Published
Weekend Reading — Momala and Popala
Tech Stuff
Building the Micro Journal So adorable!
And you may find yourself maintaining a large codebase
And you may tell yourself, these are not my beautiful data structures
And you may ask yourself, who wrote this crap
And you may ask yourself, how did I get here
Screen Studio For screen recording this looks amazing! It can zoom into UI components — automatically and you can also edit the zooms — shows a very pronounced cursor on screen, tons of editing options, generating screen demos that just look top notch. Not free but if you're doing screen recording to show your product, then also not extremely expensive.
OH my God y'all my wife (she is a self-taught coder who now teaches biology students to code) only just found out about rubber ducking this morning and she's so excited about it 🥹 she's buying 100 little rubber ducks to give to her students 🥹 she's like "Knowing that this is what REAL DEVELOPERS do will be so good for them" 🥹
nixCraft “perfect function doesn’t exis- 👇”
HeyPuter/Oops.js A powerful undo/redo library with a powerful name.
80% of developers are unhappy. The problem is not AI, nor is coding Of the people who go to Stack Overflow and respond to their surveys:
80% of professional programmers are unhappy. One in three respondents actively hates their job, while almost half survive in survival mode. This leaves only 20% of those who claim to be somewhat happy.
According to the new Stack Overflow survey showed that majority of developers hate their jobs. Anecdotally, both plumbers and farmers are happier than them.
jamonholmgren/qub Qub is a CLI and QB64 web framework for building websites with QBasic!
We tend to think of Big Tech as innovators, but in most cases, when that was genuinely true, they were Small Tech. Big Tech rarely innovates from within. It usually buys it.
WordStar 7, the last ever DOS version, re-released for free Do you remember WordStar? I used it on a portable computer of the time, which was only 20lb, but small enough to fit in the trunk of a car :)
Apple. Apple please. You can't use the same short flag for two different things. Apple please
Waffle mark Waffle mark looks really cool. The obviousness of a regular bar chart but with more precision when you need it.
Stop hiding all your fucking information in discords
Observable Plot A JavaScript library for data visualization from the D3 team. And it looks pretty exhaustive.
dessant/buster Chrome/Firefox extension that solves CAPTCHAs by completing the audio challenges using your on-device speech recognition.
if you think minimizing dependencies is a wild idea you probably aren't ready to consider another powerful idea: software can be finished
The Space Shuttle had a 59-pound printer on board, known as the Interim Teleprinter. Putting this heavy printer in orbit cost $1.5 million per flight, but it was a key piece of flight hardware,
providing the astronauts with mission plans, weather reports, and other documents from Mission Control. Let's take a look inside... 1/12
The bizarre secrets I found investigating corrupt Winamp skins Oh the things you find when you unzip Winamp skins …
Carlo Zottmann “That's great, thank you, Apple”
Eye for Design
8 Copywriting Hacks Backed By Science Works every time.
EP–1320 medieval The evil geniuses at Teenage Engineering made a medieval version of their iconic EP-133 beat maker, complete with old latin labels, lute and gregorian chant samples, and more.
Peoples
MSNBC Host Lawrence O’Donnell Slams His Own Network on Air Over Trump’s Press Conference The failure of US journalism in 2024, so perfectly explained.
reinforcing that last boost: i'm hearing this from everyone, too. the job market sucks because a bunch of the megacorps are doing waves of layoffs. layoffs have no correlation to job skill (especially this time) -- and they also cause the best people to wake up, look around, and flee -- so it's like if 10x as many college kids graduated this year.
you're not a bad coder, you're just suddenly part of a mass migration, and the boats are still very small, and may be for a while. it's not you.
interviewer: and where do you see yourself in 5 years?
me: (visualising myself in bondage gear driving a mad max war truck)
me: in a position of responsibility furthering development horizons in a company that cultivates talent
Praise my GitHub profile! “Instead of trying to tear eachother down with AI, why not use it to help lift others up?” — using AI for a good cause!
Business Side
An old employer of mine used ChatGPT to write their mission statement.
Which tells you everything you need to know about my old employer, ChatGPT, and mission statements.
Hollywood Takes on Silicon Valley in an Epic Presidential Brawl That one time I agreed with the Hollywood Reporter:
We’ve had a decade in which the Musks and Zuckerbergs and Sam Altmans of the world have been defining our culture, and the world is not better for it”
…
“What you’re dealing with here is a cult. These tech billionaires are building a religion. They believe they’re creating something with AI that’s going to be the most powerful thing that’s ever existed — this omniscient, all-knowing God-like entity — and they see themselves as the prophets of that future.”
…
“They see Trump as a useful idiot,” says Wylie. “He’s somebody who’ll do what they want.”“They see him as a way to pursue their political agenda, which is survival of the fittest, no regulation, burn-the-house-down nihilism that lacks any empathy or nuance.”
Humane’s daily returns are outpacing sales I'm not saying this product is a disaster, just quoting from the article
Between May and August, more AI Pins were returned than purchased, according to internal sales data.
The low sales figures also pale in comparison to the over $200 million that Humane has raised from … OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. To date, around 10,000 Pins and accessories have shipped in total. Humane hoped to ship about 100,000 Pins within the first year
A new report finds Boeing’s rockets are built with an unqualified work force Boeing just being Boeing. Related, NASA says SpaceX may need to fetch astronauts Boeing launched:
NASA officials conceded Wednesday that the agency might have to rely on SpaceX to return two American astronauts to Earth from the International Space Station due to problems with Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft.
Machine Intelligence
Visual Electric In the text-to-image category of generative AI, Visual Electric is pretty damn impressive. (Last week I linked to FLUX which I is really good, but Visual Electric is even better)
Over One Month Later, Copilot+ Laptops Are Still a Mess Apparently adding AI to the Windows laptop didn’t make it any better:
It’s clear that Microsoft is dialing back Copilot integration while it works to fix Recall, but the result is that Copilot+ feels a lot more like Copilot-.
Avocados are rich in monounsaturated fats, which are necessary for brain function, cognitive development, and the _____ LLM sampling.
Elicit There's a free version if you want to try out Elicit, which is an AI for researching academic papers.
Use AI to search, summarize, extract data from, and chat with over 125 million papers. Used by over 2 million researchers in academia and industry.
Using Chatgpt-4o to Redesign My Homepage
I’ve used a custom, hand-rolled homepage ever since Google googled its iGoogle personalized homepage thing back in 2013. It’s set as the homepage for my browsers, and is a quick way to get to things that I use often and to check in on weather and status at several places at once.
Screenshot of the original version of my homepage.
But it never quite worked the way I wanted it to.
the spouse did an implicit bias training today. the trainers asked the attendees to come up with back stories for people based on 4 pictures of folks of different skin color and implied class (clothing, visible hygiene). spouse, being spouse, thought they were sus and said he didn't think they had backstories because they looked like they were AI generated. trainers admitted they were. spouse then asked what prompts were used to generate the images. trainers were flummoxed. everyone got a training about implicit bias, but not the one they were expecting. I'm so proud.
Kroger's new dynamic AI pricing scheme is 'corporate greed is out of control’ Don’t worry, it’s just AI adjusting the price so they can charge you more:
"The increased use of dynamic pricing will drive company profits higher—leaving consumers with the bill," wrote the senators. "It is outrageous that, as families continue to struggle to pay to put food on the table, grocery giants like Kroger continue to roll out surge pricing and other corporate profiteering schemes."
Silicon Valley parents are sending their kids to AI summer camps How young is too young for AI summer camp?
“Sometimes they’ll bring a 4-year-old, and I’m like, you’re not supposed to be here”
“After one week, the parent said, ‘My child did not learn much. My cousin is a Google engineer, and he said he’s not ready to be an intern at Google yet.’ What do I say to that review?”
Insecurity
www.crowdstrike.com An explanation of what happened. Short version, because who has all day to read how CrowdStrike messed up the basics of programming: they changed a function to expect 21 parameters, but only supplied 20 parameters, which caused an out-of-bounds memory access error. That's the cause of the crash. Why didn't they catch it? Because the test suite used a regular expression with wildcards:
In summary, it was the confluence of these issues that resulted in a system crash: the mismatch between the 21 inputs validated by the Content Validator versus the 20 provided to the Content Interpreter, the latent out-of-bounds read issue in the Content Interpreter, and the lack of a specific test for non-wildcard matching criteria in the 21st field.
Justice Department Disrupts North Korean Remote IT Worker Fraud Schemes Through Charges and Arrest of Nashville Facilitator Feds arrest a 38 year-old Nashville man who allegedly provided a US network presence for a bunch of fake North Korean IT workers trying to raise money for the DPRK's nuclear weapons program.
Home security giant ADT says it was hacked ADT will protect your home property. It just won’t protect your personal records:
The disclosure comes a week after a seller on a known cybercrime forum, seen by TechCrunch, claimed in a post on July 31 to have more than 30,000 customer records stolen from ADT.
Sequoia’s weekly permission prompts for screen recording This article talks about Apple’s new intrusive permission model (in macOS 15 Beta) which they really need to get rid of before it causes more harm:
If Sequoia’s repeated reminders and dire warnings about privacy intrusion are here to stay, I don’t see any way forward except to eliminate the use of captured screen images. This reduces the quality and functionality of my software, but if the warnings are enough to put off some users, removing the dependent features is the only way to stop them from scaring people.
The Great npm Garbage Patch npm package registry flooded with spam packages: estimated to be over 500,000 in Q2 2024. The spam packages are associated with the Tea protocol, which incentivizes developers to artificially inflate their contribution through mass publication of worthless packages.
Bluey coins worth $400,000 stolen by worker, say Australia police
Police say the man stole a trove of limited-edition coins themed on the hit children’s tv show.
Horror story, but apparently it's true.
I'm sitting in an AWS meetup, and a dude is telling a story about how 50 people physically showed up on a Tuesday at his wife's Fortune 500 company.
All 50 people said that they start their new job today. She works in HR, she has 0 new employees starting today.
Apparently scammers had completely mirrored the company's career website, conducted interviews with these candidates, sent them written offer letters, had them fill out I-9 forms to start their new jobs... An insane phishing attack where the scammers have gathered everything there is to know about these 50 people, including banking information "for credit checks," social security numbers, everything you hand over to a new employer to accept a job offer.
Obviously, devastating for these 50 people. Not only has their TOTAL identity been stolen, they're still unemployed.
The iOS "hey can this BLE device read your notifications" prompt is surprisingly lenient about the device name string.
Mount Olympus
Imane Khelif sold scrap metal to pay for her boxing training, is a UNICEF ambassador, stood up against horrific bullying, and is now an Olympic champion.
South Korean sharpshooter wins silver. Elon Musk helps her go viral Ignore the reference to Musk, she says that "I’m not very active on social media. I only have six or so posts on Instagram and I didn’t have a Twitter account, so I didn’t find out until much later.” Otherwise, the rest of this interview is just pure gold.
The Internet is "discussing" this picture and in many places one side is being insulted for the outfit the choose. Some people are also writing condescendingly: Both choices are completely fine (star-emoji).
What most people fail to recognize is that none of the women really chose their outfit. They are forced to do their sport in outfits that are approved by the men of their patriarchal system. In one system you have to cover yourself, in the other you have to get naked to be able to take part.
From Snoop Dogg to Flavor Flav and breaking, Paris is serving the first hip-hop Olympics 👍
Everything Else
George Hotelling “My "Dad Joke A Day" calendar is anti-colonialist today”
Bring a light jacket to Vegas with ya, gonna be under 110 for most of the week!
I only act nonchalant. Inside I'm chalant af.
I autograph every hotel Bible I find with "Best wishes, JC".
Explaining to my children that there used to be one movie for the whole plane.
Just for those who may be a little confused: An abortion after birth is called a school shooting.
What do you mean I don’t automatically get free jar of mayonnaise when I visit Mayo Clinic??
TIFU by thinking my son was having gay sex when he was just eating Hummus [Concluded] TLDR: My son is actually gay, but also I really like hummus.
More and more German trains are not allowed to enter Switzerland In Switzerland the trains run on time … or they don’t run at all.
If Deutsche Bahn trains are too unpunctual, they are not allowed to cross the Swiss border. This is happening more and more frequently.
Natasha Jay “Boost if you've done this, or remember ...”
Blow-nado: Hurricane Debby dumps $1 million of cocaine onto Florida beach I didn’t understand how sharks off the coast of Brazil test positive for cocaine, but I guess that answers it!
Hurricane Debby blew 70 pounds of cocaine onto a Florida Keys beach over the weekend. A beach visitor spotted 25 packages of the devil's dandruff on the sand and called the cops.
Google has an illegal monopoly on search, US judge finds This will take a while to litigate, since appeals run through the Supreme Court, but good news for now:
A U.S. judge ruled on Monday that Google violated antitrust law, spending billions of dollars to create an illegal monopoly and become the world's default search engine, the first big win for federal authorities taking on Big Tech's market dominance.
David Ho “One of these should be a crime.”
"Racial codes are born from the goal of, and facilitate, social control. For instance, in a recent audit of California’s gang database, not only do Blacks and Latinxs constitute 87 percent of those listed, but many of the names turned out to be babies under the age of 1, some of whom were supposedly “self-described gang members.” So far, no one ventures to explain how this could have happened, except by saying that some combination of zip codes and racially coded names constitute a risk. Once someone is added to the database, whether they know they are listed or not, they undergo even more surveillance and lose a number of rights.”
- Ruha Benjamin, "Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code,” p. 11
All the winners get to sit up front on the way home, wearing their huge medals. I want to fly on air horse one! 🐴
