Labnotes - Weekend Reading — Layoffs, explained

Can a bus be any cooler?

Tech Stuff

The Website vs. Web App Dichotomy Doesn't Exist If there’s one takeaway from all this, it’s that the web is a flexible medium where any number of technologies can be combined in all sorts of interesting ways.

9 years of Apple text editor solo dev This post covers a lot of things: source of influence, programming language, dependencies, debugging, pricing scheme, gnarly bits and gimmicks, and more. Worth a read, even if you’re not an Objective-C developer and not thinking of building apps for Apple hardware.

PocketBase When you need an open source backend in just 1 file. With realtime database, authentication, file storage, and admin dashboard.

mcollina/async-cache-dedupe A cache for asynchronous fetching of resources with full deduplication, i.e. the same resource is only asked once at any given time. You can use either in-memory or Redis for storing cached data.

elfvingralf/macOSpilot-ai-assistant Voice + Vision powered AI assistant that answers questions about any application. You can speak or type your question, and it will answered in text and audio.

Behind the scenes macOSpilot takes a screenshot of your active window when triggered, and sends it to OpenAI GPT Vision along with a transcript of your question. It's answer will be displayed in text, and converted into audio using OpenAI TTS (text to speech).

The all-in-one AI workspace for writing If Linear and Copilot had a baby and that baby was a Kanban board and chat UI that you can use together to better focus on your writing.

Weird things engineers believe about Web development

• Web browser engineers know Web development really well
• The people who make Web specifications know Web development really well
• Web developers know Web development really well
• Browsers aren’t made to run SPAs
• MPAs will replace SPAs
• All sites should work without JavaScript
• Web development shouldn’t need a build step
• My blog is representative of Web development at large

Top Front-End Tools Of 2023 These tools span numerous categories, including JavaScript libraries and utilities, web frameworks, CSS generators, database tools, React components, CLI tools, and even ChatGPT and AI-based tools.

Mᴀʏᴀ

Programming is fun because sometimes you're making a complicated backend function in half an hour and then you spent 3 hours failing to position correctly on the page the button connected to the ajax that fires it.

JRJurman/callout-alert Inspired by Github's callout elements, I published a native web component for adding your own Callout Alerts in HTML! 🎉

basisbit

The top level domain .blog is operated by a company called

"Knock Knock WHOIS There, LLC"

(I am serious, thats the legal company name)

@storybook/cli - Storybook A React component library inspired by the Windows 95 UI. What we’ve all been waiting for!

Eye for Design

The Perfect Webpage How the internet reshaped itself around Google’s search algorithms — and into a world where websites look the same.

The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit Related:

The Internet used to be so simple to use that people collectively coined the term “let me Google that for you” to make fun of people who had the audacity of asking other people questions online. In the future I fear that people will have no other choice but to ask people for information from the Internet, because right now it’s all full of AI dogshit.

It's 2023, here is why your web design sucks TLDR: At some point, we told design they couldn't sit with us anymore, and surprise! It backfired! Now, not only has the field and profession of web design suffered, but also, we build shitty websites.

Laura Helmuth “is anybody else disturbed by this sign”

Business Side

European Union set to revise cookie law, admits cookie banners are annoying When politicians do UI design …

European Union Justice Commissioner Didier Reynders recently told German newspaper 'Welt am Sonntag' that the European Commission is aware of how annoying cookie consent banners have become…

Dive into anything Layoffs, explained.

Peoples

Why Your Brain Hates Junk Food

Fiber is an important macronutrient, and it is meant especially for your gut microbes, not you. That single alteration—eliminating fiber—may be the worst thing that has happened to the American diet over the last 70 years. As a result, the microbial composition of our guts is changing, and some species are even becoming extinct.

The Psychology Behind Why You Can’t Put Down Your Phone Here's the one psychological quirk that explains why slot machines and social media algorithms are so addictive:

If you’ve ever wished you could read more books, be more present with your family, or avoid the daily onslaught of negativity so many services seem to push, curated consumption is a saner way to deal with your online media.

Machine Intelligence

rabbit R1 is basically the smarts and interactive nature of ChatGPT, but contained in a small and beautiful device you can carry around everywhere. From the same company that designed and built the beautiful Playdate. This got so much interest, that 10,000 units were all sold in the first 24 hours.

Related, Humane which makes the — in my mind totally pointless — AI Pin is laying off 4% of its employees. And their product hasn’t shipped yet.

Deepfaked Celebrity Ads Promoting Medicare Scams Run Rampant on YouTube Clearly the problem here is generative AI that’s used to create these fake celebrity ads. Or maybe the problem is YouTube accepting and serving these ads? Or maybe it’s how easy it is to scam people out of their Medicare money? I think it’s that last cause.

Joe Rogan, Taylor Swift, Andrew Tate, Steve Harvey, The Rock, and Oprah have been cloned by AI for scam ads that, in total, have been viewed more than 195 million times on YouTube.

stux “The design is very human”

Lazy use of AI leads to Amazon products called “I cannot fulfill that request” The telltale error messages are a sign of AI-generated pablum all over the Internet.

Insecurity

secretlint/secretlint Pluggable linting tool to prevent committing credentials.

nixCraft

This wrench can get infected by ransomware. DRILLCRYPT, to be precise.

Essential for precision manufacturing, the Bosch device can be exploited with no authentication, disrupting an entire factory floor.

Torque values can be subtly changed to cause chaos in an assembly line.

23 vulnerabilities were discovered by researchers at Nozomi, which malicious actors can form into an attack chain resulting in production line stoppage. https://x.com/lauriewired/status/1744770156205850809?s=46

Everything Else

Asbjørn Ulsberg “Jupiter, high on caffeine, sleep deprived, and doing its best to take care of 95 moons. 😵‍💫”

I Has Wisdom

I am terrified of elevators. I’m going to start taking steps to avoid them.

James

There’s a time and a place for everything unless you’re traveling at the speed of light then everything is also the time and the place.

Speed Bump

Deniz Opal

One of my super powers is that I can very quickly and accurately identify dinosaurs.

For example. Look at this image.

Yes. Definitely a dinosaur.

That took me under 2 seconds.

Study underlines consumers’ concern over fake reviews

The majority of respondents (63%) think the brand’s website they’re visiting should be solving issues of fraudulent content online, followed by governmental bodies (49%) and a third-party expert (36%).

Half (49%) also think government bodies should be solving issues of fraudulent content online, and over a third (36%) think the same of third-party experts.

Assaf Is it insider trading if I bought Boeing puts while I am inside the wrecked airplane?

Today I learned

TIL I learned that the the town of Boring (Oregon, US) established relationship with village of Dull (Scotland, UK) in 2012; the following year they were joined with the Shire of Bland (New South Wales, AU) to form the League of Extraordinary Communities.

https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/19227v4/til_i_learned_that_the_the_town_of_boring_oregon/

Mouse submits back-dated invoice for “cleaning services” “A mouse featured on BBC News repeatedly cleaning a man’s shed has today submitted an invoice for all of his work.”

Grickle “The signal.”