Web Review, Week 2023-46
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-46.
Blender 4.0
Tags: tech, blender, 3d
Yet another very impressive release for Blender. This is really one of the best in its class.
https://www.blender.org/download/releases/4-0/
The French National Police is unlawfully using an Israeli facial recognition software
Tags: tech, france, surveillance
Welcome in France, a country scared of its own population where the police uses facial recognition illegally. But don’t worry, we can expect attempts to make it legal in the coming months or years instead of addressing the problem. Will it make it less shameful? I don’t think so.
No Bing, no Edge, no upselling: De-crufted Windows 11 coming to Europe soon | Ars Technica
Tags: tech, politics, law
This is going to be interesting to see how this new regulation unfolds. Its impacts are well beyond just Microsoft.
Moving our Encrypted DNS servers to run in RAM | Mullvad VPN
Tags: tech, dns, privacy
Excellent, looks like a public DNS server worth using.
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/moving-our-encrypted-dns-servers-to-run-in-ram
The Use Cases and Benefits of SVCB and HTTPS DNS Record Types
Tags: tech, dns
Now that they’re standardized better learn about those new record types.
RFC 9420 – A Messaging Layer Security Overview
Tags: tech, protocols, standard, security
Finally a standardized protocol for end-to-end encryption! Let’s see where this gets used.
https://www.thestack.technology/rfc9420-ietf-mls-standard/
Don’t Build AI Products The Way Everyone Else Is Doing It
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, design, architecture
A balanced view, that’s refreshing. Indeed we see too many “let’s call the OpenAI APIs and magic will happen”. This is very short sighted, much better can be done.
https://www.builder.io/blog/build-ai
We are drowning in Google’s magnanimity - kpassa.me
Tags: tech, google, infrastructure
Half a rant but interesting… Why are people making popular solutions to problems they’ll never have? Just because it’s been released by Google?
https://www.kpassa.me/posts/google/
We Need to Bring Back Webrings
Tags: tech, blog
I admit I miss webrings indeed. They were great to discover new blogs with nice content.
https://arne.me/articles/we-need-to-bring-back-webrings
Upgrade your Development Environments with Devbox | Alan Norbauer
Tags: tech, tools, developer-experience
Definitely looks interesting. Might be a good way to uniformize developer environment management across projects.
https://alan.norbauer.com/articles/devbox-intro
Why Rust in Production? | Corrode Rust Consulting
Tags: tech, rust
This is a well balanced view on the Rust ecosystem as of today. It highlights fairly well where it shines (safety, predictability, bugs found early) but it also mentions the current issues linked to its maturity.
fx – command-line tool for JSON
Tags: tech, tools, command-line, json
Looks like a very good tool for handling JSON files. Might come in handy next to jq… maybe it’ll replace jless.
Navigating around in your shell
Tags: tech, command-line, tools
Good list of tips and aliases. Might inspire a few changes in your setup.
https://blog.meain.io/2023/navigating-around-in-shell/
How git cherry-pick and revert use 3-way merge
Tags: tech, tools, git
Ever wondered how git implements cherry-pick and revert? Here are a good way to understand them. Also explains what is the 3-way merge git uses widely.
https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/11/10/how-cherry-pick-and-revert-work/
Laurence Tratt: Four Kinds of Optimisation
Tags: tech, optimization
Not in full agreement with this, but having a rough idea of the different leverages you can use for optimizations is worthwhile.
https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2023/four_kinds_of_optimisation.html
67 Weird Debugging Tricks Your Browser Doesn’t Want You to Know | Alan Norbauer
Tags: tech, debugging, web, browser
A few interesting tricks in there, the web platform definitely helps in term of tooling.
https://alan.norbauer.com/articles/browser-debugging-tricks
A Very Subtle Bug - Made of Bugs
Tags: tech, bug, debugging, system, unix
Interesting subtle differences between gzip and Python expectations which leads to a tough integration bug to find.
https://blog.nelhage.com/2010/02/a-very-subtle-bug/
Push Ifs Up And Fors Down
Tags: tech, programming
Interesting heuristic to improve code structure. I definitely recommend. As every heuristic it’s not a law though, don’t overdo it either.
https://matklad.github.io/2023/11/15/push-ifs-up-and-fors-down.html
TDD Outcomes - by Kent Beck - Software Design: Tidy First?
Tags: tech, design, tdd, craftsmanship, quality
Good summary that TDD is many things… it helps for quite a few dimensions of writing code, still, it’s not a magic bullet in term of design. Your software design abilities are crucial to practice it well.
https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/tdd-outcomes
5 Skills the Best Engineers I Know Have in Common
Tags: tech, engineering, productivity, leadership, tech-lead
Interesting list. Definitely good things to try to learn there.
https://www.developing.dev/p/5-skills-all-10x-engineers-have
Minimize global process | Organizing Chaos
Tags: tech, organization, consistency, autonomy
This is a constant trade-off to find. How in organizations give autonomy while ensuring some consistency? A couple of ideas.
https://jordankaye.dev/posts/minimize-global-process/
Your Small Imprecise Ask Is a Big Waste of Their Time | Stay SaaSy
Tags: management, decision-making
Yes, seen this kind of imprecise requests go wrong fairly quickly more than once. It requires constant awareness though, on both sides of each request. This can be taxing, so no wonder we often drop the ball.
https://staysaasy.com/startups/2023/11/10/imprecise-asks.html
How to Boss Without Being Bossy – Holy Ghost Stories
Tags: management
Interesting taxonomy on how to request things from people. Lot’s to mull over in there.
https://www.jeffwofford.com/?p=2089
How to Build Trust - Jacob Kaplan-Moss
Tags: management, trust
Good piece, this is indeed essential in managing others. If they can’t trust you then fear will ensue.
https://jacobian.org/2023/nov/16/how-to-build-trust/
4.5 Billion Years in 1 Hour - YouTube
Tags: science
They really outdid themselves this time. One hour of bliss, it’s really well done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S7TUe5w6RHo
Bye for now!