Web Review, Week 2025-44
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-44.
Sakana AI’s CTO says he’s ‘absolutely sick’ of transformers, the tech that powers every major AI model
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, business, research, science
I’m happy to see I’m actually very much aligned with one of the “Attention Is All You Need” co-authors. The current industry trend of “just scale the transformer architecture” is indeed stifling innovation and actual research. That said I find ironic that he talks about freedom to explore… well this is what public labs used to be about, but we decided to drastically reduce their funding and replace that with competition between startups. It’s no surprise we have very myopic views on problems.
Kafka is fast – I’ll use Postgres
Tags: tech, architecture, complexity, databases, queuing, distributed, postgresql
Indeed, in most case you don’t need the extra complexity. Also interesting is showing that even if the application has to scale rapidly you still got quite some time to plan the transition to something else. It makes Postgres a sane default choice.
https://topicpartition.io/blog/postgres-pubsub-queue-benchmarks
WebDAV Isn’t Dead Yet
Tags: tech, webdav, storage
Indeed, WebDAV is too easily overlooked nowadays although it’s a respectable protocol with general availability. It’s likely available somewhere in what you already use.
https://blog.feld.me/posts/2025/09/webdav-isnt-dead-yet/
You already have a git server
Tags: tech, version-control, git, tools
A good reminder that you don’t always need a full blown forge.
https://maurycyz.com/misc/easy_git/
Use the XDG Base Directory Specification!
Tags: tech, standard, unix, linux, freedesktop
Nice little website advocating for more use of the XDG base directory specification. This is still needed to push for it indeed.
https://xdgbasedirectoryspecification.com/
fnox - Fort Knox for your secrets
Tags: tech, tools, security, secrets
Looks like an interesting tool to go with mise.
The Linux Boot Process: From Power Button to Kernel
Tags: tech, linux, kernel, hardware, system
Nice explanation of the very early steps leading to the kernel loading.
https://www.0xkato.xyz/linux-boot/
The Journey Before main()
Tags: tech, kernel, elf, linux, system
A good introduction at the early steps when a process is started. Covers what happens in the kernel, the ELF interpreter and your language runtime before the main function is called.
https://amit.prasad.me/blog/before-main
Stackful Coroutine Made Fast
Tags: tech, asynchronous, coroutine, performance, hardware, cpu, c++
Maybe we have a path forward for performance stackful coroutine? More pieces need to fall in place but this looks promising.
https://photonlibos.github.io/blog/stackful-coroutine-made-fast
Quantifying pass-by-value overhead
Tags: tech, cpu, hardware, performance
Interesting to see how it behaves in practice when passing parameters by value. Turns out there are surprising patterns in the data.
https://owen.cafe/posts/struct-sizes/
Closure captures
Tags: tech, c++, rust
Indeed, the C++ syntax for closure captures is way superior to the Rust one. Interesting musing on a potential path forward for Rust.
https://andwass.github.io/rust/2025/10/23/closure-captures.html
How to Avoid Fighting Rust Borrow Checker
Tags: tech, rust, memory
Interesting notes about borrow checking in Rust. Looks like it does a good job exploring the whole space of issues one can encounter with potential solutions.
https://qouteall.fun/qouteall-blog/2025/How%20to%20Avoid%20Fighting%20Rust%20Borrow%20Checker
Image Dithering: Eleven Algorithms and Source Code
Tags: tech, graphics, colors
Interested in how dithering works? All the algorithms you will ever need are probably on this list.
https://tannerhelland.com/2012/12/28/dithering-eleven-algorithms-source-code.html
By the power of grayscale!
Tags: tech, computer-vision
A good way to see the basics of computer vision. This gives all the building blocks needed.
https://zserge.com/posts/grayskull/
Serverless Is An Architectural Handicap (And I’m Tired of Pretending it Isn’t)
Tags: tech, cloud, architecture, complexity
A bit of an advertisement toward the end. That said, the evaluated constraints are completely valid. You don’t want to fit your whole code base into the “cloud function” model, only a few workloads will make sense there.
https://viduli.io/blog/serverless-is-a-handicap
Mistakes I see engineers making in their code reviews
Tags: tech, codereview, quality
An interesting set of principles for code reviews.
https://www.seangoedecke.com/good-code-reviews/
As an engineer, you have more power than you think
Tags: tech, engineering, technical-debt
Definitely this. It’s a good reminder of the boy scout rule. It’s fine to clean up as you go and when you find the opportunity.
https://candost.blog/journal/engineers-have-more-power/
The simplest, hardest way to “live like a local”
Tags: tourism, satire
An excellent satire about tourism. Are you sure you want to “live like a local”? Think twice.
https://andrewsamtoy.substack.com/p/ten-ways-to-live-like-a-local-anywhere?ref=DenseDiscovery-362
Bye for now!