Blogs

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2021-08.

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La CNIL avertit un club de foot : il ne faut pas faire n’importe quoi avec la reconnaissance faciale

Tags: tech, ai, facial-recognition

Article in French

Clearly the use of facial recognition will soon be out of control if even soccer clubs need to be reminded to drastically limit its use.

https://www.numerama.com/tech/690077-la-cnil-avertit-un-club-de-foot-il-ne-faut-pas-faire-nimporte-quoi-avec-la-reconnaissance-faciale.html#utm_medium=distibuted&utm_source=rss&utm_campaign=690077

XSL Transformations (XSLT) Version 3.0

Tags: tech, xslt, json

This new version supports JSON. Looks like learning XSLT wasn’t completely a waste then. :-)

https://www.w3.org/TR/xslt-30/#json

Patterns, Predictions, and Actions

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning

Looks like an interesting book (didn’t read it yet, would love an epub version out of the box) about AI and machine learning.

https://mlstory.org/

Plus de 400.000 données de patients français vendus dans le blackmarket

Tags: leak

Article in French

Large leak of health data from french patients found on the blackmarket… The source of the leak is still being investigated.

https://www.zataz.com/plus-de-400-000-donnees-de-patients-francais-vendus-dans-le-blackmarket/

faster isn’t better

Tags: tech, apple, vendor-lockin

Interesting analysis showing how the M1 SoC from Apple is really a good way for them to close and control their desktop ecosystem even more than before. In my opinion, if you care even one bit about your personal freedom you should likely stay away from this ecosystem.

https://side-effects.neocities.org/anticapitalism/hardware.html

How Popperian falsification enabled the rise of neoliberalism – Charlotte Sleigh | Aeon Essays

Tags: science, epistemology, popper, ethics, politics

This is an excellent reminder on how the Popperian falsification came to be and how weak it is. More surprising are the ethics and politics ramifications of it and how they got used.

https://aeon.co/essays/how-popperian-falsification-enabled-the-rise-of-neoliberalism

La technopolice aux frontières – La Quadrature du Net

Tags: surveillance

Article in French

Or why our world is more and more looking like a bad dystopian sci-fi movie… EU now funding drone swarms for border control…

https://www.laquadrature.net/2021/02/22/la-technopolice-aux-frontieres/#pll_switcher

Martin Heinz - Advanced Git Features You Didn’t Know You Needed

Tags: tech, git

Very nice set of tip and tricks for git. Quite a few are probably known to the more advanced users but still there might be one or two for everyone’s taste.

https://martinheinz.dev/blog/43

Build smaller, faster, and more secure desktop applications with a web frontend | Tauri Studio

Tags: tech, rust, rich-client, npm, web

Still a young project but that looks like an interesting approach. At least it would make for much smaller bundles than Electron while still enabling the same type of uses. I still have slight concerns about the complexity involved because of all the layers or how much memory this can consume (akin to Electron). Let’s wait and see how it evolves.

https://tauri.studio/en/

How they SRE (Site Reliability Engineering)

Tags: tech, production, reliability, devops, monitoring, performance

Obviously didn’t read it all but this is a very large knowledge repository of practices from many companies one can get inspired by to work on Site Reliability Engineering. It is especially comprehensive since it’s not only about technical tips but also deals with hiring, team building and culture (which is almost as important if not more).

https://github.com/upgundecha/howtheysre

Four fours – Sentiers Media

Tags: productivity, sustainability

This is an interesting approach to ensure at sustainable productivity through the year. It covers different rhythms as it should: daily, weekly, yearly. If you read between the lines you can tell it tries quite hard at keeping stress at bay. I think I’ll even try to apply some of that with my own adaptations (it’s not strict rules more like guidelines, clearly needs to be adapted to your job, for instance “only” 4 hours of knowledge work per day would feel low in my context).

https://sentiers.media/four-fours/

Perseverance Rover’s Descent and Touchdown on Mars (Official NASA Video) - YouTube

Tags: science, nasa, mars

I almost had tears in my eyes watching this. I think it’s amazing to have for the first time such beautiful footage of a rover descent and to see such nice videos of the Mars surface. It’s just a great feat from NASA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4czjS9h4Fpg&feature=youtu.be

Unspash : des photos haute résolution qui pèsent lourd - Green IT

Tags: tech, design, green-it, ecology

Article in French

Interesting example (Unsplash as case study) on how simple design changes can greatly impact the ecological footprint of a service.

https://www.greenit.fr/2021/02/23/unspash-des-photos-haute-resolution-qui-pese-lourd/

Marie-Cécile Godwin :« les usages prévalent sur tout » – Framablog

Tags: tech, design, free-software

Article in French

Great interview from one of the designers very involved with Framasoft. She’s doing an excellent job at framing what UX design really is and highlighting some of the problems in the Free Software community.

https://framablog.org/2021/02/24/marie-cecile-godwin-les-usages-prevalent-sur-tout/

Anxious feelings about optimisation through complexity

Tags: tech, complexity, optimization, emergence

Interesting take on optimisation and complexity… Indeed it’s probably best to not use the latter to achieve the former otherwise that complexity can never be removed anymore.

http://interconnected.org/home/2021/02/12/optimisation

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Bye for now!