Tags: web-review, performance, tools, safety, design, funny, databases, architecture, surveillance, c++, foss, security, self-hosting, python, hardware, nfc, privacy, cryptography, history, cpu, gpt, supply-chain, machine-learning, tech, politics, failure, research, version-control, pattern, memory, system, project-management, algorithm, crdt, distributed, law, tests, web, ai
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-26.
Tags: tech, surveillance, privacy, cryptography, law
Very neat piece, shows quite well the problems with Chat Control like laws. It’s been postponed this time, but expect it to comeback somehow.
https://mhatta.substack.com/p/chat-control-and-the-new-panopticon
Tags: tech, politics, law
This is becoming an important industry. Regulation is needed to avoid consumers to be in a mouse trap. This is necessary to reap the benefits of those technologies.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/26/unplanned-obsolescence/
Tags: tech, cpu, security
A new type of attack targeting the CPU indirect branch predictor.
https://indirector.cpusec.org/
Tags: tech, supply-chain, security, web
This is bad for two reasons: 1) people clearly put too much trust in random CDNs to distribute their dependencies and 2) people don’t track depencendies obsolescence properly.
https://sansec.io/research/polyfill-supply-chain-attack
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, foss, self-hosting
This is ignoring the energy consumption aspect. That said, it is spot on regarding the social and economics aspects of those transformer models. They have to be open and self hostable.
https://doc.searls.com/2024/05/28/the-peoples-ai/
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, research
Further clues that transformer models can’t learn logic from data.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11502
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, research
Interesting paper showing a promising path to reduce the memory and workload of transformer models. This is much more interesting than the race to the gigantic size.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02528
Tags: tech, nfc, hardware
Nice reverse engineering of a NFC chip used in a disposable transportation ticket.
https://www.righto.com/2024/06/montreal-mifare-ultralight-nfc.html
Tags: tech, crdt, self-hosting, privacy
Interesting approach for using CRDT through a file sync application. Probably something to see somehow generalized on traditional desktop applications.
https://tonsky.me/blog/crdt-filesync/
Tags: tech, databases, tools, tests
Interesting tool for diffing database tables. Should come in handy for tests.
https://reladiff.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
Tags: tech, performance
Interesting case, when everything else gets faster, memory copies might start to become the bottleneck.
https://lemire.me/blog/2024/06/22/performance-tip-avoid-unnecessary-copies/
Tags: tech, system, memory
If you needed to be reminded that allocating small blocks of memory is a bad idea… here is a paper explaining it.
https://lemire.me/blog/2024/06/27/how-much-memory-does-a-call-to-malloc-allocates/
explicitTags: tech, c++
Definitely not the rules you want to apply on your projects. Still it’s interesting to know how the STL uses explicit.
Tags: tech, python
This is a useful construct in Python which is often forgotten.
https://mathspp.com/blog/breaking-out-of-nested-loops-with-generators
Tags: tech, algorithm, pattern, design, architecture
A nice pattern to separate decision from actions in complex algorithms.
https://mmapped.blog/posts/29-plan-execute
Tags: tech, safety, distributed, failure
A nice zine introducing the topic of faults and failures in distributed systems.
https://decomposition.al/CSE138-2024-01/zines/zine-ali.pdf
Tags: tech, project-management, version-control
A nice collection of versioning schemes. I definitely didn’t know them all.
Tags: tech, history
Another story of precursors in the tech space. They basically invented the palmtop and spawned Symbian which was very much dominant on mobile for a while. The end of the Nokia story is a bit oversimplified for my taste just glancing over Maemo, but it is forgivable since it wasn’t the focus of this piece.
https://www.abortretry.fail/p/of-psion-and-symbian
Tags: tech, history, funny
I remember playing with this a long time again… but it’s actually even older than I suspected.
Bye for now!