Web Review, Week 2025-05
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-05.
Supporting the Fediverse, one small act at a time
Tags: tech, fediverse, community
Indeed, the Fediverse needs to be better known. Any small actions towards this goal helps.
https://blog.elenarossini.com/supporting-the-fediverse-one-small-act-at-a-time/
Open source alternatives to Instagram, TikTok, and WhatsApp raise funds on Kickstarter
Tags: tech, foss, fediverse
This is good to see funds being raised for those projects. Lets hope they get madly successful.
AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt - Ars Technica
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, criticism
Maybe at some point the big providers will get the message and their scrapers will finally respect robots.txt? Let’s hope so.
DeepSeek Mania Shakes AI Industry to Its Core
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, business, politics
I guess this was just a matter of time, the obsession of “just make it bigger” was making most player myopic. Now this obviously collides with geopolitics since this time it’s about a Chinese company being ahead.
https://www.404media.co/deepseek-mania-shakes-ai-industry-to-its-core/
OpenAI Furious DeepSeek Might Have Stolen All the Data OpenAI Stole From Us
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, business, politics
Looks like the monopolists are vexed and are looking for arguments to discredit the competition… of all the arguments, this one is likely the most ridiculous seeing their own behavior.
https://www.404media.co/openai-furious-deepseek-might-have-stolen-all-the-data-openai-stole-from-us/
China’s new and cheaper magic beans shock America’s unprepared magic bean salesmen - The Beaverton
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, business, satire, funny
Excellent satire, it summaries the situation quite well.
ChatGPT : how to think after the hapax
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, neural-networks, gpt, science, energy
I mostly agree with this piece. There’s lots of room for optimization still so we might see a temporary drop in the energy consumption of those systems. That said, longer term energy consumption is indeed the main leverage to improve performance of those systems. It can only get us so far, so new techniques will be needed. Hence why my position is that we’ll come back to symbolic approaches at some point, there’s a clear challenge at interfacing both worlds.
https://algonaute.fr/en/thinking-after-chatgpt.html
A cross-platform context-aware key remapper
Tags: tech, tools, portability, wayland
Looks like a neat tool to have available to remap keys.
https://github.com/houmain/keymapper
Why Trees Without Branches Grow Faster: The Case for Reducing Branches in Code
Tags: tech, cpu, performance, programming
Nice primer on the impact of too many branches in your code on the CPU. This is sometimes a good way to boost performance when you’re mindful about that.
https://cedardb.com/blog/reducing_branches/
Regular expressions can blow up! – Daniel Lemire’s blog
Tags: tech, safety, regex
Always be careful with regular expressions indeed. It can badly backfire.
https://lemire.me/blog/2025/01/25/regular-expressions-can-blow-up/
JavaScript Temporal is coming | MDN Blog
Tags: tech, javascript, date, time
Finally some sane API to deal with date and time in JavaScript? Maybe, we’ll see…
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/blog/javascript-temporal-is-coming/
“Will I ever use this in the real world?”
Tags: tech, science, culture
Of course I agree with this piece. You need enough culture in your field to know about a breadth of topics. It will definitely help pick up the next one you don’t know about yet or help you build parallels for the tougher problems you encounter.
https://blog.waleedkhan.name/will-i-ever-use-this/
Build It Yourself
Tags: tech, dependencies, supply-chain, security, complexity, maintenance
This is a worthy questioning… We try to reuse, but maybe we do it too much? For sure some ecosystems quickly lead to hundreds of dependencies even for small features.
https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/1/24/build-it-yourself/
Dealing with Impostor Syndrome
Tags: psychology
It’s widespread, especially in our field. You’re not alone. Find your coping strategy.
https://www.cultivatedmanagement.com/dealing-with-impostor-syndrome/
Bye for now!