Note di Matteo

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.

pg_repack. pg_repack is a PostgreSQL extension which lets you remove bloat from tables and indexes, and optionally restore the physical order of clustered indexes. Unlike CLUSTER and VACUUM FULL it works online, without holding an exclusive lock on the processed tables during processing. pg_repack is efficient to boot, with performance comparable to using CLUSTER directly.

Postmortem di Railway, la creazione di un indice PostgreSQL ha tirato giù tutto:

A routine change to this Postgres database introduced a new column with an index to a table containing approximately 1 billion records. This table is critical in our backend API’s infrastructure, used by nearly all API operations.

The index creation did not use Postgres’ CONCURRENTLY option, causing an exclusive lock on the entire table. During the lock period, all queries against the database were queued behind the index operation. [...] Manual intervention attempts to terminate the index creation failed.

Le misure:

We’re going to introduce several changes to prevent errors of this class from happening again:

• In CI, we will enforce CONCURRENTLY usage for all index creation operations, blocking non-compliant pull requests before merge.
• PgBouncer connection pool limits will be adjusted to prevent overwhelming the underlying Postgres instance's capacity.
• Database user connection limits will be configured to guarantee administrative access during incidents, ensuring maintenance operations remain possible under all conditions.