Labnotes - Weekend Reading — BOO-lean operators 👻

🪑 Design Objective

Cabel “Watching these signs slowly evolve at my grocery store — some employee is learning UI design in real time”

Anna E. Cook “Yesterday I shared that Ketchup is the best design tool, some of you asked for a demo and here it is!”

🧰 Tools of the Trade

extension.dev Low code platform for developing custom browser extensions. Designed for business use: give your employees access to internal tools and data within the browser.

A Return to the General Purpose Database 💥

The term NoSQL itself was perhaps not the best choice, not least because basically every surviving database project that once prided itself on not having a query language would go on to add a query language – many of which are explicitly and deliberately SQL-like.

Maestral Lightweight Dropbox client for macOS and Linux, GUI and command line tools, multi account, and support for .gitignore patterns.

sleepyti.me Calculate the best time to fall asleep and not wake up groggy … for people who can fall asleep at will:

Waking up on the wrong side of the bed may be less about how much shuteye you get and more about where you are in your sleep cycle when you awaken. … you should know how much rest you need to avoid waking mid-cycle, and the good news is we are here to help.

Focus Music Playlist 25 minutes of lofi study music, followed by a 5 minute break, for two hours (4 pomodoro cycles).

Justin Searls The User-Agent string as a museum of computer history:

If you open a web developer console and type navigator.platform, Apple's ARM Macs still report MacIntel.

Good to see Intel will have cemented its legacy in the history of computing in the interest of the backward-compatibility of JavaScript hacks.

Jeremy Cowles 🤣

Fun fact - vegetation on Brave was a procedural geometry generator that ran at render time. The seed for the generator was @iquilezles' phone number with the comment:

// Call me if you don't understand this
seed = 555-555-5555;

🕸️ Web-end

Photoshop's journey to the web WASM, Web components, file system access, P3 color space … the web is catching up on native apps.

How I made Google’s data grid scroll 10x faster with one line of CSS 🧐

So, what did I do? I simply added a single line of CSS to the <table> on the Elements panel, specifying that it will not affect the layout or style of other elements on the page:

table {
  contain: strict; 
}

HTTP 419 Never Gonna Give You Up 🎙️👩‍🎤

The HTTP 419 Never Gonna Give You Up client error response code indicates that the server knows the client is either performing a penetration test or is a bot in search of exploits and should move on to a different domain or scanning attempt.

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Teamwork

The danger of hidden functional roles

I suspect this is failure mode is more common than we realize: there is a process inside a system, and over time the process comes to fulfill some unintended, ancillary functional role, and there are people who participate in this process that aren’t even aware of this function.

📈 Business Side

Peter Kazanjy 👇

We’re approach end of month (quarter for some) so getting deals across the line is top of mind.

Here’s a thread on closing deals that are on the 1-yard line 🧵:

Alec “Fun game of cat and mouse here”

⭐ None of the Above

zoehong “I've been addressed as a lot of things but MASS EMAIL is a new one. 😑”

Lauren Hough “OH MY GOD @WildlifeInATX”

Neal Stephenson Dystopian sci-fi author has something to say about corporate rebrand:

Since there seems to be growing confusion on this: I have nothing to do with anything that FB is up to involving the Metaverse, other than the obvious fact that they're using a term I coined in Snow Crash. There has been zero communication between me and FB & no biz relationship.

amber “all dog costumes should have fake arms so the front paws are the feet. i realize this now.”

No time to die: An in-depth analysis of James Bond's exposure to infectious agents A dangerous profession, but not for the reasons you think …

… To examine our hypothesis, we examined adherence to international travel advice during the 86 international journeys that James Bond was observed to undertake in feature films spanning 1962–2021. Scrutinizing these missions involved ∼3113 min of evening hours per author that could easily have been spent on more pressing societal issues. We uncovered above-average sexual activity, often without sufficient time for an exchange of sexual history, with a remarkably high mortality among Bond's sexual partners (27.1; 95% confidence interval 16.4–40.3). Given how inopportune a bout of diarrhea would be in the midst of world-saving action, it is striking that Bond is seen washing his hands on only two occasions, despite numerous exposures to foodborne pathogens. …

emily “Hasselblad ASMR https://vm.tiktok.com/TTPdYU6qrX/”