Published
Weekend Reading — Aggravation is observed
Wilhelm Gere "This should explain things"
Tech Stuff
Cursed Knowledge Immich shares their experience and I love that their product website (it's not a dev tool!) has this page. (via archiloque)
You Should Write An Agent In the mantra of "you only think you understand how a bicycle works, until you learn to ride one":
Agents are the most surprising programming experience I’ve had in my career. Not because I’m awed by the magnitude of their powers — I like them, but I don’t like-like them. It’s because of how easy it was to get one up on its legs, and how much I learned doing that.
Introducing Parallel Search: the highest accuracy web search API engineered for AI If you need a search API for your AI:
The Parallel Search API, built on our proprietary web index, is now generally available. It's the only web search tool designed from the ground up for AI agents: engineered to deliver the most relevant, token-efficient web data at the lowest cost. The result is more accurate answers, fewer round-trips, and lower costs for every agent.
docmd This looks cool. Write your docs as Markdown files (easy and Git friendly) and the doc(tor) will build you a proper doc site with stylish ToC and navigation links, includes plugins for GA, SEO, and Sitemap.
Microservices adds lots of benefits to the development process like:- network call overhead for every operation
- more cloud infrastructure to manage—IAM policy writing, costs accounting, etc.—on all those services
- submitting PRs on 50 Git repos in order to make cross-cutting changes
- reimplementing a type system in a YAML file
- buying developer laptops with 64GB of RAM to spin up 50 containers to replicate the functionality previously provided by a damn bash script
Paul Frazee So true:
One of the huge perks of working at a software company is, when there's something about the product that bothers you personally, you can get your hands dirty and find out why it's basically impossible to get fixed
Good from Afar, But Far from Good: AI Prototyping in Real Design Contexts
The quality of AI-generated outputs strongly depends on the specificity of the prompt. Our evaluation showed that longer prompts with clear, detailed design requirements consistently yield better results — particularly with AI tools that generate code-based prototypes, which can produce outputs that resemble the work of a human designer.
people should be more alarmed that a huge portion of the software that the world depends on for our daily lives is maintained for free by people who are now in their 50s/60s and there is basically no pipeline to replace them.
I haven't interviewed any job candidates in the last few years since my role has changed, but a fun question (which had nothing to do with the actual interview) I would ask is "Do you know where the term Little Endian vs Big Endian originates from?" And of the dozens of people I've interviewed, zero of them know.
Spoiler alert: It's Gulliver's Travels. Which end of the egg do you break first?
Tomasz Oryński "Those are nice, but seriously, the peak in the computer body design has been reached in 1959 in Poland and nobody ever came even close to this"
Eye for Design
Marmly Owl Spot on:
A11y is about the least accessible way of writing 'accessibility' possible. A-11-letters-Y is not enough information to go on unless you've already been primed to understand it. It's aesthetically (a11y) ugly, astonishingly (a11y) pretentious, and has just this awful whiff of artificiality (a11y) about it. In an age where machines will automatically (a11y) type entire words out for you using the shorthand is aggravatingly (a11y) lazy and unintuitive.
Quite frankly it strains acceptability (a11y). I don't think that this numeronym is being used appropriately (a11y).
Please just let me type in the year I was born. No more scrolling. We don’t have to keep doing this to each other...
Why You’re Addicted to Lovable Before You Even Hit the Paywall
Peoples
AiDHD I, too, have AiDHD:
I have AiDHD
It has never been easier to build an MVP and in turn, it has never been harder to keep focus. When new features always feel like they're just a prompt away, feature creep feels like a never ending battle. Being disciplined is more important than ever.
Fast is a Moat Maybe just not have that many meetings?
In our field, speed is often mistaken for haste. But true velocity is not rushing. It is shortening the time between an idea and a tangible result.
This speed is one of the most powerful moats a designer, and frankly, any ambitious individual, can build. And to be clear, none of this is an excuse to lower the quality of work. Quality is the baseline. Speed is the advantage layered on top.
An idea that is just discussed is a ghost. Everyone imagines a different version of it. An idea that is prototyped becomes real. It turns into a concrete artifact that travels. It gets shared in forums and shown in rooms you are not in. It becomes the center of the conversation. It forces reactions, sparks new thoughts, and creates alignment (or exposes the lack of it) in a way words never can
Business Side
Made an app that finally surpassed $1k/mo. Here's what nobody tells you.
The First $100 is Harder Than the Next $900
Everyone talks about scaling to $10k. Nobody mentions the psychological hell of going from $0 to $100.
The more good businesspeople I work with, the more I realise that the really effective folks are nearly always able to cut a business situation down into a single thing that matters.
Very rarely are there two things that matter. Usually it’s just the one.
Machine Intelligence
One of my favorite features of ChatGPT is that it learns about you based on your usage. Now when I ask it to summarize an article or paper, it also includes an additional analysis from a tech and business strategy angle given those are my usage patterns.
I wish every app had this level of smart personalization. Especially map apps that I use daily yet struggle to figure out my travel patterns.
Modern Yiddish Curses for the A.I. Era of Advertising 🤣
May you do with the utmost efficiency that which should not be done at all.
— Modern Yiddish curse
Insecurity
Mozilla did a review of all the car companies privacy policies. and it was terrible.
"Nissan earned its second-to-last spot for collecting some of the creepiest categories of data we have ever seen. It’s worth reading the review in full, but you should know it includes your “sexual activity.” Not to be out done, Kia also mentions they can collect information about your “sex life” in their privacy policy. Oh, and six car companies say they can collect your “genetic information” or “genetic characteristics.” Yes, reading car privacy policies is a scary endeavor."
I was pretty pissed off at Kia for listing these categories as things they could collect.
"age, race, color, ancestry, national origin, citizenship, religion or creed, marital status, medical condition, physical or mental disability, sex and gender information,"
That includes religion and ethnicity. the specific things we're never supposed to collect because of the Holocaust.
Also reserving the right to collect genetic information is a new low.
Security conference talks fall into two categories
- we designed a distributed entropy siphon to perform a black-box hypervisor side channel escape and chain-load a persistent rootkit into the CPU cache
- we looked behind the sofa and found an entire industry of products/services that have made no attempt at security at all and are therefore vulnerable to the most basic issues that we've been finding in everything for the past 30 years, and no-one else had bothered to look.
Viss "infosec has a lot to learn about understanding failure conditions and accurate, understandable error messages from roadies"
Everything Else
Anna "Good morning"
“Some say aggravation is observed when passive voice is present in a headline that appears in a news article”
My son told me he was awarded the Leslie Neilson badge at school. I asked “What's that?” He said, “It's a big building with lots of kids, but that's not important right now.”
Chromblitzen (Classic-Cars) "Harlekin-Ente"
kindness is free. for an ad-free kindness experience, upgrade to kindness+ starting at $15.99 a month
It’s a five minute walk from my house to the pub.
It’s a 35 minute walk from the pub to my house.
The difference is staggering.
Just Tom "Meanwhile, in the Sainsbury's car park this morning, someone put their clocks back further than they intended last week..."
Think of every meeting as an opportunity to figure out how to NOT have that meeting again.
computers used to be annoying. they still are but they used to be too.
My kid's elementary class created the school's award-winning pumpkin this year, decorating it to look like Derpy and Sussie from K-Pop Demon Hunters. It's kind of amazing what they did on their own
Sure, LED Zeppelin is great, but you should really upgrade to OLED Zeppelin
Local restaurants...I beg you...maintain an actual Web Site...that isn't Facebook or Instagram...I am pleading with you...just a simple site, on the web...for me, your old pal Sadsquatch...
Ricki Yasha Tarr "Forget Meyers-Brigg, this is the real personality test"
Thief makes off with $80K in whipped cream during Ontario trailer heist That is one delicious heist.
In a scientific study with cats (n=100), cats were allowed to a) ask for a snack once or b) do nothing.
Research found that 800 demands for snacks were made. First snack stocks had to be filled-up seven times.
The study finds that 800% of the cats want snacks.
Further research is suggested to examine how snack stocks emptied faster than estimated when designing the study.
In the mist of shite political news from around the world, here's a good news story, the Danish Foreign Minister give the Egyptian Foreign Minister a Lego set of the Pyramids as a gift, just look at his face ;)
Tech Bros Have Been Accidentally Poisoning Themselves With Severe Brain Toxins for Years On the question of "why do tech bros have such bizarre views and erratic behaviour?" (via Ian Betteridge)
Earlier this week, a bombshell analysis by Consumer Reports found that popular meal replacement drinks — a long-time favorite of tech bros — contain more lead in a single serving than a healthy adult should eat in a day.
Among the worst offenders was Huel’s Black Edition powder, the low-carbohydrate alternative to Huel’s mainstay powder, which contained a stunning 6.3 micrograms of lead per serving, as well as more than double the safe daily serving of cadmium.
DefaidodonDay starts now! It's time for lamb spam - shear joy and woolly good vibes all day!
On this day every year we celebrate our fuzzy farm friends by drowning the fediverse in sheep!
Got no sheep? We happily accept goats, chickens, horses, cows.
But mainly sheep.
No use bleating around the bush, just post something, tag it, and watch our annual flock grow!
