Blogs

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-24.

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Artilect needs some help

Tags: tech, community

You might remember we were hosted in Toulouse for the KDEPIM Sprint this year. Very nice venue, they do other things locally of course. They need to raise some money to get to the next level. It’d be nice to see them receive lots of love. Head to their fundraising page! (in french though)

https://www.helloasso.com/associations/artilect/collectes/artilect-fablab

‘No regrets,’ says Edward Snowden, after 10 years in exile | Edward Snowden | The Guardian

Tags: tech, surveillance

Things improved a bit… they also got worse in a way. This stays an ongoing fight for the years to come.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/08/no-regrets-says-edward-snowden-after-10-years-in-exile

Reddit’s users and moderators are revolting against its CEO - The Verge

Tags: tech, reddit, social-media

Another centralized tool for communication going down the drain. I wonder what the IPO will look like in this case.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/10/23756476/reddit-protest-api-changes-apollo-third-party-apps

What Reddit Got Wrong | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Tags: tech, reddit, social-media

Excellent summary of the situation regarding the Reddit debacle.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/what-reddit-got-wrong

Killing Community @ marginalia.nu

Tags: tech, business, social-media, community

Interesting and provoking thought… Indeed it’s hard to build communities while also aiming for rapid and constant growth. There’s no chance of having communities properly stabilize which leads to the tribalism and bad behavior we see on social media.

https://www.marginalia.nu/log/82_killing_community/

Every Signature is Broken: On the Insecurity of Microsoft Office’s OOXML Signatures | USENIX

Tags: tech, cryptography, security

Signature of digital documents is definitely not as safe as we would like. All the serious formats have known flaws at this point.

https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity23/presentation/rohlmann

Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2023

Tags: tech

The results of this annual survey are available. A few interesting insights in there even though I find some of the categorization weird. For instance why splitting so much in details the various Linux flavors? If they didn’t it’d show them as the most popular option for professional use. There are a few other cases where one might want to aggregate by hand or split in several groups among questions.

Here are some of the takeaways I found:

• it’s interesting to see PostgreSQL, MySQL and SQLite reigning supreme in the database space on several metrics;
• there’s clearly something going on with Rust which is once again among the favorites;
• also notable is the popularity of the Phoenix framework which is probably driving the Elixir adoption;
• I find interesting and ironic the raise of Markdown for sharing information, it feels like it could become the de facto standard in some organizations while staying in the shadow of Confluence and Notion;
• a big surprise to me is that it feels like Matrix has potential to make a dent into the communication tools space for the coming years (there are early signals in the survey in my opinion, we’ll see if that gets confirmed);
• it looks like hybrid and remote work are here to stay, some people went back to being fully in-person but not that many.

It’s also the first time they integrate the use from AI tools but that doesn’t give any surprising or interesting insight yet. It just confirms the hype and the domination of a couple of giant players.

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/

LLMs are good at playing you

Tags: tech, ai, gpt

Nice piece which shows how easy it is to get such models to produce nonsense.

https://lcamtuf.substack.com/p/llms-are-better-than-you-think-at

Language Model Sketchbook, or Why I Hate Chatbots

Tags: tech, ai, gpt, ux

Interesting ideas for using large language models. There is a world beyond the chatbot interface and it might bring more value to users and avoid some of the pitfalls of anthropomorphisation.

https://maggieappleton.com/lm-sketchbook

An America-less Internet | NthBrock

Tags: tech, internet, distributed, dns, geography

Interesting experiment… with surprising results in places. What stays available or not is not necessarily what one would think. It’s not that easy to be flexible and available across regions.

https://www.nthbrock.com/posts/americaless-internet/

How much memory is needed to run 1M Erlang processes? - Hauleth

Tags: tech, multithreading, performance, memory, benchmarking, erlang

Deep dive on a proper benchmarking and implementation for 1M task on the Erlang runtime. Clearly the previous benchmark had room for improvements.

https://hauleth.dev/post/beam-process-memory-usage/

A comprehensive study of bloated dependencies in the Maven ecosystem | SpringerLink

Tags: tech, java, dependencies, supply-chain

Very interesting study on dependencies. This is specific to the Maven ecosystem so too early to generalize the findings to other similar ecosystems. This indicates at least the difficulties of managing dependencies, especially the transitive ones. Also tries to define the “dependencies bloat” problem.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10664-020-09914-8

60 terrible tips for a C++ developer

Tags: tech, programming, c++

Funny list of anti-patterns. Not all of it is C++ specific in there, but some are good reminders of the hidden traps in the language.

https://pvs-studio.com/en/blog/posts/cpp/1053/

AsyncIO

Tags: tech, python, asynchronous, multithreading

A piece criticizing the asyncio approach in Python (especially considering the performance tradeoffs in this language). Also provides viable alternatives.

https://charlesleifer.com/blog/asyncio/

Describing Descriptors | Pydon’t 🐍 | Mathspp

Tags: tech, python, metaprogramming

Interesting feature from the Python language. Lots of features are actually built on top of it.

https://mathspp.com/blog/pydonts/describing-descriptors

GitHub - imsnif/diskonaut: Terminal disk space navigator 🔭

Tags: tech, tools, command-line

Might come in handy when Filelight is not available, I could see myself using this over SSH connections.

https://github.com/imsnif/diskonaut

CLI tool to insert spacers in command output to provide visual markers of when things happened

Tags: tech, tools, command-line, logging

Interesting little tool, can come in handy.

https://github.com/samwho/spacer

Some tests are stronger than others • Buttondown

Tags: tech, tests

Interesting way to reason about tests and classify them. I think it can be more useful than the strict “unit” vs “integration” that is way too widespread.

https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/some-tests-are-stronger-than-others/

ignore the code: Anti-Personas

Tags: tech, product-management, ux

Interesting idea, personas help with producing features, something is needed to prevent features we don’t wante.

http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2023/06/13/anti_personas/

Jim Highsmith, Co-creator of the Agile Manifesto, Storyteller, Adventurer - YouTube

Tags: tech, agile, values

The interview is overall very interesting (I advise listening to it in full). It’s nice to have such an historical perspective. At 15:00 there’s a question which prompt a very important explanation of why the word “over” was chosen and repeated in the agile manifesto. Unfortunately it’s been often misinterpreted…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VW8YNSVYX4&t=900s

Removing uncertainty: the tip of the iceberg

Tags: tech, risk, project-management, product-management, deployment, architecture

Good piece on how to reduce uncertainty before something is built and ready to be in front of users. It starts with prototyping but goes all the way to feature flags and deployment

https://theengineeringmanager.substack.com/p/removing-uncertainty-the-tip-of-the

Tindall On Software Delays

Tags: tech, project-management, product-management, history

Very interesting! This is really old wisdom which should be more widespread. A few words of caution in there for everyone, me included.

https://two-wrongs.com/tindall-on-software-delays.html

Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems « the jsomers.net blog

Tags: productivity

Interesting point of view… it’s also about the perceived cost of a task. Of course this means one needs to get faster through practice, it’s not about delivering botched work.

https://jsomers.net/blog/speed-matters

Johnny•Decimal

Tags: tech, productivity, organization

Interesting way to organize your data. This gives a library feel for sure. At least it makes me curious.

https://johnnydecimal.com/

UNIHIKER - A single board computer brings you brand new experience.

Tags: tech, hardware, embedded

Looks like an interesting device to tinker with.

https://www.unihiker.com/

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Bye for now!