Weeknotes 2024.15

I finally went back to my Swift projects mid-week. It’s a much more chill environment. After the initial excitement subsided, the constant whack-a-mole and rabbit hole of web development became a bit exhausting. I will return to it, both because I have to and because I want to.

The xz backdoor has been quite the wakeup call for many. We should not forget however that the backdoor and recent licensing controversies are symptoms of the same problem: open source sustainability. People and companies need to rethink their relationship with software. The point of open source is not to get software for free or as cheap as possible.

Remember last week when I said I like Markdown with Frontmatter as database frontend? I'm not the only one thinking Markdown makes an excellent DB product.

Changelog

• Continued the Swiftification of the internal OSINT/DSS
• Started writing up the thinking behind BackstageWorks branding for when it’s released

Linklog

Not much this week, as everybody still seemed to deal with xz investigations and the aftermath of the Redis relicensing.

AI Limits

Amazon ditches ‘just walk out’ checkouts, because the ‘AI’ was 1000 people in India watching the videos. Fake it till you ditch it.

Kangaroos are too erratic for AI in your car’s emergency braking. Turns out Emus aren't the only challenging Aussie animals.

Citing Alex Komoroske via Simon Willison:

LLMs are like a trained circus bear that can make you porridge in your kitchen. It’s a miracle that it’s able to do it at all, but watch out because no matter how well they can act like a human on some tasks, they’re still a wild animal. They might ransack your kitchen, and they could kill you, accidentally or intentionally!

Programming

Get started with Embedded Swift, with a couple of examples to try on your ARM and RISC-V microcontrollers.

Christian Tietze on Masterclass of Decoupling: Diablo II Resurrected. A really nice find by Christian.

See you next week!