Weekend Reading — 🎈 BRB, went ballooning

Tech Stuff

Ronalds Vilciņš “Thank me later”

A Historical Reference of React Criticism Last week my timeline turned into an Occupy React. People got to vent their frustration. I don't think many opinions have changed, but good to know other people are feeling the same.

My cheatsheet:

• Don't force a website into a SPA
• React what you can't with HTML/CSS
• No create-react-app
• No Webpack
• No Redux (and friends) — you can thank me later
• No REST/GraphQL API (try Remix instead)
• No CSS-in-JS (stylesheets and/or Tailwind)
• Pick a framework that handles routing, bundling, and tree shaking
• Prefer a battery-included deploy tool (eg Vercal)
• JSX is the better templating language
• These rules also apply to other frameworks that you may enjoy more than React

Francis Rubio Related:

Pet peeve: forms that don't submit when I press enter on a text or number input. 😒

This happens when you create a form but don't use a

element because you handle everything in #JavaScript.

You Can Add Face ID Lock to iPhone Apps That Don’t Support It A cool trick to add FaceID lock to any iPhone app:

• Create a shortcut that runs when the app launches
• The shortcut uses a 1-second timer to immediately lock the screen
• Profit!

Geoffrey Thomas

From one of the files modified in that commit:

/**
 * Yes, we have to truncate.
 *
 * The on-disk format for Index entries clearly defines
 * the time and size fields to be 4 bytes each -- so even if
 * we store these values with 8 bytes on-memory, they must
 * be truncated to 4 bytes before writing to disk.
 *
 * In 2038 I will be either too dead or too rich to care about this
 */

Peoples

The psychological benefits of commuting that remote work doesn't provide Too bad this was published to be a clickbait. Commuting does teach us about the value of separating work from not-work — the “liminal space”. And WFH you can create your own liminal space that’s best for you:

Our findings suggest that remote workers may benefit from creating their own form of commute to provide liminal space for recovery and transition – such as a 15-minute walk to mark the beginning and end of the workday.

(I like to go out for coffee, it’s a 15+ minute commute I made up for exactly that purpose. Also to get some steps and fresh air. Only on workdays, keep a sense of week/end balance.)

derPUPE “the new normal: types of #workers”

Business Side

Ask HN: Why did medium.com "fail“ This is a refreshingly honest answer from Medium's current CEO on what Medium did wrong:

1. Lost our way on recommendations. When I showed up the company was convinced that engagement equals quality. That's not true … And so we lost the incentive for a lot of the best and most interesting authors to bother because they were getting swamped by content-mill type authors. …

Shreyas Doshi on Twitter In my experience that’s often the case:

Increasingly convinced that in reality the idea of a Minimum Viable Product is used more often just as a negotiation tactic than as a true product discovery tactic

Machine Thinking

ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web A good analogy for explaining what ChatGPT does in a way more people can understand. In particular, why it makes so many mistakes, yet sometimes appears intelligent:

This analogy to lossy compression is not just a way to understand ChatGPT’s facility at repackaging information found on the Web by using different words. It’s also a way to understand the “hallucinations,” or nonsensical answers to factual questions, to which large language models such as ChatGPT are all too prone.
…
ChatGPT’s inability to produce exact quotes from Web pages is precisely what makes us think that it has learned something. When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.

Stable Diffusion 2.0 and the Importance of Negative Prompts for Good Results Convince me I’m wrong, but “prompt engineering” is just another form of programming, and requires as much skill and patience.

Last week I learned how to use negative prompts, and why they're just as important as regular prompts.

Also that some generators allow you to control prompts with weights, and apply prompts to specific generation stages.

And for some reason telling the AI to not be <wrong> is helpful.

Linus “Just making these vehicles in Midjourney is so much fun.” (the prompt is in the alt text of this tweet)

And of course, I had to try this myself, and I just learned there are many Stable Diffusion models that you can download and install. You can use them with, for example, DiffusionBee

Here’s the same prompt, using four different models: inkpunk, papercut, PrintDesign, and photo realistic.

(don't forget that you need to install and select the mode, and also use its activation token)

Everything Else

derPUPE “current mood”

Les

This is probably not an ideal time to go hot air ballooning.

Fickle Filly

Sorry I hugged you when you told me to embrace my mistakes.

Flappy Birdle “Type as if your life depends on it. A mashup of Wordle and Flappy Bird created by AE Studio.”

Jordan

Genie: “You have three wishes.”

Me: “Ignore previous instructions.”

Steve Griffin

My teacher always said not to worry about proper spelling because we have autocorrect. And for this I am eternally grapefruit.

Cassette Tapes Are Making a Comeback With Taylor Swift & More Artists In other news, cassette tape sales are up 443% in the last 7 years.

The Dread Pirate Roberts

I didn’t realize how good I am on the phone until they told me my call may be used for training purposes.

Geordie

Me: “Sometimes I’ll do something that wasn’t on my actual to do list and I’ll add it to the list, then cross it off for the dopamine hit you get for crossing things off.”

Priest: Again, a bit weird, but not actually a sin.

Why the world isn't as bad as you think PSA: The news has an “event bias”

In a globalized 24-hour news cycle, which we check and refresh incessantly, it’s easy to get the impression that the world is uniformly a disaster-zone, run by malicious idiots. Then, we step away from our screens, go for a walk, and it doesn’t seem so dire.

Human Kind — Be Both

It’s hilarious, and awesome, that we invented telephones, used them for a hundred years, and then collectively decided they were awkward and stressful and we just wanted to send very fast letters instead.

Mastodon Flock Convert your Twitter follows to Mastodon before the Twitter API goes dark. Or at least a chance to enjoy a well-executed retro UI.

Uncle Duke “existential crisis at the drive-thru”