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Andy P “But it is public domain”
Tech Stuff
Fish 4.0b1 I'm giving Fish a try. So far it’s really amazing and a step up from ZSH, which itself was a step up from Bash. 4.0b1 is out, noted as “highly stable” and as better in a lot of ways (also, it’s a rewrite in Rust.) But the default install is still 3.7.1, to get 4.0b1: brew install fish-shell/fish-beta-4/fish.
Collection of insane and fun facts about SQLite A lot of things I didn’t know, including: it originated from a US warship, does not come with OSI approved license, does not accept outside contributions, has 600 lines of test for every line of coce, and they take backward compatibility very seriously.
Things we learned about LLMs in 2024 2024 was an epic year for LLMs but it wasn't all perfect.
My Favorite Website to Markdown Tools For LLMs A variety of tools you can use to convert any content into Markdown for the benefit of your LLM lord and master: MarkdownDown, HeckYesMarkdown.com, URLtoMarkdown.com, Jina.AI Reader, Firecrawl.dev, and Webscrapbook.
Tiptap A bucket of features for when you need an open-source collaborative editor framework. And they do seem to have a lot of features you can use to custom build your own editing creation: AI, whiteboard, chat, website builder, todo list, etc.
Software Design is Knowledge Building
Granted, my story was an all-too-perfect illustration of Naur’s thesis. I can’t prove it, but I suspect that we could benefit from accepting his theory as a law: the ultimate goal of software design should be (organizational) knowledge building.
Database mocks are just not worth it 💯
Zero one infinity rule I think this law makes a ton of perfect sense in the world of software: "The only reasonable numbers are zero, one and infinity."
codfather
Roni Laukkarinen Dad joke of the week:
Why are people from Norway so good at editing files in Linux?
Their ancestors are vi-kings.
Nostromo UI When you want your VS Code to resemble the computer from the Alien's Nostromo spacecraft.
Eye for Design
The Great Exhibition unveils the world's only office roller coaster in Stockholm “Breaking from routine”
Our goal is to foster creativity that feels real, breaking from routine and leaving a genuine mark
bad keming Explore the world of disastrous typography.
slash pages A guide to common pages you can add to your website.
DOOM CAPTCHA Now this is CAPTCHA that I don’t know if AI can defeat quite yet. Certainly I couldn't defeat it. 🤣
Peoples
How to break free from your “toxic productivity” cycle For 2025, let’s dodge the toxic productivity and embrace the “value-aligned life”.
Can you sleep your way to better decision making? Here’s what the science says Science has a few things to say about the committee of sleep:
“It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.”
Robin Rendle
One thing that drives me bonkers about tech culture is teaching designers that the bureaucracy is more important than the output — journey maps, documentation, multiple iterations, user research etc etc. All of these are fine tools but the goal is a good product and you can spend months producing mountains of all these design artifacts and still end up with junk.
Business Side
Meta scrambles to delete its own AI accounts after backlash intensifies According to Meta the future is AI-generated accounts in your Facebook feed. Because we love spending quality time with fakes. Or because ad publishers would spend more money if ads are watched by more I-balls? Either way, some people noticed that AI-generated accounts already exist and they’re quite a sloppy creation, so Facebook has discontinued them for now.
Ben Just a reminder that better search engines do exist.
John Breen
FWIW, I was with a medium size tech company about 15 years ago, and we had excellent human tech support, and it was rarely needed.
One big reason, IMHO, was that the support budget came out of the sales budget.
The dynamic this setup was that sales was forced to balance "requests for new features" with "cost of supporting poorly designed or executed products".
I think that's a very rare choice these days.
Indiana bakery still using Commodore 64s originally released in 1982 as cash registers — Hilligoss Bakery in Brownsburg sticks to the BASICs Sometimes the title writes itself :)
Machine Intelligence
It's 2083 and you can't tell if you're dating an AI
Can LLMs write better code if you keep asking them to “write better code”?
When you say "write better code" your prompt is accompanied with a copy of the previous conversation, so you're effectively saying "here is some code, suggest ways to improve it". The fact that the LLM itself wrote the previous code isn't really important.
ChatPRD This is the perfect job for our present day AI — write a PRD! It's not surprising that AI-4-PM is a thing that exists and at $10/month it’s actually very reasonably priced considering how many hours of “work” it can spare you. Or as their tagline says "Become a 10x PM.”
Age against the machine—susceptibility of large language models to cognitive impairment: cross sectional analysis The biggest challenge in AI is defeating dementia:
With the exception of ChatGPT 4o, almost all large language models subjected to the MoCA test showed signs of mild cognitive impairment
BirdVoxDetect Using AI to detect a bird from its song. While we’re on the subject of using AI to understand animal communications: Researchers ‘Translate’ Bat Talk. Turns Out, They Argue—a Lot
BoldVoice That was seriously impressive! 🤯 Nearly every person I meet fails to guess my accent — most people decide I sound French. This AI got it right with pretty high confidence.
Coconut by Meta AI – Better LLM Reasoning With Chain of CONTINUOUS Thought? Is Alex a gorpus or bompus? On using two cycles of continuous chain-of-thought (COCONUT) to add intelligence to LLMs.
Tips on Using LLMs (AI) Effectively for Text A collection of tips for using LLMs: generating text, revising it, summarizing, and retrieving info.
Botto: A decentralized autonomous artist While people are debating the value of AI art, Botto the “decentralized autonomous artist” had already netted $4m in sales.
Ged Maheux I tried that on my MacBook and I got the same result:
I asked Siri what a baby kangaroo was called and this is the response I got. No joke. I have no idea what’s going on at Apple any more.
Insecurity
Eniko
final results: people in infosec are more likely to know about the US strategic cheese reserve than the general public
Mark Downie (PS Honey is owned by PayPal)
A quick summary of the Honey scam:
- Honey promises customers the best coupons at checkout.
- They then collaborate with online stores to withhold the best coupons.
- Influencers are paid to endorse Honey.
- Honey replaces all influencer affiliate links at checkout.
Waldo Jaquith
FedEx's website lets you set a password of unlimited length (I've tested it up to 100), but when logging in, the password field has a maxlength of 25 characters, so it'll reject your >25 character password. If you override the maxlength in the HTML and enter the full password, then the form complains that the password field is empty.
🙄
Over 3.1 million fake "stars" on GitHub projects used to boost rankings You can now buy GitHub stars for 10 cents each, if you need your scam project to look convincing:
Users should look past stars, evaluate the repository activity and quality, read the documentation, examine the content and contributions, and review the code if possible.
Peter Wilson 💪
I got a phone call from the security department at my bank yesterday. It started with "you may think this is a scam but I will not ask you for any information, I will only be providing you with information", the caller then went on to warn "please don't give me information as part of this conversation" and advised me to call the bank after the call to verify the notes added to my account.
I was impressed.
Everything Else
Watch Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl Did I love every minute of Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl? Why yes I did!
Missing The Point
Be environmentally friendly and recycle your New Year’s resolutions.
Comrade Weez
In a world of Donald Trumps, be a Jimmy Carter
Etherbloom
Manza
just learned about recency bias. my favourite type of bias for sure
donni saphire
If I had to do it all over again, I would, but only because I had to
Trammell Hudson “Ready to tackle big math problems.”
Laura
At my funeral, take the bouquet from my coffin and throw it into the crowd to see who is next
marlies
I forgot who originally said this but doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result is the definition of practicing
Doodle Dreams Watch your child's imagination come alive through AI animation.
arturo182
"We don't abandon projects because they are hard, we abandon them cause they were 90% done and we lost interest!"
An Unreasonable Amount of Time
“Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.”
Coca‑Cola Creations But … why? Three thousand times why?
For the first time, Coca‑Cola Y3000 was co-created with artificial intelligence to help bring the flavor of tomorrow to Coke fans.
Dry January is more popular than ever in France, despite lack of government support Interesting. (I'll be in Franch end of January and I'm currently a practicing sober curious)
Apropos cutting down on alcohol consumption: Alcohol should carry warning label for cancer risk, US surgeon general says.
Not Only Do Campus Sexual Assailants Go Unpunished, They Often Get Special Treatment
The role of the university, Bedera points out, is to “treat students equitably and make sure students’ education isn’t impaired.” She continued, “Perpetrators are emboldened when they not only face no consequences for their violence, but also reap rewards.”
Great Guinness heist: thieves stole truck carrying 35,000 pints Impressive. But even more impressive: Excavator used to smash into North York bank, steal ATM.
"The Telepathy Tapes" is Taking America by Storm. But it Has its Roots in Old Autism Controversies. The third-most popular podcast on Spotify is entirely about telling parents their kids are not autistic they're telepathic.
On roads teeming with robotaxis, crossing the street can be harrowing Waymo (aka Google) admits that it trains its robotaxis to break the law. Waymos fail to stop for pedestrians in marked crosswalk 70% of the time. Waymo says it follows "social norms" rather than laws.
Self-Driving Waymo Cab Smashes Into Delivery Robot Speaking of Waymo, the future we were promised: self-driving cars smashing into food delivery robots.
Wolf 2.0
A camp for HIV positive kids in Northern Minnesota is closing and going up for sale.
The reason? Anti-retroviral HIV drugs work. There are now not enough HIV-positive kids to need the camp.
Some good news to start your 2025
Doom Ugly Christmas Sweater I found about it a few days too late, maybe for next year.
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