Weeknotes 2024.16

Had an abomination of a week with a sudden loss of a revenue stream. Hence scrambled to accelerate other potential revenue streams. Links include topics such as the reality of AI adoption, internals of the JSR, internals of ‘Hello World’, open source, privacy and an article on Dewey, the system and the person

If it rains, it pours. Last week was a bit much to take in. To say I struggled would be an understatement. The “fun” of changing business realities and sudden revenue drops. I had and still have to remind me, where I was one year ago. So, let’s refocus and get moving.

Anyway, let's get on with the good parts. I’m a bit scrambling at the moment. While people often recommend to focus on one thing, the reality sometimes doesn’t allow for it. Hence, I’m working on multiple things in parallel. Whenever I hit a wall in one project, I take a short break and continue with a different project, until wall contact. Repeat.

Since I can’t really add much pain, I flipped the switch to alpha versions of some of the frameworks I’m using. 🤞

Changelog

Made good progress on an iOS app I’m working on. Which is good, because I really need it in more than one way.
Running a project to be released soon on alpha versions of Svelte (5.0) and Tailwind (4.0). I don’t want to jinx it, but usually that works for me.

Linklog

AI

Speed of AI development is outpacing risk assessment. This is something I wish the biggest advocates would acknowledge. Barely a week goes by, without reading about real-world challenges and pitfalls. If you want to know more about how context windows and RAGs can fail you (and more), read Lessons after a half-billion GPT tokens (via) and Notes on how to use LLMs in your product (via).

Programming

There is a new JavaScript package registry from Deno. Old news. What gets me more excited (which is hard these days), is their detailed description of the internals and that everything is MIT licensed. (via)

Hello World and what is actually happening in a Linux executable that “only” prints this phrase. (via)

Open Source

How Do Open Source Licenses Work? This will shorten my article during editing. By a lot.

Privacy

DuckDuckGo releases a privacy service subscription. Privacy Pro includes a VPN, personal information removal, and identity theft restoration. Mozilla had all the building blocks, but they fumbled the execution, including co-operating with a shady business.

Society

Fascinating article about the Dewey Decimal Classification and its inventor. If you’re like me, you heard about Dewey Decimal and what it’s for, but never really looked into how it worked. It’s a flawed system, like its inventor Melvil Dewey and a perfect mirror of (western) society even after “improvements”.