Web Review, Week 2024-42
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-42.
You Can’t Make Friends With The Rockstars
Tags: tech, capitalism, marketing, politics, criticism
People have to realize that tycoons like the ones from big tech companies can both be rich and mediocre. They were smart enough to seize opportunities at the right time but they are not exceptional. In fact, they’re even boring and spineless.
The best quote in this paper I think is: “There is nothing special about Elon Musk, Sam Altman, or Mark Zuckerberg. Accepting that requires you to also accept that the world itself is not one that rewards the remarkable, or the brilliant, or the truly incredible, but those who are able to take advantage of opportunities, which in turn leads to the horrible truth that those who often have the most opportunities are some of the most boring and privileged people alive.”
The real problem is that lots of journalists can’t come to term with the fairy tale and so fall prey to all their publicity stunts as if it had any hidden meaning. This is dangerous because of all the political power they try to seize for their own gains.
Meanwhile, “the most powerful companies enjoy a level of impunity, with their founders asked only the most superficial, softball of questions — and deflecting anything tougher by throwing out dead cats when the situation demands.”
Now you can go and read this long piece.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/rockstars/
What’s With All the Trumpy VCs?
Tags: tech, politics
It’s actually unsurprising, all those tech and crypto bros have assets in jeopardy if some regulation is applied to their industry. No wonder they’d support the one with the most libertarian agenda after the current administration which did look into antitrust cases and increased regulation (even though marginally).
Employees Describe an Environment of Paranoia and Fear Inside Automattic Over WordPress Chaos
Tags: tech, blog, wordpress
Wow, the atmosphere looks fairly toxic at Automattic right now. It felt like it was just about the trademark dispute but clearly the craziness is running much deeper. This is concerning for WordPress future I think.
https://www.404media.co/automattic-buyout-offer-wordpress-matt-mullenweg/
You should be using an RSS reader
Tags: tech, social-media, rss
Want to put an end to the social media platforms weight on our lives? For once there’s an individual solution which might work. This is a chance because as he rightfully points out individual solutions are generally too complicated to bring systemic change. Here this is actually doable.
Using Cloudflare on your website could be blocking RSS users
Tags: tech, cloudflare, rss
Cloudflare indeed needs to do better to accommodate RSS readers. They’re not malicious bots and shouldn’t be flagged as such.
https://openrss.org/blog/using-cloudflare-on-your-website-could-be-blocking-rss-users
Stop using Brave Browser
Tags: tech, web, browser, google, privacy, politics
A good reminder that this is not the Google Chrome alternative you’re looking for. It’s the same privacy invading mindset with some bigotry on top.
https://www.spacebar.news/stop-using-brave-browser/
The Internet Archive and its 916 billion saved web pages are back online
Tags: tech, web, archive, security
It’s a very important project, it’s really concerning that this attack went through. The service is still partly disrupted but they’re showing signs of recovery. Let’s wish them luck and good health. This archival service is essential for knowledge and history preservation on the web.
Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, knowledge, criticism, research
Now the impact seems clear and this is mostly bad news. This reduces the production of public knowledge so everyone looses. Ironically it also means less public knowledge available to train new models. At some point their only venue to fine tune their models will be user profiling which will be private… I’ve a hard time seeing how we won’t end up stuck with another surveillance apparatus providing access to models running on outdated knowledge. This will lock so many behaviors and decisions in place.
https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/3/9/pgae400/7754871#483096365
LLMs don’t do formal reasoning - and that is a HUGE problem
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, neural-networks, gpt, logic, mathematics, research
Of course I recommend reading the actual research paper. This article is a good summary of the consequences though. LLMs definitely can’t be trusted with formal reasoning including basic maths. This is a flaw in the way they are built, the bath forward is likely merging symbolic and sub-symbolic approaches.
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/llms-dont-do-formal-reasoning-and
Should you use uv’s managed Python in production?
Tags: tech, python, security, supply-chain, developer-experience
It’s tempting to use uv. It’s probably fine on the developer workstation at this point. It looks a bit early to use it in production though, it’s a bit young for that and carries questions regarding supply chain security still.
https://pythonspeed.com/articles/uv-python-production/
Use an External GPU on Raspberry Pi 5 for 4K Gaming
Tags: tech, raspberry-pi, gpu, gaming
Definitely a funny hack. Not usable for compute workloads though.
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/use-external-gpu-on-raspberry-pi-5-4k-gaming
Master Embedded Development with Rust and no_std
Tags: tech, rust, embedded
Nice article showing the steps to port Rust code to run on deeply embedded systems. It highlights the difficulties and caveats of such a task.
https://towardsdatascience.com/nine-rules-for-running-rust-on-embedded-systems-b0c247ee877e
Table lookups are efficient
Tags: tech, programming, optimization
This is too often overlooked, but table lookups can help with performance if done well.
https://lemire.me/blog/2024/10/14/table-lookups-are-efficient/
Graphics Tricks from Boomers
Tags: tech, graphics, 2d, hardware
Nice graphic tricks when the hardware was harder to work with. It’s amazing how much we could fit back then out of sheer motivation.
https://arnaud-carre.github.io/2024-09-08-4ktribute/
Why is everybody talking about sync engines?
Tags: tech, web, collaborative, crdt
Excellent introduction to sync engines and how they work. The concept is indeed coming from the gaming industry and we see it more in web applications nowadays due to the user demands for working offline and real time collaboration.
Can Logic Programming Be Liberated from Predicates and Backtracking?
Tags: tech, programming, logic, ai, prolog
Finally a path forward for logic programming? An opportunity to evolve beyond Prolog and its variants? Good food for thought.
https://www-ps.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~mh/papers/WLP24.pdf
Be Suspicious of Success
Tags: tech, reliability, tests, debugging
This is an important trait to have for a developer. If you’re content of things working without knowing why and how they work, you’re looking for a world of pain later.
https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/be-suspicious-of-success/
Boring Tech Is Stifling Improvement
Tags: tech, architecture, complexity, developer-experience, vendor-lockin
I tend to side on the “boring tech” side, but indeed this is a good reminder that what we want is finding the right balance.
https://yonkeltron.com/posts/boring-tech-is-stifling-improvement/
Cognitive load is what matters
Tags: tech, complexity, cognition, design, architecture
Definitely this. Our cognitive capacity is limited, we’d better not deplete it due to complexity before we even reach the core of the problem at hand.
https://minds.md/zakirullin/cognitive#full
Why make software?
Tags: tech, philosophy
Our craft is based on shifting sands. This brings interesting philosophical questions, like why do it at all? I think the answer proposed in this short article is spot on. It can help bring new ideas on how to be in the world. This is more important than the code itself.
https://sean.voisen.org/blog/why-make-software
Germany’s 49-euro ticket resulted in significant modal shift from road to rail
Tags: train, ecology, politics
This is definitely a good idea, I wish we had the same in France. This is too bad that they plan to raise the price, it’s going to limit the impact of the measure.
Bye for now!