Web Review, Week 2023-47
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2023-47.
What OpenAI shares with Scientology
Tags: tech, ai, criticism
Ironically, I think this is one of the best analysis I’ve seen regarding OpenAI and the recent turmoil around of one of its founders.
https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/look-at-scientology-to-understand
Oops! We Automated Bullshit. | Department of Computer Science and Technology
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, criticism
Excellent piece about everything which is wrong in the current industrialization moment of generative AI.
https://www.cst.cam.ac.uk/blog/afb21/oops-we-automated-bullshit
Pluralistic: Tesla’s Dieselgate (28 July 2023)
Tags: tech, automotive, DRM
Don’t you love DRMs in cars? Especially when the business people at the helm are pathological liars?
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/
Youtube has started to artificially slow down video load times if you use Firefox
Tags: tech, google, attention-economy
I guess it’s a strategy to move more people over to Chrome. Shameful.
https://old.reddit.com/r/youtube/comments/17z8hsz/youtube_has_started_to_artificially_slow_down/
Cryptographers Solve Decades-Old Privacy Problem - Nautilus
Tags: tech, cryptography, privacy
Cool results, let’s see what the future brings. This could be exciting.
https://nautil.us/cryptographers-solve-decades-old-privacy-problem-444899/
Streamlined interface for generating images with AI in Krita
Tags: tech, graphics, ai, machine-learning
I guess this will end up being a popular plugin for Krita.
https://github.com/Acly/krita-ai-diffusion
Audio Samples from StyleTTS 2
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, speech
The newer text to speech models are really good now.
Making an E-Paper Picture Frame
Tags: tech, raspberry-pi, e-ink
This is a cool project, not too expensive as well.
https://wolfgang-ziegler.com/blog/ink-display
Email obfuscation: What still works in 2023?
Tags: tech, web, email, spam
Good list of techniques. Some of them aren’t fully evaluated yet. Definitely worth considering.
https://spencermortensen.com/articles/email-obfuscation/
Ethernet is Still Going Strong After 50 Years - IEEE Spectrum
Tags: tech, networking, history
A bit of history behind what’s probably the most widespread local network technology.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/ethernet-ieee-milestone
RFC 9498: The GNU Name System
Tags: tech, dns, privacy, censorship
Interesting a new name system being standardized. It’s supposed to protect privacy and be censorship resistant. We’ll see how it gets adopted.
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/info-gnunet/2023-11/msg00000.html
How many floating-point numbers are in the interval [0,1]? – Daniel Lemire’s blog
Tags: tech, floats
Floating-point numbers are really a complicated species. This is an interesting deep dive in some of their representation.
https://lemire.me/blog/2017/02/28/how-many-floating-point-numbers-are-in-the-interval-01/
Herbie: Automatically Improving Floating Point Accuracy
Tags: tech, floats, tools
Interesting tool. Hopefully will help us manipulate floating point expressions better.
A close encounter with false sharing | More Stina Blog!
Tags: tech, multithreading, performance
Good reminder that false sharing is a real thing. It’s easier to encounter than you think when you start to dabble into multi-threading.
https://morestina.net/blog/1976/a-close-encounter-with-false-sharing
GWP-ASan: Sampling-Based Detection of Memory-Safety Bugs in Production - 2311.09394.pdf
Tags: tech, memory, safety, security
Nice approach to also hunt for memory safety issues while software is in production.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.09394.pdf
Retries – An interactive study of common retry methods – Encore Blog
Tags: tech, networking, programming
Nice little article with simulations demonstrating why you want exponential backoff and how jitter is an extra layer of protection for the server.
https://encore.dev/blog/retries
Create RSS Feeds in Java using ROME
Tags: tech, java, rss
Yes, I have a thing for bringing RSS back. This time it’s a library enabling the feature for Java projects. Looks easy to use.
https://www.blackslate.io/articles/create-rss-feeds-in-java-using-rome
Explicit Resource Management: Exploring JavaScript’s and TypeScript’s new feature | iliazeus
Tags: tech, javascript, resources
Looks like RAII is finally making its way in Javascript. This looks like a good thing, it’s still rough around the edges though.
https://iliazeus.github.io/articles/js-explicit-resource-management-en/
The Changing “Guarantees” Given by Python’s Global Interpreter Lock · Stefan-Marr.de
Tags: tech, python, multithreading
Won’t be easy to get rid of the GIL in the Python ecosystem. There are notable differences of behavior between implementations and even versions of the same implementation… Lots of user code will unwillingly depend on a specific set of guarantees.
https://stefan-marr.de/2023/11/python-global-interpreter-lock/
It’s Time For A Change: datetime.utcnow() Is Now Deprecated - miguelgrinberg.com
Tags: tech, python, api
Since quite a lot of Python code will be impacted by this, better get ready.
https://blog.miguelgrinberg.com/post/it-s-time-for-a-change-datetime-utcnow-is-now-deprecated
Exploring a Postgres query plan | notes.eatonphil.com
Tags: tech, postgresql, databases
Ever wondered how to programmatically introspect query plans? This is a long article but good starting point on how it’s represented under the hood.
https://notes.eatonphil.com/2023-11-19-exploring-a-postgres-query-plan.html
garnix | Contextual CLIs
Tags: tech, command-line
Good food for thought to design CLI interfaces.
https://garnix.io/blog/contextual-cli
An Interactive Guide to CSS Grid
Tags: tech, frontend, browser, css
Nice guide, the interactive parts definitely help. Good way to improve CSS Grid use. It’s much more powerful than I suspected.
https://www.joshwcomeau.com/css/interactive-guide-to-grid/
How large pull requests slow down development
Tags: tech, git, version-control, complexity, risk, quality
Interesting statistics, this show how important it is to have well structured and focused change sets as much as possible.
https://graphite.dev/blog/how-large-prs-slow-down-development
Software Development and Postmortems
Tags: tech, project-management, failure, postmortem
Very good piece. Explains why postmortems are important. It also explains how to prepare your organization to conduct them and how to do them properly. This is important since a lot of pressure will happen in case of a failure.
https://vadimkravcenko.com/shorts/dealing-with-failures-and-postmortems/
75% of Software Engineers Faced Retaliation Last Time They Reported Wrongdoing - Engprax
Tags: tech, politics, law, work
This is really bad… Now, this is investigation is UK centric though. I wonder how other countries would fare.
Performance Is Contextual - Jacob Kaplan-Moss
Tags: management, productivity
Definitely this, the context matters a lot. Sometimes I’ve seen people too quick to blame the skillset of underperforming colleagues. But the same person in a different context could probably do much better.
https://jacobian.org/2023/nov/20/performance-is-contextual/
14 Signs of a GOOD Manager. Navigating leadership excellence.
Tags: tech, management
This is a good list. I guess some of it feels obvious… at the same time it’s indeed something you don’t see every day. More awareness from managers is needed.
https://medium.com/blob-streaming/14-signs-of-a-good-manager-ea7879f8d894
Bye for now!