Web Review, Week 2024-13
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-13.
Google Ordered To Identify Who Watched Certain YouTube Videos
Tags: tech, google, law, surveillance
This is a worrying trend we see in law enforcement a bit everywhere. It’s a bit too convenient to make such requests even though it is unconstitutional.
Redis Renamed to Redict - Andrew Kelley
Tags: tech, redis, foss, licensing, community
Indeed, time to leave Redis behind in favor of Redict. It’s not like one can expect new things to come out to such a project.
https://andrewkelley.me/post/redis-renamed-to-redict.html
A Return to Blu-ray as Streaming Value Evaporates | Audioholics
Tags: tech, streaming, movie, copyright, economics
Interesting, with the price hikes and bundles to come, we might indeed see a resurgence in physical media. It will stay niche for sure, but looks like demand is about to grow.
https://www.audioholics.com/news/a-return-to-blu-ray-as-streaming-value-evaporates
How People Create and Destroy Value with Generative AI | BCG
Tags: tech, ai, gpt, creativity, quality
Interesting study on the impact generative AI can have on people performances in business settings. There are a few nuggets in there. In particular anything related to problem solving people do worse with generative AI tools than without. And even worse than that when they’ve been trained (probably due to overconfidence). The place where it seems to help is for more creativity related tasks… at the individual level, but at the collective level creativity decreases due to homogenization. Definitely things to keep in mind.
Have We Reached Peak AI?
Tags: tech, ai, gpt, criticism, communication, copyright, law
Very interesting piece. The chances that it is another bubble are high. It’s currently surviving on a lot of wishful thinking and hypothetical. This really feels like borrowed time… I wonder what useful will remain once it all collapses. Coding assistants are very likely to survive. Clearly there could be interesting uses in a more sober approach.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/peakai/
Models All The Way Down
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, statistics, bias
Wondering where some of the biases of AI models generating images come from? This is an excellent deep dive into one of the most successful data sets used to train said models. And they’ve been curated by… statistical models, not humans. This unsurprisingly amplifies biases all the way to the final models.
This is an excellent piece, I highly recommend reading it.
https://knowingmachines.org/models-all-the-way#section5
Mozilla fixes two Firefox zero-day bugs exploited at Pwn2Own
Tags: tech, mozilla, browser, security
Those were nasty, good they’ve been patched already.
Hotel hotspot hijinks - P.T.C.
Tags: tech, web, automation, wifi
Some captive portals are indeed stupid. Why not automating going through them?
https://peateasea.de/hotel-hotspot-hijinks/
Why x86 Doesn’t Need to Die – Chips and Cheese
Tags: tech, cpu, hardware
Good exploration of the CPU architectures we have nowadays, and why the RISC vs CISC debate doesn’t make sense anymore.
https://chipsandcheese.com/2024/03/27/why-x86-doesnt-need-to-die/
Bump Allocation: Up or Down? • Core Dumped
Tags: tech, memory
Making your own allocator? This is definitely something to consider and measure.
https://coredumped.dev/2024/03/25/bump-allocation-up-or-down/
Why choose async/await over threads? – notgull – The world’s number one source of notgull
Tags: tech, rust, multithreading, coroutine
In which case you want one or the other? This is illustrated in the Rust case which has its own struggles, but the question applies more largely in my opinion.
https://notgull.net/why-not-threads/
Linux Crisis Tools
Tags: tech, production, linux, tools
Good reminder that you want the diagnosis tools in place and working before you get an actual problem in production.
https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2024-03-24/linux-crisis-tools.html
shelmet 0.6.0
Tags: tech, python, processes, filesystem
Interesting API for running subprocesses and interact with files.
https://shelmet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
ASON AltScript – Write Data Not Code
Tags: tech, data, json
Might be a good alternative to JSON in some cases.
3D DOM viewer, copy-paste this into your console to visualise the DOM topographically
Tags: tech, web, browser, debugging, frontend
Interesting debug tool for web frontend code. It’d be nice as a browser extension.
https://gist.github.com/OrionReed/4c3778ebc2b5026d2354359ca49077ca
TDD: You’re Probably Doing It Just Fine - The Code Whisperer
Tags: tech, tdd, craftsmanship
All good points. Can we improve? Sure. Does it means we do it bad? No. Just do it more when it makes sense.
https://blog.thecodewhisperer.com/permalink/tdd-youre-probably-doing-it-just-fine
On Tech Debt: My Rust Library is now a CDO
Tags: tech, supply-chain, maintenance, complexity
This is about a Rust library but equally applies to any ecosystem which allows to easily pull a dependency. As soon as you pull them, you need to monitor their health for the sake of your own project.
https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2024/3/26/rust-cdo/
Two open source projects with great documentation
Tags: tech, documentation, architecture
Of course documentation, especially one presenting the architecture, shouldn’t be neglected. It takes time and skills of course.
https://johnjago.com/great-docs/
Bye for now!