Blogs

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-47.


In 1982, a physics joke gone wrong sparked the invention of the emoticon - Ars Technica

Tags: tech, history, culture

If you’re wondering where emoticons and emojis are coming from, this is a nice little piece about that.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/11/in-1982-a-physics-joke-gone-wrong-sparked-the-invention-of-the-emoticon/


Screw it, I’m installing Linux

Tags: tech, linux, foss, gaming

Clearly something is brewing right now. We’re seeing more and more people successfully switching.

https://www.theverge.com/tech/823337/switching-linux-gaming-desktop-cachyos


Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs—And They Have No Idea What They’re Doing

Tags: tech, vpn, privacy, law

This is totally misguided… Let’s hope no one will succeed passing such dangerously stupid bills.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/lawmakers-want-ban-vpns-and-they-have-no-idea-what-theyre-doing


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

If there’s one area where people should stay clear from LLMs, it’s definitely when they want to learn a topic. That’s one more study showing the knowledge you retain from LLMs briefs is shallower. The friction and the struggle to get to the information is a feature, our brain needs it to remember properly.

https://theconversation.com/learning-with-ai-falls-short-compared-to-old-fashioned-web-search-269760


The Psychogenic Machine: Simulating AI Psychosis, Delusion Reinforcement and Harm Enablement in Large Language Models

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, psychology, safety

The findings in this paper are chilling… especially considering what fragile people are doing with those chat bots.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10970v1


Feeds, Feelings, and Focus: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Examining the Cognitive and Mental Health Correlates of Short-Form Video Use

Tags: tech, social-media, cognition, psychology

Unsurprisingly the news ain’t good on the front of social media and short form videos. Better stay clear of those.

https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2026-89350-001.html


Do Not Put Your Site Behind Cloudflare if You Don’t Need To

Tags: tech, cloud, decentralized, web

Friendly reminder following the Cloudflare downtime earlier this week.

https://huijzer.xyz/posts/123/do-not-put-your-site-behind-cloudflare-if-you-dont


Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025

Tags: tech, cloud, complexity, safety, rust

Wondering what happened at Cloudflare? Here is their postmortem, this is an interesting read. Now for Rust developers… this is a good illustration of why you should stay clear from unwrap() in production code.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/


Needy Programs

Tags: tech, ux, notifications

Kind of ignore the security impact of the needed upgrades, but apart from this I largely agree. Most applications try to push more features in your face nowadays, unneeded notifications and all… this is frankly exhausting the users.

https://tonsky.me/blog/needy-programs/


I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla

Tags: tech, browser, ai, machine-learning, gpt, mozilla

Looks like Mozilla is doing everything it can to alienate the current Firefox user base and to push forward its forks.

https://manualdousuario.net/en/mozilla-firefox-window-ai/


DeepMind’s latest: An AI for handling mathematical proofs

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, mathematics, google

That’s an interesting approach. Early days on this one, it clearly requires further work but it seems like the proper path for math related problems.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/11/deepminds-latest-an-ai-for-handling-mathematical-proofs/


Production-Grade Container Deployment with Podman Quadlets

Tags: tech, systemd, containers, linux, system, podman

Podman is really a nice option for deploying containers nowadays.

https://blog.hofstede.it/production-grade-container-deployment-with-podman-quadlets/


Match it again Sam

Tags: tech, regex, rust

Nice alternative syntax to the good old regular expressions. Gives nice structure to it all. There’s a Rust crate to try it out.

https://www.sminez.dev/match-it-again-sam/


10 Smart Performance Hacks For Faster Python Code

Tags: tech, python, performance

Some of this might sound obvious I guess. Still there are interesting lesser known nuggets proposed here.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2025/11/10-smart-performance-hacks-for-faster-python-code/


Floodfill algorithm in Python

Tags: tech, python, algorithm, graphics

This is a nice little algorithm and it shows how to approach it in Python while keeping it efficient in term of operations.

https://mathspp.com/blog/floodfill-algorithm-in-python


AMD vs. Intel: a Unicode benchmark

Tags: tech, amd, intel, hardware, simd, performance

Clearly AMD is now well above Intel in performance around AVX-512. This is somewhat unexpected.

https://lemire.me/blog/2025/11/16/amd-vs-intel-a-unicode-benchmark/


Memory is slow, Disk is fast

Tags: tech, memory, storage, performance, system

No, don’t go assuming you can use disks instead of ram. This is not what it is about. It shows ways to get more out of your disks though. It’s not something you always need, but sometimes it can be a worth endeavor.

https://www.bitflux.ai/blog/memory-is-slow-part2/


Compiler Options Hardening Guide for C and C++

Tags: tech, c++, security

Good list of hardening options indeed. That’s a lot to deal with of course, let’s hope this spreads and some defaults are changed to make it easier.

https://best.openssf.org/Compiler-Hardening-Guides/Compiler-Options-Hardening-Guide-for-C-and-C++.html


The problem with inferring from a function call operator is that there may be more than one

Tags: tech, c++, type-systems, safety

The type inference in C++ can indeed lead to this kind of traps. Need to be careful as usual.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20251002-00/?p=111647


There’s always going to be a way to not code error handling

Tags: tech, programming, safety, failure

Depending on the ecosystem it’s more or less easy indeed. Let’s remember that error handling is one of the hard problems to solve.

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


Disallow code usage with a custom clippy.toml

Tags: tech, rust, tools, quality

Didn’t know about that clippy feature. This is neat, allows to precisely target some of your project rules.

https://www.schneems.com/2025/11/19/find-accidental-code-usage-with-a-custom-clippytoml/


The Geometry Behind Normal Maps

Tags: tech, 3d, graphics, shader

Struggling to understand tangent space and normal maps? This post does a good job to explain where this comes from.

https://www.shlom.dev/articles/geometry-behind-normal-maps/


Know why you don’t like OOP

Tags: tech, object-oriented

I don’t get why object oriented programming gets so much flack these days… It brings interesting tools and less interesting ones. Just pick and choose wisely like for any other paradigm.

https://zylinski.se/posts/know-why-you-dont-like-oop/


Ditch your (mut)ex, you deserve better

Tags: tech, multithreading, safety

If you’re dealing with multithreading you should not turn to mutexes by default indeed. Consider higher level primitives and patterns first.

https://chrispenner.ca/posts/mutexes


Brownouts reveal system boundaries

Tags: tech, infrastructure, reliability, failure, resilience

Interesting point of view. Indeed, you probably want things to not be available 100% of the time. This forces you to see how resilient things really are.

https://jyn.dev/brownouts-reveal-system-boundaries/


Tech Leads in Scrum

Tags: tech, agile, scrum, tech-lead, leadership

Interesting move on the Scrum definitions to move from roles to accountabilities. The article does a good job explaining it but then falls back into talking about roles somehow. Regarding the tech leads indeed they can work in Scrum teams. Scrum don’t talk about them simply because Scrum don’t talk about technical skills.

https://www.patkua.com/blog/tech-leads-in-scrum/


How to Avoid Solo Product Leadership Failure with a Product Value Team

Tags: tech, agile, product-management

I wonder what the whole series will give. Anyway I very much agree with this first post. Too often projects have a single product manager and that’s a problem.

https://www.jrothman.com/mpd/2025/11/how-to-avoid-solo-product-leadership-failure-with-a-product-value-team-part-1/



Bye for now!