Published
Weekend Reading — Hot Potatoes
the lynne creacher “https is pronounced hot potatoes”
Tech Stuff
It's not microservice or monolith; it's cognitive load you need to understand first TL;DR How to pick the right software architecture for your team.
Thoughts on Remix I agree with most of these points. I work on two projects, one Remix (for this blog) and one Next (different apps), and I’m having more fun and feeling more productive using Remix. Something about the simplicity of its API and composing routes.
Inbox Zero By the looks of it, it's a dashboard for knowing who’s emailing you, who you’re emailing, unsubscribing from newsletters, etc. It’s a secondary email client and only supports GMail accounts.
ProductivePrivacy A directory of open-source apps that respect your privacy.
I recently stumbled upon this screenshot while researching social media on the train. Of course, it was followed by a cascade of spiteful comments, criticizing this fresh programmer’s attempt to solve a classical problem in computer science. The modulus operation.
Despite the 3.5" Magneto-Optical format's many advantages - A much larger, more reliable and resilient storage, bright backlight, and a high-resolution active matrix colour screen - it still failed to make inroads against sales of the older ubiquitous greyscale 3.5" floppy disk.
Apollo 11 vs USB-C Chargers Speaking of “For all Mankind”, here’s a detailed comparison of the Apollo 11 onboard computers vs a USB-C charger.
Cray 1 Supercomputer Performance Comparisons With Home Computers Phones and Tablets Another performance comparison, the best looking supercomputer vs the cheap devices we all own and use every day.
Quantum Computing’s Hard, Cold Reality Check I don’t think quantum computing is a revolution. Maybe there are some things it can do better, but the use cases are very limited:
Troyer says they found that a quantum algorithm with a quadratic speed up would have to run for centuries, or even millenia, before it could outperform a classical one on problems big enough to be useful.
NanoRaptor “The ideal solution to the problem.”
Peoples
The science of decision-making: why smart people do dumb things
Decision-making is the process we use to identify and choose alternatives, producing a final choice, which may or may not result in an action. It can be more or less rational based on the decision maker’s values, beliefs, and (perceived) knowledge.
How to take bigger, bolder product bets Lessons from Slack’s Chief Product Officer. I wouldn’t describe Slack as bold, not in the past few years, or just incrementally and carefully adding features, but if you have to convince your boss, certainly “as said by CPO of …” is a good way to start.
Scientists Explain Why ‘Doing Your Own Research’ Leads to Believing Conspiracies
The researchers point to a known problem in search called "data voids." Sometimes, there's not a lot of high-quality information to counter misleading headlines or surrounding fringe theories. So, when someone sees an article online about an “engineered famine” due to COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccines, and conducts an unsophisticated search based on those keywords, they may find articles that reaffirm their bias.
Make Yourself Immune to Secondhand Stress
Observing someone who is stressed — especially a coworker or family member — can have an immediate effect upon our own nervous systems. A separate group of researchers found that 26% of people showed elevated levels of cortisol just by observing someone who was stressed. Secondhand stress is much more contagious from a romantic partner (40%) than a stranger, but when observers watched a stressful event on video with strangers, 24% still showed a stress response.
Hiring a software engineer in their late 40s:
Pros:
- Understands your stack better than you do after glancing through the repo for five minutes.
- Will rewrite said stack 2x as fast, and half as buggy if you let them.
Cons:
- Gives zero fucks.
*Knows we're not really like family here.- No, seriously, absolutely zero fucks given.
Do not cite the deep magic to me, product manager, I was there when it was written.
Business Side
Mozilla 2023 Annual Report: CEO pay skyrockets, while Firefox Marketshare nosedives Firefox is dead. And it’s not because too few people use it, but because the company that makes it has new priorities. And the new priorities have little to do with people who browse the web.
The first rule of salary negotiation is the new hire budget is bigger than the promotion budget. It is always easier to negotiate a higher starting salary or hiring bonus than getting a raise or promotion after you’ve gotten the job.
I’ve been stunned at how low the bar is for hiring managers to OK a higher offer for a new hire versus fighting for a raise for one of their team members. Never believe a recruiter who says you can get a bump after you start and do well unless it’s in writing.
The best Substack alternatives For many people it’s time to ditch Substack. Something about them supporting nazis.
BTW this blog is published on Ghost, which I really like. Simple UI, lots of options but not in an overwhelming way, and quick pace of new feature releases. I don’t like the pricing, though, with over 1,000 subscribers this blog would cost $2,388 a year. Way way way too much. So instead, I self-host on Digital Ocean, which is reasonably possible but not super simple. You do have to SSH into the instance every once in a while and run an upgrade, which is not everyone’s cup of tea.
Insecurity
4-year campaign backdoored iPhones using possibly the most advanced exploit ever Quite the story! "Triangulation" infected dozens of iPhones belonging to employees of Moscow-based Kaspersky.
Machine Intelligence
American States As Real People Generated by AI
2023: The Year of AI Overview of all the AI developments that happened this year.
Monk: Buddha, what makes us human?
Buddha: Selecting all images with traffic lights.
Dare Obasanjo “One of the sad things about the proliferation of AI art is that when I see a photo like this I immediately think “That’s so cool, too bad it’s not real”.”
Everything Else
GeriAQuin “Stop following them …”
Dwight Every day, when I wake up, I start with this healthy workout:
There Are 14 Muscles Activated When We Pour A Cup Of Coffee.
When we smile while pouring our coffee, we engage 11 additional muscles.
Morning workout complete. 💪
In the US, it’s called an elevator. In the UK, it’s a lift...
I guess we’re just all raised differently..
modern society is so divorced from our food sources that most people who eat pop tarts have never actually killed one themselves
Most people think the U.S. crime rate is rising. They're wrong.
FBI data…found that violent crime dropped 8%, while property crime fell 6.3% to what would be its lowest level since 1961 […]
Murder plummeted in the United States in 2023 at one of the fastest rates of decline ever recorded…and every category of major crime except auto theft declined.
Yet 92% of Republicans, 78% of independents and 58% of Democrats believe crime is rising, the Gallup survey shows.
GeriAQuin “Appletinis …”
U.S. Announces Lunar Base Plans Amid Rising Space Competition with China | Brief Someone has been watching season 1 of For All Mankind (a really good show, highly recommended).
Today is the 30th anniversary of the BBC premiere of The Wrong Trousers, which means it’s time to recount The Most Important Story Ever Told, about how I found out how the greatest sound effect in the history of the motion picture was made.
Speaking of Aardman, the second Chicken Run movie is now playing on Netflix. And it is soooo good. The plot, the lines, the animation, everything is just perfect.
52 Interesting Things I Learned in 2023 Including things like “ciabatta was invented in 1982”, “hurricanes don’t cross the equator”, and “multicellular life developed on Earth more than 25 separate times.”
Man who made billions out of death and killing dies at the age of 94 Sometimes the headline just writes itself.
GrrlScientist “i've got my tickets to tonight's New Year's Eve events”
