Tags: web-review, version-control, copilot, social-media, gpt, tests, complexity, systemd, server, git, refactoring, wikipedia, tdd, engineering, machine-learning, philosophy, hardware, legacy, logging, programming, simd, reliability, law, unix, documentation, gafam, ai, culture, multithreading, quality, rust, kernel, optimisation, europe, management, services, performance, tools, history, tech, reading, command-line, politics, surveillance, trust
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2026-10.
Tags: tech, law, surveillance
The stupid idea of age verification keeps spreading with ridiculous laws…
Tags: tech, surveillance, law
Those dangerous and stupid laws keep popping out unfortunately. This is clearly a slippery slope as shown from the New York bill… We need to push back or the demands will keep growing. Let’s hope Free Software communities won’t try to preemptively comply, this would be short sighted and self-sabotage.
https://blog.system76.com/post/system76-on-age-verification
Tags: tech, europe, law, politics, gafam
What could possibly go wrong? This is really a weird appointment.
Tags: tech, quality, law
Is Norway about to become one of the first countries to become serious about enshittification? Will more follow? This would be welcome.
https://www.forbrukerradet.no/breakingfree/
Tags: tech, wikipedia, ai, machine-learning, gpt, quality
This is concerning, hopefully the amount of issues which get through will be limited.
https://www.404media.co/ai-translations-are-adding-hallucinations-to-wikipedia-articles/
Tags: tech, reading, culture, history, social-media
Yes there’s a dip, but this piece presents compelling evidence that it’s not the death of literacy we’re sometimes screaming at. It is also a love letter to reading and writing.
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/text-is-king?ref=DenseDiscovery-378
pre-commit, re-engineered in RustTags: tech, version-control, git, tools, quality
This looks tempting. I guess I’ll try this one instead of pre-commit when I get the chance.
Tags: tech, documentation, unix, tools, command-line
Didn’t know about this one. Looks like a nice alternative to the venerable man command.
Tags: tech, multithreading, reliability
Interesting piece which challenges the shared-memory vs. message-passing dichotomy. It message passing indeed gets rid of data races but nothing more. Of course this is nice already, but that doesn’t mean you can’t have the other families of concurrency bugs creeping in.
https://causality.blog/essays/message-passing-is-shared-mutable-state/
Tags: tech, server, services, performance
We got options beyond poll() nowadays.
https://geocar.sdf1.org/fast-servers.html
Tags: tech, rust, optimisation, simd
Yes, Rust like C++ comes with zero cost abstractions. Still they can get in the way of some compiler optimisations. This is an interesting case preventing vectorisation.
https://turbopuffer.com/blog/zero-cost
Tags: tech, kernel, systemd, hardware
Wondering how udev communicates with the kernel? And then broadcast events? This covers the basics.
https://arcanenibble.github.io/hardware-hotplug-events-on-linux-the-gory-details.html
Tags: tech, logging
A reminder that logs are not for the developers first but for operation.
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/LogMessagesAreForOperation
Tags: tech, engineering, complexity, management
Rampant complexity in software is also a management issue. Are we sure we’re rewarding the right things?
https://terriblesoftware.org/2026/03/03/nobody-gets-promoted-for-simplicity/
Tags: tech, tests, tdd
It’s been a while that I started to consider the test pyramid as fairly limiting for our thinking about tests. The dimensions proposed here give a more comprehensive model to reason about.
https://coding-is-like-cooking.info/2026/02/go-beyond-the-test-pyramid-test-desiderata-2-0/
Tags: tech, refactoring, legacy
You probably want to complete this with a higher level plan if the goal is a larger modernization. That being said, it’s a good approach for mid-level to small goals you’d want to tackle.
https://understandlegacycode.com/blog/a-process-to-do-safe-changes-in-a-complex-codebase/
Tags: tech, programming, history, ai, machine-learning, copilot
This fantasy regularly comes back. Yet, the tools evolve, might improve some things but the core difficulties of programming don’t change. At each hype cycle our industry over promises and under delivers, this is unnecessary.
https://www.ivanturkovic.com/2026/01/22/history-software-simplification-cobol-ai-hype/
Tags: tech, programming, engineering, ai, machine-learning, gpt
Very good essay on why the developer profession is not going away. On the contrary we need to double down on essential skills and put in the work. This is long overdue anyway.
https://htmx.org/essays/yes-and/
Tags: philosophy, trust
Interesting point, looking for agency seems like a good criteria. It highlights it’s not a simple test though. I’d add that trust matters and that’s built over time.
Bye for now!