It’s been a while since I wrote my first chapter on this series and the response to it has been extremely muted. I know there are many silent readers (when I read blogs, I’m one of them), but I’ve also presented these ideas to conferences and to fellow developers, where I had an opportunity to press for responses. Very few seem to care (much) about funding. I’ve come up with a few facts that could explain why that is so: […]
There’s no doubt AI can be a tremendous tool for productivity, research and coding. It’s also making software development more accessible to more people. This is generally good. We should strive to do so, because it’s empowering to do things yourself. There’s however a nuisance that’s slowly surfacing as a side effect of this progress: AI-generated (or mostly AI-generated) pull requests. I think there’s an attitude toward wanting to hide the fact that a tool was used to generate a […]
Major search engines are now including “AI Summaries” in their search results. While this is sometimes useful, such summaries are extremely annoying. I want to search for websites, not machine-generated summaries. If I wanted machine-generated summaries, I would use a different tool. Almost paradoxically, this shift in design is going to hurt search engines in the long term. When I don’t click on a search result, because I read the answer from an AI summary, I don’t access the websites. […]
Ask where one should invest a modest amount of money and nowadays the answer will most likely be to put it into passively managed index funds. It’s a very compelling and simple financial strategy: 1. Buy one or a combination of low cost index funds, preferably a mix that gives you exposure to a mix of bonds, domestic and international stocks. 2. Continue buying every now and then. 3. Wait and let the market do its compounding returns magic. And […]
Today a cyber-security firm named Crowdstrike took down large swaths of the world’s IT infrastructure by pushing a faulty update on millions of Windows machines. On a Friday. Whoops! As anyone working in IT knows, mistakes happen. But while we can bash the lack of testing and oversight over such a big mistake, I think it’s important to reflect on the role that IT departments played in the meltdown. Why would anyone ever give a company (outside the one that […]
Of all the feedback I get about WebODM, few people complain about the speed of the software. In fact, the software is often praised for its speed of processing compared to other alternatives. I care about speed and memory efficiency, a lot. I will go out of my way to avoid bloat and I write software accordingly. But this is not driven by some obsession to keep things lean. Instead, it is a self-imposed constraint dictated by my choice of […]
At the risk of sounding like an old man, the internet has changed a lot. Not all changes have been positive. Before starting a conversation about what is disappointing about the modern internet, we should list some of the things I do not miss about the old internet: What I do miss about the old internet: The modern internet has evolved and there’s no turning back. With that evolution we now have: But we also have: The points above share […]
Do a quick search on the AGPL and you’ll find a lot of criticism. Some of it often include: “It’s bad because it’s too restrictive” “It’s probably bad, because companies like Google don’t allow it internally” While it seems that the critics outweigh the fans, the reality is that critics are often individuals looking to use open source code, rather than to contribute to it. And they outnumber maintainers by a large margin. The AGPL requires people to share modifications […]
Two years ago I applied for a U.S. trademark for LibreTranslate. To my surprise and probably to my own fault for not having declared the English translation of the word “libre” from French (more on that later), the application was initially rejected on the ground that the mark was deemed by the attourney examiner to be “merely descriptive”. A merely descriptive mark is a mark that only describes a product, without adding any significant insight, interpretation, or deeper meaning. For […]
For a data format, yaml is extremely complicated. It aims to be a human-friendly format, but in striving for that it introduces so much complexity, that I would argue it achieves the opposite result. Yaml is full of footguns and its friendliness is deceptive. In this post I want to demonstrate this through an example. Ruud van Asseldonk https://ruudvanasseldonk.com/2023/01/11/the-yaml-document-from-hell