Web Review, Week 2024-46
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2024-46.
No GPS required: our app can now locate underground trains
Tags: tech, mobile, sensors, gps, transportation
Now this is definitely a smart trick to estimate position in tunnels.
https://blog.transitapp.com/go-underground/
OpenAI, Google and Anthropic Are Struggling to Build More Advanced AI - Bloomberg
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt
More signs of the generative AI companies hitting a plateau…
Releasing the largest multilingual open pretraining dataset
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, data, copyright, licensing
It shouldn’t be, but it is a big deal. Having such training corpus openly available is one of the big missing pieces to build models.
Everything I’ve learned so far about running local LLMs
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, foss
This is an interesting and balanced view. Also nice to see that local inference is really getting closer. This is mostly a UI problem now.
https://nullprogram.com/blog/2024/11/10/
When Machine Learning Tells the Wrong Story
Tags: tech, cpu, hardware, security, privacy, research
Fascinating research about side-channel attacks. Learned a lot about them and website fingerprinting here. Also interesting the explanations of how the use of machine learning models can actually get in the way of proper understanding of the side-channel really used by an attack which can prevent developing actually useful counter-measures.
https://jackcook.com/2024/11/09/bigger-fish.html
Abusing Ubuntu 24.04 features for root privilege escalation
Tags: tech, linux, security
Nice chain of attacks. This shows more than one vulnerability needs to be leveraged to lead to root access. This provides valuable lessons.
https://snyk.io/blog/abusing-ubuntu-root-privilege-escalation/
Way too many ways to wait on a child process with a timeout
Tags: tech, unix, linux, system
The title says it all. This is very fragmented and there are several options to fulfill the task. Knowing the tradeoffs can be handy.
https://gaultier.github.io/blog/way_too_many_ways_to_wait_for_a_child_process_with_a_timeout.html
The CVM Algorithm
Tags: tech, databases, algorithm
This is a nice view into how a query planner roughly works and a nice algorithm which can be used internally to properly estimate the number of distinct values in a column.
https://buttondown.com/jaffray/archive/the-cvm-algorithm/
Mergiraf
Tags: tech, version-control, git, tools, conflict
Looks like a nice way to improve handling of merge conflicts. I’ll test this one out.
Opposite of Cloud Native is?
Tags: tech, cloud, complexity, vendor-lockin, self-hosting
Definitely a good post. No you don’t have to go all in with cloud providers and signing with your blood. It’s often much more expensive for little gain but much more complexity and vendor lock in.
https://mkennedy.codes/posts/opposite-of-cloud-native-is-stack-native/
Booleans Are a Trap
Tags: tech, design, type-systems
Avoiding boolean parameters in library APIs should be a well known advice by now. Still they should probably be avoided when modeling domain types as well.
https://katafrakt.me/2024/11/09/booleans-are-a-trap/
Complex for Whom?
Tags: tech, design, complexity
Good musing about complexity. Very often we need to move it around, the important question is where should it appear. For sure you don’t want it scattered everywhere.
https://notes.billmill.org/link_blog/2024/11/Complex_forWhom.html
What makes concurrency so hard?
Tags: tech, distributed, complexity
Interesting reasoning about what is hard in systems with concurrency. It’s definitely about the state space of the system and the structure of that space.
https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/what-makes-concurrency-so-hard/
Algorithms we develop software by
Tags: tech, programming, craftsmanship, engineering, problem-solving
Interesting musing on the heuristics we use when solving problems. There are good advices in there to make progress and become a better developer.
https://grantslatton.com/software-pathfinding
Bye for now!