Web Review, Week 2024-26
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-26.
Chat Control and the New Panopticon - by Masayuki Hatta
Tags: tech, surveillance, privacy, cryptography, law
Very neat piece, shows quite well the problems with Chat Control like laws. It’s been postponed this time, but expect it to comeback somehow.
https://mhatta.substack.com/p/chat-control-and-the-new-panopticon
Cleantech has an enshittification problem
Tags: tech, politics, law
This is becoming an important industry. Regulation is needed to avoid consumers to be in a mouse trap. This is necessary to reap the benefits of those technologies.
https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/26/unplanned-obsolescence/
Indirector
Tags: tech, cpu, security
A new type of attack targeting the CPU indirect branch predictor.
https://indirector.cpusec.org/
Polyfill supply chain attack hits 100K+ sites
Tags: tech, supply-chain, security, web
This is bad for two reasons: 1) people clearly put too much trust in random CDNs to distribute their dependencies and 2) people don’t track depencendies obsolescence properly.
https://sansec.io/research/polyfill-supply-chain-attack
The People’s AI – Doc Searls Weblog
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, foss, self-hosting
This is ignoring the energy consumption aspect. That said, it is spot on regarding the social and economics aspects of those transformer models. They have to be open and self hostable.
https://doc.searls.com/2024/05/28/the-peoples-ai/
On the Paradox of Learning to Reason from Data
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, research
Further clues that transformer models can’t learn logic from data.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11502
Scalable MatMul-free Language Modeling
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, research
Interesting paper showing a promising path to reduce the memory and workload of transformer models. This is much more interesting than the race to the gigantic size.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02528
Inside the tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets
Tags: tech, nfc, hardware
Nice reverse engineering of a NFC chip used in a disposable transportation ticket.
https://www.righto.com/2024/06/montreal-mifare-ultralight-nfc.html
Local, first, forever
Tags: tech, crdt, self-hosting, privacy
Interesting approach for using CRDT through a file sync application. Probably something to see somehow generalized on traditional desktop applications.
https://tonsky.me/blog/crdt-filesync/
Reladiff
Tags: tech, databases, tools, tests
Interesting tool for diffing database tables. Should come in handy for tests.
https://reladiff.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html
Performance tip: avoid unnecessary copies – Daniel Lemire’s blog
Tags: tech, performance
Interesting case, when everything else gets faster, memory copies might start to become the bottleneck.
https://lemire.me/blog/2024/06/22/performance-tip-avoid-unnecessary-copies/
How much memory does a call to ‘malloc’ allocates? – Daniel Lemire’s blog
Tags: tech, system, memory
If you needed to be reminded that allocating small blocks of memory is a bad idea… here is a paper explaining it.
https://lemire.me/blog/2024/06/27/how-much-memory-does-a-call-to-malloc-allocates/
How the STL uses explicit
Tags: tech, c++
Definitely not the rules you want to apply on your projects. Still it’s interesting to know how the STL uses explicit.
Breaking out of nested loops with generators | mathspp
Tags: tech, python
This is a useful construct in Python which is often forgotten.
https://mathspp.com/blog/breaking-out-of-nested-loops-with-generators
The plan-execute pattern
Tags: tech, algorithm, pattern, design, architecture
A nice pattern to separate decision from actions in complex algorithms.
https://mmapped.blog/posts/29-plan-execute
Fighting Faults in Distributed Systems
Tags: tech, safety, distributed, failure
A nice zine introducing the topic of faults and failures in distributed systems.
https://decomposition.al/CSE138-2024-01/zines/zine-ali.pdf
From ZeroVer to SemVer: A Comprehensive List of Versioning Schemes in Open Source | Andrew Nesbitt
Tags: tech, project-management, version-control
A nice collection of versioning schemes. I definitely didn’t know them all.
Of Psion and Symbian - by Bradford Morgan White
Tags: tech, history
Another story of precursors in the tech space. They basically invented the palmtop and spawned Symbian which was very much dominant on mobile for a while. The end of the Nokia story is a bit oversimplified for my taste just glancing over Maemo, but it is forgivable since it wasn’t the focus of this piece.
https://www.abortretry.fail/p/of-psion-and-symbian
Neko: History of a Software Pet
Tags: tech, history, funny
I remember playing with this a long time again… but it’s actually even older than I suspected.
Bye for now!