Tech Stuff
url-parts.glitch.me Interactive tool for showing the names of URL components.
Online PDF tools for PDF lovers Every tool you need to use PDFs: merge, split, compress, convert, rotate, unlock, watermark, etc. Straight from your browser.
Kagi: a paid search engine which is worth the money You may have heard of Kagi before. I certainly did, lots of posts on social media. The thing that kept me apart was the pricing. I got accustomed to search engines being free, that I couldn’t imagine paying for one.
But Kagi does have a free plan with 100 queries, so I started there. I used it on macOS and iOS for a couple of weeks. And when I ran out of queries, I signed up for the paid plan. It’s only $5 a month, which is less than half a Netflix subscription. And the benefit is obvious: you don’t have to weed through pages and pages of ads and gamified SEO search results.
BTW I did use DuckDuckGo for several years. I generally preferred it over Google, it costs the same (free), but it also, like Google, suffers from low quality gamified search results. I’m not yet convinced Kagi is the perfect search engine we’re looking for. But I’m convinced it’s worth the price.
The Builder's Guide to Better Mousetraps
I tend to be biased towards innovation. Towards building. I think most advice for technical leaders over-emphasizes the short-term risks of innovating too much, and under-emphasizes the long-term risks of innovating too little. However, both sides have good points, and we owe it to ourselves and our businesses to think carefully about the decision.
Joplin A open-source note-taking app with synchronisation capabilities for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS.
Optimism vs Pessimism in Distributed Systems
By coloring each assumption as pessimistic (coordination-requiring) or optimistic (coordination-avoiding), we can also structure our thinking about the best time to coordinate, and make sure we’re being consistent in our choices about when and why coordination is needed.
The Developer Dictionary A crowdsourced dictionary for developers. Find definitions for all sorts of technical terms, programming jargon, and more!
David Bisset "Bill For Unused Domain Names“ Oil on Canvas
Eye for Design
Cabel Sasser “dude i’m just trying to login to a website!”
90% of designers are unhirable? I don't know if they're hirable or not, but this is one thing that drove me bonkers when I had to hire a designer, and weed through countless totally useless resumes:
I’ve reviewed more than 1,000 portfolios in my design career so far and I turned 90% of them down because of one thing — the linear design process.
By “linear design process” I mean cookie-cutter case studies that always read the same. The designer learned about a problem, conducted user interviews, created user personas, proceeded to sketches, then mockups and wireframes, made everything beautiful through visual design, created a prototype, and tested it with five users. Everything was perfect so they also created a design system which is not a design system but a style guide. But they call it a “design system” because it’s trendy and a keyword for the recruiters.
What Are the Core Principles of Good API Design?
An API should be easy to learn and write to, and hard to misuse. Your API will also need to evolve, and a good design takes this into account.
Kestral
I just visited a website.
The top half was a popup about GDPR.
The rest of it was a popup about cookie consent.
When I cleared both of those I got a popup about a newsletter.
When I cleared that I got a popup about an offer.
When I cleared that I got half an article then a paywall.
The internet, 2024.
Nina Kalinina 🤯 “I love semantic HTML. Each input field is so easy to describe in a sensible way. It can even be used by plugins and user-scripts.”
Peoples
An Introvert’s Guide to Visibility in the Workplace Being an introvert, I find advise like this mighty helpful:
Being visible at work means ensuring that your contributions, skills, and achievements are recognized and appreciated by others within your organization. Unlike bragging or showboating, gaining visibility involves strategically sharing updates, information, and successes in a way that’s useful and relevant to others, always linking your progress with the larger goals of your leaders or company.
The Dumber Side of Smart People
I often wonder how many tens of billions of dollars have been paid to management consultants to solve problems that low-wage line workers had solutions for, only because a guy in a suit has a hard time taking a guy with dirty fingernails seriously.
Should you Stay Technical as an Engineering Manager?
Yes, I can confidently say that an Engineering Manager, like a Tech Lead, but also a Tech Director like I am today, should stay technical. We will discuss the reasons, methods, and necessary depth of technical knowledge later.
Business Side
4 Engineering Slides CEOs Love (That You Can Have For Free)
- Overall Health Update
- Engineering Investment Strategy
- Engineering Investment Updates
- Engineering Health Update
When New Hires Get Paid More, Top Performers Resign First
In other words, hiring new employees at higher salaries than existing employees doesn’t just lead to generally higher turnover rates for current employees — it increases attrition specifically among the employees who add the most value to their organizations.
Machine Intelligence
Reverse engineering prompts Interesting technique: give the LLM the answer you want, and ask it to write the prompt that would generate that answer.
Self hosting a Copilot replacement: my personal experience This is a quality/speed test. It’s not looking for something cheaper, nor is it concerned about privacy (since the project’s code is already hosted on GitHub). It’s just trying to get a sense of whether you can replace Copilot with another model running on your own computer (M2 with 32GB of RAM). And the answer is conclusively: "None of them was even remotely close to the speed and accuracy of GitHub Copilot.” We’re very much not there yet.
OpenAI’s GPT Is a Recruiter’s Dream Tool. Tests Show There’s Racial Bias In this article, they’re running a test by putting four different names on the exact same resume, and then watching how GPT ranks them different based on the assumed gender and race. And it’s just enough of a difference to quality as discrimination.
To be clear, anonymizing the resume is a good idea, but doesn’t solve this problem. There’s too much in a resume that GPT can key on: work history, school name, references, etc. There’s just so many ways it can discriminate. These differences are harder to put in an objective test, which is why they’re using name only. But absolutely, if you want to avoid any discrimination in your hiring, do not use GPT for resume ranking.
Exclusive: Public trust in AI is sinking across the board
When it comes to AI regulation, the public's response is pretty clear: 'What regulation?'," Westcott said. "There's a clear and urgent call for regulators to meet the public's expectations head on.
In Moment of Unbelievable Irony, Midjourney Accuses Stability AI of Image Theft ← So this just happened.
It’s so cute the way CEOs and corporations pantomime out talking to each other like they’re friends publicly on X to try and convince everyone that they’re just regular guys, when we all know that the actual communications are happening in private, and probably between underlings.
George Takei
Insecurity
Fixing security vulnerabilities with AI A peek under the hood of GitHub Advanced Security code scanning autofix.
The Terrifying A.I. Scam That Uses Your Loved One’s Voice
Charles Bethea writes about the emergence of a scam that uses artificial intelligence to replicate a familiar person’s voice to persuade victims that their loved one is in trouble and needs them to send money.
MostlyHarmless
Everything Else
Morwen Happy InternationalWomensDay!
lilo
All products marketed as "for men", "for boys", "for women" or "for girls" must specify en detail on the packaging what the risks are if they are accidentally used by the wrong gender.
Brendan Halpin
Just saw a bottle of water bearing the brand "Oregon Trail." Wondering what marketing genius decided that a phrase an entire generation associates with dysentery would be a good brand name for water
Njion :3
Friendly reminder that if person with ADHD doesn't reply to your messages for a while or forgets about important events because of hyperfixating, it doesn't mean that they don't care or that they're lazy or that they're upset at you or anything of the sort. When we get hyperfixated on something we can spend hours focused exclusively on that one thing entirely losing track of time, sometimes even forgetting about basic bodily needs. It can very much be unhealthy and is often a much bigger problem for us than it is for you. Please be understanding.
Single dose of LSD provides immediate, lasting anxiety relief, study says The FDA is going to look at LSD as potential cure???
One dose of LSD in a clinical trial significantly improved anxiety and lasted for 12 weeks, convincing the FDA to give the drug a breakthrough therapy designation.
NTSB probing ‘stuck’ control incident on Boeing 737 Max You might think — well, Boeing is under scrutiny by the NTSB, of course they’re looking at everything single thing that could break an airplane. Make perfect sense. But also consider that maybe Boeing is just having a very bad week when it comes to their total lack of product quality. Tire falls off plane immediately after takeoff. It smashed a parked car. And also, United plane engine catches fire midair, flight turns back to Houston shortly after takeoff. Burning plane! And all these happened within the same 48 hour window.
Study links microplastics in arteries to huge increase in heart disease and death This is why we need fewer plastics in the environment:
Many studies have shown that tiny bits of plastic, some too small to be seen, can enter the human body through food, inhalation or exposure to the skin and have been found in the placenta, lungs, liver, breast milk, urine and blood.
Related: Big oil’s big deception: That plastics are recyclable
Oh, and car tires are much to blame: Rising microplastics in seas puts pressure on tyre industry — they’re responsible for 78% of microplastics!
Hacker Memes “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.” - Henry David Thoreau
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