#485 Creating memories

Topics covered in this episode:

• Backup Docker volumes locally or to any S3
• Pyodide 314.0 Release
• nb-cli: A Command-Line Interface for AI Agents and Notebook Automation
• Hindsight Agent Memory That Learns
• Extras
• Joke

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About the show

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Michael #1: Backup Docker volumes locally or to any S3

• Via Bryan Weber (thanks Bryan!), who spotted it over on Virtualization HowTo. Find Bryan at bryanwweber.com.
• offen/docker-volume-backup is a lightweight companion container that backs up the volumes your apps actually depend on, then ships them somewhere safe.
• It's tiny: written in Go and about 25MB compressed, roughly 1/20th the size of the shell-based image (jareware/docker-volume-backup) that inspired it.
• Drop it into your docker compose file as a backup service, mount the volumes you care about as read-only, and you're off.
• Push backups to a pile of destinations: a local directory, plus any S3, WebDAV, Azure Blob Storage, Dropbox, Google Drive, or SSH-compatible target. Mix and match as many as you want in one run.
• Recurring cron-style backups in a Compose setup, or one-off backups straight from the Docker CLI.
• Production-friendly touches worth calling out:
  • Rotates away old backups so you don't quietly fill the disk.
  • GPG encryption for your archives.
  • Notifications on finished and failed runs (so you find out about failures before you need the backup).
  • Stop a container during backup for a consistent snapshot using a simple docker-volume-backup.stop-during-backup=true label, then auto-restart it.
  • Run custom commands during the backup lifecycle (great for a database dump before the file copy).
  • Docker Swarm support, plus arm64 and arm/v7 builds. Hello, Raspberry Pi homelab.
• Fun aside from Bryan: he searched our back catalog for this tool and the search came back so fast he thought it hadn't run. Love to hear it.

Calvin #2: Pyodide 314.0 Release

• PEP 783 is the real news — Pyodide maintainers used to hand-build 300+ packages. Now anyone can publish Pyodide wheels to PyPI with cibuildwheel.
• The version jump from 0.29 to 314.0 is intentional — it now tracks the Python version, so 314.x = Python 3.14. Binary compatibility is locked per Python cycle, meaning packages you build today won't break on the next Pyodide release.
• sqlite3, ssl, and lzma are back in the default stdlib — no more await pyodide.loadPackage("sqlite3"). Bigger download, but a much smoother experience for newcomers.
• bigint precision bug is fixed — values above 2^53 were silently losing precision when crossing the Python/JS boundary. The new JsBigInt type makes the roundtrip correct. Worth flagging if anyone is doing numeric work in a browser app.
• Experimental TCP sockets in Node.js — you can now connect Pyodide to a real database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis tested) when running server-side. Blurs the line between "Python in the browser" and "Python runtime anywhere Wasm runs."

Michael #3: nb-cli: A Command-Line Interface for AI Agents and Notebook Automation

• From Piyush Jain (Jupyter and LangChain maintainer) on the Jupyter blog: nb-cli: A Command-Line Interface for AI Agents and Notebook Automation.
• nb-cli is an experimental, Rust-based CLI to read, write, execute, and search Jupyter notebooks. The premise: agents are great at CLIs but terrible at hand-editing the nested JSON in an .ipynb, so let them operate on the notebook from the outside instead of running inside it.
• Works with or without a Jupyter server. No server? It reads/writes .ipynb files directly and talks to kernels over ZeroMQ. Connected to a live JupyterLab, your edits show up instantly via Y.js (the same CRDT Jupyter uses).
• Smart output format: instead of token-heavy JSON or ambiguous plain markdown, it uses @@cell / @@output sentinels with inline metadata. Less wasted context, unambiguous structure, and it degrades gracefully on truncation.
• The payoff is composability. "Add a summary section and run it" becomes one shell pipeline instead of six agent tool calls. And nb search notebook.ipynb --with-errors returns only the failing cells, so the agent skips the cells that worked.
• Claude Code tie-in: it ships as an agent skill. npx skills install jupyter-ai-contrib/nb-cli and your agent can drive notebooks via nb.
• Out of jupyter-ai-contrib, which aims to become an official Jupyter AI subproject. Still early (crates.io is at v0.0.5), so kick the tires before anything load-bearing.
• See also marimo-pair.

Calvin #4: Hindsight Agent Memory That Learns

• AI agents forget everything between sessions — Hindsight gives them persistent memory that learns over time
• Simple three-method API: retain(), recall(), reflect() — store, retrieve, and reason over memories
• TEMPR retrieval runs semantic, keyword, graph, and temporal search in parallel for accurate results
• Automatically consolidates related facts into durable observations instead of piling up duplicates
• pip install hindsight-all runs the entire server in-process; integrates with LangChain, LlamaIndex, Pydantic AI, CrewAI, and more

Extras

Calvin:

• Clanker: A Word For The Machine
• **Ponytail — You know him. Long ponytail. Oval glasses. Has been at the company longer than the version control**
• **Klangk: Multi-User AI Sandboxing, Collaboration and Coding Platform**
• Cursor announces Origin
• performative-ui to quick start your new idea Michael:
• Astral Joins OpenAI: The Interview
• SpaceX to acquire Cursor
• And OpenAI renews Open Source support
• Portuguese subtitles are now available for Talk Python courses
• DSF is hiring including Six Feet Up support

Joke: Oh Babe…