Blogs

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-01. First one of 2024, Happy New Year to all!


In 2024, please switch to Firefox – Roy Tanck

Tags: tech, mozilla, foss, web

Alright, it’s 2024… Looking for a New Year Resolution? This is definitely the one you should contemplate! Maybe also prepare your switch to Plasma 6, but different story. 😉

https://roytanck.com/2023/12/23/in-2024-please-switch-to-firefox/


 The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again

Tags: tech, web, culture, social-media

Very inspiring article. I really wish we’ll indeed see more and more weird and creative websites. People apparently feels uneasy in their current social media jails, the time is ripe to leap in the unknown again.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-commentary/internet-future-about-to-get-weird-1234938403/


EU CRA: What does it mean for open source? - Bert Hubert’s writings

Tags: tech, foss, law

The current compromise might not be as bad as anticipated. Some things could be improved still. The community needs to be involved in the process.

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/eu-cra-what-does-it-mean-for-open-source/


Birb + Fossil: An RSS Revival? - Tim Kellogg

Tags: tech, fediverse, rss, ai, nlp

Indeed there are a few trends at play right now which lead to RSS being in use again. I can only hope it’ll keep growing.

https://timkellogg.me/blog/2024/01/03/birb


How bad are search results? Let’s compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT

Tags: tech, search, web

This looks like now is the time for smaller search engines to shine. Clearly the dominant ones are not doing a really good job anymore.

https://danluu.com/seo-spam/


Tesla blamed drivers for failures of parts it long knew were defective

Tags: tech, tesla, automotive, safety

The results of this investigation are actually super scary… Even if you don’t own one, those are in our streets. In any case it is a clear statement that you can’t and shall not run an automotive company like a startup…

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/tesla-musk-steering-suspension/


The I in LLM stands for intelligence | daniel.haxx.se

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, security

When bug bounty programs meet LLM hallucinations… developer time is wasted.

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/01/02/the-i-in-llm-stands-for-intelligence/


How I forked SteamOS for my living room PC — iliana.fyi

Tags: tech, valve, foss, linux, system

Funny reverse engineering of the latest SteamOS to use it in a different context. Give some information on their system design.

https://iliana.fyi/blog/build-your-own-steamos-updates/


Why I’m skeptical of low-code - Nick Scialli | Senior Software Engineer

Tags: tech, low-code

Proper word of caution. Those tools ain’t necessarily bad… but know what the limits will be.

https://nick.scialli.me/blog/why-im-skeptical-of-low-code/


How Standard Ebooks serves millions of requests per month with a 2GB VPS; or, a paean to the classic web - Alex Cabal

Tags: tech, complexity, craftsmanship, dependencies, php, web

Nice ode to simplifying web projects, to great effects. You can go a long way serving millions of requests if you choose your tools properly.

https://alexcabal.com/posts/standard-ebooks-and-classic-web-tech


A Closer Look to a Key-Value Storage Engine | Yihang’s Blog

Tags: tech, system, design, architecture, databases

Very interesting exploration of the design choices behind the creation of a key value storage engine.

https://silhding.github.io/2021/08/20/A-Closer-Look-to-a-Key-Value-Storage-Engine/


SQLALchemy vs Django ORM | Alexey Evseev

Tags: tech, databases, python, orm, django

Overview of the differences in behavior between the two most popular ORMs in the Python ecosystem. This shows interesting different design options for such things.

https://st4lk.github.io/en/blog/2023/12/09/sqlalchemy-vs-django-orm/


The ugrep file pattern searcher

Tags: tech, tools, command-line

Looks like another nice grep alternative. This one keeps its command line interface compatible with grep which is nice, not the case for other alternatives and that turns out to be my main gripe with them.

https://ugrep.com/


Container to WASM converter

Tags: tech, docker, webassembly

This makes for quite a few emulation layers stacked on each other. Still this is an interesting experiment.

https://github.com/ktock/container2wasm


Profilerpedia

Tags: tech, profiling

Nice reference for the tools available to profile software.

https://profilerpedia.markhansen.co.nz/


Occupancy explained

Tags: tech, amd, gpu, shader, performance

A very precise and thorough article about GPU occupancy. What it is, how it relates to perceived performances, it’s potentisl relationship with cache thrashing and the tools you can use to measure it on AMD GPUs.

https://gpuopen.com/learn/occupancy-explained/


Speed up your code: don’t pass structs bigger than 16 bytes on AMD64 · GitHub

Tags: tech, c++, assembly, performance

Not necessarily a practical advice in most of our daily code. Still this exhibits interesting low level details about argument passing. Might come in handy in a few cases, to be kept in mind.

https://gist.github.com/FeepingCreature/5dff669aad380a123b15659e195fb96c


Ambient Co-presence

Tags: tech, web, design

Good food for thought regarding shared presence on the web. A few good ideas in the design space. Obviously very web centric, I wonder what we could do on the desktop with shared documents for instance.

https://maggieappleton.com/ambient-copresence


The value of canonicity - Building Nubank

Tags: tech, engineering, management, developer-experience

Nice writeup about the benefits of homogeneity in an engineering organization. It also shows how it is a balancing act though, since you need experiments to happen in a controlled way for evolution to still happen.

https://building.nubank.com.br/the-value-of-canonicity/



Bye for now!