Tags: web-review, research, css, android, google, graphics, reliability, javascript, qt, ai, management, metrics, school, developer-experience, complexity, ecology, psychology, fediverse, telemetry, mobile, craftsmanship, attention-economy, maintenance, tech, bug, energy, dependencies, git, tools, type-systems, gpt, smells, profiling, community, moderation, copyright, law, leadership, quality, optimization, productivity, observability, mozilla, education, sociology, blog, performance, machine-learning, ios, organization, self-hosting, version-control, linkedin, learning, twitter, economics, social-media
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-52.
Tags: tech, social-media, sociology, psychology, community, fediverse, twitter
Despite understandable limitations, this studies has a few interesting findings on how communities can more easily switch platforms (in this case from Twitter to Mastodon). At least one is a bit counter-intuitive.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-48200-7
Tags: tech, moderation, social-media
Another platform failing at proper moderation…
https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/21/24011232/substack-nazi-moderation-demonetization-hamish-mckenzie
Tags: tech, social-media, google, research
An important question for proper statistics about the content itself. Surprisingly harder to get an answer to it than one would think.
https://ethanzuckerman.com/2023/12/22/how-big-is-youtube/
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copyright, law
It was only a question of time until we’d see such lawsuits appear. We’ll see where this one goes.
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, economics, energy, ecology
Very interesting paper about the energy footprint of the latest trend in generator models. The conclusion is fairly clear: we should think twice before using them.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2542435123003653#fig1
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, school, learning, education
When underfunded schools systems preaching obedience and conformity meet something like large language models, this tips over the balance enough that no proper learning can really happen anymore. Time to reform our school systems?
Tags: tech, blog, self-hosting, attention-economy
Definitely true… never had use for more than the server logs for understanding the traffic on my blog. No need to invade the privacy of people through their browser.
https://blog.yossarian.net/2023/12/24/You-dont-need-analytics-on-your-blog
Tags: tech, mobile, qt, android, ios
The experience is still not great on iOS and Android. This is in part due to the platforms design though, this still make Qt a great fit when you control the platform like for Plasma Mobile. For less friendly platforms this still limits the use to cases where you already have quite some Qt code. Still the same situation than a few years ago.
https://camg.me/qt-mobile-2023/
Tags: tech, javascript, type-systems, bug, quality
Interesting study, the amount of bugs which could have been prevented by the introduction of static typing in Javascript code bases is definitely impressive (15% is not a small amount in my opinion).
https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10064729/1/typestudy.pdf
Tags: tech, git, version-control
It looks like git workflows using rebase are becoming the norm. People are actively trying to avoid merge commits in their repository history. Tooling support could be a bit better though.
https://graphite.dev/blog/why-ban-merge-commits
Tags: tech, css
Interesting guidelines for organizing CSS. This should avoid making things too much of a mess.
https://ricostacruz.com/rscss/
Tags: tech, graphics
Exploration of the causes of color banding and how to work around them.
https://blog.frost.kiwi/GLSL-noise-and-radial-gradient/
Tags: tech, mozilla, observability, telemetry, profiling, optimization, performance
Very nice collection of stories from the trenches of Firefox development. Lots of lessons learned to unpack about optimizing for the right thing, tooling, telemetry and so on.
https://yoric.github.io/post/so-you-want-to-optimize-your-code/
Tags: tech, tools, craftsmanship, developer-experience
It’s indeed important to hone your tools as well. Even though most things are not blocked due to tools, the right ones when well designed can make things easier.
https://two-wrongs.com/john-the-toolmaker
Tags: tech, complexity, reliability
Word of caution on how we tend to reason about complex systems. They don’t form a chain but a web, and that changes everything to understand how they can break.
https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2023/12/23/on-chains-and-complex-systems/
Tags: tech, dependencies, maintenance
This is an interesting metaphor. I’ll try to keep it in mind.
https://dubroy.com/blog/cold-blooded-software/
Tags: tech, community, smells, organization, quality
This study does a good job looking at the impact of community smells over the presence of code smells. This is an excellent reminder that the organization influences greatly the produced code.
Tags: tech, linkedin, developer-experience, metrics, productivity
Interesting framework. I wouldn’t take everything at face value, but this looks like a good source of inspiration to design your own.
https://linkedin.github.io/dph-framework/
Tags: tech, management, leadership
A bit too archetypal for my taste but there’s some truth to it. If you lean towards “explorer” (I think I do), it’s hard to be also a leader. Now you could be aware of your flaws and put tools in place to compensate for them when you need lead.
Bye for now! And see you in 2024!