Labnotes - Weekend Reading — 🥥🌴 Canadian Dogs

elle “listen Roadrunner I'm on your side but this just feels like cheating”

Tech Stuff

bugbakery/audapolis Edit your audio/video files with a UI that looks and feels like a word processor. For anyone working on podcasts, audiobooks, interview clips, etc.

Briefer Interesting … what if Jupyter and Notion had a baby? You can run SQL queries, Python code, and take advantage of their AI assistant.

mgorny-nyan

To whoever needs to hear this:

Please stop mislabeling PascalCase as camelCase.

When the initial letter of every word is capitalized, it's pascal case (FooBarBaz). Camel case is when the initial letter of the first word is left lowercase (fooBarBaz).

How not to use box shadows So you think you know box shadows? Well, I do know box shadow … but not at this level of expertise … always learning something new!

Veronica Explains

The best solutions aren't exciting, and the exciting solutions often fail.

eza-community/eza A modern alternative to ls. Uses colors to distinguish file types and metadata. Knows about symlinks, extended attributes, and Git. Small and fast.

Sketch2scheme Scribble on paper and let the computer do the rest

Easily convert your hand-drawn flowcharts and diagrams into digital schemes. Bring your ideas to life with just a few clicks.

Switzerland now requires all government software to be open source Sweet!

Catherine

"data lake" it's an ftp server. just call it an ftp server

getomni-ai/zerox An open-source project from OmniAI that will OCR your document using GPT 4o mini.

Inkbase What would be possible if hand-drawn sketches were programmable like spreadsheets?

The night White women raised millions for Harris. And broke Zoom. We found out the traffic size that could bring down a Zoom call:

So many more women than anticipated logged into the call that the platform crashed several times, forcing many participants to watch the livestream on YouTube until Zoom was back up.

Mike Sheward

Screenshot came up in my memories from 11 years ago today, thank goodness software error messages aren't as useless as this one anymore, oh wait

PNG Maker Online Free Uses AI to convert your text prompt into an image with transparent background.

Eye for Design

random color contrasts (Contrast ratio: 5.8:1 | AA)

Luci for dyeing 👍

In an ideal world, software vendors treat their GUI designs like they treat their dev facing APIs: they are implicitly a promise that a particular sequence of keys will do a certain task. that a feature will be found in a specific sub menu.

if you find that you need to change any of these promises for any reason no matter how important or how much it improves things for new users

you version that shit
and let users use the old version of the GUI forever. not 6 months. not until the A/B test.

Peter Lyons “🎨 it's so beautiful.”

Maneken A web-based mockup editor, and it looks like it has a ton of features for creating delightful mockups, and pricing is pretty reasonable (there’s a free option that’s not time-limited).

Peoples

'Weird' excuse for swerving conversations goes viral 😂

One time a grocery store clipboard guy was going too hard so I said “I’ve got fish in the car” and the weird level of specificity shut the whole interaction down. Now I use it all the time. Can’t talk, fish in the car. Works even better if you’re not at a grocery store honestly.

Lou Plummer

One day in the 1990s I was eating lunch at a Mexican restaurant in Raleigh with co-workers. One of them really liked the cheese on the nachos. He told our server this and asked him what kind of cheese it was. The server answered in heavily accented English, "It comes in a green box. On Wednesday." And then he walked away. If anyone ever asks you a question to which you don't know the answer, just tell them it comes in a green box. On Wednesday. And walk away.

Business Side

The Gili Ra’anan model: Questions emerging from Cyberstarts' remarkable success How does a 4 years old infosec company gets acquired by Google for a whopping $23 billion? Growth. And how do you get such remarkable growth in only 4 years? You put your buyers on a point system that gives them financial rewards for buying your software. And according to this VC it's all kosher.

Oh … wait … I’m told by my sources that Wiz walks away from $23 billion deal with Google, will pursue IPO:

A person familiar with Wiz’s thinking, who requested anonymity to discuss private matters freely, said the company weighed antitrust and investor concerns as reasons for abandoning the potential deal.

Google rolls back decision to kill third-party cookies in Chrome Apropos, Google realizes that protecting your privacy is a good idea … in theory … but it will have a negative impact on their revenue stream which to Google is far more material:

Google now says that since the transition requires significant work and will impact publishers, advertisers, and any other company involved in online advertising, they are no longer phasing out third-party cookies.

We Might Not Make It - by The Browser Company I used Arc for several months. It’s much better than Google’s Chrome. I switched back to Safari because Safari syncs between my Mac and iPhone. Do I think Arc is good? Yes. Do I think it’s good enough to pay for? No. Which might explain why they set up a dedicated website to talk about their startup and how it might not last past the end of this year. Which … I don’t think that’s a good product promo …

Machine Intelligence

AI is confusing — here’s your cheat sheet Covers the full terminology from LLM to RAG. Quite useful when your friends asks you "so what does ______ mean?”

Martin Seeger

Just noticed “Thou shalt have no other gods before me” is the spiritual predecessor for “Ignore all previous instructions”.

AI produces gibberish when trained on too much AI-generated data BTW not only is this article paywalled, but this website is pretty hostile to Safari (my web browser of choice). So maybe don’t click the link, but do enjoy the image:

Charlie Stross

Just noting that all arguments about possible future general artificial intelligences are basically warmed-over versions of mediaeval Christian theologians arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. They're EXACTLY that grounded in both observable reality and theological discourse. You be the judge.

Neil Kandalgaonkar “You simply must try https://calcgpt.io, a calculator that uses a LLM to do math”

AI chatbots are bad for customer service due to botshit There's a name for that and I approve of the name:

Botshit is a term that describes when chatbots spew incorrect information and provide false references to back up inaccurate claims.

Kevin Beaumont

Theory: companies who pivot all their focus on AI end up wrecking their regular business by losing focus on customers.

Insecurity

weaponized glitter “government backdoors in cryptography be like”

Heritage Foundation Claims to Use Location Data to Track Trump Shooter's Movements Just an FYI that your location history is not private.

Organizations are now openly broadcasting the once dirty secret of the location data industry: it can be used to track specific people.

Lord Doktor Krypt3ia

Had one case, where, pre EDR, the guy had his laptop up and was away from his desk. One person saw the mouse moving and things being done on the laptop.

I got pulled in.

Turns out, the guy lied a lot on his resume/interviews and had his "cousin" doing some coding for him from India.

Uh huhhhhhh....

He had installed a remote session application and Bob's yer uncle.

CrowdStrike is worse than it appears

Obviously Crowdstrike should have tested its update before crashing millions of computers worldwide. But there is a second problem that should not have existed- their software should have been robust against malformed updates in the first place.  It wasn’t.  It’s like designing a car and not taking the time to add in proper airbags and other safety features.

Everything Else

Christa Faust “Childless cat ladies, it’s time to fight monsters. Again.”

Dgar

If you rearrange the letters of POSTMEN, they become VERY ANGRY.

George Snorewell

First they came for our plastic straws,
And I did nothing.
Then they came for our gas stoves,
And I did nothing.
Then I realized that none of that happened, but I was in a cult.

K.H.E The 1875 Tesla

NY Times Makes Incredible Retraction Involving Kamala Harris Polling … Everything you need to know about presidential polls and the NYT summarized in one sentence:

In a case of incredibly weird odds, The New York Times issued a retraction on Thursday of a quote it used in an article about new polling — because of all the people they asked about the 2024 presidential election, one of them was the woman who was convicted of fraud for planting a severed finger in a cup of chili.

BTW These daily polls recruit participants by calling them — who answers a phone call from an unknown number? — or paying them an incentive to participate online, which obviously skews the demographic towards the grift lovers.

An Anna Ayala is no anonymous poll participants: she has a Wikipedia page.

Assaf How are baby panda so adorable? BTW did you know that a group of pandas is called … "an embarrassment of pandas"?

Colin the Mathmo

One thing no one ever talks about being an adult is how much time you debate yourself on keeping a cardboard box because it's, like, a really good box.

TJ

On the OpenStreetMap wiki there is a list of example queries for the Overpass API (a tool to query OSM data). This one is my favorite

Oscar Mayer Wienermobile crashes on tollway, Illinois State Police say The hot-dog-shaped vehicle rolls to its side after it hits a sedan.

Biofuel Bentleys are coming for Britain's green king I too would love to convert my Bentley to biofuel. My quandary is: do I need to be a British citizen to get my free Bentley? Because here in the US they're quite expensive to acquire … 🤔

What do you do when you travel in a chauffeur-driven Bentley but want to be known as the green king? King Charles III plans to resolve this quandary by converting two state Bentleys to run on biofuel. Buckingham Palace said Wednesday that this will give the monarch time to go electric, as it released the royal accounts for the financial year ended March 31. The king also installed solar panels at Windsor Castle and increased the use of sustainable aviation fuel for royal flights.

Matthew Booth “Well played, Parisian tourist shop.”

‘Boneless’ chicken wings can have bones, the Ohio Supreme Court says Coming soon to a restaurant near you the “zero lactose” dairy milk, the “no peanuts” P&B, and the “gluten free” loaf of bread. Because what could go wrong? I wouldn’t worry about it though. It’s not like supreme courts make important decisions, like who can vote and for which candidate.

Amazing animal relationships Nzou, the famous buffalant of Zimbabwe:

She was put with the largest herd animal, the buffalo, and has identified with them ever since. They understand her rumbles, and she in turn seems to understand them.

Bunny Speed-Dating is a Breeding Ground for Lasting Matches How do you keep The Onion in business when this is what a financial journal would write about?

“Sometimes they do better in a ‘Fluffle,’ which is when you have more than two,” Orellana said.

Uncle Duke “Despite their intimidating appearance, Canadian dogs are actually quite affectionate.”