Week In Review
/ 3 min read
Last Updated: noncompete , ibm , hashicorp , ai , llama 3 , vulnerabilities , duckduckgo , chatgpt , 1.30 , kubernetes , cosign , kyverno , vault , k6 , self-host , volumes , read-only , privilege escalation , bash , ports , cicd , explainshell , latency , franken-ui , oss , ui , framework-agnostic , framework , intel , cpu , vending machines , japan , fallout , excel , quadratics , burnout , nixos , rift
Things That Caught My Eye
✨ Mental Bookmarks
Legal News 📜
- Noncompete agreements are dead! I definitely remember signing some strong legalese back when I was in ed-tech related to leaving for a competitor, it will be interesting to see how the industry adapts.
- IBM has acquired Hashicorp. IBM has a variegated array of products and services, which makes me curious about the direction Hashicorp’s products might take with respect to IBM’s cloud initiatives.
AI Updates 🤖
- Ars Technica reported on the embedding of AI
into what feels like an increasingly unprecedented amount of products, many of
which feel obtuse and entirely unnecessary. An old adage comes to mind:
If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
— Abraham Maslow - Llama 3 has been proposed as a superior competitor to ChatGPT, with
Wharton professor Ethan Mollick claiming:
There really is no reason anyone should be using free ChatGPT-3.5 anymore… Llama 3 is much better & free.
- Speaking of ChatGPT, GPT-4 appears to be able to exploit real vulnerabilities, this sounds like a script-kiddie recipe for disaster.
- DuckDuckGo has an AI Chat service!
- ChatGPT engineer, Gergely Orosz, discusses how ChatGPT actually works.
Kubernetes 🛳
- Kubernetes posted a blog related to release
1.30, with demos reviewing enhancements to the API server’s authorization mechanisms and implementation of layered security policies. - A blog
published by Vasiliy Angapov reviews ways to
avoid running untrusted images by using OSS tooling like:
- Sigstore Cosign
- Kyverno (Which coincidentally had a recent release with possible breaking changes, so take caution when upgrading on your clusters!)
- HashiCorp Vault (As we also know was just acquired by IBM!)
- DevOps engineer Giannakopoulosj reviewed popular load testing tool k6 in conjunction with Grafana and influxdb.
- Olaf Górski warns against excessive spending when establishing a startup by forgoing the cloud and hosting your own infrastructure. Definitely food for thought.
- K8s
1.30release means that read-only volumes are finally and literally read-only.
Security 🔐
- Z-Labs has a Linux privilege escalation auditing tool written in bash, which looks worth checking out.
- GitHub user choupit0 published a bash script called, MassVulScan, which quickly identifies open network ports and associated vulnerabilities.
DevOps ☁
- The CD Foundation published a comprehensive CI/CD report on the tech industry’s DevOps Tooling Adoption.
- Linux Magazine highlighted one of my favorite tools, explainshell! The article does a deep dive into its inner workings.
Web Dev 🕸
- Vercel published an overview of latency numbers that every frontend developer should know. One might even argue, the qualifier on the type of developer isn’t necessarily needed.
- franken-ui, written in TypeScript, caught my attention for being an HTML-first, OSS UI components library based on Tailwind CSS. It is framework-agnostic with sleek designs!
Hardware 💻
- Framework is expanding… I just hope they do not lose sight of their laptop origins, and fix some pre-existing issues related to users not being able to upgrade critical hardware components.
- Engineer Adam Majmudar created a tutorial that teaches you how “GPUs work from the ground up.”
- Intel has CPU-dispensing vending machines in Japan! i7-8700 for $3 anyone?
Randomness 🌪
- Engineer, Dynamic Pear, created a Fallout inspired video game in Excel! Sure you’re working on “expense reports” 😂.
- I love professor Po-Shen Loh’s enthusiasm for a more mathematically elegant approach to solving quadratics!
- And burnout is no fun, but this graph by psychologist, Alf Lokkertsen, feels super useful in helping oneself anecdotally identify signs!
- There has been a rift in the Nix community, and maintainers are beginning to drop and leave the project altogether. I have just caught wind of this and it all appears to be very disconcerting 😥.
A final thought.
A friend posted this the other day, and I found it rather amusing:
