Note di Matteo

TIL i resi Amazon sono testati in modo dettagliato, es. le console di videogiochi sono testate, i droni sono messi in funzione per verificare che volino, ecc. e quasi tutti tornano in vendita come nuovi o usati/ricondizionati. (DDay)

TIL SSH funziona anche con la scharfes S:

(Web Weekly #177)

TIL buona parte del Web 1.0 era ospitato da GeoCities, servizio chiuso nel 2019 ma in parte archiviato su GeoCities Gallery.

Ora c'è Neocities.org che ospita più di un milione di siti con la stessa filosofia.

Da The indie web is here to make the internet weird again:

The indie web is about reclaiming space on the internet for human-created content. It’s not about creating the best website, the most optimized one, or the most popular one. It’s about creating whatever you want without caring what an algorithm thinks of it or worrying about an AI ripping it off.

What stood out to me most, and surprised me the most, was how the indie web feels. [...] Rather than the cold apathy I feel while scrolling through Google or social media, I was genuinely curious what the next website would hold, what weird design it would feature, what funky music or fun facts it would include. Some personal websites contained journal entries that left me feeling like I was actually getting to know the person who wrote them, a distinct change from the snarky Twitter posts and tag-filled Instagram captions I’ve grown used to.

TIL una build di Chromium richiede 3-4 giorni in locale.

Rebuilds are notoriously slow. A full Chromium build can take 3-4 days on standard development hardware like a MacBook laptop, assuming nothing fails. Every modification means another full rebuild to validate changes, and iterating on patches under those conditions quickly turns into multi-week cycles.

TIL PagoPA si è stufata di stare dietro ai bonus e ha fatto una piattaforma chiamata PARI per permettere alle varie pubbliche amministrazioni di distribuire bonus tramite l'app IO.

TIL OONI.org (Open Observatory of Network Interference) è una global community measuring Internet censorship since 2012. Si installa la probe e si eseguono test che sono poi esplorabili e finiscono nei report sulla censura.

TIL il sistema di geoposizionamento what3words:

what3words è un modo molto semplice per comunicare la propria posizione geografica. A ogni 3 metri quadrati della superficie terrestre corrisponde un indirizzo unico di 3 parole che rimarrà sempre uguale. L'ordine e la composizione di queste parole è unica, facile da leggere, da condividere e da utilizzare.

Esempio: ///andiamo.mummia.visuali

TIL Nano Banana per la generazione di immagini AI non è un diffusion model ma autoregressive, a differenza delle generazioni precedenti di Imagen e a differenza di DALL-E 2 e 3. E Midjourney e Stable Diffusion.

Of note, gpt-image-1, the technical name of the underlying image generation model, is an autoregressive model. While most image generation models are diffusion-based to reduce the amount of compute needed to train and generate from such models, gpt-image-1 works by generating tokens in the same way that ChatGPT generates the next token, then decoding them into an image. It’s extremely slow at about 30 seconds to generate each image at the highest quality (the default in ChatGPT), but it’s hard for most people to argue with free.

In August 2025, a new mysterious text-to-image model appeared on LMArena: a model code-named “nano-banana”. This model was eventually publically released by Google as Gemini 2.5 Flash Image, an image generation model that works natively with their Gemini 2.5 Flash model. Unlike Imagen 4, it is indeed autoregressive, generating 1,290 tokens per image. After Nano Banana’s popularity pushed the Gemini app to the top of the mobile App Stores, Google eventually made Nano Banana the colloquial name for the model as it’s definitely more catchy than “Gemini 2.5 Flash Image”.

TIL con un file .git-blame-ignore-revs si possono ignorare determinati commit dall'output "blame" su GitHub (o con git blame --ignore-revs-file .git-blame-ignore-revs), utile quando si fanno refactoring o si modifica la formattazione ma non la funzionalità.

(fonte, esempio)

TIL AWS chiama le istanze EC2 "droplet" internamente, come DigitalOcean:

The first subsystem is DropletWorkflow Manager (DWFM), which is responsible for the management of all the underlying physical servers that are used by EC2 for the hosting of EC2 instances – we call these servers “droplets”.

TIL in PostgreSQL ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES si applica solo agli oggetti creati dal ruolo che ha creato i default privileges. Di default è il ruolo attualmente connesso, ma si può specificare:

ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES
FOR ROLE prod_dmarcwise
IN SCHEMA public
GRANT SELECT ON TABLES TO prod_pgdump;

TIL Argon2 per le password non è più sicuro di bcrypt come si pensa:

[...] Me (@jmgosney) and @Sc00bzT were both on the experts panel for the Password Hashing Competition, and both of us will tell you not to use Argon2 for password hashing. It is weaker than bcrypt at runtimes < 1000 ms.

Yep, we basically completely failed. We set out to identify The One True PHF and instead we selected yet another KDF. We also placed way too much emphasis on "memory hardness" when we should have been emphasizing "cache hardness."

(@TerahashCorp)

TIL ora JavaScript ha una funzione nativa groupBy() e non serve più usare reduce(). Mini guida qui.

TIL gli Heisenbug:

In computer programming jargon, a heisenbug is a software bug that seems to disappear or alter its behavior when one attempts to study it. The term is a pun on the name of Werner Heisenberg, the physicist who first asserted the observer effect of quantum mechanics, which states that the act of observing a system inevitably alters its state. In electronics, the traditional term is probe effect, where attaching a test probe to a device changes its behavior.

TIL la prima centrale geotermica al mondo è stata costruita in Toscana nel 1913 ed è rimasta l'unica fino al 1958. La più grande centrale geotermica in Europa è tutt'ora in Toscana, nella "Valle del diavolo", dove si produce il 10% dell'energia geotermica prodotta nel mondo. (Presadiretta)

TIL tutti questi software nell'ambito video/multimediale sono stati originariamente creati da sviluppatori francesi:

• ffmpeg
• VLC / VideoLAN
• x264 (codec H.264)
• DivX (codec)
• HandBrake (GUI per transcoding)
• Matroska/MKV (formato container)
• GPAC/MP4Box (packager)
• MediaInfo (debugging)
• dav1d (codec AV1 di VideoLAN)
• HLS.js
• TSDuck

(fonte)

TIL il firewall di Cloudflare era inizialmente fatto con nginx + PHP (!):

[...] the first version of FL was implemented based on the NGINX webserver, with product logic implemented in PHP. After 3 years, the system became too complex to manage effectively, and too slow to respond, and an almost complete rewrite of the running system was performed.

E poi fino al 2024 nginx (openresty) con scripting Lua:

From this point on, FL was implemented using NGINX, the OpenResty framework, and LuaJIT. While this was great for a long time, over the last few years it started to show its age. We had to spend increasing amounts of time fixing or working around obscure bugs in LuaJIT. The highly dynamic and unstructured nature of our Lua code, which was a blessing when first trying to implement logic quickly, became a source of errors and delay when trying to integrate large amounts of complex product logic.

Da quest'anno è in rollout la nuova versione scritta in Rust.