Labnotes

storyofmyfuckinglife This could be the title of my autobiography.

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Design Objective

Jony Ive’s Mistakes: When Beautiful Design Is Bad Design The iMac's hockey puck mouse, the MacBook's butterfly keyboard, the Apple TV remote, the list goes on:

The quote often attributed to Einstein is “everything must be made as simple as possible, but not one bit simpler.” I think the trouble was that Ive often ignored the second part of that advice in the pursuit of refinement.

Norgard 👍

It’s too simple is the greatest compliment a product can ever be paid.

The time I tried to ruin Halo 2 On the difference between what users say they will do vs what they actually do, and sticking to your design instinct:

So when our participants told us that they would not enjoy the system, we as researchers then made our own mistake and conveyed those comments as accurately representing how most players would feel about the system after they’d actually played it. And after some heated arguments and back and forth, Bungie chose to push on ahead with their novel matchmaking system over our objections, which turned out to be exactly the right call.

Bill the Lizard “A new contender has emerged...”

The hidden bias in iterative product development Be aware of this:

This weakness-based mindset gets further reinforced when we start analyzing data and feedback. Because loss aversion causes us to focus on losses more than gains, we are more likely to gloss over positive signals and areas of strength and focus instead on the areas of the product that “aren’t working.”

John Cutler Everything is an opportunity for learning:

Something I’ve noticed about great product teams.

They actually talk about the stuff that didn’t work. The misses. The surprises. What they learned. How that informed future decisions.

... it is the antithesis of success theater.

RaminNasibov “fonts matter”

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Tools of the Trade

101 Tips For Being A Great Programmer (& Human) This is a great list. Bookmark and revisit often.

93. Try to remain optimistic
    If something goes wrong, try and be optimistic. Tomorrow is a new day. Optimism will help your team dynamic and your mental health.

94. Continually re-assess your workflow
    Just because something works now doesn't mean it always will. Re-evaluate your workflow and make adjustments where necessary.

Email Like A Boss 👍

Justin Searls “Finally figured out a way to halve the time it takes to do an iCloud restore from backup on an iPhone”

(It works because restore from backup is very CPU intensive, and your phone slows down once it gets hot)

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Lines of Code

Erin ☔️

expect(umbrellaOpens).toBe(true)

tests: 1 passed, 1 total

**all tests passed**

Jaana B. Dogan 👍

If there is one advice that fits everything in programming, it is "Change one thing at a time".

Helen 侯-Sandí “The only 10x engineer”

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Architectural

Sarah Drasner 🎯

Please stop glorifying what's unnecessarily complicated. I've heard countless times people brag about how long it takes people to understand what they work on.

In my perfect world, it would be the opposite. You would brag about how quickly people can understand what you wrote.

Ben Orenstein $10K well spent:

My new consulting engagement: you pay me $10,000 and I delete your project’s backlog while explaining that nothing of value has been lost.

Baron Schwartz I wish more people would understand the first point:

True facts about testing in production:

1. You don’t have a choice; you are doing it whether you acknowledge it or not.

2. Those who say it’s a good thing (they’re right) are not telling you to stop other testing! Pre-prod testing is also, still, a good thing.

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Teamwork

Scott Belsky Extraordinary achievement does require leadership:

a team can only overcome an “insurmountable” obstacle if they see that their leader believes it can be done. it’s a big difference between “managers” and “leaders” - of incremental progress vs. extraordinary achievement.

nota_bennett 👇 Short thread about team dynamics, everything checks out in my experience:

1/5 Are your leaders talking about why basically all the time?

If you just talk about what you need a team to do, the "what" tends to get distorted over time and they end up doing not-quite-what-you-meant. "Why" gives ideas heft and longevity.

Sophie Alpert How to identify unnecessary process:

Whenever a rule is added in a team, first ask:

Will the existence of this rule discourage future people from using their human judgement to make smart decisions in nuanced situations?

Michael Carusi 😭 So true:

The three stages of career development:

1. I can't wait until I'm important enough to be included in meetings.
2. I feel so important being in these meetings!
3. I will do anything legal and several illegal things to avoid these meetings.

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Peopleware

Lenny Rachitsky 👇 Managing up is a skill for everyone, a short thread with tips:

1/5 Overcommunicate: Share what you plan to do, what you’re doing, and what you did. It’s nearly impossible to over-communicate. I sent a weekly “State of The Me” email to my boss, with my current priorities, things on my mind, and blockers I need help with. It worked wonders.

Blair Braverman 👇 Thread:

Y’all, having sled dogs has been so good for my body image. And not because mushing is a joy-filled, physical outdoor activity, although that’s true. It’s actually something much simpler than that.

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Locked Doors

Zoom Zero Day: 4+ Million Webcams & maybe an RCE? Just get them to visit your website! TL;DR

• The MacOS Zoom app included a feature that would keep a server running on your computer, even after you un-installed Zoom
• Anyone could add you to a meeting and watch you through the camera
• Zoom ignored this security flaw until the public out cry, then issued a fix
• Apple pre-empted Zoom, and did a silent OS update to disable this "feature"
• All is good now

Chad Loder To all the people reacting to the above by switching apps:

"I never audited or paid attention to @zoom_us security, but now I'm upset, so I'm going to switch to a DIFFERENT conferencing platform whose security I will also never audit."

Steelcon Gottlieb This, not the stupid cookie policy, may lead to better security and privacy practices:

I can't overstate the significance of this #GDPR British Airways fine (1.5% of worldwide turnover / £183m) for anyone in security, privacy or senior management. You've got to get security right, with appropriate levels for your organisation, else the fines can be career changing.

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None of the Above

Andy Baio “oh, to be young and online”

Josh Campbell 🌯🌯🌯🌯🌯

I was just stuck in an elevator. Everything was fine because I had a burrito in my backpack. Moral of the story: Always bring a burrito.

mrb “Lmao if you think Silicon Valley owns innovation”

Rattlesnake, uranium, whiskey found during traffic stop If you're driving a stolen vehicle, it might as well carry a venomous snakes and radioactive material.

Jen Gentleman “I've never been more invested in a random internet cat succeeding”

Tess Koman 👇 This thread is a slow burn:

name a more crushing blow than "this is a great start!" from your editor, i'll wait

Disintermediating your friends A research into how couples meet. In summary, stranger danger is trending down.

Carol Blymire This kind of behavior/attitude is one of my pet peeves:

Here is a hopefully short synopsis of something that happened this week that I still don’t understand (1/?)

Our Commitment to Lead the Fight Against Online Bullying Instagram taking some steps to stopy bullying: asking users to reconsider before posting a mean comment, and shadow bans.

The helicopter team that films the Tour de France is one of a kind They train for six months!

Annie Minoff Art meets science:

Did you know there is a legit ✨particle accelerator✨in the basement of the Louvre museum!? I heard about this a few years ago, and have been dying to see it ever since.

Well mes amis, yesterday I DID!

Join me! On y va! 1/

Stella Chuu “Winner of best cosplay at #AX2019”

Ikea releases free ‘Soffa Sans’ font made of couches “The world’s comfiest font”

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Design Objective

User Inyerface Let me ruin your day with this “A worst-practice UI experiment”.

Sahil Lavingia 💯

Great product design is customer support at scale.

The counter argument that “best support is no support” is false. There always will be people who struggle to use the product successfully, you decide whether to support them, or exclude them.

Andy Budd Related:

Good product teams are focussed on shipping great software.

Great product teams are focussed on driving business growth.

Dan Hockenmaier 🧵 Excellent reading list!

So much of what is written about growth is noise. Here are ten of the concepts I find myself coming back to over and over again 👇

1/ The Hierarchy of Engagement by @sarahtavel
A framework for sustainable growth: (1) users completing the core action (2) accruing benefits and mounting losses to drive retention (3) virtuous loop by which user engagement fuels future growth.

Doug Collins “critical lesson in affordance” 😭

A designer is about to learn a critical lesson in affordance.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should, but if it looks like you can, someone out there will. #ux #design

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Tools of the Trade

Martin Fowler A classic Type 1 tweet:

A request: don't label categories of things as "type 1" and "type 2" (etc). If you do I can't remember which is which, or indeed what is the basis of the distinction.

Emil Stenström Unfortunately, true:

The only way to know if you've chosen the right technology, is to wait a couple of years. You then sum up the maintenance cost, and if it was lower than the value created, you did well.

The Simple Genius of Checklists, from B-17 to the Apollo Missions Checklists are under-rated, so here's another post about the power of checklists.

Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly? TIL

Since the main mechanism was to rely only on the message loop and background operations were done through timer messages, moving the mouse would trigger a lot of messages, move the app up in priority, wake the app up, and get the app to process the background tasks messages. Without moving the mouse, the timer messages would be read up only at a rather slow interval.

The most famous app for this was the disk defragmenter where operations would wait for a message to update the graphic interface! so shaking the mouse would speed up the defrag.

Ben Cotton ⚾️

"I've got databases with better consistency than you" is a thing I just yelled at an umpire.

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Lines of Code

Programmer Test Principles TL;DR

Summary — programmer tests should:

• Minimize programmer waiting.
• Run reliably.
• Predict deployability.
• Respond to behavior changes.
• Not respond to structure changes.
• Be cheap to write.
• Be cheap to read.
• Be cheap to change.

betsythemuffin That's an interesting and helpful perspective:

This is a good reminder that when we say “too much magic,” what we mean is “the seams and errors are unclear to me, so I don’t feel like I have agency over the code.”

“Too much magic” is something that paints the framework as terrifying, unchangeable, and at fault.

“This is unclear to me” invites us to ask why: poor documentation? Poor foundational understanding? Too few seams in the design?
— and then fix the problem.

Julia Evans “how to handle intermittent bugs”

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Architectural

rivially parallELIZAble “the house always wins eventually.”

and, why I really cannot wrap my head around the "real programmers just don't write bugs" crowd. engineering is the art of building safety margins, redundancy, and tolerances into things.

How the Boeing 737 Max Disaster Looks to a Software Developer Software can't fix organizational issues:

But I do know that it’s indicative of a much deeper problem. The people who wrote the code for the original MCAS system were obviously terribly far out of their league and did not know it. How can they implement a software fix, much less give us any comfort that the rest of the flight management software is reliable?

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Devoops

John Allspaw Well summarized:

Things that do NOT predict how your org is learning from incidents:

• frequency of incidents
• length of incidents
• customer impact of incidents

Things that MIGHT be signals that real learning is happening:

• more people reading/commenting/referencing post-incident reviews
• more people attending post-incident meetings voluntarily, because they learn things there they can’t elsewhere

Cloudflare outage caused by bad software deploy (updated) Regular expresssion goes rogue, takes down the internet:

Unfortunately, one of these rules contained a regular expression that caused CPU to spike to 100% on our machines worldwide. This 100% CPU spike caused the 502 errors that our customers saw. At its worst traffic dropped by 82%.

Rich Rogers Ops in a nutshell:

Understanding uptime:

98.12%: you have a few problems
99.65%: you have no major problems
100.00%: your monitoring is broken

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Teamwork

Eric Elliott 💯

If a feature is taking longer than it should, the answer is more visibility. Pair a senior engineer. Open a WIP PR. Watch out for distractions - don't try to fix everything in one PR.

Shackleford Hurtmore 👇 Thread about outside consultants and the downward spiral:

A local beehive recently hired a wasp as their queen and they then invited management consultant wasps in to identify opportunities to improve productivity. We listened in to conversations in the workspace to understand what kind of changes had been made.

Kelly Eng 🤖 Please and thank you!

a bot that surveys everyone after a meeting “could this have been a email?” and everyone votes and results are posted to public slack channel

Marcin “Pair programming when executed correctly 😅”

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Locked Doors

Track This Cool idea by Firefox. Pick a persona, and it will open 100 tabs of pure madness to fool trackers into thinking you're someone else.

Jane Manchun Wong “macOS Catalina is the new Windows Vista”

Apple just blew it with macOS 10.15. Too many unnecessary prompts popping up when you're trying to get stuff done. And they block the app from making any progress, until you press OK. This UI is conditioning people to accept all prompts.

Apple can say “we're adding security all through the OS”, but I'm so disappointed they took this approach.

Alex Stamos Alex is right, this is a bad take, yet another clickbait article:

This is bad framing and The Verge should be a bit ashamed of trying to create a little scandal out of letting blind people have a slightly better experience.

If a company has your photo THEY HAVE THE DATA OF WHAT IS IN IT. Exposing that to screen readers is only positive.

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None of the Above

danee, goddess of dinosaurs “Can everybody just Please look at this cat”

Anna Debenham 👍

One of the best pieces of advice was from my Year Two teacher, on how to draw a bicycle: "Spend twice as much time looking at it than drawing it".

I apply that to so many areas. More time listening than talking. More observing than doing. The outcome will always be better.

Mikel Jollett 🤣

I love how people in LA rate earthquakes like wine.

“It was crisp with a good weight and a nice finish.”

Mark Squires A few years before Google Maps:

For this weeks #FridayFun Nokia ad we are going all the way back to '96 when the smartphone was heralded by the Nokia 9000. This was before there was GPS in phones, but there was Fax ! A big thing at the time :-)

Apple is reportedly giving up on its controversial MacBook keyboard 🕺 Finally!!! And an edge-to-edge 16" screen MacBook Pro?

25 Words That Are Their Own Opposites In English you can be running fast, but also holding fast.

Brandon Wall 👇 Reminder that some “controversial” tweets are an attempt to incite and divide. Check before you rage-tweet (and Facebook/Instagram have the same problem):

This viral tweet complaining about the Little Mermaid casting being racist has a profile pic stolen from an Instagram model. The “half black best friend” pic is taken from god knows where, but shows up in a bunch of Pinterest BFF roundups

The Neuroscience of Cravings Fascinating, even though doesn't explain my love for pickled vegetables:

“I’ve never met anyone who struggles with vegetable cravings,” says Sherry Pagoto, a PhD behavioral psychology researcher at the University of Connecticut.

sonic's orthodontist 😮 “The Washington Post’s fact check is that this is so true it somehow becomes false”

Brezina 🤔

Remote Work is to millennials what Suburban Sprawl was to boomers. Geographic arbitrage enabled by new technology. The Internet & the car respectively.

James Mackintosh Related:

WeWork vs Starbucks as office:
WeWork hotdesk cheapest in London is £200/mo, in Hackney. Free coffee and beer.
Starbucks let's say 4 coffees/day at £2/coffee (really much more) = £176.
Starbucks as an office that sells takeaway coffee, or WeWork as a coffee shop w/perks. Hmm.
Flip side of this is that Starbucks makes ~$700m/qtr selling coffee, while WeWork loses ~$700m/qtr giving it away.

We Challenged Kids to Stay Completely Still Too funny …

How to speak Silicon Valley: 53 essential tech-bro terms explained 🔥🔥🔥

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Design Objective

laura olin She's not wrong:

Every forthcoming article about Jonny Ive’s design genius and legacy should be required by law to include this photo

Kim Goodwin 💯

Engineering decisions are UX decisions, exhibit 127: if there is not enough hot water, nobody cares if the shower controls are well-designed.

Ha Phan It's never as simple as "do prototype -> deploy to production":

The trajectory of a product is dependent on the team’s ability to ask the right questions about feasibility and possibility, and the product manager’s ability to make bets in scaling value, capability, system, and impact.

Jane Manchun Wong 😱

"Fun" fact: the logo of @GoogleChrome Developers YouTube channel is 1px² off from the center, revealing white background in dark theme

Enjoy the rest of your weekend 😬

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Tools of the Trade

Software below the poverty line TL;DR open source projects are not making enough money to support their developers:

This is not the first time hard-working honest people are giving their all, for unfair compensation.

The Rise and Fall of Visual Basic I started my career in C/C++, and only later some projects with Visual Basic. Never thought about it as "lesser language", in spite of its limitations. If you look at tools that gained wide adoption in the real world, Visual Basic is there are the top.

Data Bear, PhD Correct:

It’s only Data Science if it’s from the Data region of France. Otherwise it’s just sparkling statistics.

Austin Johnsen Timezones are hard …

TIL that if you go North of the Arctic Circle in the summer and bring a MacBook with Night Shift set to be triggered by sunrise/sunset, the process will go into an infinite loop because the sun never sets...

Raspberry Pi 4 How far have computers come! This tiny card has up to 16GB of RAM, gigabit ethernet, can drive two 4K displays, and the starting price is $35.

Rory Preddy "Using the wrong tool for the job."

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Web-end

State of CSS 2019 Interesting info about trends and adoption of various Web technologies (caveat, survey responders skew towards “back of the front-end” developers).

Building the most inaccessible site possible with a perfect Lighthouse score The point is, tools like Lighthouse give an arbitrary score, which doesn't tell you how many people can use your website successfully.

cjss-group/CJSS Paradigm shifting: with CSJSS you can write your JavaScript inside the CSS!!!

component {
  --html:(
    <h2>${yield}</h2>
    <p>This is a component</p>
  );
}

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Lines of Code

Lanette Creamer Yet we can agree on code that would definitely be a nightmare to maintain:

I don’t think “write good code” is a clear and objective measure. You don’t even agree with your own code from years ago, let alone someone else’s. I do my best. I am sure that fails to meet the bar of good enough for some people.

magical 🅱irl Mesmerizing.

i wrote a cross-stitching cellular automata to find a path that uses the minimum amount of thread possible

Rebecca Franks "User Interface vs The Underlying Code #programming"

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Architectural

Cindy Sridharan 👇Absolutely (and check the rest of the thread):

The very first thing you need to do to solve any problem is impose constraints.

Also, asking the question “is it simple to implement” makes you look at research through a whole different lens.

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Peopleware

Zoe Hong 💯

People always talk about dismissing critics. Don’t. Figure out the root of their criticism. Listen. Change what really isn’t working. (Remember my long intros? I barely have intros anymore.) And then dismiss the rest, the stuff that would change the core of you.

Matthew Kobach Great take on all these "successful people" listicles:

Actual habits of successful people:

• Wake up when their body tells them to
• Read stuff that interests them
• Exercise when it best fits into their schedule
• Drink coffee if they like coffee
• Sometimes eat unhealthy food
• Tell the people they love that they love them

Your Brain Can Only Take So Much Focus TL;DR Concentrating for too long is counter productive. Let your brain wander a bit throughout the day.

The Science of Stir Crazy Why spending time alone drives people nuts.

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Teamwork

Joshua McKenty Those are so rare to come by:

Unpopular take: A well-run meeting is one of the most productive and important activities of any team.

Pam Krengel Always be improving:

#Retro helps a team determine what’s working, what’s not. Where they need to improve, what they need to stop or double-down on. It’s a critical step to measure the teams’ velocity and progress. It can also help uncover a root cause preventing a team to get to high performing.

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Devoops

Boeing’s 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers No one could have predicted what would happen when Boeing decided to fire their top developers:

Rabin, the former software engineer, recalled one manager saying at an all-hands meeting that Boeing didn’t need senior engineers because its products were mature.

And replace them with a firm that would work for free:

HCL, once known as Hindustan Computers, was founded in 1976 by billionaire Shiv Nadar and now has more than $8.6 billion in annual sales. With 18,000 employees in the U.S. and 15,000 in Europe, HCL is a global company and has deep expertise in computing, said Sukamal Banerjee, a vice president. It has won business from Boeing on that basis, not on price, he said: “We came from a strong R&D background.”

Still, for the 787, HCL gave Boeing a remarkable price – free, according to Sam Swaro, an associate vice president who pitched HCL’s services at a San Diego conference sponsored by Avionics International magazine in June.

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None of the Above

Assaf "You're never too big to fail at mail merge"

Alexa 😭

Reasons @Spiderman should found a tech startup:
🕸 Skilled at web design
🏢 Ability to scale businesses
🗞 Media calls him disruptive

Adam Laiacano 🔥

46lbs window unit air conditioner from Amazon: free shipping
2 digital-delivery tickets from ticketmaster: $18 fee

How to Shop for Quality Clothes For designers and shoppers who want to make smart choices with their money!

Sonja Drimmer 👇 Love this meme:

Elizabeth Warren doesn’t make everyone attend a meeting for business that can get done over email.

The U.S. Is Purging Chinese Cancer Researchers From Top Institutions If you are in the academic/research world, learn to spot the early signs of political purges, and call them out.

Scott Burke 👇 CEO choose your own adventure thread:

Being Startup CEO for a day:
DON'T LET YOUR COMPANY DIE THREAD
Time to pick a co-founder! Do you pick a) Your Stanford classmate who is heir to a mayonnaise fortune or b) The cypherpunk you met at a Brooklyn hackathon

rahel aima "who is the oasis bakery spices copywriter i just want to talk"

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Design Objective

How VisiCalc’s Spreadsheets Changed the World It's the 40th anniversary of the first "killer app":

Bricklin writes that he even got advice from some of his professors. Professor Barbara Jackson told him to go after simple use-case scenarios, because he’d be competing with the backs of envelopes.

Why Mazda is purging touchscreens from its vehicles Please and thank you:

Mazda is looking to add more simple, tactile controls into the cars. A quick tilt of the volume knob to the right or left goes forward or back single tracks—or holding it left or right fast-forwards it. A tap of the button mutes the system, and holding it down quickly turns off the screen and everything if it’s currently a distraction.

Austin 💯

Content design has to be one of the most undervalued roles on a product team.

The cheapest solution to 'most' UX issues is a change to the content.

5 Rules for Choosing the Right Words on Button Labels I'm a big fan of actionable UIs. Please, do write explanatory text, but don't expect me to read it before I can use the UI. so, actionable and self-explanatory.

Josh Williams 😭

Me: 24px
Illustrator: 24.001px
Me: 24px
Illustrator: 24.001px
Me: 24px
Illustrator: 24.001px

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Tools of the Trade

Time for Clockwise This is an amazing concept: a calendar defragmenter, so you can claim your focus time. I'm going to give it a try, hopefully it works in real life as well as the demo.

Pock Moves the dock into the touch bar.

At Least One VIM Trick You Might Not Know A couple I didn't know, and I've been using VIM for years.

whitequark "meet the most advanced contemporary programming language. the result of years of development and decades of industry compromise"

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Architectural

Casper Beyer 👇 The micro-dependency architecture is pure nonsense and made up of false hopes:

Here's a question, why would you willingly add a dependency on a one liner in a package? think is-odd, is-windows, etc.
...
"Because they're battle tested" is something that came up. Well for example is-windows has false positives and isn't even tested on the target platform. That is, a package that tests if it's running on windows doesn't run it's tests on Windows.

Karen You can also get a stacks 4 lifo t-shirt.

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Lines of Code

Dave Cheney Important distinction:

Readability vs Clarity.

Readability is how long it took you to read a book, a paper, a program, a function, and so on.

Clarity is simply; did you understand what you just read?

Math.Round opens the browser print dialog #290 Printers are evil and out to get us through our math libraries.

Kelly Vaughn 👍

if your code isn't working, try leaving it in rice overnight

Joe Groff "Going to start putting this at the beginning of all of my code snippets"

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Devoops

Ryan Holdaway ⛵️

Internet went down in the middle of a Zoom call. Walk out of my office to find that my 4 year old daughter had filled up a plastic tub with water and foaming soap to give her toys a bath. She was using the router as a boat.

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Peopleware

Joe Ziemer All you need to know about price and perception of value:

Have an old shed I want removed. Post it for free and get zero inquiries. Contact companies to haul it away and get bids for too much $$$. Post it for $100 and get multiple ppl wanting it while the free post is still active. 🤔

Persuasive Phrases: 9 Lines That Will Get People to Commit It may be counter-intuitive, but if it works …

“On a scale of 1 to 10, how excited are you about this proposal?”
This may sound basic, but just hear me out. Most likely, when asking someone how they feel about a proposal, you will get a safe answer. Most people’s instinct is to then follow up that answer with the standard: “What can we do to make it a 10?”

But instead of moving north, flip the script and ask them why they didn’t say a lower number.

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Teamwork

Ellen Huet 🎯

hot Slack take from a friend: email sucks. new thing arrives -- better than email! and for a while, it is. more signal, less noise. but as more people use it, it feels more like a chore

turns out what's annoying isn't email, it's people asking you for stuff, which will never end

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None of the Above

Klara Sjöberg "The eternal struggle." (h/t Damien Joyce)

Caity Weaver 😭

‼️URGENT‼️ My Dad still uses a flip phone and accidentally set his text notification to an audio file of himself recording his voicemail greeting, so EVERY TIME he gets a text, his own voice booms “Hey! If you’re ready to have some fun in your life, leave a message for John!”

Adrian 👇 The Char Dog Race:

The char dog was invented by Enrico Fermi in an underground laboratory beneath the University of Chicago's Stagg Field. Fermi discovered that it was possible to add more crispy surface area to a grilled hot dog but cutting its ends. (1/78)

Amazon Prime Video US Twitter was made for these exchanges (context):

Hey @netflix, we'll cancel Stranger Things if you cancel Good Omens. 😉

Robin Mazumder 👇 Electric bikes have more potential to transform transportation than electric cars:

At a cycling conference I spoke at this year, a man came up to me to tell me how an e-bike totally changed his 93 year old father's life. Prior to the bike, he was very socially isolated. Now he's out in the community every day. Think about that the next time you shit on e-bikes.

Lyrics Site Accuses Google of Lifting Its Content The cool thing is how Genius detected what Google was doing: they used apostrophes to encode "Red Handed" into song lyrics.

The New Science of Pot and Appetite We still don't know much about TCH, including the different ways in whihc it affects appetite:

Besides needing to clarify all the complex mechanisms at work in how CB1 affects appetite, medicine is still struggling to reliably put the effects to work for people who most need the help with regulating food intake: those with eating disorders and wasting illness, and perhaps even people struggling with overeating.

David Harvey "The driving forces of value in motion"

Men Have No Friends and Women Bear the Burden Yes, men are allowed to have feelings, and to share them with other men:

A group text chain enables the men to check in with other members between meetings, and for some of these men, this is their first truly authentic relationship with a peer. “It’s super liberating to make yourself vulnerable to a group like this,” says Randy, adding that he doesn’t need Liz to be his one and only anymore.

Spoon & Tamago Worth watching through to the end:

Tobe Zoo in Aichi conducted a lion escape drill today.

Note the expression on the actual lions faces.

Check out Fincky for more amazing FPV drone videos.

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Design Objective

Aaron Levie 💯

As a startup, always bias toward simple. Customers will tell you when your product doesn't do enough, but will never ask for fewer features when they stop using your product because it's too complex.

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Tools of the Trade

Initial Thoughts on iPadOS: A New Path Forward Apple finally figured out it needs to split iOS and create an operating system specifically for tablets. The last generation iPad Pros are amazing devices, but iOS limits them to being large-sized phones. Looks like iPadOS is the operating system we're waiting for. Or maybe just me, I'm using my iPad more than my MacBook these days.

Yehuda Katz 👇 Brand name goes a long way to sustain second rate technologies (don't get me started on GWT or Angular):

It's pretty hard to tell whether many Google technologies would make it out of the starting gate without the heavy thumb that Google monopoly power places on the scale.

Ironically, Googlers all believe that their technologies are winning because they're better.

Patrick Collison 😭

Some day, AI will get so advanced that Google Docs will automatically switch to the account has access to the document.

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Architectural

Amy Codes "This is a metaphor about software."

That Elise My dad had a new radiator fitted, then realised you could no longer open the drawer. So he remade the drawer like this to correct his mistake. This sort of thing explains a lot of my upbringing.

Dmitry Alexandrov "It is sometime useful to have a senior developers in the team."

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Devoops

WordPress.com VIP platform outage reverts sites back to default themes For a brief moment, people in my timeline were wondering about that clean and simple TechCrunch redesign. Turns out that "redesign" was just a temporary glitch.

Matty Stratton 🤔

What 90s movie most illustrates devops principles?

My favorite response to that question comes from Dave Hahn:

Groundhog Day

• This will fix it! Nope.
• This will fix it! Nope.
• This will fix it! Nope.
• This will fix it! Nope.
• This will fix it! Nope.
• This will fix it! Nope.
• This will fix it! Nope.
• This will fix it! Nope.

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Peopleware

3 Defining Features of ADHD That Everyone Overlooks Fresh take on ADHD. As Jim Stormdancer so eloquently put it:

The classic symptoms of ADHD, "inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity," describe the ways that ADHD sufferers annoy their parents, not what it's like to actually live with ADHD.

Also, this is new to me: Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria.

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Move Fast

Graham Lea 👇Fantastic responses in this thread:

Are you a tech company CTO, CIO, Head of Engineering or Operations?
What are the top 3 things you worry about in your organisation?
(Please RT for reach!)

Michael Seibel 👇 Usually goes hand in hand with title inflation. Pretending to be late stage company doesn't make you one:

I really hate when early stage startups talk about CAC / LTV. In the early stage it's almost impossible to know either. What I've realized is that way too much later stage advice is being absorbed and acted upon by early stage founders.

Bill Gross 💯

"Culture eats everything for breakfast. Culture at a company makes more different than anything else. Culture is what managers do when no one tells that what to do.." Eric Ries at #CodeCon

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Locked Doors

Ian Sigalow If you remember, last week I linked to a related article:

My day:
-Impersonator took info from our website
-Posted fake jobs on Indeed, ZipRecruiter, and LI
-Interviewed candidates on Google Hangout
-Sent fake job offers on fake letterhead
-Asked for a blank check to set up payroll
We learned about it once the victims started calling

In Stores, Secret Surveillance Tracks Your Every Move TL;DR Apps from retailers exist to track your every move and shopping habits, even when the app is not running. But so do everyday apps — games, weather, meditation, etc — app developers may not realize what they're apps are doing (it's SDKs all the way down).

U.S. Customs and Border Protection says photos of travelers were taken in a data breach In news that will surprise no one, criminals steal data collected by government surveillance.

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None of the Above

Ana Stanowick This tweet reaching a million likes, for all the right reasons:

my dad used to get so mad every time my mom would come home w a new coffee mug (she likes to collect them) and her new bf literally built her a wall to display her collection. this is why we don’t settle for loser boys, ladies!!!!!

Daniel Danger KISS:

my post-art plan is opening a grilled cheese cart. it will serve $1 grilled cheese made with white bread, bulk cheese, bulk butter, and thats it. greasy as hell. no options, no artisan, nothing. there will be no change. you give me $5 youre getting 5, you figure your own life out

meg 😭

Someone named Nolan is using my Netflix account, but I just think it was so nice of them to make their own profile & not mess up my recomendations, that I’m just gonna leave it

math prof The perfect comeback:

Sunday joke: Picked up a hitch-hiker. Seemed like a nice guy. After a few miles, he asked me if I wasn't afraid that he might be a serial killer. I told him the odds of two serial killers being in the same car were extremely unlikely.

Michelle Cyca "why don't people know about libraries"

Kristin Chirico 👇😭

This is a true story about the most humiliating experience I've ever had with my dad.

David Shackelford The Internet is a technology for finding people who know more than you do about the most specific subjects:

I was all proud for ID’ing the airplane and making a Star Wars pun, but I mixed up the airport and got instantly called out. There is always a bigger nerd.

Walela Nehanda Our individual actions do matter, but they're also used to pit people against people, and draw attention away from the real polluters:

Reducing environmental destruction to individual choices is done to purposefully obscure how things are produced & the relations of production. When we start talking about that shit, then we have to talk about extractive industry, capitalism, & major corps role in climate change.

moe Case in point:

I was declined a straw at a restaurant this morning. The waitress had one in her apron. As she poured the water I said “excuse me miss can I have a straw?” She said “we can’t just give them out” and walked away.

T.I.N.P "Testing the wire rigs for the hoverboards in Back to the Future Part II."