Blogs

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2021-30.


The Pandemic Playbook

Tags: pandemic, health, politics

Very interesting series of articles about the pandemic in various countries. It’s a few months old now though so things evolved, still it gives an interesting account about the early days.

https://www.vox.com/22403980/the-pandemic-playbook


The Assange Case Is Collapsing – But it Remains a Travesty of Justice

Tags: assange, justice

I wish they’d just drop the charges now… this has been running for way too long. Maybe it’s time freedom of the press gets back to the center stage?

https://tribunemag.co.uk/2021/07/the-assange-case-is-collapsing-but-it-remains-a-travesty-of-justice


We Need To Talk About The Insecurity Industry

Tags: tech, surveillance

Pretty much this! Indeed it won’t stop until those weapons are banned and the companies selling them treated as criminals. Will take a while to get there though as long as the people in power use them as diplomatic tools…

https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/ns-oh-god-how-is-this-legal


From Stolen Laptop to Inside the Company Network — Dolos Group

Tags: tech, security, evil-maid

Good reminder of why if you got mobile devices which are outside of a secured office (like most companies nowadays) you should never underestimate the Evil-Maid scenario…

https://dolosgroup.io/blog/2021/7/9/from-stolen-laptop-to-inside-the-company-network


Agile at 20: The Failed Rebellion - Simple Thread

Tags: tech, agile, management, history

A very interesting look at the history of the Agile movement. What it really meant and what it degenerated into.

https://www.simplethread.com/agile-at-20-the-failed-rebellion/


Joy, or Not

Tags: tech, programming, agile, life, joy, politics

Nice extracts with comments about finding joy in your (work) life or not. Two paths really… which one are you on?

Too bad this is stretching a bit too far on the politics side (although it’s not unjustified, I think it muddies the initial message in this context).

https://ronjeffries.com/articles/021-01ff/joy-or-not/


BirdNET – The easiest way to identify birds by sound.

Tags: biology, birds, tech, ai, machine-learning

Looks like an interesting system to recognize bird sounds in the wild. I’ll definitely test it.

https://birdnet.cornell.edu/


Techdirt Is Now Entirely Without Any Google Ads Or Tracking Code | Techdirt

Tags: tech, google, surveillance

Illustrates nicely how difficult it can be to let go off the Google drugs on your website.

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210726/09441047251/techdirt-is-now-entirely-without-any-google-ads-tracking-code.shtml


Solene’% : Why self hosting is important

Tags: tech, self-hosting

Nice piece advocating for self hosting. I especially like the fact that it stresses that it doesn’t mean “one server for one person” it’d be unrealistic to turn everyone into sysadmins.

https://dataswamp.org/~solene/2021-07-23-why-selfhosting-is-important.html


Rust for Linux redux [LWN.net]

Tags: tech, rust, linux

The journey of Rust inside of the Linux kernel is still in its early days. I find especially interesting the questions raised by the community. It’s especially healthy in my opinion, it’s not just “fancy let’s have it”. They also wonder about the learning path for people to join the community if it’s accepted or where to best use it. It’s a good account of the social aspects triggered by technical changes.

https://lwn.net/Articles/862018/


Simulating shitty network connections so you can build better systems.

Tags: tech, tests, networking

Looks like an interesting tool, it’s always a bit of a problem to simulate various network conditions, especially slow links randomly dropping packets. Adding more tooling to tackle this is always welcome.

https://github.com/tylertreat/comcast


How to model application flows in React with finite state machines and XState

Tags: tech, web, frontend, statemachines

Ah! I thought this was often a missing piece in most React frontend code I’ve seen which mostly piles up useEffect and useState calls. Having a finite state machine is definitely a must have there, I’m glad some options actually exist, I didn’t bump into XState so far I’ll make sure to look into it.

https://engineering.kablamo.com.au/posts/2021/finite-state-machines-and-xstate


Python behind the scenes #11: how the Python import system works

Tags: tech, python

A very thorough resource on how the Python import system works. Very convenient to figure out what’s broken when something goes wrong.

https://tenthousandmeters.com/blog/python-behind-the-scenes-11-how-the-python-import-system-works/


Postgres Full-Text Search: A Search Engine in a Database

Tags: tech, databases, postgresql, search

A good primer on full-text search features in Postgres. A nice way to get started.

https://blog.crunchydata.com/blog/postgres-full-text-search-a-search-engine-in-a-database


Introducing Triton: Open-Source GPU Programming for Neural Networks

Tags: tech, gpu, data-science, python

Now that finally looks like an interesting approach to make GPU computation more accessible to the public. This seems to do a few things right to lower a bit the complexity while retaining good performances.

https://www.openai.com/blog/triton/



Bye for now!