Tech News Some of You Can Count On

Welcome to another installment of the globalGlob(**/*) newsletter. We're glad you're reading this and not debugging code. It's important to take breaks to keep your sanity.

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News From Less Reputable Sources

The globalGlob(**/*) can't report on every story, as much as we try. But we can tell you about all the stories other people reported, and take the credit. Here are some of those!

• The Raspberry Pi desktop has been soooo boring for...well forever. But not anymore because it got a UI refresh this week.
  • There are more customizations allowed, a new dock, new launcher, and applications have a new task list when you right-click them.
  • Of course the new dock and launcher have their own set of customizations. Because what's a linux distro without too many way to shoot yourself in the foot?
  • To update, just run 'sudo apt full-upgrade'. DO NOT run 'sudo rm -rf'. I've fallen for that way too many times.
  • So go ahead and update your Raspberry Pi today. As a nerd, I know you have at least 7.
  • Raspberry Pi Announcement
• Cloudflare saved 100 TB of RAM...again
  • A single memory structure was storing 32-bit integer values without ever needing the number to be larger than 65,000
  • They wrote some less readable code to store those numbers and saved a few bytes per record
  • The new structure, scaled out to every single Cloudflare server, saved 100 TB or RAM across the entire fleet
  • Someday Cloudflare will have enough money to avoid spending expensive engineering cycles on grunt work tasks like this, instead of investing in more platform features like...more A.I. or whatever
  • Cloudflare Blog
• The latest release of Visual Studio Code includes a note saying the release notes are generated by A.I. and may be incorrect
  • After reviewing the release notes we immediately found an inaccuracy.
  • The very last note says they really appreciate people are trying the new features. But we all know developers don't actually care what their users think.
  • VS Magazine Article

Sponsor

There's no sponsor this week. But if you know anyone interested, tell us!

But don't suggest Yo Momma, we already asked.

Scoops on globalGlob.dev

Last week we learned about a proposed draft of the OAuth 4.6 protocol. It simplifies how users will be able to sign in to websites using the open OAuth protocol. But some security advocates say it will cause problems in the long run. Other security advocates say, no it won't. Who's right? Only time will tell that it's definitely the security advocates.

Draft for OAuth 4.6 Protocol Simplifies Sign-In Security By Letting Users Choose Any Account From List | globalGlob(**/*)

A draft for a future version of the OAuth specification, version 4.6, has been published with a controversial security measure. To simplify the sign-in process, users will select their account from within a very long drop-down list containing all users on the site, and then click a button certifying they are that person. No longer will users need to remember a password, or pay for an expensive password manager. Using a different password from site to site will be a problem of the past. And the a...

A developer insulted the quality of their own code and paid the price for it. It's the type of self-deprecating comment many of us have made about our own code. Thankfully we were able to walk away unscathed. Unfortunately for this developer, they learned what happens when everyone else agrees.

Developer Jokes Their Code is Bad, Didn't Think Everyone Would Pile On | globalGlob(**/*)

During a sprint retrospective yesterday at 10 AM, developer Lester Kruge showed off a still in-development feature. The proof of concept was functional enough to demonstrate to the group. While showing the API features, he made the short comment, "It's ugly right now, but so is all my code. It'll get cleaned up later." Kruge was not prepared for the entire room to agree, loudly.

Log Level Debug

In this week's Log Level Debug news roundup we talk about A.I. stealing everything from the internet, the future of css-tricks.com is up in the air, Apple's M6 chip is super fast, Facebook launches a subscription, and small hardware manufacturers are being hit the hardest by the component crisis.

Computing History Fact of the Week

The 1994 Pentium FDIV bug would return an invalid result after a divide operation. It was the result of Intel trying to optimize the division algorithm in order to generate 2 bits during a clock cycle, instead of 1. The wrong value was returned 1 in 9 billion times. Which is a little less often than my bugs are noticed in the wild. About 1 in 3 times.