links

Vicki Boykis has a good piece on Redis’s recent vicissitudes. At the same time, she recaps where we stand and sings the praises of a project that many are fond of, and not just for its technical worth. I, like many developers who have worked on high-scale, low-latency web services over the last fifteen years, have an intimate relationship with Redis. At any new job, when you ask where the data is, and someone points you to a server address with port 6379, you know you will meet an good, reliable friend there....

Molly White’s experience with LLMs corresponds more or less with my own, but she is much better at recounting, critiquing, and drawing conclusions than I am. I find my feelings about AI are actually pretty similar to my feelings about blockchains: they do a poor job of much of what people try to do with them, they can’t do the things their creators claim they one day might, and many of the things they are well suited to do may not be altogether that beneficial....

The so-called “XZ attack” is all over the internet these days, and for good reason. Over a period of over two years, an attacker using the name “Jia Tan” worked as a diligent, effective contributor to the xz compression library, eventually being granted commit access and maintainership. Using that access, they installed a very subtle, carefully hidden backdoor into liblzma, a part of xz that also happens to be a dependency of OpenSSH sshd on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and other systemd-based Linux systems....

I am not a fan of TV series. However, I have been following the Shogun miniseries with a fair amount of interest, mainly because I am intrigued by the setting and historical period covered. As is always the case with modern TV series, it started very well (the first two to three episodes). Then it slowed down, getting stuck in the main characters’ fanciful and improbable personal affairs and agendas, straying from the main plot, essentially muddling along until, I assume, the last episode of the season that will end with a bang....

As it appears, cannibalism was much more widespread than previously thought, and perhaps for more complex reasons than we think. To honor the dead, for example. Our ancestors have been eating each other for a million years or more. In fact, it seems that, down the ages, around a fifth of societies have practised cannibalism. While some of this people-eating may have been done simply to survive, in many cases, the reasons look more complex....

Take care of yourself. Sleep. Eat. Exercise. Rest. Relax. Take care of other people, as best you can. People are important. Software is just fun. – Lars Wirzenius, in his noteworthy 40 years of programming

Medieval monks also needed help with focus and attention. Joel J Miller discusses this in What Monks Know About Focus, the latest issue of Miller’s Book Review, which I recently discovered and shows great promise. While technology has evolved in the last fifteen hundred years, the human brain has not. And few people in the ancient world cared as much about the challenges of attention and distraction as monks. Our reasons might differ today, but we have much to learn nonetheless....

From my experience as a maintainer of midly successful open-source projects, I have come to the conclusion that people who criticize accepting payment to work on such projects are either acting in bad faith or are incredibly naive. Anyway, Jacob Kaplan-Moss’s recent Paying people to work on open source is good is a stellar post on the topic of open-source sustainability. My fundamental position is that paying people to work on open source is good, full stop, no exceptions....

Yesterday’s OpenAI launch of Sora is, as is always the case with OpenAI, mind-boggling. Marquees Browniee’s comment is spot-on, so much so as he’s obviously involved in the video-making scene. I don’t think content creators are at risk with Sora, not anytime soon, but, as Marquees repeatedly notes in the video above, just one year ago we thought AI-generated video was a joke.

I’m always fascinated by these in-depth bibliography efforts, and this one, with its unique 300-page catalog detailing 7,400 titles from Charles Darwin’s library, is nothing short of extraordinary. John van Wyhe, the academic who has led the “overwhelming” endeavour, said it showed the extraordinary extent of Darwin’s research into the work of others. “It also shows how insanely eclectic Darwin was,” Van Wyhe said. “There is this vast sea of things which might be an American or German news clipping about a duck or invasive grasshoppers....