Let’s go for my web review for the week 2026-14.
The Last Quiet Thing
Tags: tech, ux, design, business, attention-economy
A good piece, well designed too. Shows how demanding our current devices are. So much attention requested and so much complexity the user has to deal with. We clearly lost the plot as an industry.
https://www.terrygodier.com/the-last-quiet-thing
What we think is a decline in literacy is a design problem
Tags: tech, philosophy, learning, reading, design
Indeed it’s not simply books vs screens. It’s about design and how our attention gets fractured (on purpose). We need to recognise there are many ways to learn and to produce ideas, then design for it. We’d be better off as a civilisation rather than staying with the current attention economy.
https://aeon.co/essays/what-we-think-is-a-decline-in-literacy-is-a-design-problem
Here’s why I’ve installed a Dead Man’s Switch on my home server
Tags: tech, self-hosting, life, death
You’re self-hosting? Better keep in check what happens to the people who depend even indirectly on your services when you’re gone.
https://www.androidauthority.com/home-server-dead-man-switch-3648903/
LinkedIn Is Illegally Searching Your Computer
Tags: tech, linkedin, surveillance
Are we surprised? Of course depends on the browser and they’re looking mostly for extensions. Clearly they try hard to map what people use, it’s corporate espionage.
https://browsergate.eu/
DRAM pricing is killing the hobbyist SBC market
Tags: tech, embedded, memory, economics, ai, machine-learning, gpt
The price hike on RAM due to the LLM as a service bubble is really killing interesting fields. Can’t we have nice things? Will the arm race end soon?
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2026/dram-pricing-is-killing-the-hobbyist-sbc-market/
Nations priced out of Big AI are building with frugal models
Tags: tech, ai, machine-learning, gpt, research, innovation, economics
Real innovations come from constraints. The frugal AI movement is clearly where we will see interesting things emerging. Interestingly, those approaches are closer to what AI is about as a research field than the industrial complex which got unleashed with all its extractive power.
https://restofworld.org/2026/frugal-ai-big-tech/
The Comforting Lie Of SHA Pinning
Tags: tech, supply-chain, security, git
We’re not helped much by our tools here… Clearly provenance needs to be double checked.
https://www.vaines.org/posts/2026-03-24-the-comforting-lie-of-sha-pinning/
Tags: tech, bluray, video, codec, tools
You got bluray discs to encode for use on your NAS? This looks like a nice option.
https://github.com/dmars8047/handymkv
Running out of Disk Space in Production
Tags: tech, architecture, storage, failure
Are you sure your understand how your reverse proxy works and the impacts it can have in production?
https://alt-romes.github.io/posts/2026-04-01-running-out-of-disk-space-on-launch.html
your hex editor should color-code bytes
Tags: tech, hex, data-visualization, debugging
Interesting color coding for hex editor. It indeed brings interesting properties.
https://simonomi.dev/blog/color-code-your-bytes/
Git Bayesect
Tags: tech, git, tools, tests
Git bisect won’t help much for flaky tests… but maybe this bayesian approach can.
https://hauntsaninja.github.io/git_bayesect.html
Tags: tech, databases, sql, tools, performance, security, ci
Looks like an interesting tool to check your SQL queries on the CI.
https://github.com/makroumi/slowql
Joins are NOT Expensive!
Tags: tech, databases, performance
Interesting article which goes deep in comparing joins vs denormalised big tables. The conclusion is in the title, bit it’s worth a read for the other insights.
https://www.database-doctor.com/posts/joins-are-not-expensive
C++26 is done!
Tags: tech, c++, standard, reflection
The new standard is upon us and it’ll be massive. It indeed looks like another C++11. If used it’ll feel like a very different language.
https://herbsutter.com/2026/03/29/c26-is-done-trip-report-march-2026-iso-c-standards-meeting-london-croydon-uk/
What happens when a destructor throws
Tags: tech, c++, exceptions
A good reminder of why destructors shouldn’t throw. It really has to be a last resort measure and only carefully considered. There’s a reason why they are nothrow by default since C++11.
https://www.sandordargo.com/blog/2026/04/01/when-a-destructor-throws
Why Don’t You Use String Views (as std::wstring_view) Instead of Passing std::wstring by const&?
Tags: tech, c++, c, memory
Indeed be careful at how you use strings when interacting with C APIs. String views are likely not what you want in that context. There is a reason why they don’t have c_str().
https://giodicanio.com/2024/05/14/why-dont-you-use-string-views-like-std-wstring_view-instead-of-passing-std-wstring-by-const-reference/
Tags: tech, c, c++, compiler, embedded
Vendor toolchains should see only a limited trust. Like in this case they’re often partial or old.
https://blog.poly.nomial.co.uk/2026-03-31-watch-out-for-missed-warnings-on-vendor-cpp-toolchains.html
Why Fakes Beat Mocks and Testcontainers
Tags: tech, tests, fake, failure
I vehemently agree with this piece. Fakes are unfortunately underrated. They’re the most powerful test double, I wish more projects would invest in them (can be quite an investment, which the article doesn’t quite show unfortunately).
https://pierrezemb.fr/posts/why-fakes-beat-mocks-and-testcontainers/
Working software runs locally
Tags: tech, developer-experience, tests
This is indeed very important to ensure the tooling around your project supports running the whole thing locally. Too often projects sacrifice the ability to do this, it’s clearly a hindrance to testability and a short feedback loop.
https://nickmonad.blog/2026/working-software-runs-locally/
Scaling a Monolith to 1M LOC: 113 Pragmatic Lessons from Tech Lead to CTO
Tags: tech, architecture, debugging, observability, orm, backend, frontend, organisation, leadership
Lots of good insights in here. Of course YMMV and some definitely depends on your context. That’s a lot of dimensions to keep in mind though.
https://www.semicolonandsons.com/articles/scaling-a-monolith-to-1m-loc-113-pragmatic-lessons-from-tech-lead-to-cto
Why the verb “to be” is so irregular
Tags: linguistics, history, english
Fascinating origins of “to be”. As usual to understand this kind of phenomenon, or at least start to build a theory, you have to go back quite far in history.
https://www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/why-the-verb-to-be-is-so-irregular
Bye for now!