🧭 ChatGPT’s Atlas: The Browser That Challenges the Open Web
A sharp, reflective critique of AI’s growing influence on the web’s openness — questioning whether automation and convenience are worth trading for transparency and autonomy.
Anil Dash critiques OpenAI’s new Atlas browser, arguing it replaces the open web’s hyperlink-based structure with AI-generated imitations of websites. He describes it as a regression toward command-line-like interfaces that harm discoverability and user control, while warning about invasive data tracking and opaque agent behavior. Dash frames Atlas as part of a larger trend toward surveillance-oriented AI systems that erode the web’s open and consent-driven foundations.
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💡 The Vindication of Bubble Sort
A witty yet insightful defense of a classic algorithm — showing that simplicity, under the right constraints, can outperform sophistication.
This piece humorously defends bubble sort, illustrating a scenario in a soft real-time system where its incremental sorting approach proved ideal. Because the dataset changed continuously and full re-sorting was too expensive, bubble sort’s gradual improvement of order minimized computational cost while maintaining responsiveness.
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🗄️ Database Backups, Dump Files, and Restic
A valuable read for sysadmins and developers — demonstrating how subtle configuration choices can make backups leaner, faster, and more maintainable.
This article explores the shift from traditional database dump-based backups to using the restic tool with stdin-based input. It highlights inefficiencies in gzip-compressed dumps and explains how restic’s deduplication, compression, and tagging mechanisms enhance backup reliability and efficiency. The author also shares scripting tips and implementation lessons learned.
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