Published
Weekend Reading — “Tonic” Masculinity
What Is “Tonic” Masculinity and Why It Matters
Tech Stuff
Trigger.dev Run background jobs without timeout. I’m enjoying using it right now. I got some tasks that could run for a few seconds while others might take much longer than a service like Vercel could tolerate. Trigger makes it possible to run them for longer periods, split large tasks into steps, and more. All from the same code base.
smeijer/spin-delay When you want to show a spinner, but only if it takes more than X ms to complete a request, but don’t make it disappear before Y ms have passed. If this makes no sense, their docs explain it quite well and I can think of many UIs that would benefit from this pattern.
There are two hard problems in Computer Science:
- People are the hardest problem in Computer Science;
- Convincing people that people are the hardest problem in Computer Science.
line/ts-remove-unused Removes unused code from your TypeScript project. Similar to knip but doesn't handle dependencies, only the code.
Infisical Secret management but open source. These docs look really handy: getting started, migrating from .env file, and more.
Jimp For most tasks a great alternative to Sharp — find the image size, crop or resize it, combine images, convert to a different format, etc. Pure JavaScript so no need to install any native dependencies, which means it also works in the browser!
6 Techniques I Use to Create a Great User Experience for Shell Scripts 💪 these are all really good techniques, glad they're documented clearly.
Almost every day, I see microservices that should have definitely not been microservices. Almost every time, it's a big ball of mud with extra complexity.
You can't just split things into random smaller things, slap HTTP in between and call it architecture. In almost every case, cleaning up a monolith would have yielded better outcomes.
InsightBase “Chat with your database using AI” Look, a lot of people know which datapoints are interesting to look at, but can’t quite figure out the SQL. This is a good use of AI and I hope it works as well as advertised.
Super Send "I hope this email finds you …” is the bane of my existence, but for some people that's how they work and make money. If you need an automation to make your email life more super, this looks like a solid solution. And at $99/month that's peanuts for a sales team.
I managed to get forth code written in the 90s for a powerstation to compile and run natively on my macbook today. I'm incredibly surprised both that i got that to work and that I'm in this situation....
The First HTML LSP That Reports Syntax Errors A VSCode extension for checking your HTML and flagging erros in real time.
Skipit When you want the answer now and don’t care to spend 30 minutes through a YouTube video that’s just stretched out so they can make a few more bucks on showing you ads. This service is not free, I guess they expect your time is worth more than the $13/month subscription.
I assigned null as the backup device. Backups completed in record time
CleanupBuddy Works like a charm! It’s a tiny app that does one thing and does it well — locks the keyboard so you can clean your MacBook without having to shut it down!
Eye for Design
Comic Mono The looks of Comic Sans but monotyped: “the very typeface you’ve been trained to recognize since childhood”
Carbon When you need to share beautiful images of your source code.
homeport/termshot Terminal screenshot tool which takes the console output and renders an output image that resembles a user interface window.
Strokes Wallpaper Collection Need an amazing looking wallpaper for your MacBook, iPhone or iPad?
Peoples
Tossed Salads And Scrumbled Eggs It’s a long read, but if you want to understand why Agile Scrum Fibonacci Story Points Backlog Grooming is an incredible inefficient waste of time, you should read this post. Or just run a Retrospective of your team:
And this is exactly why I don't view Scrum itself as particularly problematic. The *fundamental issue*, the one that is only moved by small degrees by project management methodologies, is that many, many people simply have totally unsophisticated ideas around how knowledge work functions.
OTOH if you want to move up in the world of Business Exec Management Speak, check out Agile 2.0. Release 1.0, copyright of 2020, CC BY 4.0, and there’s a LinkedIn Group so you know it’s the real deal!
"Great results can be achieved by small teams focused on the correct actions" - The Art of Cyber War
Sara Joy “She's my new hero.”
Two most beautiful words in the English language:
Meeting canceled
Irina Blok Feels so real.
Business Side
Microsoft deal would reopen Three Mile Island nuclear plant to power AI Because it worked so well for Windows, the world’s most reliable operating system (*):
The Three Mile Island nuclear plant, home of the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history, would restart under a deal in which Microsoft purchases all its power.
(* Ignore July 19’s worldwide meltdown)
Ars Technica Next level product branding!
Microsoft releases a new Windows app called Windows App for running Windows apps
Windows App replaces Microsoft Remote Desktop on macOS, iOS, and Android.
LinkedIn is "TikTok" for middle aged people.
You know how older people are always scared of TikTok messing up young people's minds with disinformation and bullshit, of influencers getting kids to do dumb shit for their profit? That's exactly what LinkedIn does for middle aged people: A constant stream of weird influencers selling absolute garbage to people who are unsure about what their job means and what they care about.
Elon Musk Owes You $100 Cards Against Humanity sues Elon Musk for 15 million dollars: “Elon Musk stole your land, and now he owes you $100.” I wish CAH all the success in their effort!
Machine Intelligence
Convert text to calendar events This looks really cool, I just wish it was a feature in my calendar app and not a standalone webapp. It uses a little bit of magic (*cough*LLM*cough*) to turn any text into multiple calendar events.
dreamofmachin.es All you need to know about p(doom) in one sentence:
Language models won't create bioterrorists any more readily than celebrity cookbooks have created Michelin star chefs.
Sourcetable From what I can tell this is basically Google Sheets paired with ChatGPT. It’s a web-based spreadsheet app with access to the database, fancy charts, a collection of useful integrations, and other features, all combined with a chat UI that can help you make sense of things. $20/month is pretty reasonable for what it does (make you an Excel guru?)
Timothy Wolodzko “I'm not sure about this one...”
Conch AI I'm not recommending this tool, I haven't used it to gauge if it even works. I just wanted to point out that “AI detection" is now a category of products that exist, and so “AI detection-avoiding AIs" is also a category of products that exist:
Write, cite, and edit while bypassing AI detectors. Built to enhance your writing and research, without the busywork. Use our free content checker to check for and bypass AI detection by humanizing your text. Start using the #1 undetectable AI.
MrL314 “The mathematician and computer scientist in me are fucking dying laughing at this result.”
Secret calculator hack brings ChatGPT to the TI-84, enabling easy cheating Someone got ChatGPT working on a TI-84 calculator because of course!
The creator says he encountered several engineering challenges during development, including voltage incompatibilities and signal integrity issues. After developing multiple versions, ChromaLock successfully installed the custom board into the calculator's housing without any visible signs of modifications from the outside.
Insecurity
John Turner May he live through many data breaches!
My son just got his first data breach letter. He’s 2.5 years old.
Disney ditching Slack after massive July data breach Slack clearly slacked on that:
The Walt Disney Company is reportedly ditching Slack after a July data breach exposed over 1TB of confidential messages and files posted to the company's internal communication channels.
beautiful women named "Let's Encrypt certificate expiration notice for domain" keeps messaging me
"For legal reasons the Torment Nexus will not be made available to our valued customers in the European Union. We apologise for the inconvenience." ;)
Everything Else
May Likes Toronto “This is the greatest thing ever.”
Them: What gender are you?
Me: Engineer
Them: But what's in your pants?
Me: Gerber multi-tool
Them: But what's it say on your driver's license?
Me: Organ donor, corrective lenses required
Natasha Jay “VLC Media Player has encountered a problem with Windows”
My husband always orders two desserts to taste and gives me the one I like best. I think he read the fine print on this marriage.
House Panther “I thought that this meme I discovered on reddit was pretty good.”
All hail, those of us who continue to wade through the consequences of other people's previous decisions.
Tritan A2, Domino's pizza delivery vehicle
At Shipping Of Theseus, we guarantee fast delivery of your package, or an amalgam of your package and other objects that contains enough of your package to still be considered your package from a philosophical standpoint.
Archaeo-Histories “Police in Brazil use water buffalo to keep up with criminals trying to escape in rivers and swamps...”
Boeing CEO bought a Seattle home. Here's what we know Boeing just being Boeing. The workforce strike is still going on because Boeing can’t increase wages. Where would they find the money? Unrelated, the new Boeing CEO just bought a $4.1 million house because of course. Also just this week 10 Delta passengers receive medical attention following emergency landing in Salt Lake City.
Why Britain has stagnated This is a long read. Almost as long as the Lower Thames Crossing planning doc. But it captures the why Britain has gone from being a world superpower to an economy on the verge of collapse:
The planning documentation for the Lower Thames Crossing, a proposed tunnel under the Thames connecting Kent and Essex, runs to 360,000 pages, and the application process alone has cost £297 million. That is more than twice as much as it cost in Norway to actually build the longest road tunnel in the world.
Wigtown's Open Book: The holiday that's a 'book lover's dream' If you're a book lover, this AirBnB does have a 2 year waiting list because everybody wants to run a book shop!
Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI 🤔
The treatment reduced participants’ belief in their chosen conspiracy theory by 20% on average. This effect persisted undiminished for at least 2 months; was consistently observed across a wide range of conspiracy theories, from classic conspiracies involving the assassination of John F. Kennedy, aliens, and the illuminati, to those pertaining to topical events such as COVID-19 and the 2020 US presidential election; and occurred even for participants whose conspiracy beliefs were deeply entrenched and important to their identities.
jd “Creative sand sculpture.”
