Blogs

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-46.


No GPS required: our app can now locate underground trains

Tags: tech, mobile, sensors, gps, transportation

Now this is definitely a smart trick to estimate position in tunnels.

https://blog.transitapp.com/go-underground/


OpenAI, Google and Anthropic Are Struggling to Build More Advanced AI - Bloomberg

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt

More signs of the generative AI companies hitting a plateau…

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-13/openai-google-and-anthropic-are-struggling-to-build-more-advanced-ai


Releasing the largest multilingual open pretraining dataset

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, data, copyright, licensing

It shouldn’t be, but it is a big deal. Having such training corpus openly available is one of the big missing pieces to build models.

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Nov/14/releasing-the-largest-multilingual-open-pretraining-dataset/#atom-blogmarks


Everything I’ve learned so far about running local LLMs

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

This is an interesting and balanced view. Also nice to see that local inference is really getting closer. This is mostly a UI problem now.

https://nullprogram.com/blog/2024/11/10/


When Machine Learning Tells the Wrong Story

Tags: tech, cpu, hardware, security, privacy, research

Fascinating research about side-channel attacks. Learned a lot about them and website fingerprinting here. Also interesting the explanations of how the use of machine learning models can actually get in the way of proper understanding of the side-channel really used by an attack which can prevent developing actually useful counter-measures.

https://jackcook.com/2024/11/09/bigger-fish.html


Abusing Ubuntu 24.04 features for root privilege escalation

Tags: tech, linux, security

Nice chain of attacks. This shows more than one vulnerability needs to be leveraged to lead to root access. This provides valuable lessons.

https://snyk.io/blog/abusing-ubuntu-root-privilege-escalation/


Way too many ways to wait on a child process with a timeout

Tags: tech, unix, linux, system

The title says it all. This is very fragmented and there are several options to fulfill the task. Knowing the tradeoffs can be handy.

https://gaultier.github.io/blog/way_too_many_ways_to_wait_for_a_child_process_with_a_timeout.html


The CVM Algorithm

Tags: tech, databases, algorithm

This is a nice view into how a query planner roughly works and a nice algorithm which can be used internally to properly estimate the number of distinct values in a column.

https://buttondown.com/jaffray/archive/the-cvm-algorithm/


Mergiraf

Tags: tech, version-control, git, tools, conflict

Looks like a nice way to improve handling of merge conflicts. I’ll test this one out.

https://mergiraf.org/


Opposite of Cloud Native is?

Tags: tech, cloud, complexity, vendor-lockin, self-hosting

Definitely a good post. No you don’t have to go all in with cloud providers and signing with your blood. It’s often much more expensive for little gain but much more complexity and vendor lock in.

https://mkennedy.codes/posts/opposite-of-cloud-native-is-stack-native/


Booleans Are a Trap

Tags: tech, design, type-systems

Avoiding boolean parameters in library APIs should be a well known advice by now. Still they should probably be avoided when modeling domain types as well.

https://katafrakt.me/2024/11/09/booleans-are-a-trap/


Complex for Whom?

Tags: tech, design, complexity

Good musing about complexity. Very often we need to move it around, the important question is where should it appear. For sure you don’t want it scattered everywhere.

https://notes.billmill.org/link_blog/2024/11/Complex_forWhom.html


What makes concurrency so hard?

Tags: tech, distributed, complexity

Interesting reasoning about what is hard in systems with concurrency. It’s definitely about the state space of the system and the structure of that space.

https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/what-makes-concurrency-so-hard/


Algorithms we develop software by

Tags: tech, programming, craftsmanship, engineering, problem-solving

Interesting musing on the heuristics we use when solving problems. There are good advices in there to make progress and become a better developer.

https://grantslatton.com/software-pathfinding



Bye for now!