Simon Willison’s Weblog

Subscribe

Saturday, 13th July 2024

Third, X fails to provide access to its public data to researchers in line with the conditions set out in the DSA. In particular, X prohibits eligible researchers from independently accessing its public data, such as by scraping, as stated in its terms of service. In addition, X's process to grant eligible researchers access to its application programming interface (API) appears to dissuade researchers from carrying out their research projects or leave them with no other choice than to pay disproportionally high fees.

European Commission

# 3:52 am / twitter, apis, europe

Add tests in a commit before the fix. They should pass, showing the behavior before your change. Then, the commit with your change will update the tests. The diff between these commits represents the change in behavior. This helps the author test their tests (I've written tests thinking they covered the relevant case but didn't), the reviewer to more precisely see the change in behavior and comment on it, and the wider community to understand what the PR description is about.

Ed Page

# 5:28 am / git

We respect wildlife in the wilderness because we’re in their house. We don’t fully understand the complexity of most ecosystems, so we seek to minimize our impact on those ecosystems since we can’t always predict what outcomes our interactions with nature might have.

In software, many disastrous mistakes stem from not understanding why a system was built the way it was, but changing it anyway. It’s super common for a new leader to come in, see something they see as “useless”, and get rid of it – without understanding the implications. Good leaders make sure they understand before they mess around.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss

# 2:12 pm / jacob-kaplan-moss, software-engineering, management

Give people something to link to so they can talk about your features and ideas

If you have a project, an idea, a product feature, or anything else that you want other people to understand and have conversations about... give them something to link to!

[... 685 words]

Load Balancing. Sam Rose built this interactive essay explaining how different load balancing strategies work. It's part of a series that includes memory allocation, bloom filters and more.

# 10:51 pm / explorables, algorithms, load-balancing, sam-rose

My architecture is a monolith written in Go (this is intentional, I sacrificed scalability to improve my shipping speed), and this is where SQLite shines. With a DB located on the local NVMe disk, a 5$ VPS can deliver a whopping 60K reads and 20K writes per second.

Nikita Melkozerov

# 11:44 pm / performance, go, sqlite