Published
Weekend Reading — Make Orwell Fiction Again
Tech Stuff
colinaut/action-table A web component that allows users to sort/filter a table. Just wrap your table inside <action-table>. So simple and works like a charm.
VineJS A library for validating form data that supports HTML forms and JSON and is optimized for speed and ease of use.
lla ls on steroids.
The notion that people choose to use computer applications because they are useful at accomplishing tasks is extremely outdated. The vast majority of software use is not voluntary.
baseline-status A web component to display the baseline status of a web feature.
Grifters, believers, grinders, and coasters The four archetypes in software engineering.
Nathan Knowler “lmao I both love that the spec name breaks and that it has a self-aware subtitle.”
Coming home from my job (staring furiously at a computer) to relax with my hobbies (staring furiously at a computer).
CatSalad “New holiday sweater”
Eye for Design
stux “Fun design is fun”
A11y is about the least accessible way of writing 'accessibility' possible. A-11-letters-Y is not enough information to go on unless you've already been primed to understand it. It's aesthetically (a11y) ugly, astonishingly (a11y) pretentious, and has just this awful whiff of artificiality (a11y) about it. In an age where machines will automatically (a11y) type entire words out for you using the shorthand is aggravatingly (a11y) lazy and unintuitive.
Quite frankly it strains acceptability (a11y). I don't think that this numeronym is being used appropriately (a11y).
David Bisset “Designer: Let's put the login button next to a delete button (that doesn't confirm)”
Peoples
Live your life so that if you’re killed on the way to a stockholders meeting, people don’t say “Who cares? Screw that guy” and the stock rises 1% for the day.
"kids these days don't know how to fix anything"
Kids these days have never in their lives encountered anything that was meant to be fixed rather than thrown away.
David Chisnall The -1x engineer:
When I was at Microsoft, I encountered the phenomenon of the -1x engineer. The people who threw a load of code at projects that then took at least one full-time engineer to fix bugs in and refactor. These people were often rapidly moved to positions where they could do less immediate damage, such as going to cross-group design meetings. Unfortunately, this raised their profile and got them promotions and transfers to other teams who did not initially know how much damage they’d done in their previous team.
Interestingly, if you look at commits, these people had the exact opposite profile to the so-called ‘ghost engineers’. The people fixing their bugs would often make a load of single-line changes, they would be the ones throwing a thousand lines of spaghetti into the repo at a time. Often, it wasn’t just that the code was bad, it was the design was fundamentally flawed and they were solving entirely the wrong problem, but they wrote a lot of code and so looked productive.
The best engineers increase functionality or performance and write a net negative volume of code.
Summit AI life coach that helps you organize, track your goals, and holds you accountable. I haven't tried it myself, but I think a lot of people will find this quite useful and the pricing looks reasonable enough (you get 2 goals on the free plan to try it out).
Business Side
David Chisnall On why Microsoft no longer innovates:
My experience at Microsoft was that the culture revolves around lying to management.
The entire incentive system (bonuses and promotions) revolves around being able to demonstrate short-term impact. Claiming that a thing is done and ready when it’s actually an early prototype is rewarded.
If you’re an engineer, you claim features are done and downplay bugs and you’ll get a nice bonus and the opportunity to transfer somewhere else before anyone notices that you’ve built a mess.
Thing about Duolingo Pretty much everything you need to know about Duolingo in this one short article:
The greatest trick Duolingo ever pulled was convincing the world it was a language learning app. Behind the gamified lessons and friendly notifications lies a more fascinating truth: a carefully engineered social experiment that has little to do with language acquisition.
It really cannot be overstated enough: "For-profit health insurance" is fundamentally incompatible with keeping people healthy. UnitedHealthcare did not deny 1 out of every 3 claims because they thought they weren't medically valuable, they did it because they knew they could get away with it. The entire system cannot ever provide health as a meaningful outcome. It must be eliminated and replaced with taxation and a single-payer institution built on care, not resource hoarding.
Luke Wren “Based on historical trends I predict the number of Intel co-CEOs will double every two years”
Machine Intelligence
Neil Madden “The AI goes from strength to strength.”
ChatGPT search provides inaccurate sources even for OpenAI partner publishers In other news ChatGPT isn’t all that better from the present Google Search (but no ads for now):
A new study from Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism shows that ChatGPT's search function has serious accuracy problems, including fabricating sources and misquoting content - even from publishers that have agreements with OpenAI.
Eepy Lukas “Self report”
Insecurity
Amount of enterprises I’ve seen that have successfully widely deployed Passkeys: zero.
Studio Petrikas “Welcome to today's world, where everything's made up and the words don't matter.”
Everything Else
1969 Fiat 500 Gamine 'Noddy Car' by Vig-Sold I’m old enough to remember Noddy and damn … this car is on sale right now!
'The' Noddy car! For those that don't know: "Noddy is a self-employed taxi driver. Noddy loves driving his friends around Toytown in his little red and yellow taxi. The other toys can hear him coming by the distinctive "Parp, Parp' sound of his taxi's horn and the jingle of the bell on his blue hat.
i knew this day would come. i saw it on the calendar
I cannot quit, as I am currently 2 legit.
Vanilla Weather “No ads. No tracking. Just the weather.”
I was in an 80's band called the prevention. We were better than the cure.
I have been informed by my spouse that having pecan pie and ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner does not count as eating thanksgiving leftovers even if they are leftover from thanksgiving.
Literature Clock Click the link to see the current time expressed with a quote from literature.
Find Out Why Health Insurance Denied Your Claim From ProPublica:
You likely have the right to access records that explain why your insurer denied your claim or prior authorization request. Use ProPublica’s free tool to generate a letter requesting your claim file from your health insurance company.
In German:
Skunk is "stink animal" (Stinktier)
Sloth is "lazy animal" (Faultier)
Turtle is "shield toad" (Schildkröte)
Raccoon is "wash bear" (Waschbär)
Turkey is "threatening chicken" (Truthahn)
Bat is "flutter mouse" (Fledermaus)
Widdershins Smith “I don't remember who posted this originally, but whomever you are, you have immeasurably improved my every night in a hotel since...”
Tuna haaaaaates the Roomba. One time, he — completely unprovoked — got up from his nap, marched over to the Roomba charging base, slapped the Roomba once, and then marched right off.
The Roomba hadn't run for a few days.
He was just that full of spite.
Laura Guilty as charged.
Does anyone else do the neurodivergent plan of "I'm gonna catch up on everything/fix my whole life this weekend" every weekend but then it comes & you're like "but I deserve a break from being in work mode all week" & then repeat perpetually?
who vilified community college? bc here in Oakland you can take classes on anything for cheap or even free and it's an unmitigated good and even though I took those classes in high school and benefited from them I left feeling like adults who take them are losers and that SUCKS
Judge rejects Boeing plea deal that was opposed by families of crash victims “It appears the government’s ‘attempt to ensure compliance failed,’ judge writes.”
Bitter Americans React to UnitedHealthcare CEO's Murder: 'My Empathy Is Out of Network'
The insurance giant is notorious for denying coverage, deploying an artificial intelligence tool that has an error rate of roughly 90%, according to a lawsuit filed last year.
my daughter lost a bear in the airport when she was about 8. I told her that stuffies never really get lost. Their identity just transfers to a new body (her bear had a distinct and kind of terrible personality -- it was known as the instigator of all her biggest shenanigans). I took her to the toy store and we carefully searched the "bodies" for the spark of her bastard of a bear. She knew it wasn't the same bear... But also it was. It helped.
