Labnotes - Weekend Reading — Occam's shaving kit

GeriAQuin

Tech Stuff

Jerry Bell

Hey, it’s Friday afternoon and you know what that means!

It’s almost time to push those changes to production as you leave for the weekend!

PayOnceApps Curated directory of applications with a one time price (web, macOS, Windows).

henrygd/queue Tiny async queue with concurrency control. Like p-limit or fastq, but smaller and faster.

sad server

🚨 Receiving alerts on the weekend? 🚨

DON'T PANIC.

Rest assured knowing:

• the dev who wrote the bug
• the PM who prioritized it
• the director who created the artificial deadline
• and the exec who laid off QA

Rest assured knowing that they are all enjoying a relaxing weekend.

Good luck.

We're all counting on you. 👍

metronome-sh/dev-error-boundary Enhanced ErrorBoundary for Remix. I just tried this out and it is indeed a pleasant experience to see error messages and stack traces in development, but have my own custom ErrorBoundary work in production.

Moodist Free and open-source ambient sound generator featuring 78 carefully curated sounds. Create your ideal atmosphere for relaxation, focus, or creativity with this versatile tool.

nicanorflavier/spf-dkim-dmarc-simplified A guide to understanding SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.

Flowtest.ai An autonomous AI Agent that continuously test & monitor your website.

The Powerful Conversational AI JavaScript Library

NLUX is an open-source, zero dependency JavaScript and React library for rapidly building conversational AI interfaces. Integrate with ChatGPT and other LLMs. Highly customizable and configurable. Get outstanding NLU performance and usability with a focus on simplicity. Build chatbots, voice assistants, knowledge bases, and AI frontends in minutes with NLUX.

rixx

OH: "/api/v1 is an emotional support api prefix”

Colin

“TODO” in code doesn’t mean you’re actually going to do it, it means you don’t want questions about why you didn’t do it.

Folder Peek Adds menus to your Mac's menu bar which you can easily turn into an application launcher.

UnitQ Figured out what your users are saying about your business/product online and it can grab feedback from 50+ sources (Slack, Zendesk, Apple Store, Reddit, TikTok, etc)

Scroll Reverser Allows you to reverses the direction of scrolling but only on your trackpad or only on your mice.

Jayne, but with rainbows

As a programmer, I'll likely be making off-by-one mistakes until the day after I die

Jon Henshaw “Every single time someone watches me type on a computer”

Eye for Design

Sans Bullshit Sans A font that replaces every buzzword by a Comic Sans-styled censorship bar. Enjoy!

Cake Because absolutely your Apple Watch needs to look like a pocket-sized Rabbit R1!

John Gruber “How to write a Cancel dialog box without using “Cancel” as a button name. Good labels.”

Peoples

devopscats “See also being pulled into a random slack channel with no context…”

Lesley Carhart “Is it really, really really that hard to just dress neatly in coordinating colors?”

Business Side

How small claims court became Meta's customer service hotline When Meta cuts deep into customer support they force users to go to small claims court.

OpenAI and Anthropic are ignoring an established rule that prevents bots scraping online content Apparently Anthropic is in good company:

OpenAI and Anthropic have been found to be either ignoring or circumventing an established web rule, called robots.txt, that prevents automated scraping of websites.

Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine Add to the list of AI companies that are “surreptitiously scraping—and making things up out of thin air.”

(I recommended using Perplexity before because their UI is so much fun to use. Sorry about that. I long since switched to Kagi — I hope they don’t mess up too much)

Apple delays European launch of AI features because of EU rules Look the DMA is great except for the part where it says “don’t!” to companies that want to ship new tech.

Machine Intelligence

Succor borne every minute The FTC just elevated the discussion about AI to a whole new level!

Earnest chats with objects are not so unusual. Mark “The Bird” Fidrych, the famed Detroit Tiger, used to stand on the pitching mound whispering to the baseball. Forky, the highly animate utensil from Toy Story 4, once posed deep questions about friendship to a ceramic mug. And many of us have made repeated queries of the Magic 8 Ball despite its limited set of randomly generated answers.

Together AI Cloud platform for building and running generative AI. You can use existing models, upload and fine-tune your own models, run serverless or have them host GPUs for you. Pricing looks reasonable.

Every Way To Get Structured Output From LLMs Surprisingly returning structured data is something these computer algorithms don't do by default …

Ariadne Conill 👇 Nature is healing. Thread:

have been in many VC calls in the past few months. in the beginning, they wanted to hear about our “AI story”. now they are increasingly happy we don’t have any story about shoving AI into our product.

i think we are pretty close to the put-AI-in-everything bubble popping

Tracy Chou

i think we should stop giving our ai bots female names (alexa, siri) and give them names from the old white boys club (john, james, chad) in honor of how overconfident and annoying they are even when they’re completely wrong or making stuff up

Dean Burnett “I'm not sure people will like having to wait 3-5 years for answers to their queries, but hey ho”

Insecurity

Change Healthcare confirms ransomware hackers stole medical records on a ‘substantial proportion’ of Americans Shit:

The data also includes medical records and health information, such as diagnoses, medications, test results, imaging and care and treatment plans, said Change. The hackers stole health insurance information, including plan and policy details, as well as billing, claims and payment information, which Change said includes financial and banking information.

Miguel de Icaza “Best HN comment. Ever”

Everything Else

Eric Harris

MostlyHarmless

I’m getting stronger with age. I can now lift $100 worth of groceries with one hand.

Fred Coppersmith

Nobody ever talks about the rest of Occam's shaving kit.

GeriAQuin

Rob Ricci

I am conditioned to believe that if I even touch anything in a hotel minibar, my family will be bankrupted and my descendants will be burdened with debt lo unto the seventh generation at which hour Mammon will ascend from his throne in hell to collect the final payment in the form of the blood of innocents

Natasha Jay

I'm stunned!

This morning I learnt that Albert Einstein was a real person.

Up until now, I'd always thought he was a theoretical physicist.

users/8132629 No way I’m ever going to eat these eggs. (Follow link to see a collection of adorable food)

MostlyHarmless

"But what if they don't deserve that money?" is somehow only a question raised about poor people.

MonotoneofBill

If you meet Don Quixote, don’t tell him you’re a big fan.

MostlyHarmless

Vrimj

I think I remember Dolly Parton talking about why she kept all her publishing rights and saying something like ...
I was in my 20s and I didn't know much at all about the music business but by then I had learned a thing or two about men and I realized I needed to be in charge of anything a certain kind of man told me "don't worry your pretty little head about that" and that has served me well over the years

In This HOUSE

props to whatever nintendo person smoked a big weed & was like "what if you made a game where you use the CONSOLE to control the CONTROLLER”

NZ woman sues partner for not taking her to airport Is this not the most extreme of pettiness?

Triceratops relative had the weirdest horns ever seen on a dinosaur I love that they named it after Loki!

A new species of dinosaur discovered in Montana and related to Triceratops had one of the strangest, most asymmetrical skulls that scientists have ever studied

Boeing Sent Two Astronauts Into Space. Now It Needs to Get Them Home. Boeing just being Boeing.

Natasha Jay

Wildlife photographer Dick van Duijn spent two hours snapping over 200 shots to capture the precise moment a squirrel stopped to smell a yellow daisy …