Weekend Reading — All romes lead to roads

Tech Stuff

Wired Elements Common UI elements with a hand-drawn, sketchy look. Useful for wireframes, mockups, or just fun hand-drawn look!

supabase/index_advisor A PostgreSQL extension that recommends indexes to improve query performance.

Blink Shell Run Visual Studio Code, edit with Vim, command line shell, etc all on your iPhone!

dlvhdr/gh-dash Use GitHub from the command line with this beautiful CLI dashboard.

Why, after 6 years, I’m over GraphQL I’ve used GraphQL successfully in exactly one project. I think it was quite useful, but also I could have spent the same amount of time just optimizing a plain REST API, skip learning GraphQL and get the same performance and much simpler code (fewer dependencies). Anyway, fool me once, but I won’t be GraphQL ever again.

Your API Shouldn't Redirect HTTP to HTTPS I don't know if I agree. But definitely if you've got Cloudflare front-end before Vercel application, maybe turn off the HTTP→HTTPS conversion feature. It’s not fun to have randomly "too many redirects” errors show up in the log. (Don't ask how I know, I just spent half a day on this one stupid bug)

File0 Basically a simple API you can use to upload files, retrieve them, etc. Anything you can do with S3 but without the unnecessary API complexity.

focusedOS Hide all distractions with one click. For macOS and for iOS.

Extension A zero-config development tool for browser extensions. Supports TypeScript, WebAssembly, TailwindCSS, and friends.

Aiko Transcribe the video you're watching, a meeting you just recorded, a podcast that talks too much, etc. Uses Whisper to transcribe on your device. For iOS and macOS.

Notepad Tab This is a cool concept. It’s a note taking app that runs in your browser and … stores your notes in the URL — no need for cookies or servers! Share the note by sharing the URL, save it as a bookmark, etc.

Computer Facts

"IEEE floats" are named after the sound you make when you find out how they work

iyaja/llama-fs A self-organizing file system that uses llama 3 (basically LLM) to organize your files so you don't have to.

Qlock The JavaScript Quine Clock. (321 bytes)

Chinese Keyboards: A Forgotten History

Before QWERTY, engineers had a wealth of idea for how to input Chinese characters into computers, including huge keyboard, medium keyboards, cylindrical keyboards, and more.

Lauren Weinstein Ouch.

Because Voyager 1 is so far from Earth, it takes almost 23 hours for a command to reach it at the speed of light, and the same for a response to reach us back, for a total of close to 50 hours.

Which means that interactions with Voyager 1, currently around 15 billion miles away, are still faster than many Microsoft Windows updates.

bert hubert “It didn’t work out but I appreciate the attention to detail over at the financial times:”

Eye for Design

Visual design rules you can safely follow every time Handy list.

Tixie Salander “text-overflow: ellipsis; is not a good content design solution edition 9872628”

Peoples

Alvaro Montoro

Random weird career advise for US people: when you change jobs, it may be tempting to make your last day fall in the last day of the month. It looks like a good and clean way to provide "closure". Don't! Instead set your last day for the first day/week of the following month.

Most companies pay for insurance at the beginning of the month, and you keep it until the last day of the month even if you left the company. Leaving the last day of the month, you'd be uninsured until the next job starts.

John Overholt

Repeat after me: “I can see the value in what you’re proposing. What less valuable thing that I’m currently doing should I stop to make time for it?”

risecalendar.com Rise is another app for people who live in their calendar. And they just added projects, tasks, and a mobile app.

Business Side

Dan “I feel like most in-house software is tacitly released under the Hot Potato Licence.”

Kara Swisher's story about Sam Altman is falling apart I find Kara Swisher extremely entertaining, but believable? Not the word I would use to describe her. “The supposed hard-hitting journalist was peddling Altman’s narrative during his ouster from OpenAI”

OpenAI's Sam Altman is entering a familiar new era: tech villain Everything you need to know about tech journalism in one article:

It looks like Sam Altman, who has been hit with bad headline after bad headline over the past couple of weeks, is the latest to succumb to the narrative: The OpenAI CEO and cofounder appears to have entered his villain era.

Google confirms the leaked Search documents are real If you want to know how Google Search works and understand why you’re continuously getting wrong and low quality search results:

A collection of 2,500 leaked internal documents from Google filled with details about data the company collects is authentic, the company confirmed today.

nixCraft “Google Ad from 1999.”

Machine Intelligence

I Asked ChatGPT to Give Me Feedback on My Short Story — Here's How It Went Not surprising, ChatGPT is actually pretty good at some tasks. Not all tasks, but definitely some task.

Brook Miles

While Auto-Correct has long been a staple feature in computing, its counterpart "Auto-Incorrect" or "AI" had remained elusive, until now.

Previously limited to small unreliability prototypes, recent advances in Large Lying Models have enabled deployment of Auto-Incorrect at scale, and technology firms the world over are racing to become market leaders in this exciting new space!

Meta’s AI is summarizing some bizarre Facebook comment sections I think when you copy Google, AI search results is not the feature you want to copy.

Meta is using its AI tool to summarize the comment sections on Facebook. These summaries reflect what people are saying, whether good or bad.

AI tools gain recognition but lack daily use, survey reveals Numbers:

Most respondents who have tried generative AI tools mentioned that they had only used them once or twice since their launch.

Meanwhile, the US shows higher usage rates for LLMs, with seven per cent of people using ChatGPT daily and 11 per cent weekly.

The study revealed that the most significant difference in AI tool usage was observed across different age groups.

Younger individuals were more likely to adopt AI tools and to use them more frequently.

Andy McKay “That's it everyone, no need for developers anymore. Y'all can go home now.”

Insecurity

Chris Adams AI is not going to cheat you out of money … wait … I’m being told that:

“Before phoning the number, Gaudreau did a search in Facebook Messenger to find out whether it was legitimate.

The answer he got in Messenger from the ‘Meta AI’ artificial intelligence search tool was that the phone number he found, 1-844-457-0520, was ‘indeed a legitimate Facebook support number.’”

Andy B

I've been reliably informed Ticketmaster are taking the data breach very seriously.

From tomorrow they're adding a $14.50 "information and network security fee” per ticket to all purchases.

Stop using Opera Browser and Opera GX Friends don’t let friends use the Opera browser:

Opera Browser and Opera GX are bloated web browsers, and the company behind them has tried to cover up its controversies.

Matthew Garrett “Fucking hell what will they DRM next”

Everything Else

Andy Fletcher “Every venue should have one” Yes!

Kate Morley

In the same way most of us say “goodbye” without realising it derives from “god be with ye”, maybe one day people will end conversations with “likensubscribe”

Jared Newman

My father-in-law had a never-opened, 48-year-old GE radio in his garage. No pairing, no logins, no setup. It just works.

Rob Vanwey

Rich people like the Tesla baby keep saying "if it can happen to Trump, it can happen to you." What they really mean is it can happen to them. The rest of us knew it could happen to us long before Trump got indicted. They are just scared now.

Uncle Duke

Also Available:

• Existential Bread
• Bluesberry Pie
• Ice Cream Sadwich
• Tearamisu
• Glum Pudding
• Candied Despair
• Broken Tart
• Banana Dread

Marquis de Geek This is 5 ferrets of useful!

Do you have trouble communicating metric sizes to Americans?

If so, I have you covered!

I wrote this simple app where you type in a size (e.g. 1.2 meters) and it will output more useful units, e.g. "It is almost exactly the length of 7 medium-size bananas"

amie “all romes lead to roads”

Alex Howard In most of the modern world, people who just make a salary don’t have to file their taxes. In the US it’s a different story, but at least we’re making good solid steps in the right direction: 90% of surveyed users ranked the UX as “Excellent”!

In a HUGE win for digital government in the USA, US Treasury says Direct File will be a permanent, free tax filing option!

NB: A USGSA survey of 11,000+ filers found 90% ranked the UX as “Excellent” or “Above Average,” after a successful pilot with 140,000 Americans that saved an estimated $5.6M in costs.

Next steps: invest more to pre-populate returns, test, iterate, & scale.

Ricki Is Not A Wizard Tarr

Sometimes when you learn how something works, you think, Thanks knowledge, that really helped, everything makes more sense, and other times you look up how wrists turn, and it's like WTF?!

These Lawyers Found One Another on Twitter. Now They’re Suing Elon Musk. “A litigation team built from the sharpest, funniest tweeters is suing Elon Musk.” What a story!

Hi-Vis Kilt Hi-Vis kilts is a thing that exists! How do I not have one?