Simon Willison’s Weblog

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Friday, 2nd February 2018

asgiref: AsyncToSync and SyncToAsync (via) Andrew’s classes in asgiref that can turn a synchronous callable into an awaitable (that runs in a thread pool) or an awaitable callable into a synchronous callable, using Python 3 futures and asyncio. # 7:06 pm

Channels 2.0. Andrew just shipped Channels 2.0—a major rewrite and redesign of the Channels project he started back in 2014. Channels brings async to Django, providing a logical, standardized way of supporting things like WebSockets and asynchronous execution on top of a Django application. Previously it required you to run a separate Twisted server and redis/RabbitMQ queue, but thanks to Python 3 async everything can now be deployed as a single process. And the new ASGI spec means its turtles all the way down! Everything from URL routing to view functions to middleware can be composed together using the same ASGI interface. # 6:19 pm

Family fun with deepfakes. Or how I got my wife onto the Tonight Show. deepfakes is dystopian nightmare technology: take a few thousand photos of two different people with similar shaped faces and you can produce an extremely realistic video where you swap one person’s face for the other. Unsurprisingly it’s being used for porn. This is a pleasantly SFW explanation of how it works, complete with a demo where Sven Charleer swaps his wife Elke for Anne Hathaway on the Tonight Show. # 4:06 pm

Using setup.py in Your (Django) Project. Includes this neat trick: if you list manage.py in the setup(scripts=) argument you can call it from e.g. cron using the full path to manage.py within your virtual environment and it will execute in the correct context without needing to explicitly activate the environment first. # 12:33 pm

2018 » February

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