Labnotes

Evan Kirstel "Genius! #makers #maker #WednesdayVibes"

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Design Objective

Keith Stoeckeler “We know our users/customers"

Ben Thompson Born in a different generation, I still Ctrl+S even when I don't need to:

My daughter deleted an entire report because, after only using Google Docs previously, she had to use Word. She was completely befuddled by the idea of "save", especially because she didn't have a pre-existing folder for her class in the dialog. Finally she just quit the app 😬

iPhones are Allergic to Helium TIL if it gives you a funny voice, it may render your electronics useless. Keep your phone away from MRI machines!

That’s when he posted the issue to Reddit, where other sysadmins speculated that it might be caused by the liquid helium used to cool the MRI machine. So he investigated, and found there was a helium leak at the same time that vented into the building.

Eoghan McCabe Relevant because, did you know MRI machines are just huge magnets?

Apple consistently set the bar for simple yet engaging marketing copy. This is light and easy to read. Yet informative and fun. It makes you want to read more. This part made me smile.

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Tools of the Trade

Fifty Years of BASIC, the Programming Language That Made Computers Personal Fascinating look at the history of the BASIC language, born in a liberal arts college, to make computers more accessible. A feature of every 70's home computer that was lost to time.

IBM to acquire Red Hat in deal valued at $34 billion What a crazy year for open source:

Open source has been the biggest theme in technology this year. Prior to IBM's purchase of Red Hat, two of the biggest tech deals of the year were Microsoft's $7.5 billion purchase of GitHub, a code-sharing service, and Salesforce's $6.5 billion acquisition of MuleSoft, whose technology stitches together disparate software applications, data and devices. Earlier this month, big-data rivals Cloudera and Hortonworks agreed to merge in a $5.2 billion deal.

I Am Devloper Ghost Of Projects Past:

For Halloween I'm dressing up as all your abandoned side projects and domain renewal emails.

muesli Where is the lie?

In other words: XML combines the efficiency of text files with the readability of binary files...

Alex Novemberg "1 new message"

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Devoops

Lorin Hochstein ETOOREAL:

Software engineer (quoting Fred Brooks): The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination.

SRE: Your service fell over after it ran out of file descriptors.

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Peopleware

JBD Thread on job interviews and how to present:

Just because you didn't pass via the interview process, it doesn't necessarily mean that you are not eligible to work at that place. It means the signals are not produced. It might be you, might be the system, might be the interviewers.

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Electric Dreams

Google Webmasters I guess Waymo has collected all the data it needs to identify street signs and store fronts (citation):

Today, we are excited to announce the launch of reCAPTCHA v3. Your users no longer need to solve any challenges. You’ll get more visibility to the abusive traffic on your site and more flexibility on what actions to take. Watch this video to learn more →

Reinforcement Learning with Prediction-Based Rewards Neural network learns how to solve Super Mario by avoiding boredom:

RND incentivizes visiting unfamiliar states by measuring how hard it is to predict the output of a fixed random neural network on visited states. In unfamiliar states it’s hard to guess the output, and hence the reward is high. It can be applied to any reinforcement learning algorithm, is simple to implement and efficient to scale. Below we release a reference implementation of RND that can reproduce the results from our paper.

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Locked Doors

App Scams: Sneaky 'Utility' Apps Are Stealing $260, $2500, or even $4700 Each Year ... Per User This is another fascinating use case of how flaws in user experience (aka edge cases) will be exploited:

“Users open the app and quickly tap a “Start” button or “Continue” button on the first page,” she told me via email. “Unfortunately this loads the Apple payment prompt instead of starting the free app as most users would expect. Users then panic and press the home screen to exit the app – unfortunately on fingerprint devices this makes payment or signs up for the free trial.”

Lukasz Olejnik And at the other hand, we got UX of privacy:

Closing (modern, with T2 chip) MacBook lids causes a physical disconnect of miceophone. Protects from eavesdropping even if the system is hacked/infected. https://www.apple.com/mac/docs/Apple_T2_Security_Chip_Overview.pdf …

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None of the Above

Worker at Utah DMV wears best #Halloween costume ever for DMV worker

Max Fagin TIL

November is here, and that means a massive shift is coming. And by "massive" I am of course referring to the redefinition of the kilogram unit of mass that the world has been building up to for more than 100 years. Let me explain:

Fluff Society "Spooky level is rising <- This stuff is why the internet was invented."

Amy Renee "Most accurate time change graphic out there… ⏰😂"

Audrey "The Salesforce tower has turned into the Eye of Sauron for Halloween and I swear it’s staring at me."

Apple’s New Map Fascinating. "Has Apple closed the gap with Google’s map?"

Words matter, and they’re destabilizing the American tribe Bold. We deserve more tech leadership like this:

That’s why we at Twilio banned not just hate speech, but any organization whose primary purpose is spreading hate. It’s in our control to decide who uses our product, and from whom we take money. We choose not to profit from this hatred, or those who spread it.

Nature is Amazing "Look at the happiness on the dog's face after his big jump 😂😂"

The scariest idea I could think of for a spooky pumpkin 🎃👻😱

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Design Objective

UX Best Practices: How to Design Scannable App Screenshots This article walks you through practical ideas for making app screenshots that are more effective, informative, and enjoyable to look at. Which of course leads to more people downloading your app:

1. Explain the most important user story of your app in the first two screenshots.
2. Increase the font size and cut down on text.
3. Highlight UI elements that represent text captions.

Technology Myths and Urban Legends TL;DR

When users don’t clearly understand how systems function, they develop unique (and often incorrect) theories to explain their experiences.

Designing Better Choices for Your Users The power of a nudge in design:

A nudge is any factor that significantly alters the behavior of humans. To count as a nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Putting the fruit at eye level while it encourages for it to be picked up or bought counts as nudge. Banning junk food does not — Richard Thaler, Nudge

Pulp Librarian Advertising has come a long way, from the creative genius of Leonetto Cappiello — you could stare at these ads for hours — to boring annoyances like AdSense:

Today I'm looking at the work of pioneering advertising artist Leonetto Cappiello!

Jon Hicks 😭

Actually what I said was "If it fits between two slices of bread, it's a sandwich"

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Tools of the Trade

Saron Asking questions is a very powerful tool, and not enough people know to use it:

I talk to A LOT of developers, and one of the biggest differences I've see between new and experienced devs is that experienced devs don't wait to ask questions. #CodeNewbie

React v16.6.0: lazy, memo and contextType Reacts gets better at functional composition, object state, and code splitting. Also, RFC for adding hooks, so you can have state without using classes (yes please!):

const MyComponent = React.memo(function MyComponent(props) {
  /* only rerenders if props change */
});

James Long The difference is notable:

I'm tired of demos. It's time to see if this async version of React really works.

I flipped it on in my (changed 5 lines of code) and this is the difference. It completely changes the user experience. There's a lot of little things left to do, but this is huge. Awesome work.

The Intl.RelativeTimeFormat API JavaScript finally gets internationalized relative time formats :

const rtf = new Intl.RelativeTimeFormat('en');
rtf.format(3.14, 'second');
// → 'in 3.14 seconds'
rtf.format(-15, 'minute');
// → '15 minutes ago'

Jesse Engel 🔥

I've started mentally replacing "AI", "Neural Network", and other buzz terms with "Predictive model". It removes a false sense of agency, better reflects reality, and instantly brings the hype factor down by 300%.

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Lines of Code

Practice - Longer than a Code Kata This is an interesting way to find and unwind common practices that you may not be aware you're doing (eg over-engineering, messy merges, slipping on schedule):

But every one of the groups was writing more code than strictly necessary. They wrote code that they knew they would need in later features. This is something very natural for programmers. We write more code than we need to. For me, that is too still a very hard thing - To only write the code that is required, not what I think is required.

Because they wrote more code than necessary, we still did not have a release at the end of the second iteration. The two features worked, but there was code for some of the next features that was only partly working.

Amber Race "some strings are more equal than others" (clue)

Just learned the lesson again that just because a line of code is covered by a unit test, doesn't mean it actually works in reality. In Java, especially, some strings are more equal than others

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Architectural

nicole forsgren The product mindset:

Build the things that differentiate you, buy the things that dont.

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Devops

dvlping "When you've lost your API key"

Jake Williams 🎤

Annie, are you ok?
So, Annie are you ok
Are you ok, Annie
Annie, are you ok?
So, Annie are you ok
Are you ok, Annie
Annie, are you ok?

Michael Jackson understood the requirements for continuous monitoring...

Sky News This is one network rollout that didn't go according to plan:

Drivers in Houston had to negotiate their way around an unusual piece of road traffic - a giant, rolling cable spool.

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Peopleware

Matt Aimonetti Add this trick to The Art Of Avoiding Unnecessary Meetings:

I started messaging people with whom I have a scheduled meeting but no defined agendas. I offer them to cancel/postpone unless they have agenda items to discuss.

So far, all meetings were cancelled which I think is a win/win situation.

Shreyas Doshi Buckle up, long but excellent thread about the journey from product manager to product leader:

More than 8 years after my last public talk on product management, I spoke about PM career management at Products That Count.

What follows is a long tweetstorm with the key content.

It isn't for the faint of heart.

Are you ready?

Fabrizio Ballarini So you're saying that cross functional teams are more effective than silos:

We put SEOs & devs in the same team, to build stuff with same goal. Moving same KPIs makes tangible and eleminates noise of whether is necessary

Takes time + technically prepared SEOs but instead of explaining what SEOs do, we spend energy on what to build for our customers.

Scott Belsky Or even better, cross functional people:

a lot of the magic i’ve observed in teams over the years happens when the talent stack is collapsed - when a designer also codes, when an engineer has a growth hack skill set, when a product leader is great at copy.

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None of the Above

Amy Scott "Ouch, @NYT_Crossword."

Annie Mueller Kids always know. (Also, interesting new friendly social platform, micro.blog)

“You know, I think that cheddar is, like, more dominant. And what’s that other white one? Not mozzarella. Monterey jack. That one’s kind of weak. Swiss is a baby. Cream cheese is soft. And goat cheese is emotional, you know, it just kind of falls apart.”

Zeke, age 9

DJ Sundog - from the spook-lab "Thanks, GMaps!"

Chenoe Hart "Apparently there's names and abstract diagrams for different types of parking garage configurations."

The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture Greek and Roman statues were often painted, so how did we come to believe they're bare white marble? And why this perception is hard to change.

Matthew Dalby, PhD Probably same number of people in both groups, but one is an upper limit on audience, and the other is just a sub-group of all audiences:

If you made a film that was six hours long no one would watch it.

But if you make a six part TV drama with hour long episodes people will happily sit for six hours binge watching them all.

This probably illuminates something deep about human nature.

Patrick Hackett Ooof:

Normal brain: a building.

Videogame brain: through the door, up the pipe, across the ledge, up the ladder, on to the roof.

Apple News’s Radical Approach: Humans Over Machines It's called "journalism". The NYT gets an exclusive behind the scene look at how "journalism" works, and I wish this was an Onion article, and not actually the NYT being schooled on journalism:

For the first time recently — and after extensive negotiations on the terms of the interviews — Apple agreed to let a Times reporter in on how it operates Apple News.

The Surprising Nuance Behind the Russian Troll Strategy How the Internet Research Agency is playing both sides, to sow discord and undermine democracy.

You Had One Job "Not again."

alex "A brief summary of me trying to follow any type of tutorial on the internet."

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Design Objective

Des Traynor 🤔 There's something to it, at least this example proves the point:

The opposite of a good product principle is itself a good product principle.

Everything else just is a truism.

Designing for Cognitive Differences Often people think of accessibility as “design for blind people”, but what about users with cognitive differences like inattention, anxiety, and depression?

If most users are making mistakes on a form, users with inattention will struggle even more. When this happens, figure out exactly where the errors are occurring, and fix the design of the form to target that error. For instance, if you’re receiving the wrong data for a field, it’s a sign that form labels are unclear; if you have inline-only labels, adding regular labels outside of the fields will do more than adding an explanatory note.

The Art of Feature Naming — Four Survival Tips Naming is hard, here are some shortcuts:

1. Keep names simple.
2. Anchor as much as possible to existing knowledge among your customers.
3. Say what your product or feature does or is.
4. Try to use the name.

Sans Forgetica A font designed to help you remember your study notes, by being more difficult to read than most typefaces. The 'desirable difficulty' you experience prompts your brain to engage in deeper processing (or so they claim).

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Tools of the Trade

Suggested Changes Github's Suggested Changes is just the feature I didn't know I needed, and now can't live without!

Zach Holman I … I … I actually like the new JIRA:

This gif of the new @Jira redesign is probably some of the smartest "show don't tell" marketing I've seen in quite some time. Makes it wildly obvious what's happening in the new version.

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Web-end

Smart Bundling: How To Serve Legacy Code Only To Legacy Browsers As you can imagine, it takes a lot of effort to have the ES6/CSS5 cake and eat it too.

Ricky Mondello 😭

OH: “Just because there’s no objective truth, it doesn’t mean you just use divs and spans everywhere.”

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Lingua Scripta

Thomas Sunde Nielsen 🔥

I think I solved javascript.
undefined = function(){};

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Lines of Code

J.T. Grimes This doesn't mean ship shitty code, it means don't spend too much time on code that provides little value to users:

Maintainability is less important than shippability - nobody submits feature requests on software that hasn't been released.

If you have a choice between getting it *right* and getting it *done*, pick *done*.

Heidi Howard 👌

Best advise I every received on software development: You don’t have to (and will not succeed at) fixing everything, just leave things better than you found them.

Kevlin Henney I think data structures were treated more seriously when computers had limited memory:

I'm intrigued by how often I see the wrong choice of data structure in code.

Data structure choice is considered by many to be less of a priority than it once was, but in the last few weeks the usual suspects have popped up in different contexts, and the choice was significant.

Loch Nessa Monster "this is absolute genius"

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Architectural

Sprints, marathons and root canals How to prioritise technical debt, and convince the business side that refactoring is important?

To keep the pace constant, we need the process to be sustainable, of course, but the product needs to be sustainable as well. That second part of the sustainability is often neglected. That is where all that work wanted by the delivery team comes in, even if it’s not necessarily wanted or understood by the stakeholders. Brady, the cleaning supplies company, sells warning labels that perfectly explain this problem: “If You Don’t Schedule Time for Maintenance, Your Equipment Will Schedule It for You”.

Scaling Engineering Teams via Writing Things Down and Sharing - aka RFCs I like this idea, we do pretty much this (except we share, not send, documents), but labelling them as RFC sounds better:

1. Do planning before building something new.
2. Capture this plan in a short, written document.
3. Have a few, select people approve this plan before starting work.
4. Send this planning document out to all engineers in the company and let anyone and everyone comment on it.
5. Have everyone follow the above steps

Mathias Verraes The illusion of structure:

I think historically we've approached software design too much as an attempt to impose structure. Interesting problems are usually interconnected, so our goal should be to manage interconnectedness instead of squeezing it into the illusion of structure.

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Devoops

Belgian Air Force F-16 destroyed by fire during maintenance – Collateral damage on second F-16 Next time you accidentally rm -rf * in production, remember it could be worse:

a technician was working on an F-16 when he accidentally activated the six-barrels 20mm Vulcan M61A-1 cannon of that F-16. The cannon was loaded and some bullets hit another F-16AM (FA-128). That aircraft had just been refuelled and was – together with another F-16 – being prepared for a (training) mission. Due to the bullets, the F-16AM exploded and damaged the other F-16.

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Peopleware

How to Get Things Done When You Don't Feel Like It It happens to all of us, and there are few easy tricks you can use to cheat procrastination:

Next time you are stuck on a project you don't want to start, try doing something that you know will be satisfying. You just might have a bright idea while you're rinsing off your dishes, and that will make you excited to run over to your computer and get to work.

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Locked Doors

Kenn White Know your threat model:

I opened my Linux Chromebook and found my (grounded) daughter was logged in. I guess props for bypassing my "hardened" profile. But it made no sense. Screen-lock-on-close was enabled and guest logins were blocked, and… /1

Don A. Bailey Well played!

As some of you know @InfoSecMouse is closing its doors.

I'm proud to announce that as my Goodbye to infosec consulting, I am dropping an uncoordinated RCE 0day for OpenSSH (all recent versions affected) that is exploitable due to compiler optimization:

https://www.trusted.is/lms-2018-10-18-openssh-rce

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None of the Above

Solid Sanek

Andy Hunt Nailed it!

No, I don’t want to hop on a damn “quick 30 minute call”. WTF is wrong with you. Third time today I had that offer.

I want your terms, conditions, examples, references, in writing. On record. For future reference.

Ah, now I see the problem...

Peacharu_ "Good morning everyone have an absolutely furious mongoose"

Tess Rinearson Got a point!

hot take: the new yorkers who are upset about the bagel emoji are actually upset about the steady and inexorable shift of economic and cultural power from NY to California

Apple Fixes Bagel Emoji Fortunately, on such critical matters, Apple does listen to its customers.

ShAHHH!nnon Miller Twitter does have its shining moments:

Here is a beautiful hill.

Quote tweet this with the pettiest argument that would make you gladly die on this hill.

Trevor McKendrick True:

The weirdest part of being the 1st finance person @ a startup is going back & forth between doing high value strategic stuff (e.g. hiring, raising money, etc.) and then tediously paying some random $70 invoice

Mauly Fright
me: "I think I'll work from home today so I can be productive and relax!"
foster kitten: 😂

Wes Miller "Excel, offering deep philosophy."

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Design Objective

Things that might be missing from your job description All the things your design manager expects from you, even if they're not listed anywhere. For example:

Be flexible; briefs change
Find problems before they occur
Bring energy to the table
Don’t take design critique as an insult
Understand the impact of moving that button
Make people around you feel comfortable
Bring 3 solutions with every complaint

Stephanie Walter I guess the design meeting went something like "well, people want more control over their privacy, so let's add more privacy controls …"

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Tools of the Trade

Microsoft open-sources its patent portfolio Well, that's a pleasent surprise:

By joining the Open Invention Network, Microsoft is offering its entire patent portfolio to all of the open-source patent consortium's members

Vicki Boykis 🔥

Hottest programming skills in 2018:
5. Fixing git merge conflicts
4. Correctly mapping ports in Docker containers to host machines
3. Getting info from AWS documentation
2. Pulling summary stats from a data stream
1. Turning any of the above into a conference talk about AI

@thomasfuchs@mastodon.social "My favorite IBM design though is their 1980s cloth-bound manuals, designed by Massimo Vignelli. These are a joy to use and to look at."

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Web-end

Via Dan Mall Spot on:

"The whole history of CSS feels like we're mostly just struggling with overflow problems." —@jensimmons at @aneventapart #AEAORL

Simon Howard 🎤

take me down to parallax city where the back moves slow and the front moves quickly

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Architectural

Kevlin Henney It's hard to comprehend the temporal nature of software:

If you change data validation & collection at the front end, you need to test it against existing data stored. If it fails, you either have to change your validation or you have to write (& test) some migration scripts.

Data validation is a system issue, not a front-end issue.

Oliver Gierke Or to put it another way:

Business logic is not moved to the client, it’s replicated into it. Including all resulting downsides…

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Devoops

Liz Lam 😭

* * * * * - Five star cron job. Will run again.

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Peopleware

Screamy Moraine Thread:

Okay, I actually want to talk about this for a second, regarding millennials and how really goddamn difficult it is for us to make sense of our own age sometimes.

I Just Knew I Was Going to Surpass These Guys I Was Working For Kara Swisher shares her career story:

When I was just starting out, I’d see some of the decisions my early bosses made and I’d think, I’m not experienced, but this is how I’d do it. I was beginning to get an inkling of my own tastes and judgment. I just didn’t have the certainty and maturity to act on it. I wasn’t a prodigy personality who is like, “Get out of my way, I’m doing this.” I was a little bit uncertain about my skills. But I just knew I was going to surpass these guys I was working for. I remember once I interviewed for an internship at the Washington Post, and a guy said I was too confident. I was like, “Why don’t you retire now, because you’ll be working for me?” Men are always trying to drag women down. I said, “I’m not too confident. I’m fantastic.” I was always, always like that. And I appreciate that about myself, I have to say.

Jeypee "believe me i'm trying"

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None of the Above

Because I'm a Guy "THIS IS AMAZING 😂"

@citrustwee@knzk.me Don't try this at home!

sits down across from you
The battle of wits has begun. It ends when you decide and we both drink, and find out who is right... and who is dead.

How the Smiths took over Europe Smiths, Millers, Priests, and how different European countries got to choose the most common surname.

viral viral "Invisible doors"

Southwest Airlines That settles it:

seth levine the age old @southwestair dilemma. look mean and hope the middle seat stays open or look friendly and risk sharing the armrest...

Always start with the bad cop look. Straight face, little curve in the eyebrows, and no sparkle in your eyes. If they still sit down, then acceptance is key and it's time to go for the friendly good cop look. You may make a new friend! -Ariel

girlziplocked Solid strategy:

Treatments that cause the immune system to attack cancer earn a Nobel A huge step towards curing cancer.

Fluff Society "Seals are just dogs of the sea"

jmhodges The Great Externality:

I'm a moderate on climate change. The moderate position is massive government intervention into the economy.

The extremists want a ban on single-passenger car rides, personal jets, and beef sales. Couldn't be done. Just the massive government intervention, thanks

Climate change is the Great Externality that no market can fix

stephen thecatamites Nature can be so weird:

Having penetrated the protective exoskeleton, a wily hunter harvests the succulent housemeat within.

dylan "I wasn’t ready to laugh this hard" (watch this with sound on!)

An artwork by Banksy shredded itself after selling for $1.3 million at Sotheby’s A stunt masterpiece only Banksy could create. Video h/t Zoe Smith

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Design Objective

Why Small Teams Win And Bigger Ones Fail Why smaller teams are better at designing products.

Thomas Wendt 💯

I always chuckle when UX designers talk about "journeys." People are paying their phone bill, not trying to get to fucking Mordor. Take it down a notch.

Really Bad Design Exercises Learning about good design … by thinking about bad design:

So now, my really strange idea for better design exercises: instead of asking a candidate to design the best version of something, ask them to design the worst version of something.

Mark Dalgleish True story:

👨‍🎨 I've made a responsive design, of a car that turns into a plane.
👩‍💻 Neat—how does it work?
👨‍🎨 *Draws car*
👩‍💻 Yeah, but how does it turn into a plane?
👨‍🎨 *Draws plane*

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Tools of the Trade

Stuart Sierra Oh snap:

Remember when we used to do “serverless” with PHP and CGI?

ryanlittlefield 😭

love too accidentally open software and let it update

Anatoly Shashkin "The U.N. building has always reminded me of Scandisk/Defrag"

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Lines of Code

That One Bug The hunt for that one bug that only appears every so rarely:

1. Be playing a retail build of the game, from a disc.
2. It must be an EU build of the game, not a US build.
3. It must be playing on a PAL50-formatted television. (Not PAL60/SECAM)
4. The game language must be set to German.
5. You must play through the whole game from the start to a cutscene near the end of the game, in a single sitting.
6. Notice that the game crashes at a particular, reliable moment in the middle of the cutscene, if all the above conditions are true.

Jodi Beggs Putting up with frustration is part of the job description:

student: I’m frustrated we’re not really making progress, in an hour we’ve only written a few lines of code
me: I have some bad news for you about programming

Kelly Vaughn Also breaking, and failing, and fixing, and learning:

You know how to become a better developer?

You break things. You break a lot of things.

But most importantly, you learn from what you've broken so it doesn't happen again.

Sergio Gil "Running the tests again without saving your changes"

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Architectural

Colm MacCárthaigh So I just learned two interesting concepts. (1) Shuffle Sharding, a technique for splitting workload to minimize the (2) Blast Radius when a server goes down:

It's my ten year anniversary at AWS, I got a new badge and everything! To celebrate, I'm going to tweet out the lightning talk I gave at last week's Amazon dev con. It's all about my favorite thing from my ten years: Shuffle Sharding!

Retry Strategies for Transient Failures Analyzes how different back-off strategies deal with transient failures.

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Devoops

Katherine Scott I'm not saying you should prank your team with this trick …

The day I learned that AWS instance names can contain emoji.... 🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀🐀

One weird trick to piss off your SREs....

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Techtopia

bootsy.exe "a ministory"

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Startup Life

The Demise of Blockbuster, and Other Failure Fairy Tales Yes, Blockbuster did see Netflix coming, and other "big companies can't innovate" myths:

It immediately gained traction, and before long Blockbuster was adding subscribers faster than Netflix.

So what happened? Investors didn’t like the costs associated with the program (about $400 million), and franchisees were wary about the threat to their businesses. Things came to a head when, in 2007, Antioco stepped down after a compensation dispute with Carl Icahn, Blockbuster’s Chairman of the Board. His replacement, Jim Keyes, reversed the strategy to focus on the retail operation and the company went bankrupt three years later.

Walter Chen 💯

do things that don't scale, but don't do things that don't compound

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Locked Doors

Why You Shouldn’t Use Facebook to Log In to Other Sites Facebook's security breach compromised at least 50 million people. But it wasn't limited to your Facebook page or cat videos: attackers could gain access to any app that uses Facebook Log In. Lesson learned: don't use Facebook to sign on to stuff, use a password manager.

Security Update Facebook in their own words, describe how the breach works:

Second: A new version of our video uploader (the interface that would be presented as a result of the first bug), introduced in July 2017, incorrectly generated an access token that had the permissions of the Facebook mobile app.

Third: When the video uploader appeared as part of View As, it generated the access token not for you as the viewer, but for the user that you were looking up.

The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies Bloomberg reports. Apple, Amazon, and the Chinese vehemently deny.

The attack by Chinese spies reached almost 30 U.S. companies, including Amazon and Apple, by compromising America’s technology supply chain, according to extensive interviews with government and corporate sources.

The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies Also this gem of a quote from the Bloomberg article:

Two of Elemental’s biggest early clients were the Mormon church, which used the technology to beam sermons to congregations around the world, and the adult film industry, which did not.

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None of the Above

Hend Amry "I present to you...the best Halloween baby costume. Ever."

Sarah Drasner This toothpaste tube analogy …

Technical articles are like toothpaste tubes. Takes only a couple of tries to complete the first 90%, and weeks for the last 10%.

atomjack@mastodon.cloud One of these cats is smarter than the other …

Sofia Gallo Poetry in alt-text:

Whoever wrote the alt-text descriptions for iPhone wall papers is pure genius. "The Swirling vortices elicit a distant memory of dark mysteries" "craters pockmark the surface of the moon with determination" "large, mesmerizing petals explode off the stem of a green tinged flower"

Alex Hillman "Harsh."

Christopher Mims Late night capitalism:

one thing adam smith did not predict is that in a sufficiently mature economy all workers would be employed either inventing new mattress brands or creating podcasts to advertise them

Turn Salesforce Tower into Eye Of Sauron on Hallowe'en night This petition has some momentum behind it.

Steve Silberman "This kind of made my day."

Marcin Wichary 🛎🛎🛎

I have a new iPhone, and noticed that the Twitter app now gives me a gentle tap 20 characters before I run out of room.

Which immediately reminded me of something else: a typewriter bell, warning you that the end of the line is approaching. Everything old is new again!

Fluff Society "Harry Purrter"