This week we learn a new Postgres trick, write JavaScript for MS-DOS, we answer phone calls on our washer, go big on monospace fonts, we teach you how to market, Rickroll our customers, name our wifi Stinky, and cross the street in the modern world, and vote for the Tara Iti.
reMarkable Paper Pro And now for a delightful looking e-book reader: 11.8" color display, two-week battery life, paper-like texture, handwriting recognition, weighs only 525g, starting at $579.
Alternatively, the HannsNote2 is merely 350g, with 60hz refresh rate from its 10" color screen, and costs less at $350, but with only 4.5 hour battery life.
AI-Powered Editor When you need a rich-text editor with markdown support that also has some AI capabilities (pro: bring your own LLM) and an open-source license.
Beware of (automated) systems that make easy problems easier while making hard problems even harder: you often don’t learn about this trade-off until it’s too late.
This week, we discover the different types of bugs that LLM-generated code can provide, and how to mitigate their potential impact.
Retell AI When you want an LLM that can pick up the phone and answer but also too lazy to write the code yourself. This is one service that combines 6 other services that are each fairly easy to use, but if you don’t want to spend your time learning 6 different APIs …
We help developers build human-like conversational Voice AI in a day — with an ~800ms response time and the ability to handle interruptions.
It just occurred to me that the phases in waterfall software development could just as well have been named after the stages of grief:
denial (requirements and design)
anger (implementation)
bargaining (functional testing)
depression (alpha & beta testing) and
acceptance (release)
Inside the guidance system and computer of the Minuteman III nuclear missile Talk about RISC, the D-37C has only 58 instructions! At 12,800 ops per second it wasn't particularly fast, and it was also very economical in the storage department with only 14KB of hard disk space :( On the plus side it could travel to the other side of the world in only 35 minutes.
Sculley ultimately ran out of steam, but in the time he was at Apple he also took it from an $800m company to an $8bn one. Meanwhile, Jobs was back in founder mode at NeXT where, having taken some of Apple’s best people with him, he created a computer that no one wanted to buy and an operating system that remarkably few people installed.
Hal Pomeranz Unfortunately yes, much long-term hiring is pushed to 2025:
I feel like I’ve been giving this advice a lot lately, so I’m just going to put it on blast.
I’m sorry to say that this is an absolutely terrible time to be looking for work in tech here in the USA. We’ve had a lot of layoffs which flooded the market with job seekers. And employers are all holding their collective breath waiting for the results of the November elections. I’m talking to employers and some are explicitly saying, “No hiring until 2025.”
So it’s not just you. And it’s not an indictment of your skills and what you bring to the table. It’s about the environment you find yourself in right now. I know it feels personal and rejection feels like shit. I see you, I see your worth.
Michael Smith, 52, allegedly used AI to create hundreds of thousands of fake songs by nonexistent bands, then streamed them using bots to collect royalties from platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music
But it's not about the generative AI, it’s about automating the listening “audience”:
While the AI-generated element of this story is novel, Smith allegedly broke the law by setting up an elaborate fake listener scheme.
Marketing Strategy Generator Can AI help you with your marketing strategy? I doubt it. But here's a winning strategy in there: copy everything you see on this website — the fancy name, the demo video, green CTA button, widget showing live orders, walls of testimonials, etc. Do that and your site will also be able to convert random visitors into paying "customers”!
Machine Intelligence
Using GPT-4o for web scraping I haven’t used LLMs for scraping quite yet, but something tells me they'll do a remarkable job at that!
I was surprised by the extraction quality of GPT-4o (but then sadly surprised when I looked at how much I’d have to pay OpenAI!). Nonetheless, this was a fun experiment and I definitely see potential for AI-assisted web scraping tools.
The /llms.txt file If I get it right, this is the future of robots.txt (RIP)?
A proposal to standardise on using an /llms.txt file to provide information to help LLMs use a website.
Despite efforts to remove overt racial prejudice, language models using artificial intelligence still show covert racism against speakers of African American English that is triggered by features of the dialect.
Powerpoint suggests alt text now when I make slides for class, which is great! Like for this image: "A police officer helping a person with a dog"
Train and Customize Your AI Assistant Effortlessly with BrainyBear This is pretty amazing: “Instantly answer your visitors' questions with a personalized chatbot trained on your content.” In just three easy steps, you too can generate an utterly useless personalized AI chatbot that can’t answer even simple questions 🤦♂️
Create Custom AI Assistants with BrainyBear in Just 3 Steps and Train Them in 3 Clicks.
"The way these models work is they try to predict the most likely next sequence of text," Crivello explained. "So it starts like, 'Oh, I’m going to send you a video!' So what’s most likely after that? YouTube.com. And then what’s most likely after that?“
Insecurity
SunTzuCyber This is a new social media account that does The Art of War except for cybersecurity and it’s just so delightful to follow:
"The art of cyber war is knowing when to strike… and when to reboot." - The Art of Cyber War
"Never let your enemy know your next move, especially if it's turning the router off and on again." - The Art of Cyber War
"In cyber war, even the strongest passwords can fall, but a mind prepared for battle is unbreakable." - The Art of Cyber War
"Do not rely too heavily on the skill of the common person to detect attacks. The adversary can quickly adapt." - The Art of Cyber War
Did you know that setting a complex password that is at least 15 characters long can add THOUSANDS of years to the time it takes a hacker to crack it?
Everyone on the dark web will be very impressed with your password prowess when they see it in the plaintext file of passwords that circulates after the company is breached!
Microsoft won’t say whether it will let Windows users fully uninstall Recall. A new option that appeared recently was ‘incorrectly listed,’ says Microsoft.
Everything Else
Jan Mayen The modern world (“Meine gestrige Aufnahme passt zum Thema 'Moderne Welt’ In Flensburg gibt's ne nette Ampel!”)
Just saw that there was yet another school shooting… and one comment on Reddit was „just curious if Walmart would sell bulletproof vests would they be in the gun aisle or the school supplies aisle?“😩
As a teenager in Neustrelitz (East Germany), I painted small stones purple and left them all over town. Did it for years. It drove the police and Stasi nuts. It meant nothing. It just felt good to do something they couldn't control or understand.
Today's prize for on-brand academic behaviour goes to the School of Mathematics & Statistics, University of Glasgow, for disguising their building as a chalkboard.
(I'm informed that the elements were collected from working chalkboards in staff offices.)
New rules were introduced by the Welsh government with the aim of making it easier for people to afford homes in the area where they grew up.
To help achieve this, powers were given to local authorities to charge a premium of up to 300% on top of the normal council tax rate for those who own a second home in Wales.
“The new law requires the city to protect the physical shape of the river, the ecological cycles that make the waves unique, and the water’s finely balanced chemical makeup through public policies and funding. It also codifies respect for the waves’ cultural and economic role in the community…”
“It’s striking that the content that many of those at the top of the MAGA media game are pushing to voters is so closely aligned with the objectives of Russian state media that RT hardly had to intervene at all.”
The Italian town that banned cricket There are some things that Italy is really good at. Great looking cars that make amazing engine sounds. A history of making pizza and repurposing Chinese noodles. And just plain old not-even-denying-it racism:
The town has an ethnic make-up unique in Italy: of a population of just over 30,000, nearly a third are foreigners. Most of them are Bangladeshi Muslims who began to arrive in the late 1990s to build giant cruise-ships.
As a consequence the cultural essence of Monfalcone is in danger, according to mayor Anna Maria Cisint, who belongs to the far-right League party.
She swept to power on the back of anti-immigration sentiment - and has gone on a mission to “protect” her town and defend Christian values.
This week we run a search through Postgres, wear our Mac on our wrist, font with the Z80, hyperfocus through this post, remember Quiznos, close the circle of grift, watch Cybertruck in its habitat, lay
This week we learn how to Zod, we draggy and swappy, we interview our internal customers, don't get anything completed on time, lay off our energy healer, decode the ToS, guard our headphones, walk
This week we get our dev docs offline, color the windows, guesstimate our credit score, sue an ice cream, honk like a self-driving car, experiment on a lion, cancel our Disney+ account, and reuse our
This week we do a screen recording, restart WordStar, take our printer to space, play medieval tunes, sample the LLM, and watch out for the blow-nado. 😎 Labnotes (by Assaf Arkin) Weekend Reading —
This week we watch the olympics, make a todo list, propose new password rules, purchase a domain for > $1M, get an AI massage, shot with hand in pocket, save 100% by not buying anything, and measure
Daily Coding Problem Good morning! Here's your coding interview problem for today. This problem was asked by Twitter. A classroom consists of N students, whose friendships can be represented in an
Let's return to the previous series and discuss the typical challenge of distributed systems: Observability. We'll continue to use managing a connection pool for database access as an example
A new deep dive about a new browser, track everything and understand your life, the story of Figma Sans, and a lot more in this week's issue of Creativerly. Creativerly The Art of finishing &
This graphic presents global coal consumption by region from 1965 to 2023, highlighting Asia's continued role in driving demand. View Online | Subscribe | Download Our App Experience Data Without
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Welcome to issue #416 September 16th, 2024 News Backup and DR Service Compute Engine Official Blog Introducing backup vaults for cyber resilience and simplified Compute Engine backups - Google Cloud
OpenAI just unveiled o1, kicking off a new series of "reasoning" models designed to tackle complex questions faster than we... Product Hunt Read in browser This newsletter is brought to you
