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Dan Neuman “Nice one, IKEA”
Tech Stuff
⌘K Fast, composable, unstyled command menu for React. Not to be confused with Paletro, a command palette for every macOS app.
Remind Me Faster I think this is the perfect app for people with ADHD and at $3.99 not at all expensive, my only complaint is there's no macOS version (yet). It's an app that uses Apple Reminders but with a super slick text-based entry interface designed to never slow you down. Accessible from lock screen, control center, share sheet. Use natural language to add reminders, like “Reply to Mike tomorrow at 10am” — RMF understands time, location, etc.
Use Long Options in Scripts 👍
Many command line utilities support short form options (-f) and long form options (--force).
Short form is for interactive usage. In scripts, use the long form.
sharkdp/fd A simple, fast and user-friendly alternative to find.
notetime This is a super cool app for taking notes during a meeting: a distraction-free experience where everything is timestamped for you.
Wheel Reinventor's Principles Why and how to (sometimes) write stuff from scratch.
Lightpanda Like headless Chrome but much speedier — your AI agents will love you for using it:
The AI-native web browser built from scratch for machines. Not a fork. Not a patch. Fast, scalable web automation with a minimal memory footprint. 10x faster, 10x less RAM, and 100x better than Chrome headless.
Setapp Goodness and Tips I finally decided to give it a try, so far added 4 new apps, 2 that I’m using daily. Also 2 apps I’ve been using for a long while are on Setapp. Bonus point, you’re helping a Ukrainian company:
Setapp is an app subscription service ($9.99 a month) owned by the Ukrainian company Macpaw. It has approximately 1 million subscribers, which is a good testament to its usefulness. Here are some of the things I've learned in a year and half of being a customer.
logseq This is really interesting — an open-source app that lets you manage your notes and link them together, keep track of tasks, highlight PDFs, whiteboard, and much more. There’s also an extensive collection of plugins, and it runs on all the major operating systems and phones. Personally, I feel it requires too much patience and dedication for me to use it, but I trust some people will find this the perfect everything bucket for their life. Give it a try, it might be the right fit for you.
Juanan
Researchers at Harvard Business School and University of Toronto used unique data to quantify the value of open source.
Takeways:
- Supply-side (cost to recreate) is ~$4.15B, but demand-side (value to firms) is $8.8T. Shows massive cost savings & productivity boost from OSS.
- If OSS didn't exist, firms would need to spend an estimated 3.5 times more on software than they currently do. OSS provides a massive, often invisible, productivity boost.
- A tiny fraction of OSS developers create the vast majority of value. Only 5% of developers are responsible for over 96% of the demand-side value
- Firms should not just "free ride" on OSS but actively contribute to the ecosystem, as this is far cheaper than recreating the software themselves.
You also hate SQL? Let the LLM handle it "In the final slide, I come back to the three most important lessons: Iterate quickly, make the SQL generation robust and explainable, and iterate from a baseline.”
Tabby Cat A Chrome extension that adds a new friend in every browser tab.
Docs I’m on the fence, because it needs Docker to install, and I’d much rather just sign up to an existing webapp. But I do love the idea — essentially an open-source alternative to Notion/Word/Google Docs.
vxfemboy/purrcrypt A fur-ociously secure encryption tool that encodes your secrets as adorable cat and dog sounds, using real elliptic curve cryptography with a playful disguise. 🐱🐶
agile_otter
“A common fallacy is to assume authors of incomprehensible code will somehow be able to express themselves lucidly and clearly in comments.” — Kevlin Henney
Tasktile Get motivated to complete daily tasks with this GitHub-style contribution calendar in your menubar.
giacomo-b/rust-stakeholder Become an irreplaceable 10x developer in 30 seconds flat with this impressive-looking terminal output toy that makes you look 100% busy when stakeholders walk by your desk.
Martin Rundkvist
“In everyone’s pocket right now is a computer far more powerful than the one we flew on Voyager. I don’t mean your cell phone — I mean the key fob that unlocks your car.”
— Rich Terrile, JPL scientist and member of the Voyager imaging team
TikTok Good morning! ☕Here are some pictures of cable management done right.
Eye for Design
Our interfaces have lost their senses
Volpeon When you need to pay the subscription fee to shrink a div element:
Product Artistry Games Understand the techniques that make notifications impossible to ignore.
luna, only carbon now
out in the middle of nowhere, looking at the wifi options, got curious to “learn more…”
I don’t know what I expected.
Peoples
How to Get a Standing Ovation as a Conference Speaker This is a really good list: script your talk, rehearse it, tell a story with emotional twist, have a pre-recorded demo, don't use wall of text but use the Lessig Method instead, don't “read the slides", don't use laser pointer, etc. Stuff I’m always doing when delivering a presentation. Though I would have phrased it “how to get people to care about your talk” — I think people who expect to be glorified with a standing ovation commit most of the presentation crimes (the other large group are too afraid to not get any audience reaction at all.)
The Product Engineer “A Product Engineer is accountable for the product” 💪
Engineers should state the obvious In summary:
- It’s worth stating the obvious
- Obvious things are usually the most important things
- If you get the obvious things right, making mistakes elsewhere often doesn’t matter
- Stating the obvious gets everyone on the same page
- It’s surprisingly easy to miss the obvious when you get stuck in the weeds
Job Seekers Hit Wall of Salary Deflation Apparently switching to a different employer is no longer the fastest way to secure a pay raise.
Modern Agile is Stupid: on why all great ideas are killed by simple-minded idiots, why Jira kills software, and how to be a good manager
Imagine a coach who never attends games and instead “manages” by looking at a spreadsheet of player statistics twice a week. When he talks to a player, all he can say is “keep it up” or “your ppg is down, you need to score more.” Such an approach would be universally recognized as ineffective in sports, and yet it’s sold as a panacea of software engineering productivity in the world of Agile. It’s snake oil. It’s garbage.
JA Westenberg
Jeff Bezos is living proof that if you can get your parents to give you $500,000 and chronically underpay your workers, you, too, could spend your midlife crisis in low orbit
A History Professor Answers Questions About Dictators In today's "what should I be watching on YouTube?”
Business Side
Our experiment on the value of European news content Google knows they’re a monopoly so well they’re not even flinching when they tell you that nothing can diminish their revenue stream:
We launched an experiment measuring the value of European news results for Google which showed that European news content in Search has no measurable impact on ad revenue for Google.
Yahoo Is Still Here—and It Has Big Plans for AI Yahoo is Big in Japan, you see posters for Yahoo all over the place, so no wonder they still exist and are planning to disrupt the industry by investing big in this exciting new technology called artificial of intelligence or something like that.
Machine Intelligence
AI search engines cite incorrect sources at an alarming 60% rate, study says In the US there’s a scientific term for "cites incorrect sources 60% of the time“ and that scientific term is “US Congress”, though sometimes AI just mimics its creator: "Grok 3 demonstrated the highest error rate, at 94 percent.”
The "think" tool: Enabling Claude to stop and think in complex tool use situations Just ask Claude to take a second look at what it's doing:
The "think" tool is for Claude, once it starts generating a response, to add a step to stop and think about whether it has all the information it needs to move forward. This is particularly helpful when performing long chains of tool calls or in long multi-step conversations with the user.
AI Blindspots “Blindspots in LLMs I’ve noticed while AI coding. Sonnet family emphasis. Maybe I will eventually suggest Cursor rules for these problems.”
ChatGPT hit with privacy complaint over defamatory hallucinations Maybe you decided to never ever use AI as a search engine, but other people will be using AI to search for stuff, so you should probably periodically check how search results appear in AI world, to avoid, for example, being mislabeled as child killer:
OpenAI is facing another privacy complaint in Europe over its viral AI chatbot's tendency to hallucinate false information -- and this one might prove
People are using Google's new AI model to remove watermarks from images
Gemini 2.0 Flash won’t just remove watermarks, but will also attempt to fill in any gaps created by a watermark’s deletion. Other AI-powered tools do this, too, but Gemini 2.0 Flash seems to be exceptionally skilled at it — and free to use.
Related, The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem Adding “Creator of Meta AI” to my resume since they used my book as training material. You can search for your books here.
Study finds AI-generated meme captions funnier than human ones on average With all due respect to artificial general intelligence, I think artificial meme captioning is where it's at.
tef
as i announce loudly to the staff at burger king that i am "vibe cooking", i begin to yell out my food prompt
tonypan2/minesweeper Here's an MCP server that allows Claude to play Minesweeper — I guess Claude can find Minesweeper just interesting enough to finish a full game.
Insecurity
Matt Blaze
Seriously, though, I would really love it if just once I could teach my tech and surveillance course without having the syllabus overtaken by current events.
How to Avoid US-Based Digital Services—and Why You Might Want To Today I closed my AWS account. I still have a Prime account because it’s paid through October, but not using it. And I dissociated from Google last week.
Amid growing concerns over Big Tech firms aligning with Trump administration policies, people are starting to move their digital lives to services based overseas. Here's what you need to know.
Italy demands Google poison DNS under strict Piracy Shield law However, if you are moving your services out of the US, maybe avoid moving them to servers in Italy:
Piracy Shield is often labeled as draconian by opponents because blocking content via DNS is messy. It blocks the entire domain, which has led to confusion when users rely on popular platforms to distribute pirated content. Just last year, Italian ISPs briefly blocked the entire Google Drive domain because someone, somewhere used it to share copyrighted material.
BrianKrebs
I'm dying over here. This guy says he's created the world's first AI-based call center for actively disrupting and screwing with scammers. Their AI bots are taking live phonecalls at scale and keeping the scammers on the line for hours, and sometimes taunting the scammers. They're tying up entire scam call centers. So entertaining.
CVE-2024-9956 - PassKey Account Takeover in All Mobile Browsers
In this blogpost I will go over a vulnerability I found in all major mobile browsers that allowed an attacker within Bluetooth range to take over PassKeys accounts by triggering FIDO:/ intents.
Apple's Passwords app was vulnerable to phishing attacks for nearly three months after launch AI is not the only thing Apple gets wrong.
Everything Else
I am using my device.
Mᴀʏᴀ
I think it's funny what stupid things made me feel bad in high school. So silly. Anyway, I had to use my least favorite fork today and my day is ruined.
Ben Foote
Special request for all the hosts of podcasts I listen to: can you just talk at 1.2x speed by default so I don't have to change my playback settings? Think about it.
Jay Wants to Garden
I'm not sure where I picked up this site from, but for the last couple of weeks, whenever I've been unhappily pissed off about the state of the world, I've looked at owls in towels and felt better
Eyes on the Street 🌮🚚
You know what improved the morale and safety of my neighborhood in less than two weeks?
A new taco stand. I’m 1000% serious.
freddi futch
I wish my representatives understood that political mood right now is such that the nice old ladies who come in to buy stitch markers are saying stuff like “there’s going to be a reckoning”
Claim for a missing tooth - Department of Teeth TF-230 from The Department of Teeth to claim your lost tooth reimbursement!
Use this service to claim financial reimbursement for a tooth which has been lost and cannot be collected by the Tooth Fairy
Please be advised that this form is only for teeth which have been lost for reasons up to and including, being ripped from your mouth by dogs, hit by asteroids, or accidentally swallowed.
Scott Hanselman
I don’t want AI to make me 10x more productive, I want it to give me Fridays off.
aeva
life hack: say something really awkward and embarrassing during happy moments with friends and loved ones to ensure that you remember those moments forever
Mary Austin
For years the Russian resistance has placed toy figurines with anti-Putin messages around their cities. If the cops leave them, those signs of resistance remain. When the cops have cracked down, they look like asses who are frightened of Pokemon. It's brilliant.
Forever 21 Was Just a Phase
But I wore it only once, and I suppose it is in a landfill now. There, it will last a long, long time. Not forever, but much longer than Forever 21 did.
Quixoticgeek
If we're gonna get self driving cars on mainland EU. I'm tempted to explore getting a cycle jersey printed up with a no entry sign across the back. Or maybe a 20kph speed limit sign...
See how well what ever idiot techbro coded the self driving kill device handles such things...
Slate: High Protein Shakes and Iced Coffees Apropos low sugar (1g sugar, 20g protein) I approve of Slate. As a coffee snob, I like their lattes which have 200mg coffee and are lactose free. They use monk fruit to make it taste sweet but without the glucose side effects and no artificial sweetener.
Duterte’s bloody drug war was really a war on the poor I can’t believe they managed to get him extradited to stand trial in the Hague, yet they did! The story of how Duterte went around killing civilians is intense:
The hitmen were paid monthly salaries plus bonuses for each job, and victims were often executed in a quarry — the women sometimes raped. Ex-killers turned whistleblowers claim Duterte got his hands dirty too, emptying two full Uzi clips into an investigator.
CEO of AI ad-tech firm pledging “world free of fraud” sentenced for fraud Not from the Onion
Prosecutors: Firm offering “300% more” fraud detection oversold revenue by 700%.
JPMorganChase invests billions in affordable housing for Bay Area
- JPM is investing billions in affordable housing. Yes!
- They’re talking about Fruitvale by BART which is known for its minority population. Double yes!
- JPM wrote and then paid The Oaklandside to publish this article about them. Triple yes!
Last year I would have made a sarcastic remark about this being an ad pretending to be a news article written big corp. This year, given the current political climate, I think JP Morgan Chase deserves an award. I for one am going to use my Chase card more often now.
Lukito So sweet!
Just discovered that our local library has a Reading Dog Service. It’s not a dog who can read, sadly, but it is a big floofy golden labrador who kids can read to to improve their confidence in comprehension and speaking aloud
Warning: continuous glucose monitor safety alerts on smart devices, such as smartphones or smartwatches, may not work as expected This is a failure of whatever OS you're using, and I don't think there's an easy way that allows you to both receive CGM alerts and also not be bothered by less important notifications. You can toggle something using focus mode, but the quick and easy way is always to switch to/from silent mode, which silences all alerts.
NextByte What's your Vibe Coding competence level, because this AI tool can finally help your Vibe Manager decide whether or not to Vibe Employ you, after all they're going to spend time with you in the weekly Vibe Standup Meeting and on monthly Vibe Agile(tm) Retrospectives which are all Vibe Consuming …
SF’s most boring tech companies are embroiled in an espionage thriller Just to put this in perspective, Rippling is valued at $13.5B, Deel valued at more than $12B, and both companies provide “workplace management software”:
When the alleged spy, who was based in Rippling’s Dublin office, was confronted Friday with a court order to hand over his phone, he locked himself in a bathroom stall. … The employee did not turn over his phone, and no device was recovered from the office’s plumbing.
Deel spokesperson denied the claims and accused Rippling of trying to “shift the narrative” after it was accused of violating sanctions law in Russia.
Rippling began to suspect a mole when Deel tried to hire at least 17 members of its global payroll operations team via WhatsApp, which requires access to phone numbers.
The invisible demographic.
One of the strangest and most beautiful things about the scattered community of disabled young adults is our ability to find one another, to build our own networks of friends and found family out of the barely discernible threads of so-called “invisible disabilities.”
Global Museum
A group of tourists was visiting a crocodile farm and they were in a floating structure in the middle of a crocodile lake. The owner of the farm shouted:
"Whoever jumps into the water and swims to shore, will receive 10 million dollars."
The silence was deafening. Suddenly, a man jumped into the water. He was chased by crocodiles, but thankfully he was unharmed. The owner announced:
"We have a winner!!!".
After receiving their reward, the man and his wife returned to the hotel room. The man tells his wife:
"I did not jump in myself...Someone pushed me!!!"
His wife smiled and said coldly:
"It was me!
"Moral of the story: "Behind every successful man, there is always a woman to give him a little push" …
Canadian city blocks street for weeks so tiny salamanders can cross This is Canadian nice
The city of Burlington, about 37 miles southwest of Toronto, has closed off a portion of King Road for the past 13 years to make way for the annual migration of the Jefferson salamander, which is endangered in Ontario. The road was closed on March 12 and will remain blocked until April 9.
Wired is dropping paywalls for FOIA-based reporting. Others should follow Yes!
As the administration does its best to hide public records from the public, Wired magazine is stepping up to help stem the secrecy
Tanya
Now the recipient has got it, I can share….
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS CHICKEN?
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