Tags: web-review, type-systems, tools, tech, fediverse, architecture, object-oriented, gui, culture, static-analyzer, greenwashing, ai, performance, science, security, ecology, funny, twitter, gaming, yagni, agile, google, webgpu, programming, energy, surprising, github, react, debugging, management, django, art, kotlin, c++, profiling, self-hosting, attention-economy, generator, social-media, microservices, product-management, portability, ux, project-management, frontend, xp, safety, databases, neural-networks, web, search, hr, python, gpt, machine-learning, postgresql, ethics, small, memory, map, webassembly, velocity, cpu, 3d, geospatial, refactoring, foss, rust, java, distributed, criticism, c, ssh
I don’t know if it’s early spring and articles I found interesting are sprouting anywhere… In any case this week issue is massive. Brace yourselves and let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-08.
Tags: tech, google, greenwashing, ecology, ethics
This is indeed a massive greenwashing operation right there. And then they will claim things like “AI for good” or such…
https://theintercept.com/2023/02/17/google-cloud-saudi-aramco-oil/
Tags: tech, cpu, performance, energy, architecture
Interesting position from AMD regarding the race on the next super computers. They’re all being caught up by energy efficiency so it’ll need to be addressed both at the processor architecture level but also at the software architecture level. How we design our computing tasks will matter more and more.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/amd-eyes-supercomputer-efficiency-gains
Tags: tech, github, criticism, foss
Definitely agree with this, Github benefited from a powerful network effect and now a good chunk of important projects are “trapped” there. This can’t be good long term.
https://ploum.net/2023-02-22-leaving-github.html
Tags: tech, social-media, science, criticism
Lengthy but thorough. The evidences are now getting much clearer. Admittedly, the most worrying bit I find is that getting off the social media wagon might not help the impacted people to get better… indeed they might still be isolated if everyone else is still trapped on social media.
https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/social-media-mental-illness-epidemic
Tags: tech, attention-economy
If you didn’t have an adblocker yet (who doesn’t really?) it’s time to really think about it. When even the FBI starts to advocate for ad blockers it’s a sign of how bad the online ad market has become.
https://www.standard.co.uk/tech/fbi-recommends-ad-blocker-online-scams-b1048998.html
Tags: tech, ai, gpt, search
Inaccuracies, contradicting itself, conflating events, misquoting sources… all of that mixed with some correct facts, it’s a perfect misinformation spreading machine. This just can’t be trusted at this point. Those experiments should be stopped in my opinion, better do proper homeworks first, then relaunch when this can be better trusted.
Tags: tech, ai, gpt, google
Excellent piece as usual from Cory Doctorow. It quite clearly point out why Google is anxious and running off the chatbot cliff
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked
Tags: tech, ai, gpt, programming
Or why they are definitely not a magic tool for programming. Far from it. This might help developers a tiny bit, at the expense of killing the learning of students falling for it and the creation of a massive amount of low quality content.
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, neural-networks
Interesting strategy, shows a fascinating blind spot in the typical AIs used for Go nowadays. It kind of hints to the fact that the neural networks abstract knowledge much less than advertised.
Tags: tech, ai, generator, art, funny, surprising, culture
Interesting and surprising limitation. This makes a lot of sense when you think about the set of images used for training though. Also says something about our own art history.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/pranavdixit/ai-generated-art-hands-fingers-messed-up
Tags: tech, fediverse, twitter
Indeed people still seem to assume Mastodon is just a Twitter clone. This is a good reminder that it’s not, it’s just one front to the Fediverse and that’s much more interesting than a Twitter clone.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/02/breadth-fediverse
Tags: tech, self-hosting
It is indeed getting easier every day to self host a website. Some other services or email are a different story though.
https://grifel.dev/decentralization/
Tags: tech, geospatial, map
Interesting set of tools for displaying maps and managing their tiles.
https://www.kschaul.com/post/2023/02/16/how-the-post-is-replacing-mapbox-with-open-source-solutions/
Tags: tech, security, ssh
This is actually an interesting feature to know when a key changes.
https://bytes.zone/posts/what-is-the-randomart-image-for/
Tags: tech, java, kotlin, type-systems
I think it’s the single one reason which makes Kotlin tempting to me every time I dabble in the Java ecosystem.
https://itnext.io/null-safety-kotlin-vs-java-3d774bffd92d
Tags: tech, java, object-oriented
Interesting move. Looks like Java will get value types at last. Coming from C++ this feels long overdue.
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3687670/project-valhalla-a-look-inside-javas-epic-refactor.html
Tags: tech, refactoring, tools
Looks like an interesting tool for scripting refactorings. Seems lightweight and more forgiving than Semgrep, looks like there’s space for both in our tool belts.
Tags: tech, programming, c++
To me that looks like a fine advice even outside of C++. If conditions get at least a bit complex moving them out of the if to assign them to const booleans is always a good idea.
https://raymii.org/s/blog/Named_Booleans_prevent_bugs.html
Tags: tech, c, safety, memory, static-analyzer
Interesting approach. There’s still a lot we can achieve with static analysis in those good old languages.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.05331
Tags: tech, programming, rust
That’s an interesting perspective. Rust definitely gets in the way of iterating quickly indeed which might be a problem to test ideas. Introducing it gradually later is thus a better path. That being said it doesn’t always have a great story for mixing with other languages, there are a few tools to help, but nothing I’ve seen really used in the wild so far (this will probably come though).
https://www.propelauth.com/post/i-love-building-a-startup-in-rust-i-wouldnt-pick-it-again
Tags: tech, search, postgresql, databases
Yet another article about Postgres full test search features. This one has the advantage of giving us a glimpse about the other available options. Sometimes you want something typo resistant for instance.
https://supabase.com/blog/postgres-full-text-search-vs-the-rest
Tags: tech, python, performance, profiling
perf now available also to Python programs. This definitely can be useful for proper profiling.
https://www.petermcconnell.com/posts/perf_eng_with_py12/
Tags: tech, python, django, portability
Another impressive feat from the people behind the Cosmopolitan project. A self contained and portable binary which run your Django application on almost any platform? Apparently doable. The versions used for the dependencies are a bit old but that’s clearly something which will be solved soon.
Tags: tech, rust, 3d, webgpu, webassembly, distributed
Looks like an interesting runtime. Seems to make it easy to create multiplayer 3D experiences. Maybe too easy to be true? I guess I need to find an excuse to test it.
https://www.ambient.run/post/introducing-ambient
Tags: tech, programming, debugging, profiling, gaming
Alright, that’s an impressive set of tools they created to build their games. Lots of efforts went into this, very inspiring.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72y2EC5fkcE
Tags: tech, frontend, web, react
A bit of a rant, but even though React is well established at that point and here to stay (shake a tree and half a dozen React developers fall from it), it doesn’t mean it can’t be criticized. It does a good job at listing the main ergonomics problems React is suffering from. The funny part is towards the end, the envisioned solutions for another framework look eerily familiar to a Qt developer, it talks about signals and what looks like property changed notifications. :-)
https://emnudge.dev/blog/react-hostage
Tags: tech, gui, ux
Indeed, quite a lot of spinners and progress bars are not tied to anything meaningful. This definitely creates uncertainty from the user perspective.
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2023/faux-progress/
Tags: tech, microservices, architecture
Interesting explanations of the main drawbacks of microservices. Nothing is magical so you need to know what you loose, in this case this is mostly about increased coordination efforts and latency in feature availability.
https://sheepcode.substack.com/p/devlife-5-microservice-hell
Tags: tech, programming, culture, small
In praise of the little ideas and the small achievements. They are often overlooked but definitely needed.
https://census.dev/blog/insignificant
Tags: tech, xp, yagni
YAGNI is one of the easiest to misunderstood ideas behind eXtreme Programming. That’s why I think it’s a good thing it stays under active discussion. Often people understand it too literally which can create issues. That’s why people talking about “PAGNI” (probably are gonna need it) are right. After all, people who also conceptualized YAGNI wrote back then: “This doesn’t mean you should avoid building flexibility into your code”.
https://bytes.zone/posts/advice-you-might-as-well-take/
Tags: tech, project-management, xp, agile
Interesting to see the beginning of Kent Beck’s thinking about scaling Extreme Programming. This was clearly missing. First by looking at dependencies which are definitely a problem which arises quickly at scale.
https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/scaling-extreme-programming-dependencies
Tags: tech, agile, ux, criticism
Excellent response to an article full of misconceptions about the Agile approaches. This turns in a good summary of cargo cult agile we see in the wild and the original intent. I especially like how it points out approaches to properly integrate UX as well.
https://jchyip.medium.com/the-age-of-cargo-cult-agile-must-end-9408e1d13e1d
Tags: tech, product-management, velocity
Admittedly biased thought experiment but there’s definitely some truth in there. Focusing on the impact of what you release is way more important than focusing on releasing lots of features.
https://itamargilad.com/velocity-vs-impact/
Tags: hr, management
This is a sound advice, it’s better if it’s a conversation. Some companies push for that some don’t. If they don’t the proposed plan is a good one.
https://quad.writeas.com/how-i-give-formal-written-feedback
Bye for now!