Labnotes - Weekend Reading — pAIr Programmer

Sketchplanations explains Sampling bias

🪑 Design Objective

Chris Heilmann “Good #a11y features are beneficial for lots of people.”

🧰 Tools of the Trade

GitHub Copilot “Your AI pair programmer”

So I played a bit with Copilot and I'm impressed. The joke about an autocomplete that copies and pastes answers from StackOverflow? Copilot is like that, except trained on the entire internet (esp open source), and smart enough to adapt answers to the code base.

It's an interesting experiment in human/machine trust. Because it's trained on the entire internet, Copilot is about as smart as the average developer, and makes all the same mistakes (see here and here.)

Would developers accept having to supervise and code review an AI algorithm, or balk at letting the machine make any decisions? How many mistakes before you lost trust and uninstall Copilot?

Other demos here and here.

Doppler Manage all your environment variables from a single place. Doppler has a well-designed UI, better than platform providers (AWS, Vercel, et al). You can manage all secrets from one place, sync to every platform you deploy to. There's a doppler run command line so don't need to fuss with .env files. And you can securely share secrets.

Ilya Grigorik Shopify just leapfrogged every e-commerce platform:

Waait, is that a React app powered by Storefront GQL API, backed by React Server Components, with Shopify tuned components... Yes. yes, yes. #ShopifyUnite

l_avrot More projects should have a "don't do this page":

Hello,
This is your kindly reminder that the @PostgreSQL project created a "Don't do this" wikipage. Please read it and avoid implemented each and every case!

https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Don't_Do_This#Don.27t_use_serial

Joe Nash This tweet about the imaginary Infinidash service started a avalanche of tweets because what else is there to do than dunk on AWS?

I am convinced that a small and dedicated group of twitter devs could tweet hot takes about a completely made up AWS product, idk AWS Infinidash or something, and it would appear as a requirement on job specs within a week

📓 Lines of Code

Morgan

Whoever wrote this code clearly misunderstood when their therapist said they need to be more vulnerable and open

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Teamwork

Gardening Platforms How to build and grow a platform. Based on the experience of the Chrome’s Web Platform team. Read the slides with speaker notes.

Jem Young

Being completely honest with you my software engineering friends, being an Engineering Manager is unbelievably exhausting. You rarely get the satisfaction of finishing off a project like you did as a developer and there's a new problem every day.

But I'm still enjoying it.

📈 Business Side

All of the Announcements From Shopify Unite 2021 Boom. Shopify just dropped their App Store fees down to 0%:

For those building apps for the Shopify App Store, one of the biggest announcements out of Shopify Unite is the news that as of August 1, 2021, we’re offering zero percent revenue share on the first million dollars you make annually on the Shopify App Store.

A law equal pay law in Colorado is costing residents remote work opportunities The law of unintended consequences:

The act specifies that employers hiring in Colorado must include an expected salary range and benefits in job posts. Some reports claim that companies don’t want to reveal their cards.

I bet so, but even companies that post listings with salary ranges, you got to worry about enforcing these two policies and taking on that additional risk all for one state?

• Alert all employees of all opportunities for promotion or employment on the same calendar day, or risk facing litigation.
• Pay a fine of $500-$10k for each opportunity or job posting they fail to share properly.

Federal court tosses antitrust suits against Facebook, in huge blow to D.C.’s fight with tech

“The FTC’s inability to offer any indication of the metric(s) or method(s) it used to calculate Facebook’s market share renders its vague '60%-plus' assertion too speculative and conclusory to go forward.”

In a separate decision dismissing the states' case, Boasberg also found that state attorneys general waited too long to bring a suit challenging Facebook’s 2012 purchase of Instagram …

🔒 Locked Doors

Cybersecurity Workers Flood Twitter With Bikini Pics to Protest Harassment Can internet randos just not do that?

When she woke up hours later, after not checking Twitter for a while, she saw that someone was complaining about her posting a picture in "underwear" even though her bio says she works in infosec, suggesting that what she did is unprofessional.

Ian “Ahhh, lovely compliance.”

⭐ None of the Above

Arieh Kovler “Drone photographer Lior Patel followed a herd of sheep for several months, as the herd was shepherded to its summer pasture. Entrancing and relaxing.”

soul nate

in the 90’s, computers would scream every time you went online. that was foreshadowing

Amy's Sparkly bat “😂shockingly funny”

Pinterest bans weight loss ads in first for major social networks 👍

“This stance makes Pinterest the only major platform to prohibit all weight loss ads. It’s an expansion of our ad policies that have long prohibited body shaming and dangerous weight loss products or claims,” the company said in a blog post on Thursday.

Alexander Klöpping “Ho-ly shit” — scan a pile of Lego bricks, get instructions for what you can build with them!

Gregory Han “I demand from now on all rice be served this way. Source: https://www.facebook.com/732567673/posts/10159275470707674/”