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. […]

Not recent news of course, but I finally took the time to measure some visitor data. There’s virtually none reaching piero.dev organically anymore, which is a bit sad, since it used to receive some traffic. It’s clear that content now lives on video (YouTube) as well as other walled gardens and that efforts to disseminate an idea in writing no longer reach a wide audience.

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 […]

AR is a particularly interesting technology when combined with geospatial. AR provides an intuitive interface to navigate and understand the world in 3D. Some geospatial applications need precision. Consumer phones and tablets’ GPS units are not particularly accurate, so this is often not a concern. If we encode latitude and longitude data using single precision floats, we can expect to be off. How off? So if we need sub-meter accuracy, we need to exercise care. Mapbox Unity SDK makes it easy […]