Published
Weekend Reading — Objection-oriented programming
Zack Whittaker “Found a power-up box in the wild.”
Tech Stuff
people to me in 2004: why are you always on the computer
people in 2024: i carry at least two computers with me at all times. my car is a computer. if i can't use my computer in the airplane, i will complain, via computer
Done is Better Than Perfect Just a reminder:
Shipping something that works and solves the problem is often better than waiting until said thing is perfect.
Charles Babbage's Analytic Engine was never fully designed because he had to keep tinkering with the Difference Engine (a more limited version) which he could never finish (nowadays several computer history museums have working models from his original specs) because the printer would never work properly. We commemorate this early milestone in computing today by having our printers never work also.
Ivan Reminds me of Maven …
Writing a GitHub Action be like: why do something in 10 lines of bash when you could write 200 lines of JavaScript and pull in 30 package dependencies instead
Who called it “code review” instead of “objection-oriented programming”
Reverse Dictionary For when you're struggling to find the right word but you know the meaning
A reverse dictionary does the opposite of what dictionaries do. Instead of getting the definition of words, search for words based on the description given.
Eye for Design
Jessamyn 👇 This is an amazing thread where Jessamyn tells a bunch of stories — all are short reads — about helping regular people deal with computers:
Jamaica (who has a sister named Jessamyn and who grew up one town over from where I grew up) came in with two ancient Macbooks. "All I get are family hand me downs!" She couldn't log in to one, had tried every password. "Did you try... no password?" She did not know that was a thing. We tried it and presto! She had to go because she had some loose sheep at home, I told her to update from Mac OS Sierra when she got the ewe back.
Peter Lyons Yes!
The "Am I the Asshole" subreddit but for apps.
The Worst Website In The Entire World VMware Desktop is now free for personal use, which is great news. Except … if you’re trying to actually download it …
Never a great sign when there's a link to an 11 page PDF of how to navigate your website. That's the "Learn how to navigate Broadcom Support" link.
Peoples
I started out today with 2 meetings on my calendar. So far I've had 7 of them so now I've only got 3 left.
Word problems in elementary/primary school math didn't prepare me for this.
Apple, SpaceX, Microsoft return-to-office mandates drove senior talent away In news that surprises no one:
A study analyzing Apple, Microsoft, and SpaceX suggests that return to office (RTO) mandates can lead to a higher rate of employees, especially senior-level ones, leaving the company, often to work at competitors.
Internet use statistically associated with higher wellbeing, finds
The study encompassed more than two million participants psychological wellbeing from 2006-2021 across 168 countries, in relation to internet use and psychological well-being across 33,792 different statistical models and subsets of data, 84.9% of associations between internet connectivity and wellbeing were positive and statistically significant.
Davey 🤦
actual question my friend (also looking for work) is getting when they apply to work at a local cofe shop
Business Side
opens linkedin
closes linkedin
Thanks everyone! We closed the loop!
Most websites are now publishing algorithmic generated content in order to please ranking algorithms from search engines in order to display generated ads that will be clicked by crawling bots and automatically generated social profiles.
No humans needed any more!
Which means that you can now close your laptop, watch a sunset and talk to real humans near you. Enjoy your life far from your screen.
ChatGPT can talk, but OpenAI employees sure can’t Just a reminder that ChatGPT will scrape all the web content and then use it to generate words, but OpenAI employees must stay mum:
I have seen the extremely restrictive off-boarding agreement that contains nondisclosure and non-disparagement provisions former OpenAI employees are subject to. It forbids them, for the rest of their lives, from criticizing their former employer. Even acknowledging that the NDA exists is a violation of it.
Machine Intelligence
Technion-Kishony-lab/data-to-paper You come up with the data and let LLM write the research paper for you! Hacker News is skeptical and so am I, but the idea is cool.
California and Other States Threaten to Derail the AI Revolution The one thing we have more of than AI chatbots are AI regulations:
According to state and local AI legislation tracker MultiState.ai, there are now 585 state bills pending, and the number continues to grow steadily.
one thing i don't think every company shoving ai into their product realizes:
Apple customers were very, very angry about getting a free U2 album one time.
Google is overhauling its search results page with AI overviews and Gemini organization I have surprising news for you about how much Google really cares about “good data”:
Getting good data is the whole ball game for Google and any other search engine. Part of the impetus for creating the new search-specific Gemini model, Reid tells me, was to focus it on getting things right. “There’s a balance between creativity and factuality” with any language model, she says. “We’re really going to skew it toward the factuality side.”
Insecurity
Two students uncover security bug that could let millions do their laundry for free The beauty of the internet-connected device is that you can do your laundry for free!
CSC ServiceWorks provides laundry machines to thousands of residential homes and universities, but ignored requests to fix a security bug.
How I upgraded my water heater and discovered how bad smart home security can be Internet-connected water heaters not doing any better:
I did not intend to discover that, for a while there, water heaters like mine may have been open to anybody. That, with some API tinkering and an email address, a bad actor could possibly set its temperature or make it run constantly. That’s just how it happened.
Privacy principles: search, learning and artificial intelligence Nothing to worry about. Just Slack using your private communications — yes even DMs! — to train their AI which, we all know, would gladly leak secrets to anyone who asks nicely. But what me worry?
Joaquim Homrighausen "The Facebook comma" 🧐
Everything Else
First of all: no, and secondly: what?
— me reading my email this morning
benbrown 🤔
Have you tried unplugging it and then just leaving it unplugged
THE MOST BORING VIDEO EVER MADE (Microsoft Word tutorial, 1989) It’s a two-hour-long tutorial on how to use Microsoft Word, which was recorded in 1989, but getting a lot of traction now because it doubles as a sleep aid!
Saying "prepare for my arrival" instead of "omw" from now on. They can interpret that how they like
I think the reason we're dealing with so much misinformation now-a-days is that no one has a facts machine anymore
Power outage affecting parts of downtown A what?
Parts of downtown Toronto were without power for a few hours Wednesday after a squirrel came into contact with a utility pole.
Study shows correlation between wedding spending and divorce rates Basically, the more you spend on a wedding, the quicker you’ll divorce:
Furthermore, the research indicated that weddings with a budget of under $1,000 have a lower probability of divorce in contrast to those exceeding $20,000, resulting in a 1.6-fold increase in the likelihood of divorce among women.
Graham Sutherland “I need to start applying this philosophy to more things”
the fake union organizer, the lemon zest, and other Machiavellian triumphs at work Here’s a story of how someone “accidentally” started a union:
So my friend was terrified he was going to get fired until he realized that retaliating against him for selling pot was totally legal but retaliating against him for pro-union activity wasn’t. And so, to protect himself from being fired for being mistaken as a union organizer, he organized a union.
Samuel Alito Didn’t Give a F--k Then and He Doesn’t Give a F--k Now In case you’re wondering about the demise of democracy in the US. It has seen better decades …
The Forged Apple Employee Badge This is the most fantastic story of how someone discovered a fake Apple badge that sold for $946 on eBay:
Here's a quick and cautionary tale. This eBay auction, spotted by Eric Vitiello, immediately caught my eye: Wow. Someone was selling Apple Employee #10's employee badge?! What an incredible piece of Apple history! Sure, it's not Steve Jobs' badge (despite the auction title), but there are only so many of these in the world — especially…
With flyers more distracted than ever, United rolls out a rebooted safety video Look, United Airlines can just stop flying Boeing airplanes, but that will cost them a few pennies. So what if instead they redid their flight safety video with a ball that runs through a Rube Goldberg machine hoping you’ll pay attention. And then, I guess, just pray for the best?
An A to Z of Hungry Killer Whales In case you’re wondering why are Orcas attacking boats all of a sudden … maybe the better question is — why are we starving them to death?
Isotopic evidence of high reliance on plant food among Later Stone Age hunter-gatherers at Taforalt, Morocco Just a reminder that the real Paleo diet is “eat all your fruits and vegetables”!
Here we present the isotopic evidence of pronounced plant reliance among Late Stone Age hunter-gatherers from North Africa (15,000–13,000 cal BP), predating the advent of agriculture by several millennia. … Our results unequivocally demonstrate a substantial plant-based component in the diets of these hunter-gatherers. This distinct dietary pattern challenges the prevailing notion of high reliance on animal proteins among pre-agricultural human groups.
indrora, hacker at small “It's all about how you word it, I guess.”
