Tags: web-review, gpt, css, work, cryptography, email, privacy, multithreading, postgresql, failure, api, history, floats, politics, web, browser, performance, quality, criticism, python, safety, attention-economy, management, dns, risk, java, google, command-line, e-ink, postmortem, databases, raspberry-pi, censorship, productivity, programming, rss, security, complexity, DRM, graphics, project-management, resources, machine-learning, ai, networking, javascript, memory, tech, law, git, spam, speech, tools, version-control, automotive, frontend
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-47.
Tags: tech, ai, criticism
Ironically, I think this is one of the best analysis I’ve seen regarding OpenAI and the recent turmoil around of one of its founders.
https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/look-at-scientology-to-understand
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, criticism
Excellent piece about everything which is wrong in the current industrialization moment of generative AI.
https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/blog/afb21/oops-we-automated-bullshit
Tags: tech, automotive, DRM
Don’t you love DRMs in cars? Especially when the business people at the helm are pathological liars?
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/
Tags: tech, google, attention-economy
I guess it’s a strategy to move more people over to Chrome. Shameful.
https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/
Tags: tech, cryptography, privacy
Cool results, let’s see what the future brings. This could be exciting.
https://nautil.us/cryptographers-solve-decades-old-privacy-problem-444899/
Tags: tech, graphics, ai, machine-learning
I guess this will end up being a popular plugin for Krita.
https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-diffusion
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, speech
The newer text to speech models are really good now.
Tags: tech, raspberry-pi, e-ink
This is a cool project, not too expensive as well.
https://wolfgang-ziegler.com/blog/ink-display
Tags: tech, web, email, spam
Good list of techniques. Some of them aren’t fully evaluated yet. Definitely worth considering.
https://spencermortensen.com/articles/email-obfuscation/
Tags: tech, networking, history
A bit of history behind what’s probably the most widespread local network technology.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/ethernet-ieee-milestone
Tags: tech, dns, privacy, censorship
Interesting a new name system being standardized. It’s supposed to protect privacy and be censorship resistant. We’ll see how it gets adopted.
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnunet/2023-11/msg00000.html
Tags: tech, floats
Floating-point numbers are really a complicated species. This is an interesting deep dive in some of their representation.
https://lemire.me/blog/2017/02/28/how-many-floating-point-numbers-are-in-the-interval-01/
Tags: tech, floats, tools
Interesting tool. Hopefully will help us manipulate floating point expressions better.
Tags: tech, multithreading, performance
Good reminder that false sharing is a real thing. It’s easier to encounter than you think when you start to dabble into multi-threading.
https://morestina.net/blog/1976/a-close-encounter-with-false-sharing
Tags: tech, memory, safety, security
Nice approach to also hunt for memory safety issues while software is in production.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.09394.pdf
Tags: tech, networking, programming
Nice little article with simulations demonstrating why you want exponential backoff and how jitter is an extra layer of protection for the server.
https://encore.dev/blog/retries
Tags: tech, java, rss
Yes, I have a thing for bringing RSS back. This time it’s a library enabling the feature for Java projects. Looks easy to use.
https://www.blackslate.io/articles/create-rss-feeds-in-java-using-rome
Tags: tech, javascript, resources
Looks like RAII is finally making its way in Javascript. This looks like a good thing, it’s still rough around the edges though.
https://iliazeus.github.io/articles/js-explicit-resource-management-en/
Tags: tech, python, multithreading
Won’t be easy to get rid of the GIL in the Python ecosystem. There are notable differences of behavior between implementations and even versions of the same implementation… Lots of user code will unwillingly depend on a specific set of guarantees.
https://stefan-marr.de/2023/11/python-global-interpreter-lock/
Tags: tech, python, api
Since quite a lot of Python code will be impacted by this, better get ready.
https://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/it-s-time-for-a-change-datetime-utcnow-is-now-deprecated
Tags: tech, postgresql, databases
Ever wondered how to programmatically introspect query plans? This is a long article but good starting point on how it’s represented under the hood.
https://notes.eatonphil.com/2023-11-19-exploring-a-postgres-query-plan.html
Tags: tech, command-line
Good food for thought to design CLI interfaces.
https://garnix.io/blog/contextual-cli
Tags: tech, frontend, browser, css
Nice guide, the interactive parts definitely help. Good way to improve CSS Grid use. It’s much more powerful than I suspected.
https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/interactive-guide-to-grid/
Tags: tech, git, version-control, complexity, risk, quality
Interesting statistics, this show how important it is to have well structured and focused change sets as much as possible.
https://graphite.dev/blog/how-large-prs-slow-down-development
Tags: tech, project-management, failure, postmortem
Very good piece. Explains why postmortems are important. It also explains how to prepare your organization to conduct them and how to do them properly. This is important since a lot of pressure will happen in case of a failure.
https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/dealing-with-failures-and-postmortems/
Tags: tech, politics, law, work
This is really bad… Now, this is investigation is UK centric though. I wonder how other countries would fare.
Tags: management, productivity
Definitely this, the context matters a lot. Sometimes I’ve seen people too quick to blame the skillset of underperforming colleagues. But the same person in a different context could probably do much better.
https://jacobian.org/2023/nov/20/performance-is-contextual/
Tags: tech, management
This is a good list. I guess some of it feels obvious… at the same time it’s indeed something you don’t see every day. More awareness from managers is needed.
https://medium.com/blob-streaming/14-signs-of-a-good-manager-ea7879f8d894
Bye for now!