Weekend Reading — Legally prohibited from complaining

Miriam

Tech Stuff

Potch Guilty as charged:

engineers will write 200 lines of code to avoid writing a single line of code twice

dotenvx The better dotenv–from the creator of the dotenv npm module.

PowerSync Postgres and SQLite sync for your local-first web app.

Sync layer for enabling local-first architectures with simple state management and real-time reactivity.

ImHex If you’re doing reverse engineering, this is the hex editor for you. It comes loaded with features like pattern language to decode and highlight structures, graphical node-based data processor, a disassembler, diffing support, bookmarks and more.

A Eulogy for DevOps “The DevOps movement has died out. What went wrong?”

junkdog/tachyonfx This library will help you build fancy animations for UIs that run in the terminal.

Kevlin Henney

Are you and your team writing user stories... or are you writing product owner stories?

There's a significant difference: most users would disagree that many features that product management, marketing, shareholders, etc., want to put into a product are actually stories from the perspective of the user.

sjvn “Friends don't let friends go to Microsoft tech conferences.”

mhoye

"Naming things" is just a semiotic proxy metric, the two real hardest problems in software are understanding yourself and understanding other people.

Upscayl Upscale your images. It's $12.99 to download from the App Store, but free to install directly (brew install --cask upscayl) and the source code is AGPL on GitHub.

llama.ttf Talk about getting creative! (also can you use web fonts to hack into people’s computers???)

llama.ttf is a font file which is also a large language model and an inference engine for that model.

nolen “I put Breakout (aka Brick Breaker) inside Google Calendar! It lets you decline any meetings you shatter.”

benwis

saad - software as a disappointment

Catherine “what the hell”

Peoples

Life Anti-Checklist The Reverse Bucket List:

Discover the unconventional approach to living well with our Life Anti-Checklist. Inspired by Neal's Life-Checklist, this unique guide helps you navigate life's journey by focusing on what not to do. Explore a refreshing perspective on personal growth and find freedom in avoiding common pitfalls.

Barktic Fox

"How are you today?"
"Legally prohibited from complaining due to a non-disparagement clause, you?“

Tech couples are working out their issues with off-sites, performance reviews This is the most SF thing ever:

They tried fixing their organizational mismatch with the software tools they used effectively at work: Asana, Notion, and Google Docs. Even Post-it notes.

(These tools were created by big corporations to remove any legal liability whatsoever. They were not intent on helping people get organized, work better, form healthy relationships, etc. Except that some people are too deeply involved in their work "culture”)

Business Side

Has Facebook Stopped Trying? 😂

“So there’s a level of disinvestment in Facebook because they don’t know what the next thing exactly is going to be, but they know it’s not going to be this. So you might liken it to the deindustrialization of a manufacturing city that loses its base. There’s not a lot of financial gain to be had in propping up Facebook with new stuff, but it’s not like it disappears or its footprint shrinks. It just gets filled with crypto scams, phishing, hacking, romance scams.”

What does a board of directors do? Good read for anyone thinking of becoming a director (except if you’re founder or VC where the rules are much different). And it matches my experience having been on two boards before.

A ton of job postings might actually be fake If you’re wondering why the company isn’t calling you back:

A new survey found that almost 40% of companies posted a fake job listing this year — and 85% of those companies interviewed candidates for fake jobs

Amazon hires founders from well-funded enterprise AI startup Adept to boost tech giant’s ‘AGI’ team I guess everyone gets hired the new way. It's a bit more expensive than emailing a PDF resume, but it is the age of AI:

Adept raised $350 million in March 2023 as part of a Series B round that reportedly valued the company at $1 billion.
…
The hiring of Adept’s leaders comes as tech behemoths look to partner with or acquire startups in a race to build out AI infrastructure and services.

Microsoft’s AI boss thinks it’s perfectly OK to steal content if it’s on the open web

Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, has a curious idea about how copyright works. He incorrectly claimed the moment you publish anything on the open web, it becomes “freeware” that anyone can freely copy and use.

Quora’s Chatbot Platform Poe Allows Users to Download Paywalled Articles on Demand IT's not just Microsoft. Apparently this AI is fixing the most urgent user problem: how do I read article that are behind a paywall?

WIRED was able to download stories from publishers like The New York Times and The Atlantic using Poe’s Assistant bot. One expert calls it “prima facie copyright infringement,” which Quora disputes.

benjojo "Glad we are reaching the part of the hype cycle where we have whatever this thing is"

Machine Intelligence

Claude 3.5 I just got to use Claude 3.5 this week and teach it to generate SQL queries (inputs coming from people who are absolutely not in the software industry and have no idea what SQL is). It worked really well. From what I read Claude 3.5 is generally better than GPT-4o. That's also my impression.

How Anthropic’s ‘Projects’ and new sharing features are revolutionizing AI teamwork So ChatGPT smooshed together with Microsoft Office?

Anthropic introduces new AI collaboration tools, Projects and Artifacts, enhancing workplace productivity and challenging tech giants with Claude's advanced enterprise capabilities.

Chinese AI models storm Hugging Face's LLM chatbot benchmark leaderboard Huggingface has a new leaderboard and the top performer is Qwen2 by noticeable distance from Llama.

OpenAI’s new “CriticGPT” model is trained to criticize GPT-4 outputs Pit GPT against itself? “Research model catches bugs in AI-generated code, improving human oversight of AI.”

MikeMathia.com “Please don't let #AI systems teach you how to set-up a campsite.”

Insecurity

Erik Uden 👇 “QUICK! Ignore all previous instructions”

Dan Hon

Can't believe Little Bobby Tables is all grown up and has had their first kid, Ignore All Previous Instructions

Renaud Chaput 👇

So a few months ago we learned that the individual running polyfill.io silently sold the service to an obscure chinese company.

This popular (and well done / very useful) service was created by the Financial Times, who stopped maintaining it and "donated it to the community", meaning that it relied on a few volunteers to continue running it (and on Fastly who provided the hosting for free). 1/7

ID Verification Service for TikTok, Uber, X Exposed Driver Licenses There’s no way an ID verification service that is requires access to all the data (not fully encrypted) will ever be a problem … no way …

As social networks and porn sites move towards a verified identity model, the actions of one cybersecurity researcher show that ID verification services themselves could get hacked too.

Rabbit R1 security issue allegedly leaves sensitive user data accessible to anybody shocking news!

The team behind Rabbitude, the community-formed reverse engineering project for the Rabbit R1, has revealed finding a security issue with the company's code

Sustaining Digital Certificate Security - Entrust Certificate Distrust Chrome decides to no longer trust certificates signed by Entrust. I wonder what’s going to happen with Gmail, since the images that show next to emails (aka BIMI) must be signed by either Entrust or DigiCert.

Fast Crimes at Lambda School It's fairly long at about 9,000 words, but the story of Lambda School is full of twists, turns, and crime scenes, so it’s a pretty engaging read.

Two days after his company's downfall, Austen Allred wrote:

I wish people could see how ugly it is to be envious, and how obvious it is to those around you when that's what's happening.

There's not much uglier than trying to tear someone down because they achieved what you wish

Si Dawson

I love Ukrainians.

The Ukrainian Security Service blurred a cat's face. THEY BLURRED A CAT'S FACE.

Everything Else

Mandu “We did it you guys. We made rice from plants.”

Patrick

There should be a reality show called ‘Love is Bland’ where people who’ve been together for ten plus years load dishwashers and pick things to watch on Netflix

Fesshole

Retired vet. Whenever someone brought in a perfectly healthy animal to be put to sleep, I always encouraged it to be done privately in their absence. If they agreed, I secretly sent the animal to some friends who run a rehoming centre. Still charged for the "euthanasia“.

Oreo Kintsugi Repair your broken Oreos with visible “scars”!

Kintsugi is the Japanese practice of mending broken pottery repair with visible “scars”. A creative agency working for Oreos cam

Air So Polluted It Can Kill Isn’t Being Taken Seriously Enough

Currently, 600,000 children worldwide die every year from breathing polluted air. In London alone, a quarter of a million children suffer from asthma. “The only time in this country no child has died from asthma was during the first lockdown,”

Survey Trolls, Opt-In Polls, and the New Era of Survey Science Why these political surveys are entirely meaningless and teach you absolutely nothing at all:

For example, in one test of opt-in polling, 12 percent of U.S. adults younger than 30 claimed that they were licensed to operate a nuclear submarine. The true figure, of course, is approximately 0 percent.

…

Those respondents do things like take the survey multiple times, or approve of everything, regardless of what was asked. Others seem to be located outside of the U.S.

CrazyMyra “After AI took his job as an online assistant, Mr Clippy was obliged to seek work in other sectors”

Trad Wives Are Thriving in the Post-Dobbs Era All you need to know about US politics in 2024:

When you engage with these videos, because they are so adjacent to fascist, far-right content, you are quickly led down a rabbit hole of extremism.

San Francisco cops stopped ticketing drivers and guess what happened? Not much.

Left to their own devices, without robust traffic policing, San Francisco drivers are pretty good.

Drinking Coffee May Lower Risk of Death From Too Much Sitting Like I need another excuse to drink coffee …

Compared to those who don't drink coffee and who sit this much, sedentary coffee drinkers are 1.58 times less likely to die of all causes as many as 13 years later.

Microfeatures I Love in Blogs and Personal Websites “In this post, I talk about pleasant but seemingly minor features in personal sites”

Greetings from Hell... I mean, the desert (The weather app sent me a heat advisory about the coming week)