came across this line:
> Then, see how to deploy a Flask+HTMX app via Granian, wire it into NGINX, and ensure automatic startups with systemd.
So I've just discovered that https://github.com/emmett-framework/granian exists...
edit: console command for anyone else struggling to read this `document.documentElement.style.setProperty('--bulma-strong-color', '#000');`
This site doesn't even have two themes, that css is just there to break the bold text!
You can read the first 1/3 online for free. The rest is available DRM free.
It is pretty light reading, name dropping a lot of software without going into details.
As always with Python: These books do not tell you the downsides, and the future of Python is uncertain because the governance has been taken over by a bunch of mediocre weirdos. Python core has always suffered from the problem that occasionally smart people implement something and then leave, but the majority of core devs are pretty dumb and they can now vote in their own after van Rossum left.
Was hoping the book would cover data persistence.
This forced my browser to reload the page, and it beats the entire purpose of anchoring and fragment-based navs.
Actually, one of the more interesting parts of the Google SRE book was that they don't try to aim for 0 downtime. They consider the background error rate of any network request and optimising much beyond this is counter productive.
Even for individual services they make a point of not trying to make them perfectly available, as this means downstream services are less likely to build in adequate provision for failure.
Those tech giants got to where they are by recognising specifically that they don't have "no downtime" requirements.
"Move fast and break things" isn't the mantra of companies with zero downtime requirements.