Published
Weekend Reading — The future is reduced for quick sale
Tech Stuff
What I Wish Someone Told Me About Postgres If you’re just starting with Postgres, make sure to not repeat past mistakes.
No GPS required: our app can now locate underground trains Yes! “Our offline motion detection shows where you are between stations, and reminds you when your stop’s up next”
Why % CPU in Activity Monitor isn’t what you think
The next time that you open Activity Monitor on an Apple silicon Mac, to look at % CPU figures, bear in mind that while those numbers aren’t completely meaningless, they don’t mean what you might think, and what’s shown as 100% could be anything between 27-100%.
Morning Pages It does one thing only but it does it really well. It deletes what you write as you’re writing more stuff, so no temptation to edit. You can still correct typos, but this should keep you on the writing track.
[walking into a server room] it smells like uptime in here
Delta When you really need to see the exact change introduced by the commit.
Service offering:
For a flat rate, I will take a quick glance at your code and tell you how fucked it is, and how much you should budget for a deeper code review from a professional team of security consultants.
I keep doing this for free, and it's starting to be exhausting.
Rob Fahrni “Lightly used MacBook Pro for sale, $3,000.00. Don’t lowball me, it’s fine. 🤣”
Eye for Design
A guide to designing errors for workflow automation platforms
Alternatives To Typical Technical Illustrations And Data Visualisations We got pyramids, streams, 3D, doughnuts, lollipop, Sankey, and more.
Stretch It “A minimalist gesture timer from your menu bar”. It’s extremely silly but also seems like such a fun thing to use.
Royce Williams “Delightfully evil - can't unsee.”
Peoples
Want to Network in Silicon Valley? Bring a Bathing Suit
The company hosts founder nights, as well as events for investors and founders to mingle. Othership says tech companies big and small are considering offering its services as a benefit to employees.
I can't even begin to tell you how wrong this is (acceptable in some countries, just not the US), other than this was posted in the WSJ, and you can clearly see it was written by a couple of PRs agents so the "journalist" at least gets their paycheck for their "writeup", which come to think of it is a smart strategy (on the journalist's part). So there is something to learn from this article after all.
Dad Joke Bot “Job you want”
Business Side
How ChatGPT Brought Down an Online Education Giant How about we rewrite this headline with these wording: "How ChatGPT drove a cheat service out of business”?
Then came ChatGPT. Suddenly students had a free alternative to the answers Chegg spent years developing with thousands of contractors in India. Instead of “Chegging” the solution, they began canceling their subscriptions and plugging questions into chatbots.
SF 'AI doctor's office' company, once worth $1B, abruptly shuts down “AI doctor’s office” went from $1B valuation to shutting down. This business is called Forward because I guess going bankrupt is the new forward thinking business strategy?!?
CEO and founder Adrian Aoun was hyping his CarePods on CNN as recently as September. In the interview, he mentioned getting handed a clipboard and paper at the doctor’s office and said patients are getting “abused” by a health care system stuck in its low-tech ways.
Keith Jenkins And yet somehow clicking on the EULA passes in court as “accepting all terms and conditions” 😠
The Amazon EULA is 1.09 Tolstoys
"A Tolstoy is the metric we are using to emphasize just how large these EULA webs can become. One Tolstoy is the length of the novel War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, or 587,287 words."
On a call with a tech vendor at work, and The Guy keeps talking about “the [ProductName] Activity Centre”, and all I can think of is THIS
Machine Intelligence
Who wants some good news?
Last week I spoke to a middle school class about cybersecurity as a career, and AI came up. I asked if they had tried to use LLMs to do their schoolwork—they all had. But every student in the class said it didn't work. Why?
"ChatGPT is too stupid."
Kids are alright.
Apple AI notification summaries exist; rarely useful, often hilarious That is the perfect summary of Apple’s new AI feature, which I find mostly useful and sometimes hilariously drunk. r/AppleIntelligenceFail collects some of the best takes.
Ask HN: What hacks/tips do you use to make AI work better for you? This thread has some useful advice, my favorite is:
Treating it like a coach - tell it what you've done and need to get done, include any feedback you've had, and ask it for suggestions. This particularly helps when you're some kind of neurospicy and "regular human" responses sort of escape you.
Something weird is happening with LLMs and chess I think this article is merely clueless about how LLMs work and what they can and cannot do. But if you’re still wondering about the “brain” capacity of LLMs, maybe you’ll want to read this.
OpenAI, Google and Anthropic Are Struggling to Build More Advanced AI Maybe because you can’t make LLMs any smarter no matter how many GPUs you throw at them?
OpenAI isn’t alone in hitting stumbling blocks recently. After years of pushing out increasingly sophisticated AI products at a breakneck pace, three of the leading AI companies are now seeing diminishing returns from their costly efforts to build newer models. At Alphabet Inc.’s Google, an upcoming iteration of its Gemini software is not living up to internal expectations, according to three people with knowledge of the matter. Anthropic, meanwhile, has seen the timetable slip for the release of its long-awaited Claude model called 3.5 Opus.
Binary vector embeddings are so cool This is what AI vendors should be focusing on, since it saves memory and processing capacity (faster, cheaper, less heat and wasted water):
Vector embeddings by themselves are pretty neat. Binary quantized vector embeddings are extra impressive. In short, they can retain 95+% retrieval accuracy with 32x compression and ~25x retrieval speedup. Let's get into how this works and why it's so crazy.
I can’t give students a zero for using AI, unless I have proof? No problem. The simplicity of this trick is also its brilliance:
The thing is, when you ask ChatGPT, “Tell me a story,” it always spits out the exact same story - about a girl named Elara who lives in the woods.
Les Orchard “Oh holy crap, what specific set of circumstances caused this LLM to conjure this up?”
Rebind AI Talk about the books you love with experts! OK not real live human experts but AI that's sourced from hours of commentary by the experts. Which I guess is almost the same thing only cheaper and available every hour of the day. They put Chopra on the home page, so you can get a sense for the books they'd like you to read and talk with their AI about. (On my part, that's a hard pass)
Insecurity
The Open Source Project DeFlock Is Mapping License Plate Surveillance Cameras All Over the World “DeFlock has mapped the locations of more than a thousand ALPRs around the United States and thousands more around the world.”
what if instead of cramming AI into everything we crammed privacy into everything
This 'AI Granny' Bores Scammers to Tears That is such an entertaining way to combat this spammer using AI!
After a survey found that 71% of Brits want revenge on scammers, mobile operator O2 deploys Daisy, an AI tool that keeps fraudsters on the line to waste their time.
(Reference: Mastermind behind call centre in Pakistan blitzing British homes with a fiendish phone scam)
Insurers say bear that damaged luxury cars was actually a person in a costume
In what it has dubbed “Operation Bear Claw,” the California Insurance Department said four Los Angeles residents were arrested Wednesday, accused of defrauding three insurance companies out of nearly $142,000 by claiming a bear had caused damage to their vehicles.
Everything Else
I don't struggle with anxiety, I'm actually really good at it!
MostlyHarmless True.
Once you get your PhD every meeting is a doctor’s appointment.
Dr Sarah Hendrica Bickerton (for reference about Haka)
Iconic.
(honestly this powerful image will end up in the history books … do not know who to credit with taking it [edit: credit to Samuel Rillstone/RNZ] but that has to be a photo of a lifetime)
first they came for literally everyone all at once and i did not speak out for i like cheaper eggs
The worst part of being an insomniac is having to eat spiders while I’m awake to maintain my yearly average.
Which Country Should You Move To? This site tells you where in the world you should move to based on your listed preferences.
farlukar 🍋
When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons, what the hell am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager!
elle “Silent book club 📚. I love this so much” BTW there's a Silent Book Club and it's available in over 500 cities around the world.
Why is it called vampirism when neck romancer is right there
gotta say, douglas adams prepared me better for our absurd future than isaac asimov. like, spending hours explaining to a replicator AI how to make an excellent cup of tea, only to have the AI then lock up 100% of the ships computers resources mid-battle as it tries to comply with the request, that does seem like an increasingly more plausible scenario than a scientist planning a techno cult centuries in advance to prevent a great calamity
Dr. Lucky Tran “Vaccines are one of the most important inventions humans have ever made. Period.”
Alberto Cottica 👇 The goodness of humanity summarized in a thread:
So, this needs to be said: two weeks ago something happened that made me proud to be Belgian. THREAD!
Here's the story. A friend – I will call her Caroline – got in touch after a silence of several years. We used to work together back in the day, and had become sort-of-friends. We had stayed in touch through a common friend, who, like me, lives in Brussels. Caroline herself, who lived in the US when we worked together, was now back to France.
The United States of Abortion Mazes Don't worry you're only trying to get an abortion, no biggie … except that entirely depends on which state you're in 🤯
The 'Woke Agenda' is actually just Human Rights. Every time someone says 'woke agenda', mentally substitute 'human rights' and the conversation will become clearer.
yesterday we met some crows on the beach and i gave them some almonds. we just kinda hung out for a while with the crows. our plan was to go back there the same time today, to see if they would remember us. we got there and waited around for a while, but the crows didn't show up. we eventually went back home, and the crows were at our house
We Found a 79-Year-Old Grandma Winning Burnout Contests in Her 1957 Caddy “Some people take up knitting in retirement. Annie the Hot Rod Granny has discovered the joys of burning rubber.”
I’m a neuroscientist who taught rats to drive − their joy suggests how anticipating fun can enrich human life Scientists taught rats to drive cars. The rats quickly learned to rev the engine and take longer routes just for fun.
SF just lost 14,000 parking spaces. Here’s what to know If you’re wondering how this could possibly happen … it’s not just San Francisco, every city in California is subject to the new regulation that’s starting January 2025. And the new regulation is to allow more safe space for pedestrians to cross the road. So it’s a life saving maneuver. Something that the SF Standard managed to label negatively, because of course.
