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1. How to Communicate When You’re Hyper-Rational and Hyper-Correct
INFO: Does it annoy you when less technical people use imprecise language or misdescribe technology? Do you need to correct them and ensure everything is technically accurate? Well, congratulations—you’re winning the battle but losing the war. This approach doesn’t lead to good outcomes in the IT industry. This article will help you focus on practical, less nitpicky communication so you can ultimately improve, rather than complicate, teamwork.
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2. Free Alternative to OpenAI Operator – AI That Automates Your Browser (Video, 22 min)
INFO: Operator is a solution from OpenAI that can perform any task you describe in a web browser. The problem? It’s neither free nor cheap. The price—$200 per month—can be a dealbreaker. Fortunately, an open-source alternative has been developed, allowing you to host it on your hardware and power it with any LLM you choose. How well does it work in practice? Find out in the video.
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3. Backdoor and AWS Key Found in Eight Sleep Smart Bed
INFO: The author discovered that their IoT smart bed allows company engineers to remotely log in via SSH and execute any code, posing a serious privacy and security risk. Interestingly, they also found an AWS key for data transmission, which attackers could exploit to generate massive costs for the bed manufacturer.
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4. When Cost-Cutting Becomes a Threat to IT Systems
INFO: The author introduces the concept of frupidity—irrational cost-cutting that is supposed to save money but reduces productivity, lowers employee morale, and degrades work quality. This often manifests as managers skimping on tools, buying underpowered equipment, investing in inefficient infrastructure, or making drastic cuts to training budgets. The article explains the long-term consequences of such decisions and why they’re not actual savings.
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5. Common Mistakes When Using Feature Flags and How to Avoid Them
INFO: Feature flags are a widely used tool that enables quick deployments and controlled rollouts. However, implementing them can lead to several pitfalls. In this article, the author highlights seven common mistakes developers often make. It's worth looking to ensure you write better, more maintainable code.
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6. How Do Git Core Developers Configure Their Environment?
INFO: The author explores the configuration settings used by Git core developers. They explain each setting, suggest which ones should be the default, and explain their choices.
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7. OpenAI Introduces GPT-4.5 to the World
INFO: The new LLM model will soon be available in ChatGPT, initially only for PRO users, not Plus. It’s smarter than GPT-4.0 but still doesn't quite match, for example, the o3-mini version. This is a step forward in fast models for everyday use. Many improvements have been made - the article provides more details.
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8. Pull Request or Jira Ticket? – How to Collaborate Effectively Across Teams
INFO: Instead of waiting for another team to implement a feature requested in Jira, why not immediately open a pull request? This article explores the benefits of this approach and the challenges it involves—from aligning with the team's coding standards to considering future responsibility for maintaining the new feature. It is a topic worth considering.
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9. A Historical Report on Unix Security Vulnerabilities and the Role of /bin/sh
INFO: The Unix Historical Society has released a 1984 Bell Labs technical report by James Allen. The report analyzes Unix system vulnerabilities, focusing on the /bin/sh shell. The document categorizes security flaws into two groups: those requiring complex techniques and easily exploitable errors, such as improperly implemented setuid programs. It highlights cases where careless use of environment variables like PATH or IFS allowed privilege escalation to root. While this isn't knowledge you can readily apply to modern systems, it might appeal to retro computing fans.
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10. Does Staying Up Late Harm Mental Health?
INFO: It's said that we have different chronotypes. Some people prefer working in the morning, while others are more productive in the evening. Some rise with the sun, while others stay up all night, and it's considered natural. The question is, how does this affect our health? A study conducted on over 75,000 adults found that certain sleep-related behaviors have the same impact on our health regardless of chronotype. It’s worth reading, especially if you consider yourself a night owl.
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11. DuckDuckGo AI Chat – Use LLMs for Free and Anonymously
INFO: DuckDuckGo has launched its own AI assistant capable of interacting with GPT-4o-mini, Llama 3.3, Claude 3 Haiku, o3-mini, and Mistral Small 3 models. All of this is free, with no account required and noticeable limits. This could be a good place if you want to use a language model and ask an unusual question without revealing your identity. As always, with AI tools, exercise caution with what you input into the system.
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12. Breaking into Dozens of Apartments in Minutes – Poorly Secured System
INFO: One of the more popular apartment management systems in the U.S. can be hacked, granting access to the personal data of all residents and the function of unlocking apartment doors. The author doesn't use specialized attack techniques but relies on default login passwords, which installers of such systems often fail to change. The article explains how to identify vulnerable systems from a particular operator.
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13. Free Numerical Data from Steam – Regularly Updated
INFO: The author of this service regularly collects and publishes statistics from the Steam platform every month. The data includes information about released and unreleased games and the tags under which games are published. As long as you only need raw data for your processing, you don’t need to pay anything. A premium account is required to access AI features or completely raw data without interpretation. This engaging and substantial dataset allows for a quick market analysis of games. The data starts from November 2024.
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14. Fly To Podman – A Script to Ease Migration from Docker
INFO: Switching from Docker containers to Podman isn't straightforward. While starting from scratch may be quick, migrating something that’s been in place for many years can be daunting. This script will significantly speed up your migration, moving the containers, images, volumes, network configurations, and more.
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15. Do Coding Assistants Really Speed Up Software Delivery?
INFO: It’s said that tools like GitHub Copilot can increase code delivery speed by 50%. But is that true? What’s the actual, measurable improvement in productivity? Does every aspect of programming benefit equally from using assistants? This fascinating analysis shows how AI impacts the speed at which developers complete tasks. Interestingly, the increase in task completion speed varies greatly, so the answer to ‘how much AI helps you in your work is’: it depends.
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16. MDQ – A Tool Like jq, but for Parsing Markdown
INFO: If you're familiar with jq for working with JSON files, the tool I'm linking to works similarly, but for Markdown files. You can request content extraction from a specific file section or retrieve all titles, links, etc. This tool can be helpful when handling large amounts of data in this format and wanting to automate the process.
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17. New Possibilities in CSS – Function and IF as Game-Changers
INFO: CSS is about to gain elements that could revolutionize the definition of dynamic style. These include the ability to create functions and conditional statements previously missing from the standard. These will enable the creation of dynamic designs that adjust to user needs in a much simpler and more efficient way. The article explains how these new features work and how to implement them. Currently, functions and conditional statements are only available in the experimental version of Chrome, but they should soon become widely accessible.
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18. reCAPTCHA as a Surveillance Tool – How Google Tracks Users? (18-minute video)
INFO: In the previous newsletter issue, I linked an article suggesting that Google’s reCAPTCHA is more of a marketing tool for making money than a real security feature. This time, I’m linking to a video that explains how Google tracks its users through this solution. What information is collected, and how can this technology pose a privacy risk? It's an interesting topic to consider.
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19. European Accessibility Act – What Does It Mean for Websites and Apps?
INFO: On June 28th of this year, the European Accessibility Act (EAA) will come into effect, imposing specific requirements on the websites of companies operating within the European Union. Who exactly is affected by these requirements, what are they, and how can they be met? Here’s a valuable and concise summary.
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20. AsciiDoc vs Markdown – Advanced Documentation Capabilities
INFO: AsciiDoc is a more advanced alternative to Markdown, overcoming its limitations and offering better file organization, table support, footnotes, and many other enhancements. If you haven’t yet worked with AsciiDoc, it’s worth looking at this article. It might convince you to use this format instead of Markdown.
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21. Do You Have a Kobo E-Book Reader? – An Interesting and Automated Way to Get Cheap Books
INFO: Kobo claims to have the cheapest e-books on the market. If you find a cheaper e-book elsewhere, they’ll refund the price difference and add a 10% bonus. The author decided to automate finding these cheaper e-books, which is not that difficult. How can this be useful? If you read a lot and the e-books you're interested in are cheaper on Amazon but unfortunately come with DRM protection, you might find them much more affordable on Kobo, DRM-free, and still make a profit.
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22. A Review of 7 Modern Terminal Emulators for Linux
INFO: If you often work in the Linux terminal, you probably use one of the most popular solutions. However, many terminal emulators with surprising features can make your work easier. Look at this review and find something that suits your needs.
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23. ExpenseOwl – A Simple Self-Hosted Expense Tracker
INFO: Want to track your expenses and plan your household budget on your server, on your terms, without paying for a service or sending your data to the cloud? If so, this app is for you.
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24. Claude 3.7 and Cloud Code – New LLM Model and Developer Tool (6-minute video)
INFO: This week, we saw the release of two interesting solutions from Anthropic. These include a new, even more intelligent LLM model and a developer tool called Cloud Code, which works in the terminal. How do these innovations compare to solutions from OpenAI or DeepSeek? Listen to this report to find out.
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25. Frequent Deploys Increase SXG Prefetching Errors – ETag, Cache, and Other Performance Enemies
INFO: Are you using SXG (Signed Exchanges) on your site but referencing server resources that change frequently? The application might not be working as expected—what’s going on? This interesting debugging record by the author analyzes the situation using diagnostic tools like dump-signed exchange and Google Search Console to determine who (or what) is responsible for the errors. It’s an intriguing read, even if you don’t use SXG but rely on CDNs in your application. It’s one of many articles by the author on SXG, so be sure to check out the others
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26. nping – Ping Tool with Visualization of Results
INFO: If you want to ping multiple hosts at once and visualize the results as graphs, this app can help you. It supports IPv4 and IPv6 protocols and displays real-time information on maximum, minimum, and average packet latency and packet loss percentage.
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27. Jellyfin – Open, Free Media Center
INFO: I know this is one of those iconic apps, but there's a chance you haven't heard of it yet. If you have an extensive movie collection at home and want to build your own private Netflix on your server or NAS device, Jellyfin is what you're looking for. It has no ads, no fees, and no tracking.
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