Published
Weekend Reading — Home office the way I like it
Kieran Healy “Finally getting my home office the way I like it.”
Tech Stuff
Postgres as a search engine On doing full-text search with tsvector, semantic search with pgvector, and fuzzy matching with pg_trgm.
Algorithms we develop software by 🤔
Start working on the feature at the beginning of the day. If you don't finish by the end of the day, delete it all and start over the next day. You're allowed to keep unit tests you wrote.
dotUI A large collection of React components using Tailwind CSS for styling. Accessible, mobile friendly, and looks pretty impressive.
“Can’t you just…” is an idiom that means “I don’t understand the work you do at all”
RewriteBar The one thing LLMs are really good at — writing. RewriteBar is a macOS menubar app that helps with your writing: fix grammar, simplify language, change tone, summarize and expand, etc. I have no idea how that compares to the upcoming features in macOS, but at $5/month it's cheaper than ChatGPT (they use GPT-4o-mini), so if you need something to tide you over.
Create Calendar Entries with Anthropic Claude 3.5 Stupid but useful AI tricks: Creating calendar entries from an image using Anthropic Claude 3.5.
Using ChatGPT to reverse engineer minified JavaScript OpenAI is shockingly good at unminifying code
I was curious about how a component was implemented in a minified JavaScript file and used ChatGPT to reverse engineer the component.
…
"I apologize, GPT-4, for mistakenly accusing you of making mistakes.”
im a linux girl, in a windows world
life's fantastic, kernel panic
LLMs won't save labor when you use them like this
There are obvious uses and benefits to a technology that can extrude workable patterns of information, especially code. But uncritical use of that code is going to create a real mess.
AgentOps Ops dashboard for your AI agents. For testing and debugging AI agents, correlating API requests across sessions, recording prompts and completions, tracking spending, etc. Early release so right now only for Python, but if you use Python, give it a try.
Scientists discover simple trick that can dramatically improve battery lifespan If you overcharge, do it mindfully:
Researchers found that deliberately losing some supply of lithium at the start actually helped it keep more of it in the future, however. That lithium makes a special layer that forms on the negative electrode and then protects it from degrading over time.
Amazon.com Looks like a classic Mac but will accommodate your newish Apple Watch (photo not for scale.)
Eye for Design
Jason Lefkowitz “This is the ideal web design. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like” More at the Web Design Museum.
Playlists Discover what designers are listening to.
nevesnunes/z80-sans I have no idea how many of you even remember what a Z80 is — the very first computer I ever used was powered by a Z80 — anyway here's a font for you:
This font converts sequences of hexadecimal lowercase characters into disassembled Z80 instructions, by making extensive use of OpenType's Glyph Substitution Table (GSUB) and Glyph Positioning Table (GPOS).
Peoples
Dreadful Sanity It’s is really good and I loved watching it:
This is the best explanation of hyperfocus in ADHD I have ever seen. Someone give this guy a medal. And Oscar. Something.
When I hear developers complaining about a colleague who's a "perfectionist" that is "slowing them down", even just a cursory investigation usually reveals that the team has low standards and that the "perfectionist" keeps trying to raise them.
This is normally when things like "pragmatic" and "just get it done" get bandied about to try and make it sound as if the developers who've been checking in untested code are the real professionals in this set-up.
A light-bulb moment for me was realizing that much of the talk about student "motivation" (how to boost it or why a given kid lacks it) is really code for talking about compliance: the extent to which students do whatever they're told without question.
Business Side
Dare Obasanjo Are they using CoPilot to name their products?
Microsoft heard Google had stolen the crown for naming products terribly and just dropped the nuke of terrible product naming decisions to get the crown back.
80% of corporate AI projects fail — twice the rate of other IT projects I’m surprised that it's only 80%. And this is not my opinion of AI, it’s my opinion of “shiny new thing” corporate IT projects in general:
The most common cause of failure is that the people running the projects have no idea what “AI” even is or does. “In some cases, leaders understand AI only as a buzzword and do not realize that simpler and cheaper solutions are available.”
A brief history of Quiznos’ collapse Just a reminder that failing Subway was once upon a time the little guy that brought down the towering Quiznos franchise:
And then, Subway began selling footlong subs for $5.
Quiznos made the mistake of trying to compete by discounting.
Grifography
Coinbase sees first crypto transaction between AI agents Science has not cured cancer quite yet, but we finally did complete The Automated Circle of Grift!
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong recently oversaw his first crypto transaction completely managed by artificial intelligence bots, following several industry efforts to develop platforms for AI agents to execute transactions.
Here’s 22 Examples of Google Employees Trying to Avoid Creating Evidence in Antitrust Case I’m not saying Google is “do be evil” but definitely Google is not on the side of being lawful, not even by accident:
Employee 1: “Please keep history off on this legally sensitive chat room”
Employee 2: “who all have we debriefed in legal?” [end of chat]and
Employee 1: “do you know if our pings are privileged/discoverable?”
Employee 2: “we should turn history off” [end of chat]
David Gerard One of these headlines is not like the other …
Machine Intelligence
NotePin is the latest pointless AI wearable that should be an app The title of this post says it all.
Allowing police officers to submit LLM-written reports reveals a remarkable misunderstanding of what LLMs do, a profound indifference to the notion of integrity in the communications of law enforcement with the justice system, or both.
Given how readily subject to suggestion human witnesses—including police officers—are known to be, this is a disaster.
Yes, police reports aren't always the most accurate, but introducing an additional layer of non-accountability is bad.
Anthropic Release Notes: System Prompts An interesting look at the Claude prompts that are used by their claude.ai.
The Effects of Generative AI on Design Fixation and Divergent Thinking Small sample size (N=60) but probably not wrong:
This paper explores the effects of exposure to AI-generated images on measures of design fixation and divergent thinking in a visual ideation task. Through a between-participants experiment (N=60), we found that support from an AI image generator during ideation leads to higher fixation on an initial example.
Anyone who still works for Google, can you tell me what the fuck is going on? I am not in the market for automated high-throughput bluffing
Insecurity
Bypassing airport security via SQL injection Talk about a vulnerability …
We discovered a serious vulnerability in the Known Crewmember (KCM) and Cockpit Access Security System (CASS) programs used by the Transportation Security Administration.
chrisisgr8 “bitch you are a clock!!!!!!”
Judge Rules $400 Million Algorithmic System Illegally Denied Thousands of People’s Medicaid Benefits Oops. I guess it’s just a minor bug that you can easily fix and nobody will get … what???
Thousands of Tennesseans were illegally denied Medicaid and other benefits due to programming and data errors in an algorithmic system the state uses to determine eligibility for low-income residents and people with disabilities, a U.S. District Court judge ruled this week.
josef The perfect error message does not exi…
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"We need your support today. Independent journalism is more important than ever. This timely and essential task, however, is expensive to produce."
"That's why we run active fingerprinting scripts on your web browser, with as precise geolocation as we can generate, store it as an advertising profile, and sell it to 848 (and counting) advertising partners!"
I appreciate y'all's honesty (and the European laws that require it), but imma gonna "Reject All".
Everything Else
Dave Rahardja I am so old that when people say Attenborough the first thing that comes to mind is a gray Land Rover Defender in the wilderness of Africa next to a pack of lions. It’s just instinctive recall. Anyway, if you remember David Attenborough, you are going to love this short clip of him narrating a Cybertruck’s symbiotic lifestyle. Too true.
Natasha Jay 🤦♂️
I made a graph to review all of my past relationships...
It has an ex axis and a why axis.
That horrifying moment when you're looking for an adult, but you realize you are an adult. So you look around for an older adult, an adultier adult, someone better at adulting than you.
grant “actually this is the median consumer”
I'm stepping down from my position as an adult. As it turns out this isn't for me but, I appreciate the opportunity.
like i gotta say you do not need to worry about people self diagnosing autism. they are not going to use up all the autism
At the Minnesota State Fair tonight stumbled into an “alpaca and llama costume contest” and it was the best thing ever. Dolly Parton won, but my favorites were the bathtub rubber ducky and Wednesday Addams with Cousin It.
"this is fine" is our generation's SNAFU
love it when you're telling a funny childhood story and then everyone is like "babe that's trauma" and you're like "uh oh"
Nearly 6pm. You know what time that is? It's crime time.
I hope this email finds you, and in the darkness binds you.
“Load-bearing walls” is a myth made up by the carpenters’ union to scare people away from doing their own home improvements.
Latte macchiato “job market is insane right now”
"endless summer" nowadays sounds less like a fun scooter rave banger and more like an apocalyptic threat
Billions of crabs suddenly vanished, likely due to climate change, study says Unfortunately, due to the Exxon Heat Wave:
Between 2018 and 2021, there was an unexpected 92% decline in snow crab abundance, or about 10 billion crabs. The crabs had been plentiful in the years prior, puzzling scientists and crabbers alike.
South Yorkshire Police inundated after asking people to report anyone living a lavish lifestyle without having a job South Yorkshire Police went online and asked “Do you know someone who lives a lavish lifestyle, but doesn’t have a job?” The British reported on one suspicious family …
Caltech's latest STEM breakthrough: Most of its new students are women 👍 Now we just have to fix sexism in the industry:
The California Institute of Technology, long a bastion of male STEM students, enrolls an undergraduate class of majority women this fall, the first time in its 133-year history.
MIT study explains why laws are written in an incomprehensible style When complexity is a feature:
An MIT study on “legalese” suggests this convoluted language acts to convey a sense of authority in legal documents. The researchers also found that even non-lawyers use legalese when asked to write laws.
Errant ostrich brings traffic to a halt in South Dakota after escaping from a trailer In North Dakota a towering flightless bird is all you need to stops traffic:
An ostrich brought traffic to a halt in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, as motorists tried to lure and nudge the towering bird off a multilane thoroughfare. Drivers called Sioux Falls police just before noon Tuesday to report the roughly 7-foot-tall bird in the middle of a busy four-lane road. As police and animal officials responded, motorists hopped out of their cars and managed to carefully corral the flightless bird. A police spokesman says the bird was among several ostriches being hauled in a trailer owned by an out-of-state traveler before it escaped. The owner helped capture the bird and managed to get it back into the trailer.
Judges Rule Big Tech's Free Ride on Section 230 Is Over Third Circuit rules that TikTok must stand trial for manipulating children into harming themselves. They didn't change 230, but argued that TikTok was a distributor, not a publisher. Hopefully this will survive the Supreme Court and be extended to other parties (*cough* Facebook *cough*)
Algorithms are no longer a Get out of Jail free card. The Third Circuit ruled that TikTok must stand trial for manipulating children into harming themselves. The business model of big tech is over.
Jesus fucking Christ, NYT, was the Holocaust also an affordable housing plan?
These people have lost their damn minds.
tveskov “Protip 🍷”
