Blogs

This is indeed very much true… there’s a clear crisis in research. It turned into a hamster wheel of publishing articles at a constantly faster pace. The incentives are misguided which pushes that behavior to even have a career. Meanwhile, knowledge building suffers.

https://realizeengineering.blog/2021/01/20/we-are-drowning-in-information-while-starving-for-wisdom/

Photographer Fools the Internet With AI-Generated Cameras That Don’t Exist | PetaPixel

Tags: tech, ai, gpt, generator, fake

Don’t worry, so called AI isn’t going to take away your jobs. But do worry though, this marks the end of trusting any pictures or texts you see in the media. Everything needs to be challenged, even more so now.

https://petapixel.com/2022/12/15/photographer-fools-the-internet-with-ai-generated-cameras-that-dont-exist/

Cyberpunk Translate

Tags: tech, ai, neural-networks, translation

Interesting tool to for the automatic transcription and translation of videos using off the shelf components. Seems to work nicely.

https://github.com/elanmart/cbp-translate

Copilot Internals | Hacky repo to see what the Copilot extension sends to the server

Tags: tech, github, copilot, ai, machine-learning

Interesting reverse engineering job of Copilot’s client side to have a better idea at which information it actually feeds to the model. A couple of funny tricks to prepare the prompt are involved. Obviously some telemetry involved as well, again with interesting heuristics to try to figure out if the user kept the suggestion or not.

https://thakkarparth007.github.io/copilot-explorer/posts/copilot-internals.html

A not so unfortunate sharp edge in Pipenv :: dade

Tags: tech, python, supply-chain

This is indeed a problem in the way Pipenv handle this kind of cases. Makes for bisecting clearly troublesome.

https://0xda.de/blog/2022/12/a-not-so-unfortunate-sharp-edge-in-pipenv/

An Ode to Unit Tests: In Defense of the Testing Pyramid

Tags: tech, programming, tests, tdd, architecture, craftsmanship

Good piece. I like how it frames the debate, asking the right questions on where might be the assumptions on how testing is done.

https://www.infoq.com/articles/unit-tests-testing-pyramid/

The Cargo Cult of Good Code

Tags: tech, programming, craftsmanship

Good points, this shows quite effectively the problem with blindly following rules without keeping in mind the reasoning behind them.

https://pboyd.io/posts/cargo-cult-of-good-code/

Taming Names in Software Development - Simple Thread

Tags: tech, programming, craftsmanship

Excellent piece about naming things in code. The conclusion is perfect of course: it’s hard but it pays off.

https://www.simplethread.com/taming-names-in-software-development/

The Story of A - by Kent Beck

Tags: tech, architecture, refactoring, craftsmanship, xp

A good set of skills to develop to bring technical changes to a project. It doesn’t need to be overwhelming or a fight. If you doubt, if you have empathy and if you slice the proposals it can become doable and help the people around you.

https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/the-story-of-a

The topologist’s world map – tafc.space

Tags: tech, map, art

This is really cool work. Very insightful and pretty to look at.

https://tafc.space/qna/the-topologists-world-map/

Bye for now! And Merry Christmas!