2023 Week 7 in Review

"The sheep will spend its entire life fearing the wolf, only to be eaten by the shepherd."
— African Proverb

This week's adventure in wonderland was largely spent learning about font subsetting; eventually culminating in me writing a small plugin for #11ty to create highly cut down versions of the Iosevka font for use on this website. I'm currently in the process of writing about that (see Update font once complete) but the meat of it is I went from having multiple MB of font files down to just under 100KB in total for the four fontsets that I use.

Alongside that adventure and as part of seeking Inbox Zero I rediscovered that the IMAP extension for #PHP causes it to hang on the console. This seems to be a known issue with the extension with a closed issue from 2020 giving a potential solution to IMAP hanging after installing the IMAP extension : adding the hostname to /etc/hosts is a potential solution.

I tried this out and it worked! However, I am honestly surprised that nowhere other than that GitHub issue could I find a solution nor an explanation as to why. I had a quick look at the extension's php_imap.c source code, but I think the hostname DNS query is being prompted by an upstream dependency instead of the extension itself.

"The success of a search engine depends on two interrelated things—accuracy and trust. I’m flabbergasted that Google and Bing are perfectly willing to squander their reserves of both."
— Jeremy Keith | link

Online it appears there has been a lot of drama related to GPT-3 and Bing; Simon Willison has a great writeup in their post Bing: "I will not harm you unless you harm me first" and Khari Johnson's Chatbots Got Big—and Their Ethical Red Flags Got Bigger for Wired sums up my thoughts nicely.

Joke of the week

"Don't be worried about your smartphone and television collecting your data... Your vacuum has been gathering dirt on you for years now."

Notable Articles Read

• Simon Willison: Bing: "I will not harm you unless you harm me first"
• Brr: Last Flight Out
• Łukasz Wójcik: The quest for purging my bookmarks
• Wes Ely MD: The haunting brain science of long Covid

Notable Videos Watched

• Thunderf00t: Will ChatGPT destroy everything?
• CuriousMarc: Bendix MG-1 Central Air Data Computer: First Look Inside
• Have a Luke at this: I made a self-solving Minesweeper screensaver

Cool things from around the internet

• This layoff does not exist in the same vein as this person does not exist and these cats do not exist; except this time rather than using StyleGAN to generate images its using GPT-3.
• Website dedicated to the IBM System/3 an interesting insight into some computing history.
• DOS-RS: Create DOS protected mode programs with Rust! this was shared on the Fediverse by @dec_hl@mastodon.social and gives me an excuse to maybe look into Rust for #DOScember
• Terry's free game of the week especially because I found BABBDI via this webiste
• cafe: catfetch to your linux distro