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 […]

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

Unity announced pricing changes and a new runtime fee, which is already causing tremendous backlash. This is a reminder that you cannot trust proprietary software and that your business is tied to the whims of the company behind it. Why take such risk? Game developers should consider Godot for their next project.

I sincerely look forward to see more states and countries bringing forward right to repair laws. If you bought something, you should own it. I didn’t realize how bad this has gotten, until I tried to replace the batteries on both my Kindle and Google Pixel. It’s clear these people DO NOT want you to open these things up. My god. Took me a good hour to change the Kindle battery. Took me FOUR hours to pry open the Google […]

Drone mapping has been the focus of my work for the past few years. For 2020 I’m planning to increase this focus with the development of DroneDB, which I have hopes will replace the (clunky) workflows around aerial data management. For this reason I’ve adopted a new name for all drone tech related business activities (and hopefully put an end on the “how do you spell Masserano?”). Say hello to UAV4GEO. Website: https://uav4geo.com