Published
Weekend Reading — I'll take one Canadiano please
CM Harrington "Timeline cleanse: Her name is Nibi."
Tech Stuff
pandan Not to be confused with the flavor, this is a fantastic time-tracking app that lives in the menubar. I like to know how long I'm spending at the coffee shop. I used the iPhone timer app for a while, but often forget to run it. I tried the macOS timer app but too cumbersome to use routinely. I tried a bunch of menubar apps, but none of them sticks. Finally settled on Pandan because it just does one thing — tracks time — I don’t even have to remember to start/stop it!
Software Should Feel Like Magic 🙏
The software of the future will feel like an extension of you. It’ll understand you. Adapt to you. Guide you. It’ll feel so natural that you won’t even realize it’s there.
Reor Chat with a local-first LLM that has full context of your Markdown notes.
It's OK to hardcode feature flags
In any case, adding more moving parts to any software system should always be given scrutiny to see if it’s actually necessary and whether the risks it introduces are worth the problems being solved.
Extending AI chat with Model Context Protocol (and why it matters)
The Power of Ten – Rules for Developing Safety Critical Code And some comments on NASA’s 10 rules for software development.
Visprex Upload CSV files and visualize the data.
I'm going to make sure all my open source software has one of the banned DEI words in it somewhere. Other nations will be able to use it, but not the US government. I don't even need to change from an open language--the USA will self-police.
uswriting/bcrypt A modern, secure implementation of bcrypt for JavaScript/TypeScript.
Context-switching is the main productivity killer for developers
Not refactoring is like leaving tissues in your pockets and then putting your clothes in the washing machine.
Back to Mac BTW I used to use an iPad for half a day every day for 2+ years. Some stuff I would only do on the iPad (email, Slack, product planning, expenses, etc), using the Mac only for coding. But that was more than 2 years ago. I haven't used the iPad at all in over six months.
I’m reminded of YouTubers who say that they tried using something as their main whatever for a whole week; well, I did it for eight years. Allow me to report back.
Unread I used Reeder for years to get my daily dose of RSS and loved it, but it got replaced by a new release with a revamped UI which is pretty in a demo but practically useless in real life. And the old version of Reeder doesn’t feel like it's getting maintained.
So I switched to Unread. It has a different UI which tokes long time to adjust to (the settings are numerous and all over the place, some default behaviors not obvious, etc), but now I'm in a happy place. And I love that I can turn each subscription to use the feed, the website, or combo of both.
I’m not saying Unread is better than Reeder, they both have pros and cons, and they're too different to easily compare. Just saying that you might enjoy using one much more than the other, so try both.
Silicon Valley's next act: bringing 'vibe coding' to the world The Vibe Coding Train is leaving platform 404 at 8:15 sharp. Please board and enjoy the ride! 🤦
Seriously, open source people, name one of your variables "transgender_marxism" and name one of your functions "green_new_deal".
You don't want your software used in weapons? This will help ensure it isn't.
13” Boox Note Max With an e-ink screen large enough to run two apps side-by-side you can read in one and annotate in the other (or type using the attached keyboard).
Eye for Design
The hardest working font in Manhattan A story of a 150-year-old font you have never heard of:
To put it in perspective: the font I first assumed was a peer to 1950s Helvetica was already of retirement age the day Helvetica was born. Gorton was older than Gill Sans, Futura, or Johnston’s London Underground font. It was contemporaneous to what today we recognize as the first modern sans serif font, Akzidenz-Grotesk, released but three years before the end of the century.
The Braille Institute created a font designed to make reading easier for people with low vision called Atkinson Hyperlegible in 2019.
It just released an update (Atkinson Hyperlegible Next) and monospace version with enhanced characters, 7 weights, and variable weight.
They’re free for personal and commercial use.
Super Wild Coffee It's Poodleproof! I haven’t tried their coffee, nor do I know what Poodleproof even means, but I loved their sign at the train station, had to look it up, and so linking to this article from the designer.
The Subtle Art of Designing Physical Controls for Cars
This Reusable Modular Magnetic Sticky Note is About to Make Post-Its Obsolete
Citroen Ami There was an Ami parked next to my hotel in Paris. It was the most cute adorable vehicle I’ve seen in a long while. I think I want one!
* Technically, the Ami is not a car but more like a quadcycle
** And the Ami costs as much as a Mac Pro but doesn't look like a cheese grater
Peoples
How to professionally say Sometimes the wife asks me how to phrase a text message or an email so it sounds more professional. Sometimes I use the LLM for help. So it’s nice to have this convenient website full of “professional” sayings.
Business Side
Forrest Brazeal “I'm going to business hell for this one”
Explore vs Execute Getting to PMF and beyond from founder/CIO of WP Engine.
YouTube is now even bigger on TVs than phones I thought YouTube was always bigger on TVs than phones. You can get a 52” TV for half the price of a 6.9” phone. Half the price and 8x the size sounds "bigger" to me, or am I doing math wrong?
Jess I bet that Facebook can label people as “low performers” by virtue of their date of last employment, but the departing employees can’t sue Facebook for defamation:
The fact that employers publicly announce that they're laying off their "lowest performers" is shockingly cruel. Not only are you depriving someone of their livelihood, you're publicly branding them as a poor performer to harm their ability to get a new job.
That's not something you do simply to cut costs, that's targeted intentional cruelty to terrorize your existing employees into overwork and quell dissidents.
Every single time I hear the sentiment "like it or not, ______ is here to stay", I like to take a moment to reflect on the overwhelming majority of "things we were told would be permanent" that now, shockingly, no longer exist.😮🫢🤗🙄
Google’s AI Super Bowl Ad Fiasco Somehow Gets Worse
It turns out Gemini didn't hallucinate a fake stat, Google just copied a website's existing text instead.
Machine Intelligence
Assaf The future as predicted by AI.
Google will use machine learning to try and tell if a user is under 18 Next AI party trick: guess my age!
A YouTube spokesperson clarified to Engadget that the model will make its predictions using data like the types of info the person searches for, the categories of videos they watch and the age of their accounts. For example, if someone frequently searches for info about mortgage lending or taxes, that probably points to the person being over 18. Ditto for an account that’s over 20 years old.
New estimates have ChatGPT using 10x less power than previously thought There's no way the anti-GPT crowd that claims GPT is decimating the climate could have done their math wrong and yet …
A commonly-cited claim is that powering an individual ChatGPT query requires around 3 watt-hours of electricity, or 10 times as much as a Google search.
However…
We find that typical ChatGPT queries using GPT-4o likely consume
Jiminy. Programming with AI assistance is just gobsmacking.
DoppelBot: Replace your CEO with an LLM
We were planning on releasing the weights for
@erik-botto the world, but all our metrics have been going up and to the right a little too much since we’ve launched him…So, we are releasing the next best thing.
DoppelBotis a Slack bot that you can install in your own workspace, and fine-tune on your own Slack messages. Follow the instructions here to replace your own CEO with an LLM today.
Microsoft Study Finds AI Makes Human Cognition “Atrophied and Unprepared” The downside of Vibing.
Insecurity
Introducing Privacy Pass authentication for Kagi Search Nice new feature from Kagi: new authentication system that knows if you have a paying account, but doesn’t record enough information to track your actual searches. (Works in most browsers except Safari)
Smuggling arbitrary data through an emoji 🤔
Hundreds of foreigners freed from Myanmar's scam centres If you notice phone scams and pig butcherings are taking a much needed break, this is one reason:
Thai Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra has pledged to close scam centres along the Thai-Myanmar border.
Related, Casinos, high-rises and fraud: The BBC visits a bizarre city built on scams.
Phishing Tests, the Bane of Work Life, Are Getting Meaner
Last year, a follow-up study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego, which looked at a wider range of training programs, found the tests led to a measly 2% reduction in phishing success rates.
Passwords: Never reuse passwords!! That's not secure!
Security questions: You must reuse these 3 questions on every single site, the answers to which were matters of public record in the first place.
The thing that would fix IT security is to start using very large physical keys like in video games
Uber drivers sexually assaulted 24 women, 3 men, lawsuits say
They say the company misrepresented itself by claiming to offer a safe method of transportation.
OK, but who in their right mind thinks of Uber as “a safe method of transportation”? Isn’t that why Waymo has such strong presence in San Francisco?
If VPNs were actually entrusted with private data and the secrets of your life, you wouldn't buy them from a fucking podcast ad. They are fungible because they don't fucking do anything critical to your privacy. You don't have to trust them. You don't need to trust the transport! That's the entire point. What don't you understand about this.
Jeep's Pop-up Ads Are Driving People Mad At Every Stoplight Enshittification comes to our transportation: “The extended warranty ad keeps appearing every time the driver stops the vehicle”
Everything Else
Marie Antoinette This poster for the new show that’s playing on Canal+ right now. It looks like an interesting historical drama full of intrigue. And this poster is just 👩🍳💋. How would you translate “L’affaire du collier” to US English? Maybe call it Necklace-gate?
But it was assigned “Gulf of Mexico” at birth…
Never mind Inbox Zero. I'll settle for Laundry Zero.
A humpback whale briefly swallows kayaker in Chilean Patagonia — and it's all captured on camera Jonah in Patagonia.
(PS technically a whale can’t swallow you, their mouth may be twice your size, but their throat is quite narrow)
Dr. Rachel Reddick Related:
In happier news, it turns out that the population of humpback whales -- which StarTrek expected would be extinct by the time of the Star Trek future -- now have a population over 100,000, and are no longer considered endangered! Hooray! Sometimes things do get better.
Decades of research and we still haven't determined who let the dogs out.
Lihit Labs Compact Pen Case Review 💯
I started bullet journalling a month ago and it's my understanding that part of getting into analogue tools is buying too many pens and shit.
How a UC Davis Research Center Is Changing the World of Coffee
“I often tell people there’s too much blood in my caffeine stream,” he laughed
Floor796 A huge animation scene with many references to memes, games, films, series, anime, music groups.
Years ago, I went to a birthday party in a small town. I went to a general store and asked if they had balloons. The fellow said yes. I asked if they had any in fun shapes and he said, "depends on how amusing you find circular". For some reason that's lived in my brain for years.
❤️ it’s the time of the year when you can donate to the pet shelter, and they’ll name a stray cat after your ex and have him castrated ❤️
Heliomass (At least they have elevators, the Paris Metro has none)
Transit photo of the day: The mad network of lifts at Tottenham Court Road station.
I’m so tempted to make a game out of this…
Whenever a police detective moves back to their home town, there is always a murder for the first time in years.
And this holds true for ANY COUNTRY.
Surely someone sees a connection here?
Filed under "I don't get paid enough for this shit," one of my students hits me with this question out of the blue. "Ms Rox, what is copulate?" I was wondering what the fuck was going on! So in my best "everything is fine here" voice I asked where the student read it and what the context was... Apparently the screen reader pronounces Microsoft Copilot ... like... copulate. So I'm glad we got that straight! I may retire to my fainting couch with a handle of gin for the rest of the evening.
how to do anything “How to Start a Cattle Farm”
Health Insurers Deny 850 Million Claims a Year. The Few Who Appeal Often Win. US health "care" summarized: appeal. Few do it but the success rate is pretty high because so few people do it.
Animal owners worry about pet welfare after microchip company closes Save This Life is dead.
Nice Airport, If You Can Get to It: No Subway, No Highway, No Bridge In Belgium, Paddington au Pérou posters are splashed in major train stations, making sure you don't forget that there's a movie about the delightful British bear, and also that it's practically impossible to get to Peru's new airport:
A highway meant to whisk travelers to the $2 billion terminal has yet to be built, even though flights are supposed to begin operating in just seven weeks. A bridge to get across a river that runs along the grounds was never constructed.
There’s a subway stop labeled “Airport” planned for Lima’s new metro system, but that station is set to be built (three years from now) much closer to the old airport that’s being decommissioned.
‘Rationalist Fleet’: Before killings linked to fringe group, ‘Ziz’ led fateful tugboat voyage to California Four words: “a young vegan rationalist”
ElevenReader Generate a podcast track from any book, article, PDF, newsletter, or text file. Super easy to use.
How to Boil an Egg? Scientists Claim to Have Cracked the Recipe. Eggs are getting so expensive in the US that if you’re preparing a boiled egg you might as well follow the scientific method!
(I think this method is too much pain for very little gain, but I just wanted to point out egg prices didn’t go down like the Regime said they would)
When Zeke was being badly bullied at his new school, his dad, desperate for help, posted in a local Facebook group, hoping to reach other parents.
That’s when K-Dogs Kidz, an anti-bullying biker group, offered to pick Zeke up from school to show his peers how “cool” he really is. That day changed Zeke's life. He had the time of his life—and the bullying stopped.
K-Dogs Kidz anti bullying mission comes to the aid of kids that have special needs and those that have a hard time fitting in.
White House blocks AP reporter from Trump-Modi news conference because of Gulf of Mexico fight AP sticking to their guns about Gulf of Mexico is why I just subscribed to their feed and will be posting links to AP articles in the future.
The Cybertruck Appears to Be More Deadly Than the Infamous Ford Pinto, According to a New Analysis Apparently Ralph Nader got just enough votes that he swung the election so that Bush won against Al Gore. And Nader got ample recognition from his best seller Unsafe At Any Speed. Nader did warn us about the Ford Pinto, which was so badly designed because it was cheaper to compensate fatalities than build a safe vehicle. We used to laught at people who were clueless enough to own a Pinto.
Anyways, “the Cybertruck might lead to 17 times more fatalities than the infamous Ford Pinto.”
When I was a kid, I had an old transistor radio that had a lot of components. One day when I was bored, I cut out components one by one to see how long it would keep functioning as a radio.
No reason why I'm bringing this up.
A bunch of boring things you might want to do soon if you can:
Getting your MMR shot reupped*, your passport in order**, all age-appropriate preventive care (mammogram, colonoscopy, cholesterol check), eating more produce, getting established with a primary care doctor, getting prescriptions refilled, making lists of phone numbers, doing whatever strength work your body allows.
This isn’t selfish or non-communitarian. You can’t help others if you get knocked off the board.
