Logs

Quick thoughts, cool links, and random notes. Things that are too small for a blog post, but worth sharing. A continuous stream.

• 15 February 2026 Zstandard

  Today I learned about Zstandard, a new compression algorithm, and it really blew my mind. It went against everything I knew about computers, but the explanation became clearer when I learned how ancient today’s standards are.

  I always thought there was a compromise for everything, for example, x265 is more efficient than x264, but the compromise is it takes more time to encode and more computational power to watch them. But Zstandard is different: it can compress much more than gzip and it does it much faster!

  So where is the catch? The best part is, there is none. It is possible because it uses much more modern computational techniques that we didn’t have in the 90s when gzip was created.

  Zstd is mainly an alternative to gzip, not for 7z or rar. It’s mainly for sending data on the web, where it is crucial to be fast at compressing and decompressing. This new standard will make API throughputs higher and websites load faster, which is a huge deal for the web.

• 12 January 2026 Anything New?

  Do you remember the time when a new JavaScript framework seemed to pop up almost every week? Or a new programming language to solve some problems in a different way?

  I know we are in the AI hype right now and instead of new frameworks, new AI startups are popping up every week, so it’s understandable those things aren’t the primary focus of the community, but what I fear is, what will happen after?

  Will there be any new way to do something? Who will create a new JS framework if AI only knows React the best? Or how will a new programming language gain traction if AI models aren’t trained on it to vibecode with it?

• 11 December 2025 All New

  Today I learned that Google has a special Top-Level Domain (TLD) called .new that allows users to quickly create new documents or projects in various Google services. For example, docs.new opens a new Google Docs document, keep.new creates a new Google Keep note, and meet.new starts a new Google Meet call.

  And actually, this TLD is not exclusive to Google’s services.

  • repo.new creates a new GitHub repository.
  • excel.new opens a new Microsoft Excel document.
  • pen.new opens a new CodePen project.

  You can find all the .new shortcuts on whats.new.

• 08 December 2025 Big Bing

  Everyone knows that Bing is mostly a failure and always in the shadow of Google. But today I learned that if Bing was a separate company, it would be worth about 400 billion dollars, which makes it the 25th most valuable company, more valuable than IBM and AMD and almost as valuable as Netflix. as of writing this ¹

  And if we compare it by revenue, Bing’s revenue for 2025 is more than 12 billion, which makes it earn more than Shopify, eBay, Nintendo, and Airbnb.

  I guess the search engine market is more valuable than I thought.

  1. Calculated using Google’s revenue-per-user stats. Since Bing likely generates less per user, the real figure is probably slightly under $400B. ↩

• 04 December 2025 Linear to Power

  I’ve always used YouTube’s volume slider between 1% and 20%. It gets loud so quickly that there is very little difference between 50% and 100%. That’s because sound intensity increases with power, but our ears perceive it logarithmically. If you map the slider linearly, like YouTube does, it feels wrong.

  Fortunately, we can fix that with a small userscript. (If you don’t have an extension for Userscripts, I recommend Violentmonkey for Firefox and Tampermonkey for Chrome) You can install this userscript to fix both YouTube and YouTube Music.

  In Chrome, you need to give permission to Tampermonkey to run userscripts.

• 03 December 2025 Subtitle Searcher

  I found a website for searching through subtitles of YouTube channels and videos. With Filmot, you can select channels to search and type your query. It will show the results with timestamps. You can even search without specifying a channel to search across all videos.