Published
Weekend Reading — Bumpy safety yellow
Alice McPhotos My favorite yellow is "bumpy safety surface yellow."
Tech Stuff
Vitest I just switched from Jest to Vitest. My app uses Remix so it relies on Vite which is hard to get working with Jest. Also, I use TypeScript which is another pain point. Switching to Vitest took no time and so far it feels much much faster. Recommended.
darrenburns/posting If you need an HTTP client that runs in the terminal.
god grant me the patience to accept the software I shouldn't rewrite, the strength to rewrite what I should and the wisdom to tell the difference
TargetJ A javascript framework that lets you animate anything.
A Most Useful Color Picker How about an HCL color picker?
Dear Crowdstrike, and all Americans:
Please stop deploying on Thursdays. They are our Fridays.
Love,
UTC+everyone.
Jellypod I don't know if this works well or not, but this is a really good use for AI. This iPhone app generates a daily podcast from your newsletter subscriptions, so you can listen to your newsletter while driving to work, shopping for groceries, bicycling, etc.
Eye for Design
Stephen Farrugia “Pay-to-disable is the future of UX and monetisation of AI features.”
Luci for dyeing 👇 Thread:
a huge formative experience happened when I was 16. I was brought into my mother’s office and hired to compell a guy to use his computer who was refusing to use his computer, and exclusively used his IBM selectric.
First up, the guy was an unlikable jerk. However, first thing he does when I get there is refuse to even talk to me about the situation until AFTER I read The Invisible Computer by Donald Norman.
It’s a good book I cannot summarise in the 50 characters I have left in this post
Ryanair – when every page is a dark pattern I few on Ryanair once. It was a family trip so we needed a budget airline. Was it a good experience? No. But the drive from the airport to city center was way worse and at some point our driver almost got into a fist fight.
Seiko Originals: The UC-2000, A Smartwatch from 1984 It's 1984 and you're in the market for a smart watch …
Peoples
White-Collar Work Is Just Meetings Now
The meeting-industrial complex has grown to the point that communications has eclipsed creativity as the central skill of modern work.
NTP is down, time is now undefined, all meetings are cancelled
Business Side
Google Now Defaults to Not Indexing Your Content I can’t verify this is how their search engine works, but my experience is that this is absolutely factually correct:
Now, for each piece of content, Google decides if it's worth indexing, and more often than not, the answer seems to be "no." They might index content they perceive as truly unique or on topics that aren't covered at all. But if you write about a topic that Google considers even remotely addressed elsewhere, they likely won't index it. This can happen even if you're a well-respected writer with a substantial readership.
Indonesia’s 'Strava jockey' trend goes viral, but buying exercise achievements comes with potential pitfalls, say experts For the low low price of $0.62 per km you can pay someone else to run for you on the Strava app.
For $335 an hour, LA pet psychics will talk with your dog I'm clearly in the wrong profession 😦
Exploding Soda Cans Cause Chaos on Southwest Flights This Exxon Heat Wave coupled with already hot Las Vegas with a Southwest Airlines cabin and some cans of coke is a recipe for disaster:
Airline officials reported a series of incidents where cans of carbonated drinks have ruptured, often during opening, resulting in onboard messes and about 20 employee injuries so far this summer.
Machine Intelligence
Imitation Intelligence, my keynote for PyCon US 2024 This is a really good presentation on the current state of AI, what it does, what it's good for, how to use it, what to avoid, the works. And it's no pie-in-the-sky "AI will save humanity" or “AI will democratize art”. Real, factual, stuff you can code right now.
AI Has Become a Technology of Faith The Atlantic captures the essence of generative AI:
The greatest trick of a faith-based industry is that it effortlessly and constantly moves the goal posts, resisting evaluation and sidestepping criticism. The promise of something glorious, just out of reach, continues to string unwitting people along. All while half-baked visions promise salvation that may never come.
Study claims AI is funnier than humans after people rate jokes written by both Which GPT should I be using to get you all laughing more?
Amplify GenAI So basically a platform for building AI chat apps that can reference your docs for Q&A, and produce Word/Powerpoint docs, and do a whole lot of other stuff. Open source, deploy to your AWS account, and connect to Anthropic or OpenAI LLMs. And they claim it's used by 1,300 users at Vanderbilt.
Insecurity
Defective McAfee update causes worldwide meltdown of XP PCs Here are two things you need to know about the CrowdStrike disaster.
One, the CEO of CrowdStrike was previously the CTO of McAfee. And when he was CTO of McAfee, they released an update to their antivirus system that deleted a crucial Windows XP file, sending servers into a reboot loop that required manual repair.
Two, the same thing happened Thursday night with CrowdStrike.
TIRED: touch grass
WIRED: touch every single one of your installed machines
Leaked Docs Show What Phones Cellebrite Can (and Can’t) Unlock Leaked docs show Cellebrite couldn't forcibly unlock any iPhone running iOS 17.4 or newer. Most of the listed Android devices could be unlocked.
Hackers could create traffic jams thanks to flaw in traffic light controller, researcher says
A security researcher found that some traffic lights controllers are exposed on the internet and could be manipulated.
Exclusive: USPS shared customer postal addresses with Meta, LinkedIn and Snap Informed Delivery is a great service for seeing what’s in your inbox. But do I need to share this info with LinkedIn?
In the case of USPS, some of that collected data included the postal addresses of logged-in USPS Informed Delivery customers, who use the service to see photos of their incoming mail before it arrives.
Let's cut the bullshit and spell out a few things. The IT security industry is about as trustworthy as the food supplement and vitamin industry, but somehow they escaped the same reputation. Their products are overwhelmingly based on flawed ideas, and the quality of their software is exceptionally bad. And while not everyone will agree with the harshness of my words, I'll say this: Essentially everyone in IT security who knows anything in principle knows this.
Weak Security Defaults Enabled Squarespace Domains Hijacks
At least a dozen organizations with domain names at domain registrar Squarespace saw their websites hijacked last week. Squarespace bought all assets of Google Domains a year ago, but many customers still haven't set up their new accounts. Experts say malicious hackers learned they could commandeer any migrated Squarespace accounts that hadn’t yet been registered, merely by supplying an email address tied to an existing domain.
I worked for a couple of years as a private investigator. While most PIs spy on husbands cheating on their wives, I was corporate. My job was to look into stolen secrets, sources of leaks, and computer crimes.
My mentor was a guy named Hildner, a former military intelligence officer and career PI. He taught me what I now call Hildner's Law. It is good guidance in general.
"You are going to fall in love with your first theory about what happened. To find the truth, ignore it and keep looking."
Grant Trebbin “I knew this day would come.”
Everything Else
pronto “KIT KAT wins the internet today”
Then they came for the sarcastic people and I was like oh great that's exactly what we need right now well done to all concerned.
People really tell themselves they would have joined the Resistance in WWII and they... couldn't even stop using a lousy website
Red pandas spend the whole day chilling, eating and sleeping. Unless it's snowing, when they go hog wild. Or unless they are cubs, when they spend a lot of the day pouncing. But mostly they just chillin'. Which is a lesson for us all to take life easier.
Humans be like: Yes I have a small furry creature wandering around my living space. I cannot effectively communicate with it and it screams at me and sometimes bites or claws me to the point it draws blood. Also it vomits on the floors and sometimes other places. Anyway it's totally worth it because I get to frequently rub my hands on it
If you suffered in life and want others to suffer because you turned out fine - you in fact, did not turn out fine.
narkosefuzzy “Delikatesse mit ⚡”
Driver fleeing car collision on Bay Bridge jumps off railing That’s not from the Onion:
a man trying to escape his involvement in a car wreck on the Bay Bridge between Oakland and San Francisco Thursday climbed onto the railing and jumped
Bud Light slips again, falling behind Modelo and Michelob Ultra after boycott So the conservative boycott of Bud Light was so successful it kicked Bud Light down to third place (6.5% of beer dollar sales). Interesting. Except that first place with 9.7% of sales is now Modelo Especial – a Mexican imported beer 🤯
(BTW Modelo Negra is one of my favorite beers, I recommend trying it)
Chilly “It's one banana Michael, how much could it cost... $104?”
Mike Olson PSA
In my town of Berkeley, CA, the public library has a branch that lends only tools. Hammers and screwdrivers, yeah, but concrete mixers? Monster masonry drills? Electric demolition hammers? They got 'em!
About once a decade, I need to sink a posthole. I always borrow the postholer and digging rod from the library and do a much nicer job than my wife expects.
This is such a wonderful service. Plus I like to brag about my local public library!
TBH, this seems worse than having the road blocked by climate activists for a few minutes, much less talk about doing so on a Zoom call.
Land was barren. He dug 10-acre underground village & orchard 😮 This is a 45 minute video but it passes so quickly because the story is entirely captivating and the presenter is really engaging. Go watch even jsut a few minutes of it:
During the California heat wave of 1906, Baldassare Forestiere dug a home underground with just a pickax and shovel. He spent 40 years excavating 10 acres of rooms, tunnels, a chapel, an underground aquarium, and courtyards to experiment with underground farming.
Inside the Mafia of Pharma Pricing The reason drag prices are so damn expensive in the US? Turns out it’s not the drug makers or the insurance companies. It’s the PBMs that are controlled by UHG, CVS, Humana, and Cigna. And an FTC that’s only now catching up to how bad this law is:
But because of a legal change I’ll explain, just three PBMs are now in control of pricing of pharmaceuticals, and are redirecting vast amounts of money to themselves. And they are why the price of generic Gleevec didn’t drop as it should have.
