Web Review, Week 2025-11
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-11.
Kill your Feeds - Stop letting algorithms dictate how you think
Tags: tech, social-media, criticism
Simple steps to escape the algorithmic social media circus.
https://usher.dev/posts/2025-03-08-kill-your-feeds/
Music labels will regret coming for the Internet Archive, sound historian says
Tags: tech, culture, archive, history, law, copyright
Once again the music labels can’t understand the cultural value of building archives. Let’s hope they loose the lawsuit.
What does “PhD-level” AI mean? OpenAI’s rumored $20,000 agent plan explained
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, marketing, business
Here we go for a brand new marketing stunt from OpenAI. You can also tell the pressure is rising since all of this is still operating at a massive loss.
Microsoft is reportedly plotting a future without OpenAI
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, microsoft, business
Are we surprised? Not really… This kind of struggle was an obvious outcome from the heavy dependencies between both companies.
https://techstartups.com/2025/03/07/microsoft-is-plotting-a-future-without-openai/
Cognitive Behaviors that Enable Self-Improving Reasoners, or, Four Habits of Highly Effective STaRs
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, cognition, research
I like this kind of research as it also says something about our own cognition. The results comparing two models and improving them are fascinating.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01307
Google’s Gemma 3 is an open source, single-GPU AI with a 128K context window
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt
More smaller footprint models are becoming available. This is becoming interesting (even though the open source claim is overrated here).
Why extracting data from PDFs is still a nightmare for data experts
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, ocr, computer-vision
So much data trapped in PDFs indeed… Unfortunately VLM are still not reliable enough to be unleashed without tight validation of the output.
A Quick Journey Into the Linux Kernel
Tags: tech, linux, kernel, programming
Nice exploration of the important areas in the kernel.
https://www.lucavall.in/blog/a-quick-journey-into-the-linux-kernel
Standards for ANSI escape codes
Tags: tech, unix, command-line, terminal, standard
A nice glimpse into the maze of the escape codes on the terminal.
https://jvns.ca/blog/2025/03/07/escape-code-standards/
Tech Notes: Rust trait object layout
Tags: tech, rust, type-systems, memory
OK more questions than answers I guess… That said, it shows interesting differences in design choices with C++ to support the traits system.
https://neugierig.org/software/blog/2025/03/trait-object-layout.html
When are Rust’s const fns executed?
Tags: tech, rust, compiler, optimization
A quick primer about compile time evaluations in Rust.
https://felixwrt.dev/posts/const-fn/
Why do I find Rust inadequate for codecs?
Tags: tech, rust, c, codec, performance, safety
Interesting reasons to let go of Rust, some spaces indeed can have a safety vs performance tradeoff which would justify using good old C.
https://palaiologos.rocks/posts/rust-codecs/
The Art of Formatting Code
Tags: tech, programming, tools, unicode
Ever wondered how to make a code formatter? This post does a good job showing the main problems you might encounter. The impact of Unicode is especially funny. Very interesting stuff.
https://mcyoung.xyz/2025/03/11/formatters/
Idiomatic Go
Tags: tech, programming, go
An evolving list of how to write idiomatic Go.
https://dmitri.shuralyov.com/idiomatic-go
Building Websites With Lots of Little HTML pages
Tags: tech, web, frontend, css
You can really do a lot with CSS transitions nowadays.
https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/lots-of-little-html-pages/
Post-Processing Shaders as a Creative Medium - Maxime Heckel’s Blog
Tags: tech, gpu, shader, web
Nice set of tricks for post-processing effects all centering around pixelated patterns. Really neat.
https://blog.maximeheckel.com/posts/post-processing-as-a-creative-medium/
What Makes Code Hard To Read: Visual Patterns of Complexity
Tags: tech, programming, maintenance
The whole field is unfortunately a bit fuzzy. That said, this article gives interesting ideas about what to pay attention to when writing code to ease the readability.
https://seeinglogic.com/posts/visual-readability-patterns/
How Long Should Functions Be? - by Kent Beck
Tags: tech, engineering, craftsmanship, quality, tdd, programming
Nice post. Explains well why the answer is not a number to target. You want to impact the distribution.
https://tidyfirst.substack.com/p/how-long-should-functions-be
How to Write Useful Commit Messages
Tags: tech, version-control, codereview
Might be going a bit far if you use everything listed here. That said, it gives lots of good ideas so you might want to decide on what you should adopt on your project.
https://refactoringenglish.com/chapters/commit-messages/
CSS Relative Colors
Tags: tech, web, css, colors
Nice new tricks to specify colours in CSS.
https://ishadeed.com/article/css-relative-colors/
Stewardship over ownership
Tags: tech, engineering, maintenance, leadership
I like this. Sometimes a simple word can make all the difference in the way we behave. Code stewardship is indeed a better word.
https://ntietz.com/blog/stewardship-over-ownership/
The Staff+ Performance Cliff
Tags: tech, leadership, management, learning
It’s indeed not easy to go from individual contributions, to team level leadership, to organisation level leadership. Many things need to be learned or relearned at each step.
https://sylormiller.com/posts/2025/staff-plus-cliff/
There is No Automatic Reset for Engineering
Tags: tech, quality, project-management, product-management
Interesting thinking around a portfolio of activities. You can prioritise differently within it to manage quality vs speed of delivery over time.
https://agileotter.blogspot.com/2025/03/there-is-no-automatic-reset-in.html?m=1
Reducing Power Gradients - Psych Safety
Tags: organization, management, power, psychology
Interesting tips to reduce the power dynamics in organisations.
https://psychsafety.com/reducing-power-gradients/
Bye for now!