Web Review, Week 2025-35
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-35.
Open Source is one person
Tags: tech, foss, community, maintenance
This stays true, most projects are maintained by a single person and that’s a problem. Where is the support from all the businesses benefiting from FOSS?
https://opensourcesecurity.io/2025/08-oss-one-person/
The World Runs 20 Billion Instances of Curl. Where’s the Support?
Tags: tech, foss, maintenance, politics
The situation is still complicated for maintainers… And companies benefiting from their free labor don’t get it. This leads to really stupid situations.
https://thenewstack.io/the-world-runs-20-billion-instances-of-curl-wheres-the-support/
Give Your Spouse the Gift of a Couple’s Email Domain
Tags: tech, email, productivity
This is a funny but interesting productivity tip.
https://mtlynch.io/couples-email-domain/
Google says a typical AI text prompt only uses 5 drops of water — experts say that’s misleading
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, ecology, research
We can expect more misleading papers to be published by the big LLM providers. Don’t fall in the trap, wait for actually peer reviewed papers from academia. Unsurprisingly the results aren’t as good there.
https://www.theverge.com/report/763080/google-ai-gemini-water-energy-emissions-study
No, Google Did Not Unilaterally Decide to Kill XSLT
Tags: tech, google, web, xml, xslt, html
Here is another point of view on the XSLT situation in the WHATWG. Clearly the process needs to be made clearer. I’m not necessarily convinced by everything which is brought forth in this piece, still nice to have different point of views on it.
https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2025/08/22/no-google-did-not-unilaterally-decide-to-kill-xslt/
Google will block sideloading of unverified Android apps starting next year
Tags: tech, google, android, security, vendor-lockin
Unsurprisingly this ecosystem keeps being more and more closed.
Citrix forgot to tell you CVE-2025–6543 has been used as a zero day since May 2025
Tags: tech, networking, security
Clearly Citrix is drowning as a product… How can people still trust the provider after such an episode?
I Hacked Monster Energy
Tags: tech, security
Alright… That’s really bad security practices. Don’t do this at home.
https://bobdahacker.com/blog/monster-energy
ghrc.io Appears to be Malicious
Tags: tech, security, containers, supply-chain
Mind your typos… It seems clear a bad actor is hiding behind that one.
https://bmitch.net/blog/2025-08-22-ghrc-appears-malicious/
Xz format inadequate for general use
Tags: tech, compression, safety
Probably biased, but this raises questions about xz.
https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/xz_inadequate.html
The vulnerability might be in the proof-of-concept
Tags: tech, security
Not every vulnerability reports are born equal… This can be a waste of time when the vulnerability is on the reporter end.
https://sethmlarson.dev/the-vulnerability-is-in-the-proof-of-concept
Pulse: A responsive monitoring application for Proxmox VE
Tags: tech, virtualization, monitoring
Looks like a nice tool to monitor your Proxmox install.
https://github.com/rcourtman/Pulse
Materialized views are obviously useful
Tags: tech, databases, caching, complexity, architecture
Indeed, if you can guarantee your materialized views to always be up to date, you might be able to get rid of some caching… and thus some complexity can be avoided.
https://sophiebits.com/2025/08/22/materialized-views-are-obviously-useful
shared_ptr: the (not always) atomic reference counted smart pointer
Tags: tech, c++, multithreading, memory, atomics, optimization
This is an interesting and deeply buried optimization for the GNU C++ STL implementation. I didn’t expect anything like this.
https://snf.github.io/2019/02/13/shared-ptr-optimization/
io_uring, kTLS and Rust for zero syscall HTTPS server
Tags: tech, linux, kernel, system, performance, networking
We really have nice facilities in the kernel to squeeze some extra performance nowadays.
https://blog.habets.se/2025/04/io-uring-ktls-and-rust-for-zero-syscall-https-server.html
Trying to get error backtraces in rust libraries right
Tags: tech, rust, safety, failure
Clearly the error handling landscape still evolves in Rust and that’s a good thing. The current solutions are too fragmented at the moment.
https://www.iroh.computer/blog/error-handling-in-iroh
Rust for Everyone!
Tags: tech, programming, debugging, learning, rust
Interesting talk. The tools presented can indeed go a long way helping people figure out what’s wrong with a piece of code or learning some of the harder parts of a language.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0dP-QR5wQo
Go is still not good
Tags: tech, go, criticism
Keep in mind this is a rant, so it likely goes over the top a bit. That said, I first hand encountered some of the constructs mentioned here… I find that surprising in such a recent language indeed.
https://blog.habets.se/2025/07/Go-is-still-not-good.html
You no longer need JavaScript
Tags: tech, web, frontend, html, css
Long but thorough collection of all the nice improvements CSS brought the past few years.
https://lyra.horse/blog/2025/08/you-dont-need-js/
Shader Academy
Tags: tech, graphics, shader, learning
Looks like a neat way to learn shader programming.
https://shaderacademy.com/explore
How to Slow Down a Program? And Why it Can Be Useful
Tags: tech, performance, multithreading
This can be useful indeed to explore concurrency issues. It requires some work though.
https://stefan-marr.de/2025/08/how-to-slow-down-a-program/
Inside Windows 3
Tags: tech, windows, history, architecture, system, complexity
Ever wondered about how Windows 3 was architectured? This is an interesting read. It was really complex though, you can really tell it’s in the middle of several transitions.
https://www.xtof.info/inside-windows3.html
Everything I know about good API design
Tags: tech, web, api, design
Lots of good points in there. Very much focused on web services APIs, that being said the first part also applies to libraries APIs in my opinion.
https://www.seangoedecke.com/good-api-design/
Why I Read Technical Books
Tags: tech, book, learning
I think this is pretty accurate… I have mostly the same reasons.
https://ratfactor.com/b/technical-books
Developer’s block
Tags: tech, programming, motivation
Feeling blocked? Maybe try a few of those things on your project.
https://underlap.org/developers-block/
College students are bombarded by misinformation, so this professor taught them fact-checking 101
Tags: tech, social-media, fake-news, politics, teaching
The approach is good, the results are encouraging as well. Not much effort and a very visible change. We need more such initiatives.
The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov
Tags: philosophy, physics, science
A very good essay which reminds us we can’t really reason in terms of absolute right or wrong.
https://hermiene.net/essays-trans/relativity_of_wrong.html?ref=DenseDiscovery-353
Bye for now!