Blogs

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2022-46. With all the turmoil in the social media space, this looks a bit like a special edition on this topic (more links to articles related to that than usual).


Microsoft “irreparably damaging” EU’s cloud ecosystem, industry group claims | Ars Technica

Tags: tech, microsoft, cloud, vendor-lockin

More anti-trust pressure coming toward Microsoft. Let’s see how it goes.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/11/microsoft-irreparably-damaging-eus-cloud-ecosystem-industry-group-claims/


Infosys leaked FullAdminAccess AWS keys on PyPi for over a year | Tom Forbes

Tags: tech, security

Shady practices clearly… don’t commit secrets in repositories. There are even tools to check this doesn’t happen.

https://tomforb.es/infosys-leaked-fulladminaccess-aws-keys-on-pypi-for-over-a-year/


“When We All Have Pocket Telephones”: A 1920s Comic Accurately Predicts Our Cellphone-Dominated Lives | Open Culture

Tags: tech, smartphone, history, culture

Interesting look at the perception of cellphones before they even existed.

https://www.openculture.com/2022/08/when-we-all-have-pocket-telephones.html


The Age of Social Media Is Ending - The Atlantic

Tags: tech, social-media

Interesting point of view, also lays out nicely how social networks degenerated into social media. I appreciate this kind of perspective.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/11/twitter-facebook-social-media-decline/672074/


Fediverse

Tags: tech, fediverse, social-media, ecology

Good thinking about the recent Mastodon users increase. Highlights fairly well why it’s desirable, why it’s a better social media platform but also the challenges ahead… including resources consumption.

https://bastianallgeier.com/notes/fediverse


Home invasion - Mastodon’s Eternal September begins

Tags: tech, fediverse, social-media

Success is a two sided coin. Clearly this mass exodus of Twitter users will overwhelm existing Mastodon users and a few instance administrators. It’s understandable that is can be perceived as some kind of assault from people not used to the customs. How will the preexisting culture hold? The Pandora box is now opened we shall see.

https://www.hughrundle.net/home-invasion/


Is the fediverse about to get Fryed? (Or, “Why every toot is also a potential denial of service attack”) – Aral Balkan

Tags: tech, architecture, fediverse, performance, social-media

There are indeed a few architectural problems with the Fediverse as it is. Can this be solved? Hopefully yes.

https://ar.al/2022/11/09/is-the-fediverse-about-to-get-fryed-or-why-every-toot-is-also-a-potential-denial-of-service-attack/


How fast is ASP.NET Core?

Tags: tech, benchmarking, web, framework, microsoft, dotnet

Don’t believe too good to be true marketing claims by vendors. Clearly something went wrong there and the benchmark has been gamed.

https://dusted.codes/how-fast-is-really-aspnet-core


Refactoring with =delete

Tags: tech, programming, refactoring, c++

This is a clever and important use of =delete which I sometimes miss in other languages.

https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2022/11/11/refactoring-with-delete/


Immutable Collections should be Your Default

Tags: tech, programming, multithreading, java

Illustrated with Java, still this highlight fairly well the caveats of mutable collections in multithreaded code.

https://alexn.org/blog/2022/10/27/immutable-collections-your-default/


Performance Optimizations Can Have Unexpectedly Large Effects When Combined With Caches

Tags: tech, performance, optimization

Interesting take about how performance optimizations can sometimes leverage even more performance gains than you would expect.

https://justinblank.com/notebooks/performanceoptimizationscanhaveunexpectedlylargeeffectswhencombinedwithcaches.html


The hidden cost of complexity

Tags: tech, software, complexity

A simplified mental model of complexity in software projects. It’s not completely accurate but is valuable in the way it is easy to reason about it and probably use it for decision making.

https://medium.com/@dolevp/the-hidden-cost-of-complexity-d9d8eb91594c


Split Your Overwhelmed Teams - ACM Queue

Tags: tech, management, team, burnout

Interesting take of the cognitive overload in bigger teams which end up with more responsibilities. Indeed splitting the teams and the responsibilities can then be a way out.

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3570920


Why do we call it “boilerplate code?” • Buttondown

Tags: tech, programming, history, etymology

I love this kind of explorations. Where does the term boilerplate code come? Let’s find out.

https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/why-do-we-call-it-boilerplate-code/


Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books - Internet Archive Blogs

Tags: book, low-tech

The limits of digital books, this won’t get me off the paper books addiction I got.

http://blog.archive.org/2022/11/15/digital-books-wear-out-faster-than-physical-books/



Bye for now!