Labnotes - Weekend Reading —🦆 What the duck

Not Jerome Powell

Tech Stuff

modern-async I settled on modern-async as my go-to library for spicing up JavaScript asynchronous code: async iterators (map, filter, some, etc), queues with concurrency limit, sleep and scheduler.

import { map, sleep } from 'modern-async'

const array = [1, 2, 3]
const result = await map(array, async (v) => {
  // these calls will be performed in parallel
  await sleep(10) // waits 10ms
  return v * 2
})
console.log(result) // prints [2, 4, 6]
// total processing time should be ~ 10ms 

Turbo Console Log Do you use console.log for debugging? (🙋‍♂️) Highlight a variable, and this VS Code extension writes the log message for you. It can also comment/uncomment all log messages it inserts in the code.

So it turns out you can get the current timezone from the browser using Intl.DateTimeFormat().resolvedOptions().timeZone. And it works in all the browsers I care about. Pretty slick way to pick the default timezone during sign-up.

Teclis - Non-commercial Web Search How to build a better search engine in 2 easy steps? Step one, every time you crawl a page, notice how many ads are on that page. Step two, ignore pages with too many ads.

Finding genuine content on the web became incredibly hard, as if the ad-monetized search engines are tuned to steer the user towards the sites that feed into the same ad food chain. As a result, the same "top" sites dominate the search results, happily patting each other on the back. The rest of the web has more or less gone incognito.

…

The crawler is hybrid, using async python requests and puppeteer with uBlock Origin. The way detection works is we count the number of uBO blocked requests on the page, and if too many (threshold is set to 5), we kick it out, leaving only "clean" pages in the index.

JavaScript Daily I'm old enough to remember language="JavaScript":

I’m a big believer in going back to the classics so one eBay bid later I have this classic JS book from 1998. Surely we can learn a thing or two from such a tome, even now.

Vala Afshar “New glasses powered by augmented reality (AR) allow people with hearing loss to see spoken words converted to written words @rexchapman”

Charles Miller Not wrong …

If your reaction to a successful product is “I could have built that in a weekend’, the first thing you should consider is that you didn’t.

Andrew Schmelyun “So here's why I bought a receipt printer: Every time one of my GitHub repos gets a new issue, I now get a physical ticket printed out on my desk 🪄” (via Julien Kirch)

Everything Else

jonathan slater “Just trying to help”

Kaitlin Ruiz Not only is dad right, but this Tweeter thread is delightful:

for years my dad has argued that what the world needs is “the travel taco” i.e. a taco with sealed edges to keep all the filling from falling out while you’re on the move. and for years my mom has patiently explained the concept of burritos.

rands people with ADHD will understand:

"Overstimulation calms me down."

Ralph Aboujaoude Diaz “Never forget that without contextual understanding, data is just reduced to random information.“

Kendra Fortmeyer

We thought it was our ability to love that made us human, but it turns out it was actually our ability to SELECT EACH IMAGE CONTAINING A BOAT

jendziura 🧵 if you ever wondered what podcasts were like before the internet …

HEY YOUNG PEOPLE, I'm going to do a little thread about how people did normal office/business stuff before the internet really worked, back in the '90s/very early '00s. BUCKLE YOUR FAX MACHINES...

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, et al. , Plaintiffs, v. GOOGLE LLC I love it when a company trains its employees to hide possibly illegal activity and call that practice “Communicate with Care":

For almost a decade, Google has trained its employees to use the attorney-client privilege to hide ordinary business communications from discovery in litigation and government investigations. Specifically, Google teaches its employees to add an attorney, a privilege label, and a generic "request" for counsel's advice to any sensitive business communications the employees or Google might wish to shield from discovery. Google has referred to this practice as "Communicate with Care."

This strategy might have been more effective if they had enough money to pay their lawyers to pretend respond:

In these email chains, the attorney frequently remains silent, underscoring that these communications are not genuine requests for legal advice but rather an effort to hide potential evidence.

To quote one Eric Schmidt:

If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place

m “this is the best duck video I've come across on tiktok so far.”