Published
Weekend Reading — That escalated quickly
37 Silly, Absurd, And Super Freaking Creative Signs That escalated quickly!
Tech Stuff
Write.as That looks interesting: a way to run your own blog that has a minimal and elegant UI, focusing mostly on your text.
Launched in 2015, and still “owned and operated by our founder, Matt Baer, who has no interest in making an exit.” $6 a month which is actually really cheap comparing to running your own server, or any other blogging platform I know about.
Linear This is my favorite project management tool. For listings tasks I’m working on, bugs that need to be fixed, planning roadmaps and sprints, etc. Easy to use, very responsive, with native apps for macOS, iOS, and other operating systems. Generous free plan to get you started on your side/personal projects.
NotePlan “Use the flexibility of Markdown to quickly create tasks.” It looks cool, and I think a lot of people like that way of planning their day/week/month: as a written down plan. Not free, but not super expensive either ($10/month). iOS, macOS, and they’re working on web UI.
CACM Is Now Open Access 💪 yes!
We are excited to announce that Communications of the ACM (CACM) is now a fully Open Access publication. This means that more than six decades of CACM’s renowned research articles, seminal papers, technical reports, commentaries, real-world practice, and news articles are now open to everyone, regardless of whether they are members of ACM or subscribe to the ACM Digital Library.
Simplify Gmail A browser extension from the co-founder of Google Inbox that makes your Gmail look sharper. Super easy to use with many different customization options. The individual plan is $2, which is much much cheaper than Superhuman.
laurentpayot/verticalize A pipe-like function to verticalize your JavaScript code. Because some ideas are fun even if they have no clear use case.
ARCHITECTURE.md Such a simple idea and makes 100% sense:
If you maintain an open-source project in the range of 10k-200k lines of code, I strongly encourage you to add an ARCHITECTURE document next to README and CONTRIBUTING.
Chris Heilmann “Rainbow CSV for VS Code is lovely and makes CSV data so much easier to read!”
Struct A new way to chat with your team: replaces channels with threads, feeds, and dose of AI.
PRESS RELEASE: Future Software Should Be Memory Safe The White House has just made a fantastic decision about software quality and reliability — use memory safe languages.
The full report is not that long, and while it doesn’t say “only use Rust”, that’s the message many people are going to take away:
At this time, the most widely used languages that meet all three properties are C and C++, which are not memory safe programming languages. Rust, one example of a memory safe programming language, has the three requisite properties above, but has not yet been proven in space systems.
cassandra Related.
It's OK to abandon your side-project
In an industry that pressures developers to always be shipping side-projects, it can be helpful to be retrospective with the projects that don't make the cut
Peering through Lenovo’s transparent laptop into a sci-fi future Super cool! I wouldn’t buy it, I don’t think the computer’s screen need to be transparent. And definitely the keyboard should not be a flat surface. But one day we’ll be able to use this in car and house windows. Not to mention making every TV show looks more sci-fi.
Stefan Judis “Haha, @lonekorean@front-end.social found the ultimate z-index hack. 😅” https://codersblock.com/blog/playing-with-infinity-in-css/
Eye for Design
Design Ah! (デザインあ) · learning the fun of design A gem of an educational show from Japan about design.
“The five to ten minute duration of each episode makes it just long enough to convey a message, yet short enough to not lose its viewers’ interest.”
Seriously, these are some great intro to design in a few short and fun to watch videos. And you don’t need to know Japanese to get immediate value from watching them.
The 3 capabilities designers need to build for the AI era
When imposter syndrome strikes, just remember, nobody has all the answers. This whole AI thing is new for pretty much everyone, and we’re all trying to figure it out as we go, together.
Hi, software developers, I know you're trying to be more user friendly by not including a bunch of "confusing gibberish" when errors occur, but for the love of god, please include something more useful than "something went wrong”
Dead Simple Sites A curated list of the most minimal sites on the web. No overly animated content. No scroll jacking. No excessive storytelling.
Peoples
How To Fix Broken Teams Most teams break in very similar ways. And, even more luckily, most teams can be fixed in similar ways. And this one rule applies to all too many teams:
All of these issues collectively add to what feels like an organizational gaslighting. Nobody really knows what the truth is, what good looks like, whose fault anything is. People are angry and nothing ever seems to fix it.
It’s not just your imagination: tech job interviews are getting worse When did interviewing for an engineering job become the fight of your life?
Interviews for technical jobs are more than just an awkward Zoom call: candidates report extreme exercises like coding apps from scratch or crafting in-depth project evaluations — all on tight deadlines (and without compensation).
Employment rate for Americans with disabilities reached record high in 2023 — One big reason is the rise in remote work!
Business Side
How startups beat incumbents A startup can beat a large, successful incumbent, if it does things the incumbent can not or will not do. Here are those things.
Improving Developer Experience Drives Profitability In news that should surprise no one:
Through 18 questions, the researchers proved that: A focus on enabling more flow state positively impacts developer, team and organizational outcomes.
Tighter feedback loops influence team-based outcomes. An effort to reduce cognitive load positively affects developer, team and organizational outcomes.
Tim Clicks “Difficult for a job ad to have a red flag in every sentence, but not impossible apparently.”
Machine Intelligence
Pi, your personal AI A personal AI that will chat with you, ask you questions, answer your questions, give you advice, etc. It doesn’t have the ability to search the internet for answers, but everything else is pretty solid. Actually fun to use. Feels like I’m talking to a real person.
New Theory Suggests Chatbots Can Understand Text Interesting!
Far from being “stochastic parrots,” the biggest large language models seem to learn enough skills to understand the words they’re processing.
BookPecker.com I guess this is how we can read 100+ books in couple of hours: a catalog of 14509 books, each book summarized in 5 bullet points.
Tiny Predictive Text This is a really interesting experiment. Predictive text, in only 13kb of code, no LLM. Just a JavaScript function and a large array of “most likely next word”. Which, the whole point of this exercise is to show how simple text prediction is. LLMs are much more intelligent than just statistically guessing the next word in a sequence.
Insecurity
GitHub besieged by millions of malicious repositories in ongoing attack If you have or using an open source project from GitHub, pay close attention to this new attack vector. The campaign flow is simple:
- Clone existing repos (for example: TwitterFollowBot, WhatsappBOT, discord-boost-tool, Twitch-Follow-Bot, and hundreds more)
- Infect it with malware loaders
- Upload back to GitHub with identical name
- Automatically fork each thousands of times
- Covertly promote them across the web via forums, Discord, etc.
Tumblr and WordPress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools If you have a Tumblr or a blog on WordPress.com, just so you know, they’re going to share your content with Midjourney and OpenAI. You can opt-out, a feature that most people won’t know about, or where to find it. I used to think Automattic is a unique company that gets it, and tries to run software the correct and honest way. I no longer hold this position.
Calendar Meeting Links Used to Spread Mac Malware WTF!
Malicious hackers are targeting people in the cryptocurrency space in attacks that start with a link added to the target’s calendar at Calendly, a popular application for scheduling appointments and meetings. The attackers impersonate established cryptocurrency investors and ask to schedule a video conference call. But clicking the meeting link provided by the scammers prompts the user to run a script that quietly installs malware on macOS systems.
Everything Else
elle “seems impossible to make a potato threatening but here we are”
God, grant me the serenity to accept the terms and conditions I do not read.
When I was a kid I had to use the Oxford dictionary to understand adult words. Now I'm an adult and have to use Urban Dictionary to understand what the kids are saying.
Forgetfulness is another form of freedom
“Go touch grass” is something people who spend too much time on the internet get told by people who spend too much time on the internet.
Boiling tap water may be solution to microplastics
Worried about plastic pollution in your tap water? Try boiling in it, a new study suggests. Boiling tap water can destroy at least 80 percent of three of the most common plastic compounds that can be found in your water, according to findings published Wednesday in Environmental Research Letters.
New HHS Study Finds Nearly $124 Billion Positive Fiscal Impact of Refugees and Asylees on the American Economy in a 15-Year Period Refugees have cost the US … correction … refugees have made the US $124 billion.
Man throws 3-month birthday party for pothole city is slow to fix: 'Complaining wasn’t workin
How Fear of Regret Influences Our Decisions A simple dice game shines a bit of light on the psychology of regret:
Researchers have performed these experiments, and the results are illuminating. At triple the value, 50 percent of people switch. You need to get to 10 times the value before 90 percent of people switch.
Uncle Duke “Malcolm realized now that he’d misunderstood what his friend had meant when he told him there’d be a ton of trash at the Kid Rock show.”
What It’s Like to Be a Sociopath
“Just because I don’t care about you doesn’t mean I want to cause you more pain,” says Patric Gagne, author of a new memoir about her sociopathy.
"Like someone pulled the metaphorical plug": Dr. John Gartner on Trump's "accelerating dementia“ Back in the day, we wouldn’t accept any diagnosis that was given without an in-person evaluation. In many respects, I still feel this is the right thing to do. Just that these are not ordinary times. This article is not going to change minds, but it does expose some of what’s painfully obvious to so many people:
In 2016, what were my peers afraid of? The American Psychiatric Association? What was the worst that could have happened to us? We could have been expelled from the American Psychiatric Association. So what?! With Trump trying to come back to power, people are looking over their shoulders out of a reasonable fear of professional, social economic, and even criminal retaliation, as well as the threat of political violence from the right wing. We weren't making those risk assessments before.
Watch Nimona. Nimona is really really good. And yes, it’s an animated movie, but you don’t have to be into animations to enjoy every minute. On Netflix.
Tuition will be free at a New York City medical school thanks to a $1 billion gift Your moment of “billionaire does the right thing”:
Ruth Gottesman, who is chairperson of the college's board of trustees, made the donation using money left to her by her late husband, financier David Gottesman, who was a friend of Warren Buffett and whose company, First Manhattan Co., was an early investor in Berkshire Hathaway, according to Forbes.
Jungle George “The perfect area rug doesn't exi…”
