Published
Weekend Reading — Concept of a plan
halcy “IPA....ddress”
Tech Stuff
nuno-faria/tetris-sql An implementation of Tetris as a SQL query, proving that SQL is Turing complete!
Devv Pro! This looks pretty remarkable, I’m going to give it a try. It’s a search engine for developers. It can use different LLMs (GPT, Claude, Gemini, etc), you can filter results to specific programming language, limit to a GitHub repo, etc. There's also a Visual Studio Code extension 🤯
Helicone LLM-observability and it does look quite interesting. I just started using it, just changed a few headers to work with the library I’m already using. (They already support 11 of the most popular LLM providers)
Tailwind CSS Animations Plugin Add animation using CSS classes and TailwindCSS.
Should web developers and JavaScript library authors still transpile their code to ES5? This post looks at what the data suggests based on what popular libraries, tools, and websites are doing
Over the past few years, it seems like the rate at which new CLI tools are being written has picked back up again, accelerating after seeing relatively little activity between ~1995 and ~2015. I’d like to talk about this trend I’ve noticed, where people are rewriting and rethinking staples of the command line interface, why I think this trend might be happening, and why I think this trend is a good thing.
Penify.dev Penify will document everything for you: PRs, code changes, repos, architecture diagrams, APIs, etc. At this point I’m not sure why we need AI to document anything, why not use AI to read through the code and explain the architecture diagram to you? But if you do like docs and especially if you're paid by the page, this might be a good way to get promoted.
EverCraft On one hand, this app lets you manage your files like they’re part of a Git project. Which sounds like a good idea. I would like to have version control and history for my Word documents, text files, etc. On the other hand, their docs are a Notion website which I guess works but doesn’t feel like this product is ready for prime time quite yet.
Wealthfolio Track your portfolio with an open source web-app that doesn't require a subscription and doesn't store any data on their servers. No subscriptions and no cloud.
I have seen many odd things in my years as a professional third party code reviewer but today I am looking at code where someone has meticulously hand-terminated all their strings with a \0 in case the C compiler forgets to add one
Microservices vs. Monoliths: Why Startups Are Getting "Nano-Services" All Wrong Because incentives matter. And getting hired at Facebook/NetFlix/Microsoft is a good incentive for your manager, even if they're currently passing the time at a startup.
UGREEN Do you want an iPhone charger with a smiley face? (I have not idea if these are any good for their price, I just find their design entertaining)
Don't think of it as a Halting Problem, think of it as a Halting Opportunity
Now I’m ready to learn about this fancy “computer programming” stuff I have heard so much about.
Eye for Design
Steve Troughton-Smith “The new 6.9” iPhone screen size is now only two inches smaller than the one on the original Macintosh 🤪”
Natasha Jay “Victorian i-Pads - £2.95”
Peoples
The Moral Implications of Being a Moderately Successful Computer Scientist and a Woman
In this blog post, I will attempt to describe the system within which I exist as a moderately successful computer scientist and woman. I will highlight the fallacies that lead to women (1) leaving tech, (2) generally being anxious in our society, and (3) experiencing horrific harassment and misogyny.
Whenever you see an amazing way of working that a team has come up with, and you are like "how did they make this happen" the answer is always incentives being aligned and people being psychologically safe. If you get that right the magic happens by itself
‘Founder mode’ is the latest Silicon Valley buzzword telling toxic bosses they’re great Spot on. The rest of the article is just ok, but this one statement is the perfect summary.
It often takes a certain personality to start a company. And while tech bros love to glorify a founder, they often gloss over the realities of a boss so committed to the vision that they refuse to delegate.
The cognitive dissonance of calling yourself 'alpha' while religiously consuming some podcast bro's health supplements at 10x the market price is truly astounding
Has Anyone Because we’re always curious to know “has anyone … ?”
Business Side
America’s stores are winning the war on shoplifting
This year, retailers are telling a very different story — or no story at all. It’s as if the shoplifting crisis suddenly vanished.
Crisis averted! Ok, maybe there was never any crisis to begin with. Corporations needed a plausible story to justify closing the shops that were not economically viable. And yes, even close shops that seem to have a lot of foot traffic — foot traffic does not mean profitable. Sometimes they get more people to come through the door by trimming their profit margins.
Did you hear about the summer's big grifter trial? It didn't involve Donald Trump Coming to you straight from Mountain View California — the heart of Silicon Valley — BTW all these impersonations happened before we had generative AI on speeddial. Grift is tech agnostic.
That voice belonged to Rao, who used digital technology to sound like someone else while assuring the high-powered bankers of a snuggly relationship between YouTube and Ozy — a relationship which didn’t exist. Watson explained it away as his COO suffering from a mental health episode. But come the trial, Rao was no longer willing to lie for Watson.
Reflection 70B model maker breaks silence amid fraud accusations What if AI could catch founders of AI companies in their bold lies? Large Grifter Model?
Matt Shumer, co-founder and CEO of OthersideAI, also known as its signature AI assistant writing product HyperWrite, has broken his near two days of silence after being accused of fraud when third-party researchers were unable to replicate the supposed top performance of a new large language model (LLM) he released on Thursday, September 5.
Machine Intelligence
Reader API Get LLM-friendly input from a URL or a web search, by simply adding r.jina.ai in front. This service will also handle images and PDFs.
Reader-LM: Small Language Models for Cleaning and Converting HTML to Markdown From Jina Reader, two small language models designed to convert raw, noisy HTML from the open web into clean markdown.
Firecrawl An API service that takes a URL, crawls it, and converts it into clean markdown.
Google is using AI to make fake podcasts from your notes AI is now taking over the much coveted niche of the podcast bros!
Google’s AI note-taking app, NotebookLM, will now let you generate a conversation between two AI “hosts” about your research.
Insecurity
"Know your enemy, but first know their favorite social media password reset questions." - The Art of Cyber War
CrowdStrike ex-employees: ‘Quality control was not part of our process’ Yes of course it wasn’t:
“It was hard to get people to do sufficient testing sometimes,” said Preston Sego, who worked at CrowdStrike from 2019 to 2023. His job was to review the tests completed by user experience developers that alerted engineers to bugs before proposed coding changes were released to customers.
BTW when you buy software, always choose the best product based on where it is on the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For scale:
The company also noted that it “has been recognized as one of the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For for the last four years.”
Ford seeks patent for tech that listens to driver conversations to serve ads I used to not care much for Ford cars, but now I’m in the camp of “I’ll never ever ever own a Ford”:
Ford Motor Company is seeking a patent for technology that would allow it to tailor in-car advertising by listening to conversations among vehicle occupants, as well as by analyzing a car’s historical location and other data, according to a patent application published late last month.
BrianKrebs “In any government court document, comic relief is often found in the footnotes.”
Facebook admits to scraping every Australian adult user's public photos and posts to train AI, with no opt-out option You see the problem with Australia is … they’re not part of the EU:
The company provided an opt out option to EU users in part because of legal uncertainty surrounding strict privacy laws covering those nations.
Ms Claybaugh admitted to the inquiry that those opt-out options were not offered to Australians.
Looking up what one of those barnacle windshield boots was, and apparently a few years ago someone figured out you could just use a defroster to pry them off, open them up, and then they have a sim card with unlimited data so they used it as a hotspot.
the original comment was deleted but the story is recounted here: https://driving.ca/auto-news/news/students-defeat-new-barnacle-parking-boot-skip-fines-and-get-free-internet
Everything Else
Dr. Lucky Tran “Ok Chicago wins”
Tim Walz puts the recipe at the top of the post.
Smoke detectors are just a scam foisted by Big 9 Volt Battery.
Uncle Duke “i think both sides are to blame here”
Over 90% of the things you worry about, never happen.
Which proves worrying really works.
diyPresso Open source software for your morning brew? This espresso machine is designed for DIY enthusiasts and coffee lovers. Build your own espresso machine and configure it with their open source software.
Fliers Now Avoiding Flights on Planes With Spotty Safety Reputations
Fully 55 percent of participants said recurring headlines about midair incidents had led them to alter the way they book flights, by either avoiding specific planes or in other ways. Also, 22 percent said they've cut back on the number of air trips they'll make this year as part of those modified habits.
Iceland Encourages Locals To Throw Baby Puffins Off Cliffs Throwing baby puffins off a cliff is actually a good thing! Or not, maybe Iceland just has too many developed areas …
GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar
The publications were related to three issue areas—health (14.5%), environment (19.5%) and computing (23%)—with key terms such “healthcare,” “COVID-19,” or “infection”for health-related papers, and “analysis,” “sustainable,” and “global” for environment-related papers.
