Labnotes - Weekend Reading — Don't give eeffoc

19 Funny Signs This is how I start every day!

Tech Stuff

ToDesktop Turn your Web app into a macOS desktop app in minutes! Used by some of my favorite apps like Linear and Notion.

Graham Sutherland

what do you say when your code performs badly?

O(no)

evanshortiss/env-var Verification and type coercion for environment variables in Node.js. Super cool and works in combination with dotenv.

lawless polymorph So true:

C library functions are always like: "SYNOPSIS. This function converts foos into bars depending on the user locale. ARGUMENTS. src and dest pointers must be distinct; it is undefined behavior if they are not QPU-aligned. RETURN VALUE. Returns the number of foos converted. A zero value indicates failure, or that zero foos were converted. A negative value indicates that the final foo was only partially converted (function got tired). Check this global variable to find out why.”

metaskills/experts Create and deploy assistants and link them together to create an advanced Multi AI Agent Systems with expanded memory and attention to detail.

Joshua Foust 🤔

I have recently used the word “technicalia” to describe a group of technical details, minutae, and expectations, kind of like how “marginalia” is about scribbles in the margins… and apparently it doesn’t exist??? How does this not exist? And can we make it a thing?

Daylight Computer Launches This looks fantastic! Tablet size, monochrome, paper-like display that’s bright enough to see even in the sun. 60hz refresh rate, so it feels like a color tablet. You can type on a keyboard and take notes with a pen. Days of use on a single charge. Maybe I need one?

Sue Smith

The hardest problem in computer science is being born into generational wealth

Assaf In case of fire 🔥

Foone

The whole point of the "paperless office" wasn't to cut down on paper, exactly. It was misnamed.

It's actually a printerless office. If we can be paperless, we can finally be printerless.

Garple.com And may your next startup name be a "short, easy to say, without any real meaning" domain name!

tinyPod Turn your iWatch into a tiny iPod!

Messaging Service ICQ To Shut Down Next Month After Nearly 30 Years 😢 The first instant messenger I used was ICQ. I still remember it fondly.

MostlyHarmless

Jeremy “Linux Filesystem”

Eye for Design

Do you suffer from Productitis? Learn how to avoid it.

Steve Lord “The future we could've had without big tech.”

Peoples

Mark Downie

One of my biggest problems is that I hoard interesting problems. I think of them as things to personally solve rather than share with my team 🙃. I take on the characteristics of Smaug, which is clearly not a good thing.

Ricki Is Not A Wizard Tarr

The most ridiculous thing about cop procedural shows is when they ask where a person was, and what they were doing at a specific time the person always has perfect and immediate recall. I'd be desperately trying to remember what day of the week that was, and trying to open my phone calendar. If I was the cop, I'd immediately be suspicious of the person who remembered exactly where they were and what they were doing.

Javier “Saw some text online that made me want to turn it into signage. What good are graphic design skills if you can't have a little fun with them.😜”

Business Side

Humane is looking for a buyer after the AI Pin’s underwhelming debut I have $20 in my pocket. Do I got for morning coffee, or do I purchase this company?

The startup apparently thinks it’s worth between $750 million and $1 billion despite the deep software flaws and hardware issues of its first product. Humane, the startup behind the poorly-reviewed AI Pin wearable computer, is already hunting for a potential buyer for its business.

Copilot 🤔 I wonder how much traffic this totally unrelated B2B service got this week for all the discussions, some good some bad, about Microsoft’s Copilot?

nixCraft

I asked Google "who ruined Google" and they replied honestly using their AI, which is now forced on all of us. It's too funny not to share!

Machine Intelligence

It’s Time to Believe the AI Hype “The explosive demos from OpenAI and Google that started the week show there’s plenty more disruption to come.” You could not be more wrong. Let’s review what happened with OpenAI, Google and Microsoft just this week.

Liam “Google AI just telling people to drink piss. Perfect, no notes.”

Google decided to release their new AI before properly testing it and fixing all the very very obvious bugs. So in just a few days we got this recommendation to drink piss, use glue to make pizza, eat one rock a day, informed that Obama is muslim, prepare for snake fight in our PhD, use gasoline to make spaghetti, jump off a plane without a parachute, talk to your cat about gun safety, leave your dog in a hot car, and more.

Kagi Kagi is the new player in town. It does use AI to nicely summarize search results. And it works because the search results are much much better than anything Google would ever produce. Somehow Kagi, which displays no ads, also dodges the SEO spam. AI — when done right — is magic. It's not free, but at $5/month it's also not horribly expensive and worth every penny.

How to Turn Off Google AI Overview and Set "Web" as Default If you're a Google die-hard, here are some tips for fixing Google Search on Android, iOS, Chrome and Firefox. May the udm=14 be with you!

Recall is Microsoft’s key to unlocking the future of PCs Windows 11 will now record everything it sees on your screen, feed it to its AI brain, so then you can search for it. Except for DRM, because Microsoft doesn’t believe you should be recording DRM material. Nothing to worry about. I mean, maybe someone logs into your computer and can see your entire private search history and passwords. Maybe it’s your employer?

Your best counterargument isn't threat actors stealing company data.

It's that opposing counsel will request the recall data and demand it not be disabled as part of e-discovery proceedings.

The threat that keeps your executives up at night are lawyers, not hackers.

News Corp. and OpenAI strike 'multi-year global partnership' deal to use journalistic content to improve ChatGPT Don't worry, OpenAI will never have a GPT that spits out nonsense. They only get the best most accurate totally unbiased news from News Corp.

Jef Poskanzer

OpenAI: At long last, we have created an AI voice that sounds like Scarlett Johansson, as described in her classic legal demand letter "Don't Create An AI Voice That Sounds Like Me Or I'll Sue”

Insecurity

The Whore of Blahbylon

Everything Else

elle “All I saw was sandwich for at least 15 seconds”

MostlyHarmless

All you seniors posting about how you survived lead paint, no seatbelts, no helmets etc… I’m very happy for you. Would love to hear sometime from those who didn’t, but for some reason their posts don’t show up on my feed.

Today I learned 😮

TIL that a juvenile orca started a fashion trend of wearing dead salmon as a hat and the whole group started wearing them.

Kabosu, the dog behind the 'doge' internet meme, has died 😢

Meanwhile in Canada

If mosquitoes sucked fat instead of blood, they'd be more popular.

McNadoMD

Two ways to look at the 2nd known human case of H5N1 in the US — one is to say oh heck another case, that’s not good. The other way of looking at it is that there are thousands of infected cows interacting with hundreds of dairy employees, and we’ve found two cases, both of whom had pinkeye.

True Size Of Countries What's the true size of Greenland?

Prof. Sam Lawler 👇 Read this thread about SpaceX debris!

This is about an hour away from my farm, so this'll be a fun conversation, and yet another great opportunity to tell a lot of people about what a huge problem we have with unregulated commercialization of orbit. (Also I just redid my slides for my public talk next week, this is going in!)

Daily marijuana use outpaces daily drinking in the US, a new study says Don’t Worry. Be Happy.

Emma

you have no idea how many times i've thought about making nuclear weapons but stopped because the iTunes Store EULA forbids me from listening to Apple Music while doing so

A Tesla owner says his car’s ‘self-driving’ technology failed to detect a moving train ahead of a crash caught on camera Another day another Tesla Full-Self Driving Mode gone wrong.

Stuart Palmer

Is “Love Is Blind” a Toxic Workplace? Apparently. “Reality-TV contestants are barely paid, and the experience can feel like abuse.”

Man strikes back against city order with boat mural Malicious compliance much?

Prof. Catherine Flick “Same, buddy, same.”