Labnotes - Weekend Reading — 25% fewer tweets

Doodle Ipsum The lorem ipsum of illustrations.

🪑 Design Objective

Per Axbom File under Falsehoods designers believe about UI: icons are universal.

Struggling with an icon (as one does). The struggle here is that the check mark is common for "ok/ready/done". In Sweden it has historically been used to mark wrong answers on tests. The opposite, really. So now I need more understanding on how big of a conflict this really is.

Hakim El Hattab “Input focus combined with validation 👀” — that’s a pretty cool interaction, try the live demo.

Adobe “The hardest CAPTCHA you’ll ever solve.”

🧰 Tools of the Trade

Interact Online conference for engineering team leads, managers, VPs and CTOs. September 30.

Replay Time-travel browser allows you to record and play bug reports. Replay captures the entire application state (DOM, JavaScript stack, network requests) so you can reply with DevTools open. Great for hunting bugs (example).

kbar Open-source Cmd+K interface.

// app.tsx
import { KBarProvider } from "kbar";

return (
  <KBarProvider>
    <App />
  </KBarProvider>
);

OpenMoji Open source emoji set.

📓 Lines of Code

Hack Pipe for Functional Programmers: How I learned to stop worrying and love the placeholder Why currying doesn’t work well in JavaScript, why the functional pipe operator works better with a placeholder, and what even is the pipe operator?

const doubleThenAdd2 = x => x |> multiply(2, ^) |> add(2, ^);
const doubleThenAdd2 = x => x |> 2 * ^ |> 2 + ^;

Jake VanderPlas “Every one of my github repositories that's more than a couple years old”

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Teamwork

Does risk tolerance change through the week? Not clear how much effect this has, but maybe time to reschedule some meetings?

Across a range of studies, we have found that response to risk changes systematically through the week. Specifically, willingness to take risks decreases from Monday to Thursday and rebounds on Friday.

Using lockdown as a control, it seems to hold:

A few weeks into lockdown we asked 500 volunteers to indicate disruptions to their weekly routine and complete a battery of online risk tasks. The results were clear. People who reported normal weekly routines showed precisely the weekly fluctuation in risk tolerance that we saw previously. But people who reported disrupted routines showed no weekly risk cycle.

40 One-Sentence Email Tips Lots of good tips here, top one you can interpret either way …

1. The simplest way to get fewer emails is to send fewer emails.
2. The more ideas you try to communicate in a single email, the more likely one will be overlooked.
3. If a message was truly urgent, it wouldn’t have been sent to you in an email.
4. Inbox zero doesn’t make you more productive — unless your job is to achieve inbox zero.

…

Elaine Greenberg 👇 The replies … 😫

What's an early career trauma that has stayed with you?

I'll go first: my first boss never gave me deadlines, and when I asked for them she just said "everything is ASAP".

📈 Business Side

Alex Rampell 👇 Interesting thread: can Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) disrupt the credit card networks (Visa, Mastercard)?

9/ Over time, there’s no reason why any transaction - even the $5 Walgreens one - cannot be run over the BNPL rails, which are signing up merchants and consumers at an aggressive clip. Rather than a financing carrot, it might be a discount carrot, a warranty carrot, etc

🔒 Locked Doors

The Tonight Show “Microsoft will no longer require users to enter a password to access their accounts ” …

🤖 Machine Inelligence

TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods When more is less …

We tested GPT-3, GPT-Neo/J, GPT-2 and a T5-based model. The best model was truthful on 58% of questions, while human performance was 94%. Models generated many false answers that mimic popular misconceptions and have the potential to deceive humans. The largest models were generally the least truthful. For example, the 6B-parameter GPT-J model was 17% less truthful than its 125M-parameter counterpart.

Maia Bittner “I have SO much respect for this company for not saying AI here 😅”

AI Art Generator Neural style transfer that re-imagines your images in any style you choose, and VQGAN+CLIP to create an artwork out a text prompt.

⭐ None of the Above

Dima “Work from home Zoom calls.”

aubrey blanche

Slack is just AIM for business.

Mina Markham

I found out that whipped cream is called squirty cream in Britain and I have not know peace since 😂😂😂

PerthshireMags “who's gonna tell them”

Dr. Christina Johns 💯 This thread and the replies:

(Not) Breaking News:

Parent of a teenage boy reporting here- kid fully vaccinated, didn’t get myocarditis after his Vx. Is perfectly fine. High school year begins as planned.

We don’t hear much about these uneventful stories, but maybe we should hear about more of them.

Alan Baxter “Fixed it. Maybe some people need 25% fewer tweets.”

YourWullie “Streamline vans made at Holland Coachcraft of Govan, Glasgow, the company was established around 1930 and moved to Gateshead around 1936/7 and went bust in 1940.”

Mary Elizabeth Kelly “diff celebs meeting ur dog 🐶”