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CloudDruid

Weekly Tech Odyssey

In the vein of sharpening my technical acumen, I have decided to engage in the praxis of reviewing the weekly news. Every now and again, I may share a “timeless” podcast or post, which ignited my curiosity.

Given the elusive nature of time, this review may contain a simple list of news items with or without a blurb in “HackerNews” fashion. However, when time permits, the topics below may serve as a personal mental lodestar, offering opportunities for later exploration and reflection.

Now for the News in Review

High Level Overview

  1. DuckDB
  2. Valkey
  3. xz CVE-2024-3094

Things That Caught My Eye

  1. MS Formatting
  2. Special chars
  3. k8s & wasm
  4. Ubuntu 12 yr lts
  5. AI Not Encrypted
  6. BYOLLM
  7. AI & Emotional Intelligence
  8. k8s & Cloudspend
  9. nix-ide & vim
  10. AI & Racism
  11. The Earth is Slowing?
  12. Right to Repair

DuckDB

Principal Software Engineer, Paul Gross, recently hailed DuckDB as the de facto replacement for jq.

  • Takeaways:
    • DuckDB has 0 Dependencies.
    • DuckDB reads JSON files “directly into memory” enabling easy manipulation of json from the CLI.
    • There is some tricky syntax, but DuckDB is still comprehensible.
    • Allows for variegated output (json, table, etc).
    • DuckDB can read directly from a URL, not just a file.
  • Notable Mentions:

    • I love jq, but I find it hard to use. The syntax is super powerful, but I have to study the docs anytime I want to do anything beyond just selecting fields.

    • The syntax is the same as the PostgreSQL JSON Functions…

    • And I could choose to create tables and persist locally, but often I’m just interrogating data and don’t need the persistence.

Valkey: the “New Redis”

After Redis announced it was abandoning it’s OSS (open source software) origins, the Linux Foundation in collaboration with tech titans such as AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle, Ericsson, and Snap Inc pivoted towards a new iteration of Redis called Valkey. This new fork will continue under an industry-supported BSD 3-clause license.

There were many reactions, of which I found Momento’s take quite illuminating.

  • Notable Mentions:

    • The project has already assembled a technical leadership committee of several former Redis contributors, and hundreds more community members have voiced their intent to support Valkey. (The Linux Foundation)

    • While Redis may have the ability and legal rights to shut down this community, it is important to note that Redis did not create Redis. (Momento)

    • We were about to change our company name to RedisDB and even acquired the domain redisdb.com for that purpose; however, respecting a request by Salvatore Sanfillipo, the Redis creator, we decided to stick to Garantia Data… A few months later in 2014, Garantia Data became Redis Labs. (Momento)

    • To date, the ElastiCache team has invested more than a thousand engineer years in making Redis scale. (Momento)

xz Vulnerability

Scrolling through my rss feed, I stumbled upon the xz vulnerability news. A backdoor maliciously placed in a core piece of software used in most Linux-based distributions. The more I scoured the internet for details about how I could possibly be impacted, the more the magnitude of the CVE hit me. It reads like a story straight out of Darknet Diaries (one of my favorite podcasts).

  • Takeaways:

  • Notable Mentions:

    • I count a minimum of 750 commits or contributions to xz by Jia Tan, who backdoored it. (Joey Hess)

    • The first commits they make are not to xz, but they are deeply suspicious. Specifically, they open a PR in libarchive… This commit does a little more than it says. It replaces safe_fprint with an unsafe variant… (Evan Boehs)

    • I’d suggest reverting to 5.3.1. Bearing in mind that there were security fixes after that point for ZDI-CAN-16587 that would need to be reapplied. (Joey Hess)

    • Having dpkg in that list means that such downgrade has to be planned carefully. (Aurelien Jarno)

    • Might be easier overall to spend that effort on a hard switch to zstd instead. (Mark-Oliver Wolter)

Bookmarks

MS Formatting

Some things in Windows may never change… Definitely made me think about the old phrase “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!” Especially, given the fact that msft is incentivized to keep users in their ecosystem, and not make it easy to reformat your drive to do other things 🐧.

Special Characters

I stumbled across an article reviewing the origins of special characters in Regex. Regex is super powerful, useful, and can feel like an esoteric language at times. I have only done a cursory glance of this article, but Hillel Wayne’s deep historical dive looks super fascinating!

Wasm on K8s

I am sucker for a good tutorial, and a CNCF community member published a multi-part series on Wasm in k8s using Rust. I recently did something adjacent and high level playing around with a wasm plugin, so this caught my eye as something to revisit at a later date.

Ubuntu 12 Years LTS

Given how everything these days is built to break, planned to eventually fail, or designed to become obsolete, this article caught my eye. There is a catch though for the LTS, that being a charge for businesses who desire to keep their versions as far back as 14.04. You can read more from Linux-Magazine.

AI Not So Private

Definitely need to give this one a deeper read but vulnerabilities like this just goes in the proverbial bucket of AI is still an emerging field with some businesses already engaging in questionable ethical practices. While that last bit might be somewhat of a tangent, it goes without saying that this article is a reminder to exercise caution with AI tools.

Conversely, Speaking of AI 😂

In theory, I want to continue to dive deeper into AI tools, and the intersection between open source software and AI intrigues me. #BringYourOwnLLM

AI and Emotional Intelligence

I don’t know much about hume and have not tested it out. Not sure where I fall on this one, because it sounds like an oxymoron at face value. I get a lot of dystopian vibes doing thought experiments in my head about machines that are supposed to be able to read into my emotional state… but I digress. I would like to hope that psychiatrists and therapists are involved, and that this team is using an intersectional lens informed by peer-reviewed and strongly tested sociological and philosophical perspectives. However, I am highly skeptical. This is an area where diverse perspectives are critical. I am fearful of what sort of decision-making products like this can influence.

OpenCost

An OSS k8s and cloud spend monitoring tool that is cloud-agnostic. See more on their GitHub page.

Port vscode-nix-ide to vim

Nix recently highlighted this project. I love vscode, use vim plugins, and use nix-ide, so coc-nix looks like something worth checking out. Especially, if it keeps me in a terminal longer… one day I’ll figure out emacs… one day…

AI and Racism

Researcher and MacArthur Fellow, Dr. Tiera Tanksley, explored the intersection of race and AI, something that has already had deleterious effects for the Black community with respect to policing. Moreover, as a former educator, I am interested in seeing what insights were revealed in this study.

Climate Change and The Earth’s Orbit

The planet’s orbit appears to be slowing ever so slightly because of global warming 😔.

Right to Repair!

I am still working on this podcast, “We have a right to repair!” with Kyle Wiens Founder and CEO at iFixit, but I have learned so much already about the fight against planned obsolecsence and the long road towards progress in improving consumer rights and fighting industrial pollution.