Web Review, Week 2023-06

Friday, 10 February 2023 | Kevin Ottens

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-06.

Why Steam Deck Is One of the Most Significant PC Gaming Moments in Years | TechSpot

Tags: tech, valve

Very in depth article about the Steam Deck. Interesting look back at it story and situation after a year in the wild.

https://www.techspot.com/article/2620-steam-deck-pc-gaming-moment/


Tags: tech, kde

Nice and thorough review of Plasma. Well done everyone!

https://fossforce.com/2023/02/kde-plasma-full-featured-desktop-thats-surprisingly-easy-on-resources/


Windows 11: a spyware machine out of users’ control? | TechSpot

Tags: tech, privacy, microsoft

Are we really surprised? This continues a trend they started a few years ago, they don’t want to be left behind Android in that regard.

https://www.techspot.com/news/97535-windows-11-spyware-machine-out-users-control.html


The ad for Bard is wrong…

Tags: tech, ai, google, gpt

Or why you can’t trust large language model for any fact or knowledge related tasks…

https://nitter.lacontrevoie.fr/IsabelNAngelo/status/1623013720011194368


ChatGPT Should Not Exist. Its Real Product Is Despair. | by David Golumbia

Tags: tech, ai, gpt, politics

Its limits and biases are well documented. But, what about the ideologies of the people behind those models? What can it tell us about their aims behind those models? Questions worth exploring in my opinion.

https://davidgolumbia.medium.com/chatgpt-should-not-exist-aab0867abace


Stable Attribution

Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, generator

Interesting work, trying to get back to the source material used by a generative model. This is definitely necessary as well.

https://www.stableattribution.com/


MotherDuck: Big Data is Dead

Tags: tech, data

Interesting post with a good perspective on big data projects over time. It confirms that most people don’t fall in the big data bucket, it’s likely less than a percent of the projects which would qualify.

https://motherduck.com/blog/big-data-is-dead/


dns0.eu — The European public DNS that makes your Internet safer

Tags: tech, dns, security

Looks very interesting, I guess I will switch some of my devices to using this and we’ll see how it goes.

https://www.dns0.eu/


research!rsc: The Magic of Sampling, and its Limitations

Tags: tech, statistics, profiling

Good explanation about how sampling works. Does a good job explaining why it shines and where it is limited.

https://research.swtch.com/sample


GitHub - hubblo-org/scaphandre: ⚡ Energy consumption metrology agent.

Tags: tech, energy

Looks like a young but interesting tool to assess the power consumption of a service. There’s been quite some work in this domain on the client side, not so much on the server side. This is welcome.

https://github.com/hubblo-org/scaphandre


C++ Alternative Operators

Tags: tech, c++

This is lesser known and probably should stay obscure… don’t do that at home kids. Those alternative operators (more like tokens really) don’t help with readability at all and make not much sense with UTF8 code bases.

https://www.cedricmartens.com/articles/alt_ops


The Mypy Blog: Mypy 1.0 Released

Tags: tech, type-systems, python, mypy

This is a big milestone reached for that project. Let’s hope it’ll drive adoption up.

https://mypy-lang.blogspot.com/2023/02/mypy-10-released.html


Welcome to PocketPy | A lightweight Python interpreter for game engines

Tags: tech, python, lua

Early days but could become an interesting alternative to Lua for an embedded scripting language in some projects.

https://pocketpy.dev/


The continuous amnesia issue

Tags: tech, culture, memory

I very much agree with this. It is a real concern with our industry, we seem indeed to keep reinventing the wheel a lot. How do we stop forgetting? How do we move forward?

https://www.ufried.com/blog/continuous_amnesia_issue/


Cory Doctorow: Science Fiction is a Luddite Literature – Locus Online

Tags: tech, culture, criticism

Very good essay on why we shouldn’t look down on the Luddite. They had plenty of their questioning right and it’s actually pervasive now. We use the term as libel only because back then they lost…

https://locusmag.com/2022/01/cory-doctorow-science-fiction-is-a-luddite-literature/


Bye for now!