Tags: web-review, security, ai, geography, rust, geospatial, criticism, web, programming, apple, internet, map, networking, surveillance, machine-learning, desktop, consistency, craftsmanship, agile, tech, politics, date, cryptography, blog, mobile, complexity, foss, ux, storage, frontend, gpt, simulation, cyberpunk, social-media, design, gaming, refactoring, management, self-hosting, copyright, cost, information, webcomponents, knowledge, scam, privacy, engineering, learning, cloud, optimization, science, 3d, http, mathematics, shader, usability, asynchronous, infrastructure, compression, performance, history, distributed, twitter, time, fediverse, tools, estimates, caching, project-management
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-43. A bit on the finishing line compared to the usual, I didn’t manage to post it earlier today… Well, technically it’s still Friday. 😉
Tags: tech, politics, surveillance
This is a very worrying development in Europe. This feels a lot like a dream come true for police states… Let’s not go there.
https://de.indymedia.org/node/310589
Tags: tech, politics, surveillance
A longer account of a seminar showing the amount of people and arguments against chat control. The EU commission is pretty isolated in this madness.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/24/eu-csam-scanning-edps-seminar/?guccounter=1
Tags: tech, cryptography, politics, privacy
Timely and needed statement as fights against cryptography are emerging again.
https://www.globalencryption.org/2023/10/kyoto-statement-on-end-to-end-encryption/
Tags: tech, criticism
An important read in my opinion. This whole manifesto from Andreesen is just ludicrous and this explains very well why. In any case we need more techno-pragmatists and less techno-optimists.
https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/why-cant-our-tech-billionaires-learn
Tags: tech, cyberpunk, ai, machine-learning, copyright, tools
A very needed tool unfortunately. This is fascinating research as well. The world is really so cyberpunk now.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/23/1082189/data-poisoning-artists-fight-generative-ai/
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, foss
Another open source LLM available out there. This one seems to have interesting properties.
https://jina.ai/news/jina-ai-launches-worlds-first-open-source-8k-text-embedding-rivaling-openai/
Tags: tech, twitter, social-media, information, criticism
I never liked the “it’s neutral, it’s just a tool”. A very naive view in my opinion. New illustration of this with Twitter. Tools are inserted in a socio-technical system, and the sociology side will influence the design enough to make the tool not so neutral. Here clearly all hell broke loose and it became a massive danger to democracy due to the level of misinformation and the type of messages which are advantaged by the changes.
https://rsf.org/en/twitter-x-elon-musk-s-transformation-free-speech-defender-champion-disinformation
Tags: tech, social-media, twitter, fediverse
More organizations leaving Twitter (now X… rofl). It’s a good thing and a logical step if you take values and code of conduct into account. It clearly became a cesspool from what I see.
https://carpentries.org/blog/2023/10/announcing-the-carpentries-departure-from-x-and-facebook/
Tags: tech, storage, scam, tools
Beware the fraudulent cheap drives you can buy nowadays. Looks like a nifty tool to check a drive if you have suspicions.
https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm
Tags: tech, apple, security
The spectre attack still has real world effects… This affects Safari this time.
Tags: tech, security, web
If you got to implement an OAuth integration. Please be responsible and don’t do this… this could lead to very serious breaches for your users.
https://eval.blog/research/microsoft-account-token-leaks-in-harvest/
Tags: tech, security
OAuth is nice and taking over the world… but don’t weaken the security, follow all the steps and verify the tokens you get handed.
https://salt.security/blog/oh-auth-abusing-oauth-to-take-over-millions-of-accounts
Tags: tech, cloud, infrastructure, foss
OK, I admit this looks like a very cool product. This could turn interesting for private infrastructures. Trying to get the benefits of cloud approaches while keeping it under control.
https://oxide.computer/blog/the-cloud-computer
Tags: tech, storage, networking, self-hosting
Very thorough explanation of an interesting NAS setup. There are a few interesting tools I didn’t know about in there.
https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2023-10-25-my-all-flash-zfs-network-storage-build/
Tags: tech, tools, geospatial, geography, map
Looks like a nice new solution to host and serve global maps.
Tags: tech, rust, optimization
This gives a good list of things to try when optimizing (Rust code or otherwise).
https://willcrichton.net/notes/k-corrset/
Tags: tech, 3d, gaming, simulation
Nice to see Amazon Lumberyard getting a new life. It’s really feature packed.
Tags: tech, 3d, shader, mathematics
Wanna get started playing with shaders? This is a neat into leading to a blob made of metaballs.
https://www.mayerowitz.io/blog/a-journey-into-shaders
Tags: tech, web, http, caching, compression, performance, networking
Interesting exploration of the performance for web resources when they’re bundled or not. Also dabbles in the reasons behind the exhibited performances, definitely to keep in mind.
https://csswizardry.com/2023/10/the-three-c-concatenate-compress-cache/
Tags: tech, blog, webcomponents, frontend, complexity
Another testament to the fact that it’s probably better to have minimal dependencies on your webpages. This is especially true for documents if you’re aiming for longevity. If you’re making an actual application the trade-off will be different.
https://jakelazaroff.com/words/web-components-will-outlive-your-javascript-framework/
Tags: tech, usability, ux, design, mobile, desktop
It’s nice that we get more content usable on mobiles… but this shouldn’t come at the expense of bad usability when on desktops.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/content-dispersion/
Tags: tech, programming, craftsmanship
Definitely a good advice. We’re just better at understanding positive boolean expressions.
https://testing.googleblog.com/2023/10/improve-readability-with-positive.html?m=1
Tags: tech, knowledge, engineering
Looks like an old website, still it does a neat job of explaining how the field of knowledge representation evolved. This is nice to see a reference for beginners since I dabbled quite a bit into this years ago and it wasn’t very accessible.
https://www.lisperati.com/tellstuff/index.html
Tags: tech, time, asynchronous, distributed, consistency
Time and synchronization are complicated in distributed systems. Luckily there are solutions to try to ease the pain. It’s not completely avoidable though.
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2745385
Tags: tech, refactoring, craftsmanship, cost
Definitely this. One is more painful than the other though. It’s a question of paying small price over tine vs paying a big cost later.
https://www.germanvelasco.com/blog/refactoring-is-a-habit
Tags: tech, agile, project-management, estimates
Indeed, going for scrutiny on made up numbers probably won’t get us nowhere. Tweaking them won’t help either. It’s the shared goals which matter most.
https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/private-estimates-public-progress
Tags: tech, management, engineering, learning
Definitely an excellent list to have in mind as soon as you get to engineering management. The four areas listed are the most important.
http://pnewman.org/engineering_mgmt_checklist.txt
Tags: tech, learning, engineering, criticism
Healthy criticism of where our industry went. Engineers should exhibit curiosity on how the sausage is made, not just blindly use tools they don’t understand.
Tags: tech, craftsmanship
Beautiful text. She talks with fondness about her grandfather, but there’s indeed lessons about craftsmanship here. It’s not only about machines, it can’t extend into a humanist world view.
https://www.drcathicks.com/post/on-craft
Tags: tech, programming, learning
Good list of advices for someone who just got started programming. Who knows, it might come in handy later.
https://blog.plover.com/prog/katara-advice.html
Tags: tech, time, date, history
A database we take for granted… but if you look in the margins it’s full of history and very well crafted.
https://blog.jonudell.net/2009/10/23/a-literary-appreciation-of-the-olsonzoneinfotz-database/
Tags: tech, internet, web, history
Very cool idea. Lots of history in there! There were things I even forgot about.
https://neal.fun/internet-artifacts/
Tags: history, science
Very interesting dive into where this theory comes from and how wrong it is.
Bye for now!