Web Review, Week 2024-18

Friday, 3 May 2024 | Kevin Ottens

Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-18.

Radio Free Fedi - Sounds from the Fediverse to the Universe

Tags: tech, fediverse, streaming, culture

I’ve been listening to these radio channels the past few weeks. It’s quirky, it’s weird, it’s wild. I definitely recommend them to get out of your usual music bubble.

https://radiofreefedi.net/

We can have a different web

Tags: tech, internet, web, culture, history

Very nice account of how the Internet is nowadays and how it got there. I like the gardening metaphor which works nicely here. And yes, we can go back to a better Web again. It’s a collective decision though, that’s what makes it hard.

https://www.citationneeded.news/we-can-have-a-different-web/

Save the Web by Being Nice

Tags: tech, blog, web, social-media

Definitely this. Get the content you like known, send appreciation messages to the authors. This should keep the moribund web alive.

https://sheep.horse/2024/4/save_the_web_by_being_nice.html

Google Made Me Ruin A Perfectly Good Website: A Case Study On The AI-Generated Internet

Tags: tech, web, advertisement, google, criticism

Ever wondered why the quality of websites seems to go down? Well, here is a case study of what you end up needing to do if you try to fund a website through ads (like most websites).

https://theluddite.org/#!post/google-ads

Latest Google layoffs hit the Flutter and Python groups | Ars Technica

Tags: tech, google, flutter

Looks like Flutter’s days are counted. It seems it has peeked and announcements like this are likely to move people away from it. Time will tell of course.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/latest-google-layoffs-hit-the-flutter-and-python-groups/

The walls of Apple’s garden are tumbling down - The Verge

Tags: tech, apple, vendor-lockin

Indeed there are more and more signs of the Apple vendor lock-in to be in trouble. And that’s a good thing.

https://www.theverge.com/24141929/apple-iphone-imessage-antitrust-dma-lock-in

Having a machine room can mean having things in your machine room

Tags: tech, hardware, funny

Sure you can expect mice, but raccoons? This is a funny finding… well scary if you’re responsible of this machine room.

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/MachineRoomRaccoon

pyinfra automates infrastructure super fast at massive scale

Tags: tech, tools, infrastructure, deployment, python

Looks like an interesting tool for infrastructure automation. It’s all Python based which is an interesting departure from yaml files in that space. Could be a nice alternative to Ansible. I might take it out for a spin.

https://pyinfra.com/

run0

Tags: tech, security, tools, command-line, systemd

An alternative to the venerable sudo coming with systemd. Looks like it has interesting properties.

https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/devel/run0.html

Practical parsing with PEG and cpp-peglib - Bert Hubert’s writings

Tags: tech, parsing, c++

Time to leave Lex and Yacc behind? This is definitely a nice approach to make parsers nowadays.

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/practical-peg-parsing/

Bytecode VMs in surprising places

Tags: tech, bytecode

Bytecodes everywhere! Really it’s a very widespread trick, I didn’t expect some of those.

https://dubroy.com/blog/bytecode-vms-in-surprising-places/

Reflectively constructing enums at runtime - Highly Suspect Agency

Tags: tech, java

Probably shouldn’t do this in most case… but if it’s really needed and you can bare the pain, Java has solutions for you. This is an interesting dive in lower parts of the APIs.

https://highlysuspect.agency/posts/enum_reflection/