Published
Weekend Reading — Human Slots Machine
Vee “💓 La linea”
Tech Stuff
reMarkable Paper Pro And now for a delightful looking e-book reader: 11.8" color display, two-week battery life, paper-like texture, handwriting recognition, weighs only 525g, starting at $579.
Alternatively, the HannsNote2 is merely 350g, with 60hz refresh rate from its 10" color screen, and costs less at $350, but with only 4.5 hour battery life.
Postgres webhooks with pgstream Calling webhooks on Postgres data and schema changes using pgstream.
AI-Powered Editor When you need a rich-text editor with markdown support that also has some AI capabilities (pro: bring your own LLM) and an open-source license.
Beware of (automated) systems that make easy problems easier while making hard problems even harder: you often don’t learn about this trade-off until it’s too late.
What are the most common bugs in LLM-generated code?
This week, we discover the different types of bugs that LLM-generated code can provide, and how to mitigate their potential impact.
Retell AI When you want an LLM that can pick up the phone and answer but also too lazy to write the code yourself. This is one service that combines 6 other services that are each fairly easy to use, but if you don’t want to spend your time learning 6 different APIs …
We help developers build human-like conversational Voice AI in a day — with an ~800ms response time and the ability to handle interruptions.
This organisation has uttered the cursed phrase "migration to sharepoint".
Pray for me.
SuperIlu/DOjS A MS-DOS creative coding IDE/platform based on JavaScript.
It just occurred to me that the phases in waterfall software development could just as well have been named after the stages of grief:
- denial (requirements and design)
- anger (implementation)
- bargaining (functional testing)
- depression (alpha & beta testing) and
- acceptance (release)
Inside the guidance system and computer of the Minuteman III nuclear missile Talk about RISC, the D-37C has only 58 instructions! At 12,800 ops per second it wasn't particularly fast, and it was also very economical in the storage department with only 14KB of hard disk space :( On the plus side it could travel to the other side of the world in only 35 minutes.
wishing a very happy
is it safe to use __SECRET_INTERNALS_DO_NOT_USE_OR_YOU_WILL_BE_FIRED?day to everyone who celebrates
GameBaby An iPhone case that is also a game controller just like the good old days!
Becca Royal-Gordon “Reassuring message from the pharmacy.”
kaiserkiwi 🤦♂️ “No Samsung. Just no. Nobody asked for this.”
Eye for Design
Server Mono Atypeface inspired by typewriters, Apple's San Francisco Mono, ASCII art, command-line interfaces, and programming tools.
Departure Mono A monospaced pixel font with a lo-fi, techy vibe.
Business Side
Why do people get the history of Apple so wrong? Why I pay no attention to the latest eyeball grabs from Dave Winer and Paul Graham:
Sculley ultimately ran out of steam, but in the time he was at Apple he also took it from an $800m company to an $8bn one. Meanwhile, Jobs was back in founder mode at NeXT where, having taken some of Apple’s best people with him, he created a computer that no one wanted to buy and an operating system that remarkably few people installed.
Hal Pomeranz Unfortunately yes, much long-term hiring is pushed to 2025:
I feel like I’ve been giving this advice a lot lately, so I’m just going to put it on blast.
I’m sorry to say that this is an absolutely terrible time to be looking for work in tech here in the USA. We’ve had a lot of layoffs which flooded the market with job seekers. And employers are all holding their collective breath waiting for the results of the November elections. I’m talking to employers and some are explicitly saying, “No hiring until 2025.”
So it’s not just you. And it’s not an indictment of your skills and what you bring to the table. It’s about the environment you find yourself in right now. I know it feels personal and rejection feels like shit. I see you, I see your worth.
Here’s to better days.
FBI busts musician’s elaborate AI-powered $10M streaming-royalty heist Artificially inflated music streaming:
Michael Smith, 52, allegedly used AI to create hundreds of thousands of fake songs by nonexistent bands, then streamed them using bots to collect royalties from platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music
But it's not about the generative AI, it’s about automating the listening “audience”:
While the AI-generated element of this story is novel, Smith allegedly broke the law by setting up an elaborate fake listener scheme.
Marketing Strategy Generator Can AI help you with your marketing strategy? I doubt it. But here's a winning strategy in there: copy everything you see on this website — the fancy name, the demo video, green CTA button, widget showing live orders, walls of testimonials, etc. Do that and your site will also be able to convert random visitors into paying "customers”!
Machine Intelligence
Using GPT-4o for web scraping I haven’t used LLMs for scraping quite yet, but something tells me they'll do a remarkable job at that!
I was surprised by the extraction quality of GPT-4o (but then sadly surprised when I looked at how much I’d have to pay OpenAI!). Nonetheless, this was a fun experiment and I definitely see potential for AI-assisted web scraping tools.
The /llms.txt file If I get it right, this is the future of robots.txt (RIP)?
A proposal to standardise on using an /llms.txt file to provide information to help LLMs use a website.
'Emotion AI' may be the next trend for business software, and that could be problematic Problematic. You don't say.
Facebook’s AI-Generated Spam Problem Is Worse Than You Realize The platform has been overrun with bizarro images of babies, soldiers, and muscle-bound Jesus.
AI generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect In news that should surprise no one:
Despite efforts to remove overt racial prejudice, language models using artificial intelligence still show covert racism against speakers of African American English that is triggered by features of the dialect.
Cops’ favorite face image search engine fined $33M for privacy violation Sometimes justice is served. “Clearview AI insists Dutch fine is "unlawful" but missed its chance to appeal.”
Powerpoint suggests alt text now when I make slides for class, which is great! Like for this image: "A police officer helping a person with a dog"
Train and Customize Your AI Assistant Effortlessly with BrainyBear This is pretty amazing: “Instantly answer your visitors' questions with a personalized chatbot trained on your content.” In just three easy steps, you too can generate an utterly useless personalized AI chatbot that can’t answer even simple questions 🤦♂️
Create Custom AI Assistants with BrainyBear in Just 3 Steps and Train Them in 3 Clicks.
Startup Alarmed When Its AI Starts Rickrolling Clients We’ve come full circle:
"The way these models work is they try to predict the most likely next sequence of text," Crivello explained. "So it starts like, 'Oh, I’m going to send you a video!' So what’s most likely after that? YouTube.com. And then what’s most likely after that?“
Insecurity
SunTzuCyber This is a new social media account that does The Art of War except for cybersecurity and it’s just so delightful to follow:
"The art of cyber war is knowing when to strike… and when to reboot." - The Art of Cyber War
"Never let your enemy know your next move, especially if it's turning the router off and on again." - The Art of Cyber War
"In cyber war, even the strongest passwords can fall, but a mind prepared for battle is unbreakable." - The Art of Cyber War
"Do not rely too heavily on the skill of the common person to detect attacks. The adversary can quickly adapt." - The Art of Cyber War
Did you know that setting a complex password that is at least 15 characters long can add THOUSANDS of years to the time it takes a hacker to crack it?
Everyone on the dark web will be very impressed with your password prowess when they see it in the plaintext file of passwords that circulates after the company is breached!
Follow me for more infosec tips!
This story is insane. A US Navy chief:
- Purchased a Starlink system
- Installed it on an active USN ship
- Did not hide the WiFi SSID
- Named the network "STINKY"
- Lied about it to their superior
- Changed the WiFi name to make it look like a printer
- Lied about it to their superior AGAIN
- Misled inferiors to think the network was approved by the Commander
- Was only caught by a civilian information systems technician months later
Microsoft says its Recall uninstall option in Windows 11 is just a bug TL;DR Microsoft will spy on you — passwords, bank accounts, porn sites, everything — and nothing you can do about it:
Microsoft won’t say whether it will let Windows users fully uninstall Recall. A new option that appeared recently was ‘incorrectly listed,’ says Microsoft.
Everything Else
Jan Mayen The modern world (“Meine gestrige Aufnahme passt zum Thema 'Moderne Welt’ In Flensburg gibt's ne nette Ampel!”)
Just saw that there was yet another school shooting… and one comment on Reddit was „just curious if Walmart would sell bulletproof vests would they be in the gun aisle or the school supplies aisle?“😩
I appreciate the modern world where sending my lawyer an email containing nothing other than 👍is an entirely reasonable thing to do
Mark Holtom “The first rule of naming something, never ask the British public”
I think one reason columbo is so appealing to my generation is that he always successfully finishes the job despite having nuclear grade adhd
NamibiaCam A livestream straight from the Kalahari Desert!
Voting is now open for Bird of the Year Last year John Oliver convinced his audience to vote the Pūteketeke. And they made a mural to celebrate the votes. So are you also voting for the Tara iti, New Zealand's rarest bird?
As a teenager in Neustrelitz (East Germany), I painted small stones purple and left them all over town. Did it for years. It drove the police and Stasi nuts. It meant nothing. It just felt good to do something they couldn't control or understand.
Today's prize for on-brand academic behaviour goes to the School of Mathematics & Statistics, University of Glasgow, for disguising their building as a chalkboard.
(I'm informed that the elements were collected from working chalkboards in staff offices.)
In German, instead of saying "I love you" they say "Ich akzeptiere die Bedingungen der Endbenutzer-Lizenzvereinbarung" and I think that's beautiful...
Second homes for sale in Pembrokeshire treble after council tax hike 💪 Apparently it doesn’t take a PhD in economics to solve the simple problem of housing availability:
New rules were introduced by the Welsh government with the aim of making it easier for people to afford homes in the area where they grew up.
To help achieve this, powers were given to local authorities to charge a premium of up to 300% on top of the normal council tax rate for those who own a second home in Wales.
For the First Time, Part of the Ocean Has Been Granted Legal Personhood
“The new law requires the city to protect the physical shape of the river, the ecological cycles that make the waves unique, and the water’s finely balanced chemical makeup through public policies and funding. It also codifies respect for the waves’ cultural and economic role in the community…”
Leaving behind its crew, Starliner departs space station and returns to Earth Last night the Boeing has landed. Without its passengers, but at least the empty vehicle is back on earth. In Boeing-land, that’s a major success story.
YouTubers Are Almost Too Easy to Dupe No wonder Russia finds its useful idiots among the extremely online:
“It’s striking that the content that many of those at the top of the MAGA media game are pushing to voters is so closely aligned with the objectives of Russian state media that RT hardly had to intervene at all.”
Archaeo-Histories “Just a Historical Humor... 😁😁😁”
The Italian town that banned cricket There are some things that Italy is really good at. Great looking cars that make amazing engine sounds. A history of making pizza and repurposing Chinese noodles. And just plain old not-even-denying-it racism:
The town has an ethnic make-up unique in Italy: of a population of just over 30,000, nearly a third are foreigners. Most of them are Bangladeshi Muslims who began to arrive in the late 1990s to build giant cruise-ships.
As a consequence the cultural essence of Monfalcone is in danger, according to mayor Anna Maria Cisint, who belongs to the far-right League party.
She swept to power on the back of anti-immigration sentiment - and has gone on a mission to “protect” her town and defend Christian values.
Venezuelan President Maduro moves Christmas to Oct 1 amid post-election turmoil When you run a dictatorship that claims you "won a democratic election”, spreading lies is a feature not a bug. So why not relocate x-mas to a different month?
Assaf Feeling lucky? Why not play The Human Slots Machine?