Intro
XDG Specifications 📜, AI vs Copyright 👨⚖️, and "small, but mighty" tools 💪🧰
This month I explored XDG Specifications and their benefits, learned about Anthropic's fight with book authors, followed investigative work of a PDF sleuth, and dug into tools like Go Report Card, Pico CSS, and Git Print.
Hope you will find this helpful or curious! 🙌
Blog
Cleaning up my $HOME with XDG Base Directory Specification | Evgenii Pendragon
In my career I worked with plenty of different software that require the presence of certain environment variables for them to function properly. From time to time I would notice that the program either offers it as an option or requires you to have XDG_... type variable be set in your environment. I never looked too deeply into it, however I understood that it provided base paths for the locations of configuration and application files. I simply never tried to understand what those variables are and why they begin with XDG. Recently, I have stumbed upon several software configurations where I have encountered XDG variables again. So, I decided to look it up and find out what all of that was about.
News
Anthropic Agrees to Pay $1.5 Billion to Settle Lawsuit With Book Authors - The New York Times
This news article was one of the biggest announcements in the AI industry that I was excited about. The abuse of the copyright did not go unnoticed and Anthropic was called out for it. I really hope that this is setting a precedent for other AI companies to be held accountable for an unfair use of intellectual property in their training data.
Articles
Formatting code should be unnecessary
Formatting code has always been a part of setting up or using any code base. You almost expect it to be a step to set and forget. Different projects and teams would require different settings, each one with opinion of its own.
In this article the author proposes an obvious solution to the problem - the formatting shouldn't matter, and if anything, should be a built-in feature of the language/framework in use. I could use the formatting that I like, and you could use the formatting that you prefer. In the end, it is the same code.
mjg59 | Investigating a forged PDF
A fun story about investigating the case where the author goes on to prove the forgery of the PDF document in question. I loved the story telling, the context outside of technical tools and expertise, and communication with the party who started it all.
Using Claude Code to modernize a 25-year-old kernel driver – Dmitry Brant
This one surprised me. I was not expecting Claude to handle old code like that. It is a really cool use case though that AI is apparently able to handle. I still believe that it is important to maintain an understanding of the domain in which you ask AI to generate some code or text for you.
Resources
Go Report Card | Go project code quality report cards
Ever since I started creating Go projects and saving them to GitHub repos I have discovered this tool that can produce a badge that could be displayed on a README file. Go Report Card runs several checks on your codebase and determines the compliance rate. Simple and powerful tool to check your basics.
Pico CSS • Minimal CSS Framework for semantic HTML
I find small and niche tools very appealing when it comes to doing anything in development. One such tool is Pico CSS - a minimal css framework that styles your HTML based on its structure and tag use. Simple, straightforward, and very useful for small projects, minimal viable products, or proofs of concept projects.
Git Print
I found this tool as I was browsing Hacker News. I thought that it is a interesting project that could be a useful tool for generating documentation or another means of sharing the documentation by creating PDF documents out of GitHub repositories.