Web Review, Week 2025-47
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2025-47.
In 1982, a physics joke gone wrong sparked the invention of the emoticon - Ars Technica
Tags: tech, history, culture
If you’re wondering where emoticons and emojis are coming from, this is a nice little piece about that.
Screw it, I’m installing Linux
Tags: tech, linux, foss, gaming
Clearly something is brewing right now. We’re seeing more and more people successfully switching.
https://www.theverge.com/tech/823337/switching-linux-gaming-desktop-cachyos
Lawmakers Want to Ban VPNs—And They Have No Idea What They’re Doing
Tags: tech, vpn, privacy, law
This is totally misguided… Let’s hope no one will succeed passing such dangerously stupid bills.
Learning with AI falls short compared to old-fashioned web search
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, learning, teaching
If there’s one area where people should stay clear from LLMs, it’s definitely when they want to learn a topic. That’s one more study showing the knowledge you retain from LLMs briefs is shallower. The friction and the struggle to get to the information is a feature, our brain needs it to remember properly.
https://theconversation.com/learning-with-ai-falls-short-compared-to-old-fashioned-web-search-269760
The Psychogenic Machine: Simulating AI Psychosis, Delusion Reinforcement and Harm Enablement in Large Language Models
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, psychology, safety
The findings in this paper are chilling… especially considering what fragile people are doing with those chat bots.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.10970v1
Feeds, Feelings, and Focus: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Examining the Cognitive and Mental Health Correlates of Short-Form Video Use
Tags: tech, social-media, cognition, psychology
Unsurprisingly the news ain’t good on the front of social media and short form videos. Better stay clear of those.
https://psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/2026-89350-001.html
Do Not Put Your Site Behind Cloudflare if You Don’t Need To
Tags: tech, cloud, decentralized, web
Friendly reminder following the Cloudflare downtime earlier this week.
https://huijzer.xyz/posts/123/do-not-put-your-site-behind-cloudflare-if-you-dont
Cloudflare outage on November 18, 2025
Tags: tech, cloud, complexity, safety, rust
Wondering what happened at Cloudflare? Here is their postmortem, this is an interesting read.
Now for Rust developers… this is a good illustration of why you should stay clear from unwrap() in production code.
https://blog.cloudflare.com/18-november-2025-outage/
Needy Programs
Tags: tech, ux, notifications
Kind of ignore the security impact of the needed upgrades, but apart from this I largely agree. Most applications try to push more features in your face nowadays, unneeded notifications and all… this is frankly exhausting the users.
https://tonsky.me/blog/needy-programs/
I think nobody wants AI in Firefox, Mozilla
Tags: tech, browser, ai, machine-learning, gpt, mozilla
Looks like Mozilla is doing everything it can to alienate the current Firefox user base and to push forward its forks.
https://manualdousuario.net/en/mozilla-firefox-window-ai/
DeepMind’s latest: An AI for handling mathematical proofs
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, mathematics, google
That’s an interesting approach. Early days on this one, it clearly requires further work but it seems like the proper path for math related problems.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/11/deepminds-latest-an-ai-for-handling-mathematical-proofs/
Production-Grade Container Deployment with Podman Quadlets
Tags: tech, systemd, containers, linux, system, podman
Podman is really a nice option for deploying containers nowadays.
https://blog.hofstede.it/production-grade-container-deployment-with-podman-quadlets/
Match it again Sam
Tags: tech, regex, rust
Nice alternative syntax to the good old regular expressions. Gives nice structure to it all. There’s a Rust crate to try it out.
https://www.sminez.dev/match-it-again-sam/
10 Smart Performance Hacks For Faster Python Code
Tags: tech, python, performance
Some of this might sound obvious I guess. Still there are interesting lesser known nuggets proposed here.
https://blog.jetbrains.com/pycharm/2025/11/10-smart-performance-hacks-for-faster-python-code/
Floodfill algorithm in Python
Tags: tech, python, algorithm, graphics
This is a nice little algorithm and it shows how to approach it in Python while keeping it efficient in term of operations.
https://mathspp.com/blog/floodfill-algorithm-in-python
AMD vs. Intel: a Unicode benchmark
Tags: tech, amd, intel, hardware, simd, performance
Clearly AMD is now well above Intel in performance around AVX-512. This is somewhat unexpected.
https://lemire.me/blog/2025/11/16/amd-vs-intel-a-unicode-benchmark/
Memory is slow, Disk is fast
Tags: tech, memory, storage, performance, system
No, don’t go assuming you can use disks instead of ram. This is not what it is about. It shows ways to get more out of your disks though. It’s not something you always need, but sometimes it can be a worth endeavor.
https://www.bitflux.ai/blog/memory-is-slow-part2/
Compiler Options Hardening Guide for C and C++
Tags: tech, c++, security
Good list of hardening options indeed. That’s a lot to deal with of course, let’s hope this spreads and some defaults are changed to make it easier.
The problem with inferring from a function call operator is that there may be more than one
Tags: tech, c++, type-systems, safety
The type inference in C++ can indeed lead to this kind of traps. Need to be careful as usual.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20251002-00/?p=111647
There’s always going to be a way to not code error handling
Tags: tech, programming, safety, failure
Depending on the ecosystem it’s more or less easy indeed. Let’s remember that error handling is one of the hard problems to solve.
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/programming/AlwaysUncodedErrorHandling
Disallow code usage with a custom clippy.toml
Tags: tech, rust, tools, quality
Didn’t know about that clippy feature. This is neat, allows to precisely target some of your project rules.
https://www.schneems.com/2025/11/19/find-accidental-code-usage-with-a-custom-clippytoml/
The Geometry Behind Normal Maps
Tags: tech, 3d, graphics, shader
Struggling to understand tangent space and normal maps? This post does a good job to explain where this comes from.
https://www.shlom.dev/articles/geometry-behind-normal-maps/
Know why you don’t like OOP
Tags: tech, object-oriented
I don’t get why object oriented programming gets so much flack these days… It brings interesting tools and less interesting ones. Just pick and choose wisely like for any other paradigm.
https://zylinski.se/posts/know-why-you-dont-like-oop/
Ditch your (mut)ex, you deserve better
Tags: tech, multithreading, safety
If you’re dealing with multithreading you should not turn to mutexes by default indeed. Consider higher level primitives and patterns first.
https://chrispenner.ca/posts/mutexes
Brownouts reveal system boundaries
Tags: tech, infrastructure, reliability, failure, resilience
Interesting point of view. Indeed, you probably want things to not be available 100% of the time. This forces you to see how resilient things really are.
https://jyn.dev/brownouts-reveal-system-boundaries/
Tech Leads in Scrum
Tags: tech, agile, scrum, tech-lead, leadership
Interesting move on the Scrum definitions to move from roles to accountabilities. The article does a good job explaining it but then falls back into talking about roles somehow. Regarding the tech leads indeed they can work in Scrum teams. Scrum don’t talk about them simply because Scrum don’t talk about technical skills.
https://www.patkua.com/blog/tech-leads-in-scrum/
How to Avoid Solo Product Leadership Failure with a Product Value Team
Tags: tech, agile, product-management
I wonder what the whole series will give. Anyway I very much agree with this first post. Too often projects have a single product manager and that’s a problem.
Bye for now!