Labnotes - Weekend Reading — Stack over you

Mark A. Rayner “Anarchy in the UK”

Tech Stuff

Gatekeepers Limit Continuous Delivery's Benefits

If you don’t increase the number of people with deployment authority, you’ll miss many of the benefits of continuous delivery. A single deployment gatekeeper will lower your chances of getting a return on your investment within the first 100 days and permanently limit your software delivery performance

abi/secret-llama LLM chatbot that runs entirely inside your browser. Supports Mistral and LLama 3. No server required so fully private. You’ll need Chrome or Edge since it uses WebGPU.

Hazel Weakly

Company: We have a monolith!

Me: ...

Company: holds up diagram of 8 services, 15 databases, and a home grown queue implementation

Me: You fucked up a perfectly good distributed system is what you did. Look at that thing, it's got clock skew.

A Firefox user has kept 7,400+ browser tabs alive for two years New Guinness world record?

Foone

I'm a "full stack developer", in that my stack is full and if you try to push any more tasks on me I'm gonna overflow it and start corrupting my own memory

Eye for Design

how-i-experience-web-today.com This is the most “the web of 2024” website. If you’re using an adblocker, turn it off to get the full experience.

The Sound of Software “Sound in software isn’t inherently bad. It’s just been really badly designed”

Use Both Ratings Average and Number of Ratings When Sorting by User Ratings

Users are skeptical of products with perfect ratings based on very few reviews, but these often get listed first when sorting by "User Ratings". Sort out this issue with our latest research:

Simplicity is An Advantage but Sadly Complexity Sells Better Pushing back on the cult of complexity.

Peter Mount

They should be sanitising their database inputs rather than change the input data!

"A local authority has announced it will ban apostrophes on street signs to avoid problems with computer systems."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-68942321

Scott Jenson

There is so much bad UX design here that I hardly know where to start.

If you are a professor, this is an excellent design exercise: improve this. I'm sure ANY student could make this far simpler and easier to use.

I have a short video using this that makes it ever more clear this was designed by a dysfunctional design team. This is a Dodge #Durango if you're curious.

Peoples

Mike Conley

There are certain problem classes that I describe as a "Jell-O elephant".

Let me explain.

Imagine you need to push an elephant made of Jell-O up a hill. Precise, focused pressure on the problem will not work - you will end up inside of the Jell-O elephant, and it will roll back down the hill.

You move a Jell-O elephant with diffused, sustained pressure - like using a big square of plywood, and putting weight behind it. This is how you get it up the hill.

Culture change is a Jell-O elephant.

Great Resignation's job-hoppers aren't as happy as those who stuck around The Great Resignation Regret.

Business Side

Paul Cantrell This is a fantastic thread about big company hiring practices, why job requirements are useless, why you’re wasting time even applying, and more:

Something I tell my software students a lot when they’re looking for jobs is to remember that a shockingly large number of job descriptions are written by people in HR who have next to zero understanding of the industry, the specific team, or the business need.

…

Job “requirements” aren’t really requirements at all; they’re corporate Mad Libs.

Workday has become the most-hated workplace, business software Apropos. When the sales team is performing at 110% but the product team needs to be replaced ASAP:

Since 2006, Workday, which provides software for payroll, talent management, and expense processing, has been making a mint creating misery where painless processes could be.

Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership Short version, because this is quite the messy story. A lot of people contributed content to Stack Overflow under the Creative Commons license, because it made sense. If you’re trying to be helpful, why not give it away? Stack Overflow then decided to sell all that content to OpenAI. Developers were not happy about it, so they tried to delete or edit their questions and answers. Stack Overflow then banned them!

Machine Intelligence

Slop is the new name for unwanted AI-generated content TIL

Timothy “Love what google is up to these days”

Insecurity

Pearce 😮

I hate living in a time where a buggy mobile app could injure or kill you...

RECALL: Tandem t:connect iOS app, used with t:slim X2 insulin pump

TL;DR: crashing+restarting app recurrence causes insulin pump to use up battery doing repeated Bluetooth reconnections and data transfers, leading to the pump eventually shutting itself down.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/08/health/tandem-insulin-pump-app-recall/index.html

Proton Mail Discloses User Data Leading to Arrest in Spain If you think Proton Mail is more secure and private than other email service providers, well …

Proton Mail came under scrutiny for its role in a legal request by the Spanish authorities leading to the identification and arrest of a user.

Tom MacWright

today in late capitalism, my doctors office asked for a cash donation because they are nearly out of operating cashflow because of the cyberattack on change healthcare, a unitedhealth subsidiary

somehow i feel like unitedhealth, which still has a 500b market cap, could maybe chip in here

Rabbit Holed The NFT scam that pivoted into the Rabbit R1 AI device. The rebranded Rabbit Inc is responsible for the buggy software that will probably never work well. Teenage Engineering is responsible for the beautiful hardware that makes the product look so appealing.

Everything Else

stux

Chris Hallbeck

Did it hurt when you fell from heaven? You may be entitled to compensation. Call 1-88-FALL-DOWN today to talk to our cloud mishap experts.

John Scott-Railton

My colleague Mitchell & partner just escorted a family of lost geese to the lake.

Safely navigating 2km of downtown #Toronto took 2 hours.

At one point, police stepped in to block traffic.

Strangers jumped in to help too.

Col

We should start referring to "age" as "levels".
"I'm at level 43" sounds way cooler than just being an old person.

BeeCycling “Remember that time a fox queued up for the ATM? Britain, where even the wildlife respects a queue.”

Jack Daniel

When I was a kid I figured out that if I wanted to know how the magician did a trick I shouldn't look where they pointed. Then I figured out that this didn't just apply to magicians, but to politicians, media, clergy, and more.
A whole bunch of folks have not figured this out.

Helen Czerski

Saw this while out running this evening. I have very little interest in cars, but I ❤️ the small cute ones. Just imagine how much nicer our cities would be if there were only a few big cars that people could borrow when really needed, far more bikes/walking & cute little Microlinos for the rest.

The Musk Industrial Complex Great collection of reporting on the downright awfulness of Musk’s various endeavors. BTW this collection of articles is a year old, so it’s missing the latest update from this week: Neuralink reports trouble with first human brain chip.

Mark