Web Review, Week 2023-19
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-19.
Ed Sheeran, Once Again, Demonstrates How Modern Copyright Is Destroying, Rather Than Helping Musicians
Tags: copyright, law, music
The copyright system is utterly broken at that point. This kind of lawsuits don’t make any sense.
Thunderbird Is Thriving: Our 2022 Financial Report
Tags: tech, foss, mozilla, fundraising
Clearly inspiring… this project really went from dying to skyrocketing. I’d like to see more of those.
https://blog.thunderbird.net/2023/05/thunderbird-is-thriving-our-2022-financial-report/
Bluesky is a scam – fiatjaf
Tags: tech, social-media, protocols, vendor-lockin
This clearly doesn’t look as interesting as ActivityPub…
https://fiatjaf.com/ab1127fb.html
When “free forever” means “free for the next 4 months”
Tags: tech, tools, messaging, foss, vendor-lockin
Clearly Zulip uses the opportunity for a bit of self-promotion. Can’t blame them, at least they’re the rare ones not going for open core. Also this is a good explanation on why one shouldn’t trust the “free forever” claims for cloud hosting.
https://blog.zulip.com/2023/05/04/when-free-forever-is-4-months/
Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? | The New Yorker
Tags: tech, ai, gpt, capitalism, ethics, criticism
Excellent opinion piece. Sure, “A.I.” is a tool, but who is wielding that tool currently? Whom needs is it designed to fulfill? This is currently very much of a problem. The comparison with McKinsey although surprising is an interesting thought.
Also I appreciate the clarification on the Luddites movement… they were not anti-technology.
https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/will-ai-become-the-new-mckinsey
DeepMind’s Epistemic Neural Networks Enable Large Language Model Fine-Tuning With 50% Less Data | Synced
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, neural-networks, gpt
Looks like a promising way to reduce the training cost of large language models.
Releasing 3B and 7B RedPajama-INCITE family of models including base, instruction-tuned & chat models — TOGETHER
Tags: tech, ai, neural-networks, gpt, foss
Truly open source models are pouring in. This is showing more transparency and I hope it will lead to better uses even though some of the concerns will stay true.
https://www.together.xyz/blog/redpajama-models-v1
Introducing MPT-7B: A New Standard for Open-Source, Commercially Usable LLMs
Tags: tech, ai, neural-networks, gpt, foss
And yet another set of open source models. This is really democratizing quickly.
https://www.mosaicml.com/blog/mpt-7b
Even Amazon can’t make sense of serverless or microservices
Tags: tech, infrastructure, microservices, architecture, complexity
Even the giants are slowly moving back from microservices in some places. DHH has a very cruel way to point it out, still that’s true. Let’s hope people realize the mistake it was in term of complexity.
https://world.hey.com/dhh/even-amazon-can-t-make-sense-of-serverless-or-microservices-59625580
Classification of the principal programming paradigms
Tags: tech, programming, language
Nice poster. It’s harder to classify programming languages than it sounds. This one is interesting.
https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/paradigms.html
Chris James -HTMX is the Future
Tags: tech, web, htmx, frontend, backend
This is indeed looking more and more like a viable and worthwhile option for web applications.
https://quii.dev/HTMX_is_the_Future
Deciphering Glyph :: Never Run ‘python’ In Your Downloads Folder
Tags: tech, python, security
It points out the security risk but it’s mainly a good explanation on how Python loads modules.
https://blog.glyph.im/2020/08/never-run-python-in-your-downloads-folder.html
Understanding ActivityPub - Sebastian Jambor’s blog
Tags: tech, fediverse, protocols, http
Interesting article. This is a good introduction to the ActivityPub protocol. It also gives nice flies and pointers on how to dive deeper.
https://seb.jambor.dev/posts/understanding-activitypub/
Is sequential IO dead in the era of the NVMe drive? — Jack Vanlightly
Tags: tech, storage, performance
Interesting exploration on the performance of SSDs regarding write patterns. Turns out sequential IO is still a thing, just for a different reason than with good old HDDs.
https://jack-vanlightly.com/blog/2023/5/9/is-sequential-io-dead-in-the-era-of-the-nvme-drive
GitHub - ellie/atuin: 🐢 Magical shell history
Tags: tech, shell, command-line, tools
Looks like an interesting tool to try. History is an important part of the shell experience.
https://github.com/ellie/atuin
vmtest: Run your tests in virtual machines
Tags: tech, tests, virtualization, linux
Looks like a really neat tool for testing low level and kernel dependent details in a reproducible way.
Key practice: Test Driven Development | by Jason Yip | May, 2023 | Medium
Tags: tech, tdd, tests
Neat, short and simple post highlighting the important traits of TDD.
https://jchyip.medium.com/key-practice-test-driven-development-d77bee69427c
Why engineers need to be bored. - by John McBride
Tags: tech, management, productivity, innovation
This is another way to approach the question of having slack in your schedule. This is necessary, and probably at scale in the organization (as implied by this article).
https://onengineering.substack.com/p/why-engineers-need-to-be-bored
You don’t need Scrum. You just need to do Kanban right.
Tags: tech, project-management, agile, scrum, kanban
A good reminder that there is life outside of Scrum… I especially like the framing of Scrum as training wheels. When you learned biking you outgrew the training wheels, didn’t you?
https://lucasfcosta.com/2022/10/02/scrum-versus-kanban.html
Appreciating Your Way to XP - by Kent Beck
Tags: tech, improving, management, xp
Old article, still an interesting approach to making changes and looking for growth opportunities. There is value in trying not to frame everything as problems to solve.
https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/appreciating-your-way-to-xp
Be a thermostat, not a thermometer
Tags: management, team, communication
Interesting ideas in there. It’s not enough to pick up that something is off in a conversation. It’s better to influence things to defuse the tension. Clearly not that easy to do, will require quite some practice.
https://larahogan.me/blog/be-a-thermostat-not-a-thermometer/
Bye for now!