Web Review, Week 2025-14
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-14.
How crawlers impact the operations of the Wikimedia projects
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, criticism, knowledge
Unsurprisingly, Wikimedia is also badly impacted by the LLM crawlers… That puts access to curated knowledge at risk if the trend continues.
https://diff.wikimedia.org/2025/04/01/how-crawlers-impact-the-operations-of-the-wikimedia-projects/
Beyond Public Access in LLM Pre-Training Data: Non-public book content in OpenAI’s Models – Social Science Research Council (SSRC)
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copyright, ethics
We just can’t leave the topic of how the big model makers are building their training corpus unaddressed. This is both an ethics and economics problem. The creators of the content used to train such large models should be compensated in a way.
Between this, the crawlers they use and the ecological footprint of the data centers, there are so many negative externalities to those systems that law makers should have cease the topic a while ago. The paradox is that if nothing is done about it, the reckless behavior of the model makers will end up hurting them as well.
AI ambivalence
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, criticism
I somehow recognise myself in this piece. Not completely though, I disagree with some of the points… but we share some baggage so I recognize another fellow.
https://nolanlawson.com/2025/04/02/ai-ambivalence/
Why I stopped using AI code editors
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, copilot, learning, knowledge
Even if you use LLMs, make sure you don’t depend on them in your workflows. Friction can indeed have value. Also if you’re a junior you should probably seldom use them, build your skill and knowledge first… otherwise you’ll forever be a beginner and that will bite you hard.
https://lucianonooijen.com/blog/why-i-stopped-using-ai-code-editors/
Pixelfed leaks private posts from other Fediverse instances - fiona fokus
Tags: tech, social-media, fediverse
Clearly the security practice around Pixelfed bears questioning. I’m also a bit surprise at the lack of protection of private messages in the ActivityPub protocol (even though it’s a hard admittedly a hard problem).
https://fokus.cool/2025/03/25/pixelfed-vulnerability.html
How to report a security issue in an open source project - Jacob Kaplan-Moss
Tags: tech, foss, security
This is considered standard practice at this point. The article does a good job explaining it and the reasoning behind it.
https://jacobian.org/2025/mar/27/reporting-security-issues-in-oss/
The Surprise of Multiple Dependency Graphs - ACM Queue
Tags: tech, dependencies, supply-chain
Dependency resolution is harder than people generally expect. This is a difficult problem and is very sensitive to the context.
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?ref=rss&id=3723000
A Retrospective on the Source Code Control System
Tags: tech, version-control, history
This paper is a look back at SCCS. This is nice to see how much progress was made in version control systems since then, it’s also interesting to see how the design choices changed.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10821013
git-revise
Tags: tech, version-control, git, tools
Looks like a nice alternative to git rebase to manage patchsets. Definitely interesting if you’re using something like Gerrit. With other forges… It’ll depend how your reviews are handled I think.
https://mystor.github.io/git-revise.html
Gerrit, GitButler, and Jujutsu projects collaborating on change-id commit footer
Tags: tech, version-control, git, codereview
Could be interesting if it gets standardized. Maybe other forges than Gerrit will start leveraging the concept, this would improve the review experience greatly on those.
https://lore.kernel.org/git/CAESOdVAspxUJKGAA58i0tvks4ZOfoGf1Aa5gPr0FXzdcywqUUw@mail.gmail.com/T/#u
Empowering WebAssembly with Thin Kernel Interfaces
Tags: tech, webassembly, virtualization, portability, research
This is interesting research. It shows nice prospects for WebAssembly future as a virtualization and portability technology. I don’t think we’ll see all of the claims in the discussion section realized though.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145⁄3689031.3717470
A Study of Undefined Behavior Across Foreign Function Boundaries in Rust Libraries
Tags: tech, rust, safety
Rust itself might bring interesting properties in term of safety. As soon as it needs to interact with other languages though the chances of undefined behavior increase drastically. This definitely pushes towards using more dynamic analysis tools to catch those.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.11671
Introducing Stringleton
Tags: tech, rust, memory, safety
Nice feature, but more interesting in its explanation is the topic of static initializers in Rust. They’re clearly not a settled area in the language, that’s in part because of how low level static analyzers are.
https://simonask.github.io/introducing-stringleton/
A pattern for obtaining a single value while holding a lock
Tags: tech, multithreading, c++
This is indeed a nice pattern to obtain a value, brings neat advantages.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250127-00/?p=110809
Deadlock-free Mutexes and Directed Acyclic Graphs
Tags: tech, multithreading, rust
Interesting trick to check at runtime that you always acquire mutexes in the same order.
https://bertptrs.nl/2022/06/23/deadlock-free-mutexes-and-directed-acyclic-graphs.html
Anime.js | JavaScript Animation Engine
Tags: tech, web, frontend, animation
Interesting JS library for animation on the Web. It’s nice that it seems really small.
Learn CSS Layout The Pedantic Way
Tags: tech, web, frontend, css
Looks like a nice resource to deep dive into CSS layouts and really understand their behaviours.
CSS System colors
Tags: tech, web, frontend, css, colors
Nice way to have a web frontend which respects the system color choices of the user.
https://anto.pt/articles/css-system-colors
Minimal CSS-only blurry image placeholders
Tags: tech, web, frontend, colors
This is a very smart way to create pure CSS placeholders.
https://leanrada.com/notes/css-only-lqip/
The Fifth Kind of Optimisation
Tags: tech, multithreading, optimization, rust
A good look back at parallelisation and multithreading as a mean to optimise. This is definitely a hard problem, and indeed got a bit easier with recent languages like Rust.
https://tratt.net/laurie/blog/2025/the_fifth_kind_of_optimisation.html
Ports and fat adapters
Tags: tech, architecture, complexity
A good reminder of why you often don’t want to follow an architecture pattern to the letter. They should be considered like guidelines and depending on your technical context you should properly balance the costs. Here is an example with the Ports and Adapters pattern in the context of an ASP.NET application.
https://blog.ploeh.dk/2025/04/01/ports-and-fat-adapters/
Thoughts on ECS | Voxagon Blog
Tags: tech, architecture, simulation, game
Nice post about pros and cons of ECS architectures.
https://blog.voxagon.se/2025/03/28/thoughts-on-ecs.html
The manager I hated and the lesson he taught me
Tags: tech, programming, engineering, leadership
For sure the aforementioned manager need to fix his communication style. That being said the core advice was indeed good.
https://www.blog4ems.com/p/the-manager-i-hated
Bye for now!