Happy July Bizarro Readers!

This month’s issue is another mix of interesting articles mixed with some practical tutorials and tools. And of course this wouldn’t be Bizarro Devs if we didn’t have at least a few bizarre stories to share with you. Let’s kick things off with our top highlights:

• 🧠🤖 The Most Dystopian Thing You’ll Read This Month (Probably)

• 🕵️‍♂️💰 How a Smart, Quiet Boston Teenager Stole Millions in Crypto

• 🤖💼 Beyond ATS: AI Interviewer Ushers in New Era of Tech Hiring

Enjoy the read.

📰 From the Newsroom

🧠🤖 The Most Dystopian Thing You’ll Read This Month (Probably)

The future of incarceration might not involve bars and concrete cells, but rather AI-powered pods that implant artificial memories into prisoners' brains. This isn't science fiction, but a controversial concept called Cognify, dubbed the "prison of the future." Designed by Berlin-based filmmaker Hashem Al-Ghaili, this speculative technology proposes to revolutionize criminal rehabilitation by forcing offenders to experience their crimes from the victim's perspective, all within minutes of real time.

• Cognify would use AI to create and implant artificial memories into prisoners' brains, potentially compressing years of rehabilitation into minutes of real time.

• The system is based on real scientific advancements, including successful memory implantation in mice and the transfer of memories between marine snails.

• While proponents argue it could reduce costs and reoffending rates, critics raise serious concerns about consent, privacy, and the potential for abuse.

Implanting fabricated memories into peoples’ brains sounds like an awesome plot for a sci-fi movie but a truly frightening idea for real-world implementation. Although we’ve seen some dystopian technological advancements in the past few years, particularly in the realm of warfare, this right here is arguably one of the creepiest things yet. Can you imagine how this would be abused by the alphabet agencies?

🕵️‍♂️💰 How a Smart, Quiet Boston Teenager Stole Millions in Crypto

The tale of Joel Ortiz reads like a Hollywood thriller. To his mother, he was her bright son, studying on a scholarship at UMass after being valedictorian of his high school class. To the online criminal gang he belonged to, he was known by the handle @O. He and his associates targeted well-known investors in the crypto world and drained millions from unsuspecting victims.

• Ortiz orchestrated most of his theft from his mother’s modest Boston apartment, but would use the proceeds to take brief trips to Los Angeles, where he rented out mansions and lived the high life.

• He ended up stealing over $7.5 million USD by utilizing the "SIM swapping" technique, and became the first person in the U.S. to be sentenced to prison for using it.

• Victims lost staggering amounts, ranging from $100,000 to $5 million, with the crimes being executed in mere moments.

Ortiz's penchant for flaunting his ill-gotten wealth on social media became his Achilles' heel. Investigators were watching him closely, and one day, as he was preparing to jet off to Europe from LAX, his high-flying lifestyle came to a screeching halt. He was arrested and eventually sentenced to serve 10 years, with a release date in 2028. There’s an interesting plot twist here though: the bulk of the stolen cash was never recovered and authorities have no idea if he or a third-party hid the money somewhere.

🤖💼 Beyond ATS: AI Interviewer Ushers in New Era of Tech Hiring

For over two decades, Applicant Tracking Systems have been the gatekeepers between aspiring job hunters and human recruiters. Now, a new startup called micro1 is taking automated recruitment to the next level with an AI that doesn't just sort resumes - it conducts full-fledged technical interviews.

• The AI interviewer generates tailored questions based on candidates' self-reported skills, conducts voice-based technical interviews, and produces detailed evaluation reports.

• Early results are promising, with micro1 reporting that their AI screening has increased the pass rate for human interviews from a typical 10-15% to around 50%. In short, better qualified candidates are making it in front of human interviewers, thus saving them time in the hiring process.

• The company is tackling concerns about AI bias head-on, refining questions based on human interviews and emphasizing that the AI cannot make final pass/fail decisions.

As the tech industry grapples with nearly 400,000 open computing jobs in the US alone, micro1's innovation couldn't come at a better time. But it also raises thorny questions about the role of AI in high-stakes decisions. Can an algorithm really judge a candidate's potential? Based on the initial results, the answer seems to be “yes.” Moreover, candidates themselves seem to enjoy being vetted by the AI as well, with 80-90% of early candidates reporting very favorable feedback.

⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

• ASDFJKL; - these are the standard homerow keys that anyone with a keyboard designed for the English language is familiar with, but what if better keyboard layouts exist for programmers? Get familiar with the Programmer Dvorak layout.

• The results of the latest Stack Overflow survey are in. Based on responses from roughly 90K software developers from across the globe, it appears that Zig developers have the highest median salaries, earning $103,000 per year on average.

• MySQL expert, Daniel Nichter, shares an entertaining reflection of his 20 years of working with MySQL. It’s filled with personal anecdotes and offers an insightful glimpse into the evolution of this popular database management system.

• The Brazilian government has decided to hire ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, for the purpose of expediting the screening and analysis of thousands of lawsuits. The goal is to save money by avoiding expensive court losses.

• Google Translate is expanding its language support by adding 110 new languages, increasing its total from 133 to 243 in what the company calls its largest expansion to date.

• A resident of Cheyenne, Wyoming created a custom GPT that he trained on thousands of documents taken from Cheyenne city council meetings. He then decided to enter it as a candidate for mayor in the city’s elections.

• While you can put on a VR headset and immerse yourself visually in another world, that immersion is limited to sight and sound. Enter haptic gloves, the missing sensory piece designed to allow users to feel their virtual environment.

• 📽️🎞️ The famous toy store, Toys Я Us, has created a really cool one minute movie using OpenAI’s Sora. The mini film depicts the story of a young Charles Lazarus, the founder of the brand, envisioning his dreams as a little boy in the early 1930s.

• One of the most useful features added to the JavaScript language in recent years is JavaScript modules, also referred to as ES6 modules. Check out this helpful beginner’s tutorial to get started with them.

• You may not have noticed, but Meta has begun quietly using any info you’ve uploaded to your Facebook account to train its AI models. You can, however, submit a request to opt out. Read one writer’s amusing explanation of navigating her way through Meta’s ridiculously cumbersome process to do it.

🎤 It’s How They Said It

"A single trained AI model can pilot a swarm of drones or a thousand different robot bodies at once, but I do not pilot my body. I am my body."

– Professor Shannon Vallor, explaining the limitations of applying the software-hardware metaphor to mind and body

🧮 The Numbers Game

• Nearly 50% of Dell's staff opted to forego their eligibility for promotion rather than return to the office when the company recently launched an initiative to convince their remote workers to come back at least part of the time. The effort wasn't as successful as Dell had hoped.

• 33 ChatGPT-generated submissions to a take home exam were recently submitted to University of Reading professors to see how well the professors would rate the responses and if they’d be able detect or suspect that they weren’t written by human students. Only a single submission was flagged as suspicious. The rest all scored higher than their human-generated counterparts.

• $8 is the starting asking price for a new Singaporean identity on the dark web. Researchers have noted a spike in the number of underground vendors selling stolen identity data of Singapore citizens. It has more than doubled compared to last year, and is up about 230% in total.

⌨️ Code Conundrum

Sponsored by Optimole, the best image optimization tool on the internet.

Last issue’s Python winner was Rune Memborg. Congrats Rune! The error was contained in the (post['id']). There was more than one solution and the solution I originally had, differed from Rune’s, but ultimately, the (post['id']) is what needed to be addressed. Nicely done everyone. 👏🏻

Let’s do another Python one for this issue:

Send me an email once you spot the error. Please put "Code Conundrum" in the subject line. Once again, the first person who emails me with the correct answer (either saying what the error is or sending back the snippet error-free) will get a shoutout in the next issue.

Also, a quick tip, don’t assume that if you are reading this a day or two after it was published that someone submitted the correct answer already. Just because someone else responds quickly doesn’t mean that they respond correctly.

Interested in sponsoring this section? Reach out to me with “Bizarro Sponsorship” in the subject line.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

JSON Editor Online: This freemium editor lets you view, edit, format, query, transform, compare, repair, validate and more. It also has a useful conversion feature so you can move your JSON to a CSV file and vice versa.

Virtually all of the functionality is available for free. For a nominal $3 per month, you can remove ads, and for $6 per month, you can create private documents in the cloud (1 MB per document, 1 GB total storage).

https://jsoneditoronline.org/

PDFSlick: PDFSlick is a library that enables viewing of and interaction with PDF documents in React and SolidJS apps. It's build on top of Mozilla's PDF.js, and utilizes Zustand to provide a reactive state for the loaded documents.

https://pdfslick.dev/

🖼️ What Am I Looking At?

Asier Sanz is a Basque illustrator, graphic humorist and collage artist.

He is internationally renowned for his collage caricature of Donald Trump made of banana, chorizo and mortadella. The caricature was exhibited at the Design Museum of London (2018), and was his first viral collage worldwide. The image above is his take on AI vs humanity.

💬 What’s the Word?

Shoshin (初心) is a Japanese term that refers to having a “beginner’s mind” when learning. It’s meant to reinforce keeping an open mind and being eager to learn with no preconceived notions or expectations. This is irrespective of your skill level or experience in the subject.

Applying the philosophy of shoshin can be helpful when learning a new programming language. Even if you might see some overlapping context that looks familiar, it’s good to stay open-minded and to take each language for what it is.

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Until we see each other again,
– Martin