Weekend Reading — WD40 smells so delicious

Lyfja “definitely the best thing i saw in cologne”

Tech Stuff

Marta File Manager Reminds me of Norton Commander from back in the day, except it's a keyboard-friendly fast file manager for macOS.

iOS404 A delightful design that shows you which features are missing or are only partly implemented in your browser.

Josh Collinsworth

I think we're focused on the wrong thing when we look at what tech works for a company like Amazon or Facebook or Netflix.

We should be looking at what tech works when you don't have a small army of staff engineers optimizing it. I want to know what I can scale without paying someone a half million dollar salary to do it.

There should be more case studies on things that don't have a billion-dollar company propping them up, humming along quietly on a cheap-ass VPS somewhere.

Why PHP Usage Has Declined by 40% in Just Over 2 Years TIL that if you live by the WordPress, you die by the WordPress.

sdw@mastodon.social

Blackthorne: You tell him that this lettering is an affront, set in a font I know as “Arial”. The charlatan dogs of Microsoft made an atrocity to man and God in this plagiarism of the venerable Helvetica—a fraud and a lie, and he must know it!

Mariko: Anjin is upset about the shape of the letters

Why Are Elo Ratings Everywhere Now? What's interesting here are all the different use cases:

Elo ratings can be used to grade student assessments and inspect fabric. They can be used to rank venture-capital firms and prioritize different kinds of health-care training. Until a few years ago, Tinder used Elo scores to rate users by desirability and show them potential matches with similar ratings.

Graham Sutherland / Polynomial

discovering that fewer cybertrucks have been sold than Sinclair C5s has amused me greatly. and honestly, if you want to drive a weird vehicle, the C5 is far more fun.

ErrantScience “You'll find meeting minutes are so much easier to write if you use this universal template 🗒️”

Peoples

Good genes are nice, but joy is better Harvard did a study that started 80 years ago — that's a lot of data — and found out that “close relationships, more than money or fame, are what keep people happy throughout their lives …. Those ties protect people from life’s discontents, help to delay mental and physical decline, and are better predictors of long and happy lives than social class, IQ, or even genes.”

Blog Posts, Sorted by Sleep Have you ever examined the correlation between your writing behavior and sleep?

Business Side

Why you need a "WTF Notebook" Actually sounds like a really good idea:

There's always stuff that makes me go "wtf" on a new team.

Once I've got a nice big list, I start crossing things off. There are four reasons at this point that I might cross off something I've put on that list:

There's actually a good reason for it

• The team is already working on a fix
• The team doesn't care about it
• It's really easy to fix

There's a very specific reputation I want to have on a team: "Nat helps me solve my problems. Nat get things I care about done.”

Feds fine coding boot camp for allegedly misleading students Since you’re curious “what happened with Lambda School?”

In an announcement yesterday, the CFPB said it had taken action against BloomTech and its CEO Austen Allred for allegedly not disclosing the true cost of its loans to students and allegedly claiming overoptimistic hiring rates for BloomTech graduates. BloomTech, formerly Lambda School, has operated since 2017 and offers six- to nine-month vocational programs in science and engineering, with a focus on computer technology.

Machine Intelligence

Do insects have an inner life? Animal consciousness needs a rethink There are two camps. Science is gradually establishing that even insects have consciousness. And AI Pessimism which states that “no way can anything less evolved than an ape be intelligent”.

the empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).

Lessons after a half-billion GPT tokens This image is just one paragraph, read the rest for much more useful information. In my own personal experience, this is exactly how GPT behaves, and this description is 10000x more accurate than either the hype or the doom camps like to portray AI.

Insecurity

Mathi Gwithyas “New captcha just dropped”

Kenn White

Incredible research at BlackHat Asia today by Tong Liu and team from the Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences (在iie.ac.cn 的电子邮件经过验证)

A dozen+ RCEs on popular LLM framework libraries like LangChain and LlamaIndex - used in lots of chat-assisted apps including GitHub. These guys got a reverse shell in two prompts, and even managed to exploit SetUID for full root on the underlying VM!

BrianKrebs

The U.S. government is warning that smart locks securing entry to an estimated 50,000 dwellings nationwide contain hard-coded credentials that can be used to remotely open any of the locks. The lock's maker Chirp Systems remains unresponsive, even though it was first notified about the critical weakness in March 2021. Meanwhile, Chirp's parent company, RealPage, Inc., is being sued by multiple U.S. states for allegedly colluding with landlords to illegally raise rents.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/04/crickets-from-chirp-systems-in-smart-lock-key-leak/

Church of Jeff

Everything Else

SkepticatTheDemocrat “This is what happens when you cross Caturday with 420.”

Evan Boehs

What’s wrong babe? You’ve hardly created any shareholder value today

muesli

WD40 has no right to smell so delicious.

Andrew “Aerospace chocolatiers prepare a Ferrero Rocher for launch into low earth orbit”

SaltyGirl

Me: The only limits are the ones we set on ourselves.

Police officer: That’s not how laws work ma’am. License and registration, please.

eclectech “Chicken with a Pearl Earring (with appropriate apologies to Vermeer, obvs)”

Simon McGarr

You can tell the Old Testement is the product of a desert people, because when they tried to imagine the end of the world they went with “rained for forty days and forty nights”, which in Ireland is just called Spring.

Marie

Nature is the best artist. Look at the natural color of egg shells from different chicken breeds - just beautiful.