Weekend Reading — How Alexa ruined Christmas

Above: “me when you ask me to estimate project delivery date”

🧰 Tools of the Trade

MySQL VSCode extension to manage SQL database. Project name aside, it supports MySQL, MariaDB, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MongoDB, Redis,and ElasticSearch. With bulk export/import, and option to generate mock data.

you.com Interesting take on search engines. Summarizes search results from various destinations. Here I’m searching for “abort promises on timeout”. It returns results from Stack Overflow, GitHub, Reddit, and the tech web.

Geoffrey Litt CRDT with support for inline tyles:

It's a data structure for async collaborative editing of rich text documents. What does that mean and why does it matter? Here's my view... 1/

Peritext: A CRDT for Rich-Text Collaboration: Collaboration on formatted text is hard to model with existing plain-text approaches. We review the challenges and show how to construct a CRDT for rich text.

Keijiro Takahashi “The world through iPhone 13 Pro Max sensors (Shibuya, 23rd Nov)”

Chaffey College Apple-1 Personal Computer Rare and less fungible than an ape NFT:

Mountain View-based ByteShop was the first retailer to stock Apple computers - specifically, the the first 50 Apple-1 computers built by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. This is one of them, and one of only six known examples to be...

📓 Lines of Code

Aaron Fay Sounds familiar …

"I'm goona work on my side project! 😃"

Spends 8 hours updating dependencies 😩

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Teamwork

Anosognosiogenesis The small details they do matter:

The Accident Triangle of industrial safety is interesting.

For every 600 near misses, 30 people lose a finger, 10 lose an arm, and one person dies.

Reduce the number of near misses and you dramatically reduce the number of deaths.

You prevent horrific deaths most effectively by preventing people's fingers from getting scraped.

Here’s one way to put this into practice. Noah Sussman:

Van Halen toured with the largest stage show like, ever. By weight as well as by volume. In order to be sure all safety procedures were followed, they were advised to include a clause in the contract that specified the dressing room have a bowl of m&ms but no brown m&ms.

Your Board of Directors is Probably Going to Fire You Overall great advice on managing a board of directors. I've seen similar dynamics apply when reporting to any group, like when you run a special project, reporting to the CEO+COO+CTO. You've got to manage them like a board of directors.

Present the problem, present the course of action you are recommending, perhaps present some appealing but wrong solutions and tell them why they are suboptimal (this has the added benefit of giving them the illusion that they are helping because they can discuss these few potential solutions and their pluses and minuses.)

📈 Business Side

Buy the Constitution’ Aftermath: Everyone Very Mad, Confused, Losing Lots of Money, Fighting, Crying, Etc. Banks charge you $3 for ACH and $25 for wire transfers. Ludicrous fees, but what can you do, they're all working together to set these fees. How about a distributed financial network (DiFi)? Anyone with a computer can participate, and more supply means lower prices. So goes the theory.

Right now, gas fees on Ethereum are very high, and a highly complex operation could end up costing hundreds of dollars in fees. In our case, we paid a $75 gas fee to contribute roughly $75 to the project. Of the
initial $200 we bought in ETH, $90 was eaten up in fees simply to donate to ConstitutionDAO.

🔒 Locked Doors

Apple sues NSO Group to curb the abuse of state-sponsored spyware Waiting to see how this unfolds:

The spyware was used to attack a small number of Apple users worldwide with dangerous malware and spyware. Apple’s lawsuit seeks to ban NSO Group from further harming individuals by using Apple’s products and services. The lawsuit also seeks redress for NSO Group’s flagrant violations of US federal and state law, arising out of its efforts to target and attack Apple and its users.

⭐ None of the Above

PZ “This is the best pumpkin pie decoration, ever.”

Amy Jane Gruber

My young nephews see some packages on the porch. My sister dismisses it, saying they're for cousins.

The older one, age ten, walks in and says, "Alexa, what got delivered today?"

And that's how Christmas was ruined.

Artist Comes Up With Genius Way To Use Puzzles, Sells The Result For Up To $650

Robot Arm Clock “A deliberately over-engineered timepiece provided a satisfying distraction for a busy software engineer. Long live this broken clock.”

Trung Phan “Someone cut a vid of Ed Sheeran sheering sheep 💀”

A Michigan woman tried to hire an assassin online at RentAHitman.com. Now, she’s going to prison. Some people have side projects, and one person has this specific side project:

What Wein found was presumably reassuring. The website promised her confidentiality. It boasted of industry awards. It showed off testimonials of satisfied customers, including one from Laura S., who had “caught my husband cheating with the babysitter.” The website bragged about complying with HIPPA, which it said was “the Hitman Information Privacy & Protection Act of 1964,” a nod to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, the law passed in 1996 to protect patients’ medical information.

Eleanor Morton