Heya,

I never thought I'd spend a few hours every workday saying "Buddy, you need to put your pants on". Adapting to a work from home life while raising a toddler has been a hell of a ride. I'm lucky I can take advantage of this opportunity, but I'd just as grateful if he was wearing pants.

This week:

🍔Fast-food classics you can make at home.
🤖Facebook's Reddit trained chatbot is more fun than a human.
🎧 Audio deepfakes create a rapped version of Shakespeare by Jay-Z.

Enjoy,

Chris

Bizarro Devs  

The things that kept me busy this week. 🕴️

Social media toolsMarco Polo might be a better way to keep in touch with your friends. It looks like a cool way to share short videos with people you miss without needing to schedule everything.

Workouts emailed to you three times a week with a full-body 29-minute routine each time. This might be worth a look.

Cheat day recipes If you're feeling a little wicked, then these fast-food at home recipes might hit the spot. Learn how to make a McGriddle, Chick-fil-a nuggets, and other culinary treats.

Banish resting Zoom faceThis video will show you how to set up a phone for Zoom the quality is much, much better. More Matthew, less Jabba.

Quizzes One thing that English people do better than anyone is quizzes. This site has new 2,5, and 10-minute quizzes every day.

Bizarro Devs  

Facebook's new chatbot trained on Reddit posts. 🤖

Training by the numbers: The chatbot was trained on 1.5 million public domain conversations. This superior training led Facebook to claim that 49% of people preferred conversations with the chatbot over normal human conversations. If these conversations happened on Facebook the numbers aren't really surprising.

Facebook to the very core of its being: The longer the conversation, the more offensive Blender will become. If it isn't offending you, then it just starts making up facts.

Blender is more human than human: It can get pretty fancy and display empathy, knowledge, and personality. How it picked up these skills from reading Reddit posts is the real achievement here.

No books, please we're robots: Blender can talk about music, movies, and veganism. I admit the veganism surprised me a bit.

bbc.com  

1. A Jay-Z deepfake has him rapping Shakespeare. You need to jump on it fast, now that Jay-Z has initiated copyright strikes against the producer. Check out the entire channel for things like a deepfake of Baby Got Back "rapped" by Bill Clinton.
2. The Pudding is one of the best sites on the internet for their data-visualizations, research, and design. Check out their latest which tests your knowledge of hit music from the past.
3. Dark pattern design might be effective but, damn, is it annoying. The difficulty of achieving ethics in web design and how you can do it.
4. A simple way to set up headless WordPress for faster sites.
5. A very, very cool story of potatoes in Peru. Don't skip past. The way images, text, and video is integrated on the page is great.
6. Are you one of the 100% of React users who finds it a challenging language? This is a novel approach to React problems and provides a good mental model for React work.
7. The very latest in WordPress news.
8. Kevin Kelly is a co-founder of Wired and his job title is Senior Maverick. Not bad. His 68 bits of unsolicited advice is full of wisdom.
9. The Annual Preservation Month is entirely virtual. Thirty-one days of historical places you can view right from your laptop. Perfect for one of your thousand meetings that used to be quick emails.
10. The 2020-21 meteor shower calendar.

Bizarro Devs  

That's it for the week.

If you have a link for me, then my emails are always open. Simply hit reply to this email to land in my inbox.

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Have a great week,
Chris.

Bizarro Devs