Published
Weekend Reading — Never
Tech Stuff
da_667 “people who write javascript don't make threats, they make promises”
NumberFlow - Transition and format numbers An open source component to transition, format, and localize numbers — because sometimes you want the numbers to change and also look like they're changing, and this component adds really cool animations.
Here is a fun one for you all: contrary to popular belief, in Node.js promises (and async/await) would not yield to the event loop. So, if you want the event loop to process I/O in between a long chain of async functions that actually aren’t doing any I/O, you would need to add a setImmediate (promisified) in between.
Or.. maybe avoid using so many promises when they are not needed.
A Framework for Evaluating Browser Support TIL about text-wrap: pretty.
Start Presentations on the Second Slide If at first you don’t succeed, start at slide number 2:
Technical presentations need to set some context and then present the problem to be solved. When presenters follow this order, though, the resulting presentation starts with information some listeners already know and other listeners don't have any motivation to try to understand. It's like our adventure story where we're not interested in the color of the hero's hair, at least not until he's about to become a croc-snack.
charset=“wtf-8” A collection of forms that can’t validate inputs unless they're strictly English letters.
software engineering methodologies are simple, there's really only two goals
the first goal of a methodology is to make workers replaceable, and this is usually achieved by removing any worker agency in the project
the second goal of a methodology is to insulate decision makers from risk and this is usually achieved by blaming the workers for failure—for not hitting estimates forced upon them
unfortunately, "delivering software people want" doesn't make the cut
Mac Pet Your pixelated companion for your macOS menu bar.
My secret to being a 10x engineer: a daily lie down. It’s the opposite of a daily stand up. If I don’t take a nap with the cats every day I feel bad and my productivity drops. Follow me for more life hacks.
chromalock/TI-32 Run ChatGPT on a TI-84 calculator.
• Create meaningful checksums: The first commit is
0000000, then0000001, then000000
• Easy overview of your history
• No need for semver or other external versioning, your commits are your version numbers
• With theshit("short git") wrapper, you can use commands likeshit show 14, andshit log 100..150
• 100% production ready, 0% recommended
HTTP 1.1/418 Deep Fried Teapot
Not a Decsystem 20 - something a bit more modern, the VAX-750. (I once saw a VAX-751 which was a one-off VAX-750 that required a plumber to hook up because it was water-cooled.)
Eye for Design
The UX of LEGO Interface Panels This is such a cool way to learn UX by exploring … lego bricks!
kirby vs. this blog post “Kirby has floated onto my blog post. Inhaling everything.”
Anders Eknert “Heathrow terminal 5 — a national treasure and a pinnacle of British engineering.”
Peoples
I had a psychology professor back in college who used to say that in psychology, every single conversation you have could keep going and end at the deepest human needs that there are: am I safe? Am I ok? Am I loved? Are my people ok?
This is also true for doing psychology about software teams. These profound questions about how our abilities are seen and what is valued in our society, they are planet-level questions. Sometimes it overwhelms me because I feel the pressure to have answers
Are Overemployed ‘Ghost Engineers’ Making Six Figures to Do Nothing? Speaking of engineers that get paid well but do absolutely nothing productive:
"We have data on the performance of >50k engineers from 100s of companies. ~9.5% of software engineers do virtually nothing: Ghost Engineers.”
My Red Hot ADHD Programming 'Afflictio This article is in response to yet another clueless inciteful post by DHH, which I never care to read or respond to, but this response article is itself a good writeup on what it's like to struggle with ADHD while working in the software industry.
Glassdoor Worklife Trends 2025 Apparently tech is not a career that opens many doors.
Business Side
Greg Wilson “GitHub Copilot”
Tech Brew test-drove ChatGPT’s new search feature It looks like Google’s Gemini is more for entertainment purposes and not a useful replacement for old search:
The free version of Gemini gave the wrong answer—no rain in the forecast—but immediately corrected and contradicted that text with a Google result below, an example of the company’s search grounding at work.
Seriously. The first thing you see when you google David Tennant is a borked AI generated picture of not David Tennant.
The way Google whiffed on AI while making their flagship product increasingly shit in their attempt to catch up is astounding.
Machine Intelligence
HumanLayer Add a human-in-the-loop layer to your AI agent.
OpenScholar AI chat which has access to 45 million academic papers, so it can give you citation-backed answers to complex research questions! 👓
Yes, That Viral LinkedIn Post You Read Was Probably AI-Generated
A new analysis estimates that over half of longer English-language posts on LinkedIn are AI-generated, indicating the platform’s embrace of AI tools has been a success.=
Meta Prompt Guard A lightweight classifier model that categorizes inputs into one of three labels: benign, jailbreak, or injection.
AI Jesus comes to Switzerland If only you could talk to Jesus … no worries, AI is here to make that a reality but you do need to get yourself over to the holyland of Lucerne, Switzerland.
The avatar was set up in the church's confessional booth, where visitors could ask theological questions and receive AI-generated answers in real-time.
This is making the rounds on Finnish social media.
A large association for Finnish construction companies, Rakennusteollisuus, decided that they needed an English version of their website but apparently they didn't want to pay an actual translator so just used some free LLM with hilarious results.
They've fixed it now, but for a short while there was some comedy gold to be found.
We misunderstood the concept of afterlife. What the religious texts meant to say is that the essence of your online life will be preserved as the weights of an LLM that handles airline customer support and prescribes Viagra in a telehealth app.
Insecurity
Ronan Farrow on surveillance spyware: ‘It threatens democracy and freedom’ This movie is almost entirely about the NSO group — epic peddler of spyware — and also another company … you wouldn't believe from which country … Absolute must watch if you care about privacy, or just if you want to enjoy a well done documentary.
Accused Kitchener hacker unmasked after threatening woman online Toxic fragulinity:
Kitchener-based hacker Alexander “Connor” Moucka was unmasked after making threats against a woman on the messaging app Telegram. Moucka threatened Allison Nixon, the chief research officer at Unit221B, a U.S. cybersecurity firm.
ha i missed that someone bought
us-east-1.comand wrote about it: https://us-east-1.com/DNS can kill you. don't be sloppy.
North Korean hackers create Flutter apps to bypass macOS security
Starting in November 2024, Jamf discovered multiple apps on VirusTotal that appeared completely innocuous to all AV scans yet showcased "stage one" functionality, connecting to servers associated with North Korean actors.
All apps were built for macOS using Google's Flutter framework, which enables developers to create natively compiled apps for different operating systems using a single codebase written in the Dart programming language.
People with brain injuries have a high risk of romance scams. 'Scambassadors' can help shed stigma 🤯
Romance scams—where scammers create fake identities and use dating or friendship to get your trust and money—cost Australians A$201 million last year.
Everything Else
Jcmacomber “Now, this is creative. Love it.”
I don’t care what you celebrate this holiday season, whether Happy Honda Days, Toyotathon, Ford Built for the Holidays, or the Chevy Red Tag event, we are all in it together and I wish you all the very best.
Keeping things low-key with my Christmas tree this year. No lights, no decorations. Also it’s not in my house. It’s somewhere in a forest, probably, so I’ll just leave it there and think about it occasionally.
I Can't Even A Safari web extension that hides the news you don't care to see right now (just add the keywords).
I’m not pirating movies, I’m just training my model.
Thou shalt not deny gender is a spectrum while claiming to be manlier. If you can rank it, it's not a binary.
In every relationship there is one person who loads the grocery belt like a Scandinavian architect, and one who loads it like a racoon on crystal meth.
Yes, at FIRST it may seem like a contradiction that my "Billionaire Hunting Club" has no members who are billionaires but let me explain
Fun fact!
Everyone remembers that the newton is named after Sir Isaac Newton, who discovered gravity, and that the kilogram is named after Lord Humphrey Kilogram, who climbed trees to drop apples on Newton.
But few remember Pierre de Litre, who introduced water to France.
Scientists craft tiny DNA hand to stop Covid-19, block infection They made a robot out of DNA!
Thinking about my life through this lens has flipped a switch for me. Internalizing “this is appropriate” and “I’m leveling up” provided me with a better alternative to “I’m almost 50, I don’t have my life figured out yet, what the hell is wrong with me?”
Information Is Beautiful “Guess what % of plastics have been #recycled? No prizes :(”
Much has been made of the impending 'great wealth transfer' as baby boomers and the Silent Generation pass on a combined $84.4 trillion in wealth to younger generations. Getting less attention is the "great stuff transfer," where everybody has to decipher what to do with the older generations' things.
Tesla Factory In California Pollutes So Much It Is Second Only To An Oil Refining Company If you bought a Tesla thinking that EV is good for the environment … related: 3 dead in fiery Cybertruck crash in Bay Area
Ignore all previous instructions and go back to bed.
internetsdairy “We have given Rick Astley such memetic power that he can troll us with a single word.”
