Web Review, Week 2025-12
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-12.
Please stop externalizing your costs directly into my face
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, criticism
Those bots are really becoming the scourge of the Internet… Is it really necessary to DDoS every forge out there to build LLMs? And that’s not even counting all the other externalities, the end of the article make it clear: “If blasting CO2 into the air and ruining all of our freshwater and traumatizing cheap laborers and making every sysadmin you know miserable and ripping off code and books and art at scale and ruining our fucking democracy isn’t enough for you to leave this shit alone, what is?”
https://drewdevault.com/2025/03/17/2025-03-17-Stop-externalizing-your-costs-on-me.html
FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, criticism
More details about the impacts of the LLM companies acting like vandals… This is clearly widespread and generating work for everyone for nothing.
https://thelibre.news/foss-infrastructure-is-under-attack-by-ai-companies/
Careless people – Aral Balkan
Tags: tech, facebook, politics, law, gdpr, surveillance, attention-economy
I guess more reviews of that book will come out. It looks like Meta and some EU politicians are even more rotten to the core than we ever suspected…
https://ar.al/2025/03/21/careless-people/
Everything you say to your Echo will be sent to Amazon starting on March 28 - Ars Technica
Tags: tech, amazon, privacy, surveillance
Now is the time to wake up and get those surveillance devices out of people’s homes…
Man Tests If Tesla Autopilot Will Crash Into Wall Painted to Look Like Road
Tags: tech, tesla, safety
In case it wasn’t clear yet that not relying on Lidar was a stupid move for self-driving cars.
https://futurism.com/tesla-wall-autopilot
Dad demands OpenAI delete ChatGPT’s false claim that he murdered his kids
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, law
Still so reliable… could we confine this to NLP uses please? Should never had been used for anything looking remotely like search.
It’s all hallucinations
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt
Words are important, I’m dismayed at how the marketing speak around generative AI is what people use… that completely muddies the thinking around them.
https://tante.cc/2025/03/16/its-all-hallucinations/
“Vibe Coding” vs Reality
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, programming
Despite the marketing speak… it’s definitely not there yet. So far all the attempts at using LLM for coding larger pieces end up in this kind of messy results. It helps kickstarting a project indeed but quickly degenerates after that.
https://cendyne.dev/posts/2025-03-19-vibe-coding-vs-reality.html
My Scammer Girlfriend: Baiting A Romance Fraudster | www.bentasker.co.uk
Tags: tech, security, scam
Fascinating exploration of the techniques scammers are using to hook their victims
https://www.bentasker.co.uk/posts/blog/security/seducing-a-romance-scammer.html
Introducing Orpheus Speech - Canopy Labs
Tags: tech, speech, ai, machine-learning
Impressive new models for text to speech.
https://canopylabs.ai/model-releases
HTTP/3 is everywhere but nowhere
Tags: tech, http, quic, community
The picture is a bit to bleak I think, but there’s indeed currently a divide in terms of HTTP/3 adoption. This is fairly aligned with the big players vs long tail creators divide. Hopefully this will get solved at some point.
https://httptoolkit.com/blog/http3-quic-open-source-support-nowhere/
Were multiple return values Go’s biggest mistake?
Tags: tech, programming, go
With the little Go I wrote, I admit that the multiple return values feature is… odd. Worse though, it has bad ramifications.
https://herecomesthemoon.net/2025/03/multiple-return-values-in-go/
I don’t think error handling is a solved problem in language design
Tags: tech, programming, language, exceptions
Indeed, it’s something where we lack consensus across languages and sometimes within the same ecosystem.
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/ErrorHandlingNotSolvedProblem
The Defer Technical Specification: It Is Time
Tags: tech, c, standard, memory, safety
This could be a big improvement for C. We’ll see how far this goes.
https://thephd.dev/c2y-the-defer-technical-specification-its-time-go-go-go
Speeding up C++ code with template lambdas – Daniel Lemire’s blog
Tags: tech, c++, programming, optimization
Definitely ugly in the end. Still it does the the trick.
https://lemire.me/blog/2025/03/15/speeding-up-c-code-with-template-lambdas/
Our interfaces have lost their senses
Tags: tech, gui, ux
Beautifully crafted post. So much of it is true as well, having several modalities available is better for interactions. We’ve been loosing this overtime, it’s time to reintroduce it… there’s so much to do in the HMI space.
https://wattenberger.com/thoughts/our-interfaces-have-lost-their-senses
Xenographics – Weird but (sometimes) useful charts
Tags: tech, data-visualization
Need new ideas for data visualization? This seems like a good resource.
Passive Voice Considered Harmful · Refactoring English
Tags: tech, documentation, writing
Good explanation of why the passive voice should be avoided. Also it gives a few cases where you want to favor the passive voice.
https://refactoringenglish.com/chapters/passive-voice-considered-harmful/
Why I’m No Longer Talking to Architects About Microservices
Tags: tech, architecture, microservices, criticism
Interesting piece… why talking about microservices generally leads nowhere. This is a too loosely defined term and we’re often confusing means and ends.
https://blog.container-solutions.com/why-im-no-longer-talking-to-architects-about-microservices
Who are your teammates?
Tags: tech, leadership, management, team
Interesting way to frame the question for leadership roles.
https://ntietz.com/blog/who-are-your-teammates/
Why “Normal” Engineers Are the Key to Great Teams - IEEE Spectrum
Tags: tech, organization, team, culture, productivity
We should definitely put the 10x engineer myth to rest. Let’s focus on setting up the right organisation and culture instead.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/10x-engineer
Battery breakthrough as 99.99% of lithium extracted from old cells
Tags: tech, battery, ecology
If it can be done at scale this would be very good news.
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/battery-recycle-lithium-ion-environment-b2713723.html
Why Your Brain Blinds You For 2 Hours Every Days
Tags: science, cognition, neuroscience
Nice video which gives a glimpse on how our brain constantly tries to build a coherent picture of the reality around us. This is quite a feat since our senses are ill equipped to produce such a picture. Of course we don’t even notice all those processes when we go about our days.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo_e0EvEZn8
Bye for now!