Note di Matteo

Anna's Archive, il catalogo di tutto lo scibile umano (per lo più illegale anche se l'obiettivo è nobile e non fa hosting direttamente), si estende dai libri alla musica collezionando l'intero catalogo di Spotify. La cosa interessante sono i numeri:

• 300 TB
• Metadati per 256 milioni di tracce
• File musicali Vorbis per 86 milioni di tracce, cioè il 99,6% degli ascolti

Ma la cosa più interessante sono i dati che si possono estrarre, ad esempio quelli attorno al popularity score (0-100):

In questa pagine c'è la lista dei 10mila brani più popolari.

Glow up di Brightcove dopo l'acquisizione da parte di Bending Spoons: nuovo sito, numerose nuove feature in pochissimi mesi e una consistente roadmap di prodotto per il 2026.

Scrive Dan Rayburn, esperto commentatore del settore:

For those suggesting that Brightcove is no longer in the market or that everyone has been fired since the Bending Spoons acquisition, that's far from reality. In the eleven months since being acquired by Bending Spoons, Brightcove has added more features, functionality, and focus than standalone Brightcove ever achieved in the same period. Looking inside my Brightcove account, it's great to see how much has been added and enhanced.

The company just refreshed its website with a clean, modern look, refocusing its messaging on what its platform does and where its sweet spot lies in the market. They also rolled out a vertical video gallery template across their platform, 4K support for live streaming, auto captioning, a new metadata optimizer tool, and the ability to localize videos into over 50 languages directly within the platform.

In the new year, they plan to roll out a new player UX/UI, a native recommendation engine, a modern gallery experience, the ability to do more with interactive video, and what they are calling AI Content Multiplier, which can turn a single piece of content into various clips.

A lot of progress has been made since the acquisition, and that's the strength of Bending Spoons: knowing how to build and enhance software services at scale with focus, with focus being the keyword. Previously, Brightcove tried to be everything to everyone and built features that weren't needed by its core customer base. Part of its business had turned into a pro-services show, which is not its strength. It's good to see Brightcove back to its roots, offering solutions for two use cases in the market: corporate comms/marketing and broadcast/OTT streaming.

Bending Spoons è senza dubbio brava nel rilancio dei prodotti (si veda anche la rivoluzione Evernote). Non piace perché alza i prezzi. Sono curioso di vedere cosa succederà con Vimeo, che ha un'identità confusissima da molto tempo.

Interessante progetto, Chuu Chuu, di ricerca dei trani con informazioni sullo storico dei ritardi. Quest'anno hanno fatto il "wrapped" dei ritardi in Europa:

Un benchmark sulle tecnologie moderne di OCR, dove incredibilmente sono gli LLM a vincere in accuratezza specialmente sull'handwriting.

Quello che il benchmark mi pare non consideri del tutto sono le allucinazioni. Se ho un'immagine il cui contenuto è apparentemente testo ma in realtà non è nulla di sensato, gli LLM di solito sputano fuori qualcosa di apparentemente coerente (del testo, magari proprio delle frasi) ma completamente errato.

How Temporal Powers Reliable Cloud Operations at Netflix. Netflix, sempre molto trasparente sulle scoperte ingegneristiche che fa alla sua scala, spiega come usa Temporal nei deployment per ridurre il tasso di errori delle operazioni mutazione dell'infrastruttura cloud.

Temporal is a Durable Execution platform which allows you to write code “as if failures don’t exist”. It’s become increasingly critical to Netflix since its initial adoption in 2021, with users ranging from the operators of our Open Connect global CDN to our Live reliability teams now depending on Temporal to operate their business-critical services. In this post, I’ll give a high-level overview of what Temporal offers users, the problems we were experiencing operating Spinnaker that motivated its initial adoption at Netflix, and how Temporal helped us reduce the number of transient deployment failures at Netflix from 4% to 0.0001%.

Is Your Android TV Streaming Box Part of a Botnet? Negli USA ci sono streaming box con pagamento one-time che, suprirse, sono essenzialmente delle botnet per ripagare i costi.

On the surface, the Superbox media streaming devices for sale at retailers like BestBuy and Walmart may seem like a steal: They offer unlimited access to more than 2,200 pay-per-view and streaming services like Netflix, ESPN and Hulu, all for a one-time fee of around $400. But security experts warn these TV boxes require intrusive software that forces the user’s network to relay Internet traffic for others, traffic that is often tied to cybercrime activity such as advertising fraud and account takeovers.

The "Mad Men" in 4K on HBO Max Debacle: il restauro 4K di HBO Max non va sempre benissimo: si dimenticano gli effetti visivi.

Suddenly you can see pretend puke hoses, modern LA signage, and all the behind-the-scenes magic that was supposed to be painted out. Puts a different spin on “it’s toasted.”

(via Demuxed newsletter)

SlateDB. slatedb is an OSS embedded key-value database built on object storage.

Mini-LLM di Google molto interessante:

Meet FunctionGemma, a specialized version of the Gemma 3 270M model, fine-tuned specifically for function calling and tool use and designed to be fine-tuned further.

Sufficientemente piccolo da poter essere eseguito su smartphone, e in generale forse anche su CPU su un server. È pure multilingua.

Ho aggiornato a macOS 26, infine. Non mi aspettavo altro...

portkiller. A native macOS menu bar app for finding and killing processes on open ports.

Ieri: il control plane GitHub Actions costa $0.002/min anche con runner self-hosting.

Oggi (Jared Palmer):

We’re postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions. The 39% price reduction for hosted runners will continue as planned (on January 1)

We missed the opportunity to gather feedback from the community ahead of this move. That's a huge L. We'll learn and do better in the future.

Actions is critical infrastructure for millions of developers and we're committed to making it a world‑class compute product. Although we gave away 11.5 billion build minutes (~$184 million) to support OSS last year, Actions itself is not free. There are real, web-scale costs associated with the service and behind the control plane (for logs, artifacts, caching, redis, egress, engineering, support, etc) for both hosted and self-hosted runners. We eventually need to find a way to price it properly while also partnering and fostering the rest of the ecosystem. However, we clearly missed some steps here, and so we’re correcting course.

You all trust Actions with your most important workflows, and that trust comes with a responsibility we didn't live up to. The way forward is to listen more, ship with the community, and raise the bar together.

Interesting:

Today we are going public with the developer preview of exe.dev, a new VM hosting service. We will keep the service open for new users as long as our capacity lasts. Try it out with:

ssh exe.dev

Mega refactoring di GitHub Actions:

In early 2024, the GitHub Actions team faced a problem. The platform was running about 23 million jobs per day, but month-over-month growth made one thing clear: our existing architecture couldn’t reliably support our growth curve. In order to increase feature velocity, we first needed to improve reliability and modernize the legacy frameworks that supported GitHub Actions.

The solution? Re-architect the core backend services powering GitHub Actions jobs and runners.

Since August, all GitHub Actions jobs have run on our new architecture, which handles 71 million jobs per day (over 3x from where we started). Individual enterprises are able to start 7x more jobs per minute than our previous architecture could support.

Nuovi prezzi più bassi:

Ma compare una fee di $0.002/min per i self-hosted runner.

I provider alternativi di hosted runner provano a spinnarla positivamente. Blacksmith.sh:

In the past, our customers have asked us how GitHub views third-party runners long-term. The platform fee largely answers that: GitHub now monetizes Actions usage regardless of where jobs run, aligning third-party runners like Blacksmith as ecosystem partners rather than workarounds.

Depot invece l'ha presa male.

PAGAMENTO ONLINE Il pagamento potrà essere effettuato entro la mezzanotte del giorno prima della visita.

Cioè? Fino al giorno prima o fino a due giorni prima? Perché scrivere in modo evidentemente ambiguo?

We were taught to be clear, logical, and, in a way, predictable. Our sentence structures were meant to be consistent and balanced. We were explicitly taught to avoid the very "burstiness" that ‘detectors’ now seek as a sign of humanity. A good composition flowed smoothly, each sentence building on the last with impeccable logic. We were, in effect, trained to produce text with low perplexity and low burstiness. We were trained to write in precisely the way that these tools are designed to flag as non-human. The bias is not a bug. It is the entire system.

Recent academic studies have confirmed this, finding that these tools are not only unreliable but are significantly more likely to flag text written by non-native English speakers as AI-generated. (And, again, we’re going to get back to this.) The irony is maddening: You spend a lifetime mastering a language, adhering to its formal rules with greater diligence than most native speakers, and for this, a machine built an ocean away calls you a fake.

I'm Kenyan. I Don't Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me.

Are we stuck with the same Desktop UX forever?

Analisi della conformità agli standard Internet moderni dei domini istituzionali della PA italiana di Fabrizio Tarizzo.