Weeknotes 2023.52

Here we are for the last Weeknotes of 2023, an exhausting year personally. Since Monday is a holiday in most areas, including here in Germany, I’m publishing today and will fall silent until the new year.

My part-time non-IT job is on the obligatory change-of-year break, so over the next two weeks I will get as much rest as possible. While I won’t publish anything until beginning of next year, I will take the calmer days to enjoy some technical books and some programming.

The next Weeknotes will come on January 2nd. Until then, enjoy the holidays, if you observe them, and all the best for the new year!

Changelog

• The great refactor of this website has started, so while not much has changes since last Monday, the next few days will see more and more unification of all the experiments I made.
• Yes, I’m still playing around with the naming of things, including this weekly ‘thing’.

Linklog

AI

• If you want to run Mistral models locally, look no further than Simon’s site.
• I hate to share such a depressing story shortly before holidays, but protecting children is too important.

Design

• I love investigations like this. Resizing and transforming selected objects on canvas is an example of a complex yet somewhat intuitive design. The variation in implementation is also interesting.
• Literally 5 minutes after I published last week’s notes, I learned that Adobe and Figma are abandoning their merger. It will still grant Figma $1 billion from Adobe as a termination fee. Let’s see how it plays out. I will spare you the statements.

Security

• MongoDB customer data stolen. Which only shows that being the infrastructure of businesses makes you a prime target.
• Terrapin is a scary SSH vulnerability, partially on the protocol level. Whether or not your infrastructure is in immediate danger depends on a few variables, but a protocol flaw means every other vulnerability found will be much worse.

People

• The similarities between Open Source Communities and (working) Remote Work setups is nothing new, but it’s nice to have a summary like this. Note however that both need governance by setting examples from leadership, otherwise they can implode pretty quickly. Setting examples only works by doing, never by talking.

Programming

• I totally missed the Jamstack / Netlify thing. I’m with Zach on this and also totally fine, if some concepts of Jamstack get a new marketing term for enterprises. Leave Jamstack as something for the community of independent and/or small web enthusiasts.

Business Ethics

• Nikola founder gets 4 years in prison. While I’m not in favour of sentencing just to “make an example”, I kind of agree with the prosecutors here. Fraud should be met with zero tolerance and harsh sentencing. Even for cases that are not technically illegal (yet).
• I have seen all six of these board member types. Sometimes very dangerous combinations of them. The problem is, all of them were borderline or full-on psychopaths as well.
• This policy of Substack allowing and even profiting from openly Nazi content is unacceptable, in Germany potentially illegal. They definitely get my vote for a**holes of the year.

Streaming Wars

• The question in everybody’s mind: will it become ‘Plus Max’ or ‘Max Plus’?

Wish you all restful days!