Blogs

Turns out I managed to squeeze reading here and there and have enough content for a regular review… So let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-15.


Fairbuds are Fairphone’s proof that we really could make better tiny gadgets | Ars Technica

Tags: tech, repair, sound, hardware

Another type of devices where clearly they could be repairable and batteries could be swappable if manufacturers would put care in the design. At least, Fairphone is showing it’s doable.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/fairbuds-take-the-fairphones-repairability-down-to-seemingly-impossible-size/?comments=1


The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics

Tags: tech, gpu, 3d, history

Interesting history behind the company which was instrumental in pushing computer graphics forward during its time.

https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-silicon-graphics


Software eco-design: investigating and reducing the energy consumption of software

Tags: tech, performance, energy, ecology, java, research

More work about eco-design of software. This is definitely welcome. I found this work a bit weak on the state of the art and the interview parts (10 people in the same company). But the field is so nascent that it’s to be expected I guess, PhD students have to do with what they have access to. Unsurprisingly this shows a great lack of proper tools to tackle the measurement problem. This thesis shows interesting prospects to reduce variations in measurements though, some of the proposed guidelines might help but cannot offset the hardware heterogeneity completely… The parts focusing on practical advices around Java use and deployment are interestingly easy to apply though. You need to take into account the context of your application to make the right choices of course.

https://theses.hal.science/tel-03429300/document


The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, cognition, criticism, scam

Interesting take on why people see more in LLM based systems than there really is. The parallels with psychics and mentalists tricks are well thought out.

https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/


The Assist @ Things Of Interest

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, copilot, gpt, programming

All the good reasons why productivity increases with code assistants are massively overestimated. To be used why not, but with a light touch.

https://qntm.org/assist


Hello OLMo: A truly open LLM

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, open-access, research

This is how it should be done. This one comes with everything needed to reproduce the results. This is necessary to gain insights into how such models work internally.

https://blog.allenai.org/hello-olmo-a-truly-open-llm-43f7e7359222


The lifecycle of a code AI completion

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, copilot, programming, architecture

Wondering how one can design a coding assistant? Here is an in depth explanation of the choices made by one of the solutions out there. There’s quite some processing before and after actually running the inference with the LLM.

https://sourcegraph.com/blog/the-lifecycle-of-a-code-ai-completion


Results summary: 2024 Annual C++ Developer Survey “Lite” : Standard C++

Tags: tech, c++

Some interesting insights in this survey. It helps identify common concerns.

https://isocpp.org/blog/2024/04/results-summary-2024-annual-cpp-developer-survey-lite


Glory is only 11MB/sec away

Tags: tech, cloud, infrastructure, cost

When you do the math, the cloud offerings look very expensive for most workload indeed.

https://thmsmlr.com/cheap-infra


Building My First Homelab Server Rack · mtlynch.io

Tags: tech, hardware, homelab, self-hosting

Considering using a server rack for a homelab? This is a nice tutorial with plenty of advices.

https://mtlynch.io/building-first-homelab-rack/


Intro to TLS Certificates

Tags: tech, cryptography, tls, certificates, security

The title says it all. This article is a nice introduction to certificates, how they work, how the trust model is setup, etc.

https://carrickbartle.com/certificates.html


ratarmount: Access large archives as a filesystem efficiently

Tags: tech, tools, archive

Looks like a nice tool to manipulate large archives.

https://github.com/mxmlnkn/ratarmount


Hermit: A reproducible container

Tags: tech, debugging, tools, multithreading

Looks like an interesting tool to analyze hard to reproduce bugs, especially when concurrency is involved. This could be useful to find the source of flaky tests as well.

https://github.com/facebookexperimental/hermit


my deployment platform is a shell script

Tags: tech, self-hosting, deployment, complexity, shell, scripting

Keep things as simple as possible, they might turn out to be robust too.

https://j3s.sh/thought/my-deployment-platform-is-a-shell-script.html


Shell History Is Your Best Productivity Tool

Tags: tech, shell, zsh

A few interesting tips to improve history management with ZSH.

https://martinheinz.dev/blog/110


The Blessing of the Strings

Tags: tech, web, browser, javascript, reliability

Looks like an interesting mechanism to improve the reliability of web applications. Let’s see what people make with those trusted types.

https://bkardell.com/blog/blessing-strings.html


Don’t require people to change ‘source code’ to configure your programs

Tags: tech, programming, portability, craftsmanship

Hopefully nobody is handling configuration by assuming the user will modify the source code or build scripts by hand. Unfortunately I still encounter it from time to time…

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/ConfigureNoSourceCodeChanges


If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it? • Buttondown

Tags: tech, object-oriented, history

Interesting look at the history of inheritance in programming languages. There’s clearly still room for improvements on this concept.

https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/if-inheritance-is-so-bad-why-does-everyone-use-it/


Thoughts on Pair Programming - DEV Community

Tags: tech, programming, pairing

Good criteria to decide to pair or not. This is still not practiced enough. Maybe knowing when it’s best to reach out to pair will help get more into it.

https://dev.to/shaharke/thoughts-on-pair-programming-1i8g


What I think about when I edit — Eva Parish

Tags: documentation, writing

Good advices to improve writing. I should apply such rules to myself more often.

https://evaparish.com/blog/how-i-edit


Simple Ways to Show Appreciation at Work

Tags: management, empathy

Plenty of good tricks in there. It has to be genuine of course, but said tricks reduce chances of unwillingly dropping the ball on the topic.

https://hbr.org/2023/10/simple-ways-to-show-appreciation-at-work


On Generating Ideas - Leadership & Work

Tags: meetings, leadership

This is indeed the best approach I’ve seen for brainstorming. It gives a chance to everyone to bring something forward, even the introverts.

https://read.perspectiveship.com/p/on-generating-ideas



Bye for now!