Weekend Reading — Places where I've lost my glasses

Beware Of These 19 Dogs: We Warned You That’s a risk I’m willing to take!

Tech Stuff

The High-Risk Refactoring How to approach risky and expensive system improvements.

pgroll: zero-downtime, reversible, schema migrations for Postgres Interesting: “By leveraging table views pointing to the right columns, pgroll is able to expose new parts of the schema and hide the old parts before safely removing them after the migration is completed.”

electric-sql/pglite Run Postgres in the browser: “Unlike previous "Postgres in the browser" projects, PGlite does not use a Linux virtual machine - it is simply Postgres in WASM.”

<script type="module">
import { PGlite } from "https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@electric-sql/pglite/dist/index.js“;

const db = new PGlite()
await db.query("select 'Hello world' as message;")
// -> [ { message: "Hello world" } ]
</script>

Paul Cantrell 💪

The best software tester I’ve ever known once said to me, “Whenever I start at a new place, I find out which teams hate each other. Where their systems interface with each other is the first place I look for bugs — because they’re not talking to each other.”

Software projects stand and fall on the relationships between the humans who create them. (A corollary to Conway’s Law.)

Kagi Sidekick Add fast search with Kagi smarts and AI to your personal or documentation website with just a couple lines of code.

Union, intersection, difference, and more are coming to JavaScript Sets Yes, please.

The JavaScript Set was introduced to the language in the ES2015 spec, but it has always seemed incomplete. That's about to change with the addition of functions like intersection, union and difference.

CodeRev.app Code Review as Interview — a lightweight tool to help you organize and conduct technical interviews using code reviews rather than leetcode.

How I’d use generative AI to modernize an app

So I won’t sit here and tell you that generative AI makes app modernization easy. Nothing does. It’s hard work and is as much about technology as it is psychology and archeology. But AI can make it easier. We’ll take any help we can get, right? I count at least five ways I’d use generative AI …

mymind is the extension for your mind. An app for taking notes, saving images, quotes, highlights, etc — and it uses AI to organize the information and make it searchable for you. Don’t waste time on categorizing & organizing.

Kin. A personal AI for your private life. “Get inspired, talk things through, navigate situations or get personalized guidance with Kin. Built for privacy, security, and with memory in mind.”

fasterthanlime

it's called a man page because it won't shut up about stuff you already know and doesn't actually have the answer to your question

Trevor Flowers at Transmutable Because I guarantee that what you need right now is a miniature Cray 1, TRS-80, or NeXT Cube workstation.

Eye for Design

Mx. Alba Accurate.

Peoples

ADHD may have been an evolutionary advantage, research suggests 🤔

Michael J Reiss, a professor of science education at University College London, who was not involved in the work, said while ADHD appeared to be linked to serious negative consequences, he and his colleagues had argued it may help in situations where physical activity and rapid decision-making were highly valued.

Your Brain Can Only Take So Much Focus

Yet, if we built PCD, 10- and 90- minute naps, and psychological halloweenism into our days, we would likely preserve focus for when we need it, and use it much more efficiently too. More importantly, unfocus will allow us to update information in the brain, giving us access to deeper parts of ourselves and enhancing our agility, creativity and decision-making too.

How I stay (more) focused with ADHD “I could never stay focused on one thing for a long time. These tips help me stay focused and productive.”

Business Side

stolen memes from outside fedi Facts:

Tech Leaders Fled San Francisco During the Pandemic. Now, They’re Coming Back. Because of course.

Four-day week made permanent for most UK firms in world’s biggest trial “Research shows 51% that took part permanently adopted the change, while 89% still operating policy one year on”

"Hey, will you build me a website?“ If you’re a consultant, the questions you should be asking before accepting the gig.

How Google is killing independent sites like ours - HouseFresh Why you shouldn’t trust product reviews from big media publishers ranking at the top of Google.

Insecurity

The Five Best Ad Blockers You Can Install If you're looking for an ad blocker for your browser.

FTC says Avast promised privacy, but pirated consumers’ data for treasure

According to the complaint, Jumpshot provided its clients with “extraordinary detail regarding how consumers navigated the Internet, including each webpage visited, precise timestamp, the type of device and browser, and the city, state, and country.”

Machine Intelligence

Brooke Vibber

rage against the machine learning

Chrome’s Latest Update Introduces an AI-powered ‘Help Me Write’ Feature Right-click ‘help me write’ menu option in GMail. Now all we need is a ‘help we read’ feature, and we can close the ML2ML circle.

AI Companies Are Obsessed With Planning Your Next Trip When the demo is everything but realistic:

The AI Industry Is Stuck on One Very Specific Way to Use a Chatbot — OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft are dying to help plan your next trip

“These tools are impressive, and clearly have a lot of potential. But exactly what these tools are best for right now is still murky.”

fasterthanlime "sudo make me a sandwich“

AI plays cupid as Japanese authorities try to boost marriage rate Not at all what I expected:

Authorities in many regions have been organizing traditional konkatsu matchmaking events with AI sifting compatibilities between potential partners. They say it has sometimes led to people who would never have imagined being together tying the knot.

"In terms of cost-effectiveness, it is easier to use than the private sector, and it offers advantages to many people," he said.

Everything Else

Orbital Argument “The truth is somewhere in the middle …”

Just Frank being Frank

Ask your doctor if denial can work for you.

18 Funny Signs This Week That Made Me Laugh

Here Are the Secret Locations of ShotSpotter Gunfire Sensors This article explains in detail all the different reasons why ShotSpotter is a failed technology that doesn’t work reliably. The icing on the cake, the microphone deployment is more than a touch bit racist:

An analysis of sensor distribution in US cities in the leaked data set found that, in aggregate, nearly 70 percent of people who live in a neighborhood with at least one SoundThinking sensor identified in the ACS data as either Black or Latine.
…
In January, South Side Weekly reported that SoundThinking sensors in Chicago failed to issue an alert for a 55-round shooting at a gyro shop that wounded two men. According to internal company emails reviewed by the publication, the cause of the missed detections were three out-of-service sensors. According to the file, as many as 357 sensors in the Chicago Metropolitan Area were broken, unreliable, or out of service at the time the file was created—9 percent of the total.

The Whore of Blahbylon “The perfect scarf doesn’t exi—”

Robyn Nuthall “Let's give our trees email addresses, yes, yes let's!”

Natasha Jay “Places where I have lost my glasses”

A former Gizmodo writer changed his name to ‘Slackbot’ and stayed undetected for months Wow.

When it was his time to leave, McKay swapped out his existing profile picture for one that resembled an angrier version of Slackbot’s actual icon. He also changed his name to “Slackbot.” You can’t just change your name on Slack to “Slackbot,” by the way, as the service will tell you that name’s already been taken. It does work if you use a special character that resembles one of the letters inside Slackbot, though, such as replacing “o” with the Unicode character “о.”

GeriAQuin