Programming and Standards Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 04, 2026

• Thomas Rigby ☛ A/B testing, misinformation, and YouTube

  The crux of the problem is that A/B testing presumes either A or B is the right answer, and it optimises for popularity. In YouTube's case, engagement is probably what you want, but it isn't necessarily the best outcome.

• Andreas ☛ Git worktrees: why not just clone the repo?

  Why use Git worktrees for parallel coding agents when we can just clone the repository for each agent and use GitHub to synchronize their work?

  Each clone gives an agent its own working directory, staging area and branch. They can edit, test and commit independently. When one needs another’s changes, a push and fetch will do the job. This works, so what do worktrees add?

  The useful difference is what happens locally. Separate clones are separate repositories, even when they sit next to each other on the same machine. Worktrees give us separate working directories attached to one repository. A commit created in one is immediately available to the others, without first transferring it anywhere.

• The New Stack ☛ AI is speeding up exploits. Vulnerability spreadsheets can't keep up.

  Two organizations can therefore have exactly the same CVE in their environments and face very different levels of risk. One organization might have the vulnerable component sitting behind multiple layers of protection, with no external exposure and no relevant execution path.

  The CVE is identical. The risk is not.

  Another might have it running in an internet-facing production application supporting a critical business process. The CVE is identical. The risk is not.

  This is why vulnerability programs built around static severity scores can produce a misleading sense of progress. Teams may spend significant effort closing large numbers of findings without necessarily reducing the organization’s most consequential exposure. That creates what I would call “CVE theater”: Measuring activity rather than meaningful risk reduction.

• R / R-Script

  • Rlang ☛ pipeflow: v0.4.0 on CRAN

    {pipeflow} builds a pipeline by adding one R function per step with pip_add (see also the Get started article). In this post, we’ll work with the following toy pipeline: [...]

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Vincent Delft ☛ vdcron 0.9: a cron for laptops that now survives shutdowns, power loss and reboots

    vdcron is my small cron-like scheduler for machines that are not always on, such as laptops. It is a plain shell script that runs the tasks that are due each time the machine resumes, boots or someone logs in. At the end of September I reviewed the whole script, and the result is version 0.9. It fixes several bugs that could lose tasks from the queue, corrects the date calculations, and adds an option to edit the configuration safely. Above all, progress is now saved after each task, so a shutdown in the middle of a run no longer starts everything again.

• Standards/Consortia

  • uni Cambridge ☛ A4 paper format / International standard paper sizes

    In the ISO paper size system, the height-to-width ratio of all pages is the square root of two (1.4142 : 1). In other words, the width and the height of a page relate to each other like the side and the diagonal of a square. This aspect ratio is especially convenient for a paper size. If you put two such pages next to each other, or equivalently cut one parallel to its shorter side into two equal pieces, then the resulting page will have again the same width/height ratio.