Let’s go for my web review for the week 2026-09.

Easily Replaceable USB-C Port Spawned By EU Laws

Tags: tech, usb, repair

Since these ports are becoming more and more pervasive, it’s nice to see a replaceable and repairable option on the market.

https://hackaday.com/2026/02/26/easily-replaceable-usb-c-port-spawned-by-eu-laws/

On Alliances

Tags: politics, ethics, culture

The previous piece about the disagreement with Cory Doctorow was a good one even though I didn’t put it in my review. This one is more important though! It’s a necessary reminder that we can’t put allies on a pedestal and then scream at them making mistakes or having different opinions. We can’t afford this kind of purity culture… Especially right now.

https://tante.cc/2026/02/20/on-alliances/

The Slow Death of the Power User

Tags: tech, foss, hacking, culture, business, surveillance, vendor-lockin, knowledge

Clearly the author is angry and he has every right to be. By closing platforms and fighting against tinkering, the big tech companies try to kill of the power user and hacker cultures. By letting this happen we all loose as a society.

https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/the-slow-death-of-the-power-user/

Velocity Is the New Authority. Here’s Why

Tags: tech, information, attention-economy, culture, journalism

Interesting food for thought about the information ecosystem we live in. It’s been distorted by the constant stream of content, so it’s very hard to find the good journalism within the noise.

https://om.co/2026/01/21/velocity-is-the-new-authority-heres-why/

I Verified My LinkedIn Identity. Here’s What I Actually Handed Over

Tags: tech, linkedin, social-media, surveillance

Could it get more intrusive than this? It’s really handing over sensitive data to shady companies…

https://thelocalstack.eu/posts/linkedin-identity-verification-privacy/

I hacked ChatGPT and Google’s AI - and it only took 20 minutes

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, knowledge, security, trust

One more example that it should be used for NLP tasks, not knowledge related tasks. The model makers are consuming so much data indiscriminately that they can’t easily fine comb everything to remove the poisoned information.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt-and-googles-ai-and-it-only-took-20-minutes

Facebook is absolutely cooked

Tags: tech, gafam, facebook, attention-economy, ai

If you’re wondering the kind of dumpster fire Facebook is now, that gives an idea. It was crap all along for sure, but clearly they crossed another threshold.

https://pilk.website/3/facebook-is-absolutely-cooked

Child’s Play - Tech’s new generation and the end of thinking

Tags: tech, culture, business

It feels like staring in the abyss… rather sad I’d say.

https://harpers.org/archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai-startup-roy-lee/

Vulnerability as a Service

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

The OpenClaw instances running around are really a security hazard…

https://herman.bearblog.dev/vulnerability-as-a-service/

Reviewing “How AI Impacts Skill Formation”

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, science, research

I was so waiting for someone motivated enough to publish a review of that paper. I indeed threw it away as weak after reading it. Thanks for taking the time to write this up! This is good scientific inquiry… and it shows there were interesting findings in the paper that the authors decided to just ignore.

https://jenniferplusplus.com/reviewing-how-ai-impacts-skill-formation/

The path to ubiquitous AI

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, hardware, performance, power

Still a bit mysterious but could be interesting if they really deliver.

https://taalas.com/the-path-to-ubiquitous-ai/

The power play behind Hyperion

Tags: tech, gafam, facebook, ai, machine-learning, gpt, politics, business, economics, ecology

This planned giant data center by Meta shows how the big players are grabbing land to satisfy their hubris. So much waste all around.

https://sherwood.news/tech/hyperion/

Too many satellites? Earth’s orbit is on track for a catastrophe – but we can stop it

Tags: tech, geospatial, law, politics

There’s clearly a regulation gap for satellites. We’ve been putting way too many of them in orbit the past decade and it’s currently going to accelerate. This jeopardizes the night sky, astronomy and the possibility of space exploration. Clearly we’re making the wrong choices here.

https://theconversation.com/too-many-satellites-earths-orbit-is-on-track-for-a-catastrophe-but-we-can-stop-it-275430

Cosmologically Unique IDs

Tags: tech, uuid, physics, mathematics, funny

Really fun thought experiment. What if we need truly unique IDs at universe scale? Several options are explored.

https://jasonfantl.com/posts/Universal-Unique-IDs/

Making WebAssembly a first-class language on the Web

Tags: tech, web, standard, webassembly

There is indeed a path for better support for WebAssembly on the Web platform. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take a decade to get there.

https://hacks.mozilla.org/2026/02/making-webassembly-a-first-class-language-on-the-web/

Cleaning up merged git branches: a one-liner from the CIA’s leaked dev docs

Tags: tech, git, version-control, tools

Nice little git trick. We can all thank the CIA I guess?

https://spencer.wtf/2026/02/20/cleaning-up-merged-git-branches-a-one-liner-from-the-cias-leaked-dev-docs.html

brat: Brutal Runner for Automated Tests

Tags: tech, unix, posix, shell, tests, tools

Interesting shell based test framework targeting pure POSIX. This makes it fairly portable. It feels a bit raw but there are a few interesting ideas in there.

https://codeberg.org/sstephenson/brat

codespelunker - CLI code search tool that understands code structure

Tags: tech, command-line, tools, programming, search

Looks like a good tool when you need to search for stuff in codebases.

https://github.com/boyter/cs

sandbox-exec: macOS’s Little-Known Command-Line Sandboxing Tool

Tags: tech, security, sandbox, apple

Looks like a neat little tool in the Mac ecosystem. It seems to make sandboxing easy despite a couple of caveats.

https://igorstechnoclub.com/sandbox-exec/

Lyte2D

Tags: tech, game, lua

Looks like a neat little lua based game engine for simple 2D.

https://lyte2d.com/

Ordered Dithering with Arbitrary or Irregular Colour Palettes

Tags: tech, colors, graphics

There’s something I find fascinating about dithering somehow. Here are more algorithms and approach to compare side by side.

https://matejlou.blog/2023/12/06/ordered-dithering-for-arbitrary-or-irregular-palettes/

Django ORM Standalone: Querying an existing database

Tags: tech, django, orm, databases

Interesting first article, I wonder what the rest of the series will have in store. In any case this shows how practical it is to use the Django ORM standalone. This opens the door to nice use cases.

https://www.paulox.net/2026/02/20/django-orm-standalone-database-inspectdb-query/

Parse, don’t Validate and Type-Driven Design in Rust

Tags: tech, rust, reliability, failure, type-systems

Short explanation of why you want to make invalid state impossible to represent. This leads to nice properties in your code, the price to pay is introducing more types to encode the invariants of course.

https://www.harudagondi.space/blog/parse-dont-validate-and-type-driven-design-in-rust/

Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures

Tags: tech, algorithm, data

An interesting resource, good way to match problems to algorithms and data structures.

https://xlinux.nist.gov/dads/

SFQ: Simple, Stateless, Stochastic Fairness

Tags: tech, services, distributed, queuing, performance

Interesting approach to provide more fairness to client requests.

https://brooker.co.za/blog/2026/02/25/sfq.html

Read Locks Are Not Your Friends

Tags: tech, multithreading, performance

A good reminder that on modern hardware read-write locks are rarely the solution despite the documentation claims.

https://eventual-consistency.vercel.app/posts/write-locks-faster

On the question of debt

Tags: tech, technical-debt, organisation, ai, machine-learning, copilot

Interesting point, there are indeed different types of “debt” in the systems we build. It likely help to be more precise about their nature, and indeed assisted coding might help grow a particular kind of debt.

https://medium.com/mapai/on-the-question-of-debt-aca1125d4a62

The Man Who Stole Infinity

Tags: science, mathematics, history

Fascinating story about the little known Cantor big mistake. This also shows once more, that even though we like to put people on pedestals and look for a “lone genius” or a “hero”, discoveries are always a process of several minds playing of each other.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-man-who-stole-infinity-20260225/

How far back in time can you understand English?

Tags: linguistics, history

This is an excellent piece if you like linguistics and its historical component. It shows quite well how much English changed over the centuries.

https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-back-in-time-understand-english

We need to talk about naked mole rats

Tags: science, biology, nature, funny

Yes we do need to talk more about them. They are ugly… but they are awesome! (in a scary way)

https://theoatmeal.com/comics/naked_mole_rats

Bye for now!

We're happy to announce the release of version 1.12.0 of the Qt Extension for Visual Studio Code! This is our biggest release yet, featuring PySide6 support, full CMake Presets integration, Qt translation file support, and many other improvements across the board.

We are happy to announce the release of Qt Creator 19 RC.

During this Season of KDE, we made a lot of design changes to the Mankala Engine. We successfully redesigned most of the components including the entire home page, boards and game variants. Now I was in the middle of creating a new cover image to select game variants. I tried to create a natural wooden board for Bohnenspiel, and well, we got most of the things nicely done.

Designing a board

I had used perlin noise and a custom shader to give the wooden-like texture to the board. I used this function in our shader for the random generation of the particles.

glsl
float rand(vec2 n) { 
    return fract(sin(dot(n, vec2(12.9898, 4.1414))) * 43758.5453);
}

To get a smooth, wooden-like surface, I used a function that interpolates between these random points. After experimenting with it a bit, I mixed and blended them with random values and was able to get a continuous noise surface.

glsl
float n = noise(v.yx * vec2(2.0, 12.0));
float rings = sin(v.x * 20.0 + n * 10.0);

Improvements in Wooden Texture

But to get the wood effect, this was still not enough, as if we were to render this directly, then we would have gotten a blurry, cloud-like texture. So, we stretched the noise heavily across one axis to give it a wave-like effect, having a more similar texture to a board. This made a color stretch of dark and light brown.

qml
ShaderEffect {
    anchors.fill: parent
    property real time: 0.0
    property variant color1: "#8B4513"
    property variant color2: "#D2691E"

Final look

I used QML's ShaderEffect component to compile it and connect it to the MenuCard component in Mankala, which would act as a cover image while selecting Bohnenspiel. At last, I added some shadows and depth to make it more realistic, giving a feel of wood carving to the board.

Here is a sample qml wood generator to try:

You can run the below code in a qml project and see the noise generated in a few simple steps.

import QtQuick 2.15
import QtQuick.Window 2.15
Window {
    width: 640; height: 480; visible: true; title: "Procedural Wood Shader"
    ShaderEffect {
        anchors.fill: parent
        property variant color1: "#3b2310" 
        property variant color2: "#7a4b24" 
        
        fragmentShader: "
            varying highp vec2 qt_TexCoord0;
            uniform lowp vec4 color1;
            uniform lowp vec4 color2;
            
            float rand(vec2 n) { 
                return fract(sin(dot(n, vec2(12.9898, 4.1414))) * 43758.5453);
            }
            float noise(vec2 n) {
                const vec2 d = vec2(0.0, 1.0);
                vec2 b = floor(n), f = smoothstep(vec2(0.0), vec2(1.0), fract(n));
                return mix(mix(rand(b), rand(b + d.yx), f.x), mix(rand(b + d.xy), rand(b + d.yy), f.x), f.y);
            }
            void main() {
                vec2 v = qt_TexCoord0;
                float n = noise(v.yx * vec2(2.0, 15.0));
                float rings = sin(v.x * 30.0 + n * 8.0);
                float woodGradiant = smoothstep(-0.8, 0.8, rings);
                gl_FragColor = mix(color1, color2, woodGradiant);
            }
        "
    }
}

While the small circular pits and the rectangulular spaces use the exact same logic but the rectangles look better due presence of a darker color and use of Drop Shadow which gives it a much more premium and wood like look.

References & useful resources

• https://madaror.github.io/tiled-diffusion.github.io/ - Image tiling using diffusion

• https://pbr-book.org/3ed-2018/Texture/Noise - Noise Generation

• https://dev.to/hexshift/how-to-generate-realistic-random-terrain-in-python-using-perlin-noise-3ch5 - Generation of random terrain using Perlin noise

• https://www.sci.utah.edu/~leenak/IndStudy_reportfall/Perlin%20Noise%20on%20GPU.html - Implementation of Perlin Noise on GPU

Thanks for reading :)

When introducing QRangeModel for Qt 6.10 I wrote that we'd try to tackle some limitations in future releases. In Qt 611, QRangeModel supports caching ranges like std::views::filter, and provides a customization point for reading from and writing role-data to items that are not gadgets, objects, or associative containers. The two biggest additions make it possible to safely operate on the underlying model data and structure without using QAbstractItemModel API.

Today we're releasing Krita 5.2.16. The previous version of 5.2 had issues with saving heif, heic and avif files, and while we are busy preparing 5.3, we decided this was worth it to make another release over.

Download

Windows

If you're using the portable zip files, just open the zip file in Explorer and drag the folder somewhere convenient, then double-click on the Krita icon in the folder. This will not impact an installed version of Krita, though it will share your settings and custom resources with your regular installed version of Krita. For reporting crashes, also get the debug symbols folder.

[!NOTE] We are no longer making 32-bit Windows builds.

• 64 bits Windows Installer: krita-x64-5.2.16-setup.exe

• Portable 64 bits Windows: krita-x64-5.2.16.zip

• Debug symbols. (Unpack in the Krita installation folder)

Linux

Note: starting with recent releases, the minimum supported distro versions may change.

[!WARNING] Starting with recent AppImage runtime updates, some AppImageLauncher versions may be incompatible. See AppImage runtime docs for troubleshooting.

• 64 bits Linux: krita-5.2.16-x86_64.AppImage

MacOS

Note: minimum supported MacOS may change between releases.

• MacOS disk image: krita-5.2.16-signed.dmg

Android

Krita on Android is still beta; tablets only.

• 64 bits Intel CPU APK

• 64 bits Arm CPU APK

• 32 bits Arm CPU APK

Source code

• krita-5.2.16.tar.gz

• krita-5.2.16.tar.xz

md5sum

For all downloads, visit https://download.kde.org/stable/krita/5.2.16/ and click on "Details" to get the hashes.

Key

The Linux AppImage and the source tarballs are signed. You can retrieve the public key here. The signatures are here (filenames ending in .sig).