Krebs on Security has an informative article about web notifications and how they are being used for spamming and promoting malware [1]. He also includes links for how to permanently disable them. If nothing else clicking “no” on each new site that wants to send notifications is annoying.
Michael Stapelberg wrote an insightful posts about inefficiencies in the Debian development processes [2]. While I agree with most of his assessment of Debian issues I am not going to decrease my involvement in Debian. Of the issues he mentions the 2 that seem to have the best effort to reward ratio are improvements to mailing list archives (to ideally make it practical to post to lists without subscribing and read responses in the archives) and the issues of forgetting all the complexities of the development process which can be alleviated by better Wiki pages. In my Debian work I’ve contributed more to the Wiki in recent times but not nearly as much as I should.
Mark Brown wrote an interesting blog post about the Rust programming language [4]. He links to a couple of longer blog posts about it. Rust has some great features and I’ve been meaning to learn it.
Scientific America has an informative article about research on the spread of fake news and memes [5]. Something to consider when using social media.
Jonathan Dowland wrote an interesting blog post about git rebasing and lab books [7]. I think it’s an interesting thought experiment to compare the process of developing code worthy of being committed to a master branch of a VCS to the process of developing a Ph.D thesis.
CBS has a disturbing article about the effect of Covid19 on people’s lungs [8]. Apparently it usually does more lung damage than long-term smoking and even 70%+ of people who don’t have symptoms of the disease get significant lung damage. People who live in heavily affected countries like the US now have to worry that they might have had the disease and got lung damage without knowing it.
Russ Allbery wrote an interesting review of the book “Because Internet” about modern linguistics [9]. The topic is interesting and I might read that book at some future time (I have many good books I want to read).
Linus has slammed Intel for using ECC support as a way of segmenting the market between server and desktop to maximise profits [11]. It would be nice if a company made a line of Ryzen systems with ECC RAM support, but most manufacturers seem to be in on the market segmentation scam.
- [1] https://tinyurl.com/y37jh9t4
- [2] https://tinyurl.com/y45o88ma
- [3] https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/12/broke-in-america-ending-us-poverty
- [4] https://tinyurl.com/y98llves
- [5] https://tinyurl.com/yy67g9nq
- [6] https://tinyurl.com/y99wjkvx
- [7] https://jmtd.net/log/git_rebasing_and_lab_books/
- [8] https://tinyurl.com/yy6l22x4
- [9] https://tinyurl.com/yxtwtbhe
- [10] https://jonathancarter.org/2020/12/10/centos-stream-or-debian/
- [11] https://tinyurl.com/y3kolzzs
- [12] https://tinyurl.com/y4v9xglj