Monthly Digest - April 2021

Hey folks, welcome back to our monthly digest! As always, feel free to skip ahead to your preferred content by using the quick links provided above to jump to your the section.

Article of the month

Written on the GitHub blog, you can be sure that it’s at the very least well-researched. Very important for all software engineers and practically everyone that uses any VCS, not just Git. I think this comment perfectly describes the feeling of reading this. I’ve also just found out about the existence of Git book.

Honorable article mentions

• [Je suis un dev] The project that made me burnout

Value yourself more, especially your time. This article perfectly describes an excellent reason to not kill yourself. “You are not your job. Never get so emotionally involved at work.” Couldn’t have said it better myself, the whole article makes sense and everyone should at least know about this, the earlier the better.

• [LayerCI] Crypto miners are killing free CI

It’s sad to see that, not just CI, but any service which has any amount of free computing power has to deal with this kind of stuff nowadays. Crypto is making actual hobby users and projects suffer, there will always be a reason why we can’t have nice things.

• [Jellyfin] The Jellyfin CDN

An interesting article from one of my favorite community, Jellyfin software. Read how one of the core member setup their repository CDN, being open source with members and users all across the globe, there’s bound to be some problem with ways on solving them. It’s amazing how they managed to handle all of it on their spare time.

Content of the month

A bit different this month, and perhaps way too late, but I know a lot who doesn’t know about this yet. This content’s spotlight is a game from 2017, was nominated for multiple categories, and won the IGN people’s choice for every category it was nominated for.

An amazing game no one should ever play. Yeah, I know I’m contradicting myself here, it was also an exaggeration. It was indeed a visual novel masterpiece, but still wouldn’t probably recommend for the casual people. Look forward to the full review, where I’ll explain more in details.

Honorable content mentions

• [Alchemauss] Mahou Shoujou Madoka★Magica

This was on r/anime rewatch and it reminded me to continue watching it again. Yep, first-timer for a lot of these old and classic masterpieces, and indeed it was such a masterpiece for an original work. From an amazing studio with amazing art-style, sound design, and especially the story, everything about this is just so good. The rewatch thread for the best episode.

• [Alchemauss] Blend S

Taking a break from all the psychological horror/thriller, this was really a nice getaway to run to. Initially in for the memes, I was pretty invested in the characters and story. Sadly, it’s a short season with only 12 episodes, but it means it’s a good one to binge-watch when you’ve got the time.

• [Alchemauss] Horimiya

An odd leftover from last winter’s, this was just a really good and wholesome show. If you at least read some anime news, you’ve definitely heard about this one. The rest of this review is perhaps better saved for the full review later, so until then, just watch this, you’ll know it when you watch it.

Music of the month

Actually, the whole Otogi album is amazing, especially Ambivalent, Kaede, and Kiminisekai (which is this spotlight). Just the songs themselves are so good, but it gets better when you get to know the lyrics.

Honorable music mentions | YouTube Music

Tristam just released his album and it was wild. This was the spotlight song as the album is called WLUWD, an abbreviation for this song title. The other songs in this album are also so good in itself, highly recommended to check out the whole album.

Such a good and catchy song, I was wondering that this would fit into an OP/ED of an anime. Turns out, it was one. I didn’t know this at first, but it was actually the ED of Fruits Basket final season. This makes me wants to watch it even more (still on the watch list).

Premiered on the last day of the month, perhaps a bit biased, but Eve seems to always deliver with their songs. It also has a unique tone to it which grows on you the more and longer you listen to them.

Video of the month

May be the most controversial video in the playlist this month, but hear me out, or perhaps, hear the video out. This was produced by “What I’ve Learned” channel that I’ve recently been subscribed to this year. If you see most of their other videos such as “Why does Japan eat so many Raw Eggs?” (I also recommend this), you can see that it’s very well-researched and gives lots of arguments both supporting and opposing their statements.

Again, I recommend to watch the video and decide for yourself, don’t just take my word for it. But… there’s a lot of points that they made in which I needed to point out here. It’s very easy to mislead people with statistics, especially when we know that there are a lot of people that share articles and videos without even reading/watching first or do some fact-checking. There’s also the food waste problem, which in the order of importance, might just be the first we need to solve before tackling on other problems (that are probably not even one).

My point here is that this video is well-made, no matter how you looked at it. It gives a well developed, rational and logical counter-arguments for those they point out. Cutting off meat production right now isn’t a solution, there are a lot of other problems that aren’t and should be discussed instead of pointlessly blaming other things.

Honorable video mentions | YouTube

It’s a Vsauce video. If you don’t know about this, now is a good time to. Their videos can get complicated and messy most of the time, but all of it still serves a purposes and also thought provoking. Even then, it’ll eventually make sense and concludes to the title of their videos.

This is one of those things that most of us may actually know but just can’t quite present or do practically. We know that humans are social beings that are bound to communicate with each other, but we also know that each and every one of us have our own thought and opinions on some stuff that we may disagree on. Rather than forcing your perspective on others or even avoiding the topic altogether, we ought to discuss them constructively and work together instead of fighting with one another. Also, “Why You Lose Friends”.

One of the best talks this month about JavaScript and web technologies, highly recommended to watch for programmers, and especially for web developers. There’s lots of ways to develop apps nowadays, and as such results in lots of wrong things. This talk addresses the problems most web apps are facing lately, as things progresses with many stuff on the rise, such as the notorious SPA where everything is JavaScript, even one that can be a pure static page.

Bonus video! One of the best collaboration reaction video from PewDiePie and CinnamonToastKen. It was absolutely hilarious and disgusting at the same time, really enjoyable to watch.

Headlines of the month

Leaked Mark Zuckerberg Phone Number’s Reveals He Is on Signal

Among the 533 million Facebook users leaked data, Mark Zuckerberg was one of them, and it reveals that he uses Signal app. Oh, how ironic is it that for someone who valued his privacy as to use a chat app that has e2e encryption, and regrettably got his phone number included in the leak from his own company as well. (1)

To rub salt into the wound, here’s some of the replies which suits the situation the best.

• “He’s evil, not dumb.” [jess-sch]
• “Signal, used and trusted by Mark Zuckerberg” [agilob]
• “As a dealer you should never get hooked up with the drugs you sell.” [DonManuel]

But, it’s all your fault that hackers got the data. (2)

Zuck: They “trust me”. Dumb fucks.

Source(s):

1. Mark on Signal [MSN | Reddit]
2. It’s your fault [Vice | Reddit]

Internet Rejection Against Google FLoC

The newest addition to Google’s ad technology inside Chrome called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) is being rejected by everyone in the community. Of course, it’s still in the proposal state, but it’s better to reject it early on.

Source(s):

1. Edge, Mozilla, and others reject FLoC [TheVerge | Reddit]
2. How to fight back against Google FLoC [Plausible | Reddit]

That’s it for our recap of April 2021, folks! Stay safe and have a great May 👋