Published
Weekend Reading — AI cycling
Tech Stuff
I surround code changes with two different types of refactoring: pre and post change. Pre-change refactoring is to make the change easier to implement. Post-change refactoring is to make the code easier to understand.
Totally remdom, or How browsers zoom text
What color bubbles will RCS messages be? Apple is working on better support for exchanging text messages with Android phones. So we'll see high-resolution images, emoji reactions, etc, but, no end-to-end encryption will happen, so only Apple-to-Apple messages show in blue.
GitHub Actions are a Problem Last week I wrote a GitHub Action to update the theme of this blog, whenever I commit changes to GitHub. I spent a few cycles trying to fix it and get it working. It still does not work.
A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox That’s the title. And this title is not wrong.
Brian 🐱
Eye for Design
When users encounter a problem, their first instinct is often to ask for a specific solution. Sometimes it's a good one, sometimes not so much. But it's always important to hear the valid pain point behind the cry for help.
Assaf You are what you wear.
Machine Intelligence
More on Sam Altman’s Ouster From OpenAI The official statement from the board is “he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board.” I don’t have a decoder ring handy, so I have to make a guess: Altman had some ideas on how to run and grow the business. The board didn't like them. Microsoft, being a huge investor and partner, is probably not in a happy place right now. And, if you're using OpenAI in productions — I am on several projects — now's a good time to look at competing products.
Ask HN: Is anyone else bearish on OpenAI? So this thread was posted 7 days ago, call it foresight:
I'm not saying the company will go bankrupt but I'm also not buying into the hype that it's going to become the next Google or better / create AGI for us all.
What am I missing here?
“Hallucinating” AI models help coin Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year Cambridge: "When an artificial intelligence hallucinates, it produces false information.”
Everything Else
that80sand90spage Who remembers this Fisher-Price medical kit?
Alas, I have 32 years of experience at being a novice.
Somebody just referred to capybaras as "guinea bigs" and I don't know what to do with this information.
Dutch Cycling Lifestyle Smart: this app uses AI to view your street with proper bicycle-friendly lanes.
Study: Cutting 1 Teaspoon of Salt As Good As Blood-Pressure Meds I guess something to add to the list of goals for 2024: “Cutting your salt intake by 1 teaspoon daily provides the same blood-pressure-lowering benefits as popular hypertension medications, says a new study published in JAMA Network.”
Phrases ADHD people hear more often:
😴 stop being lazy
🙄 you’re just making excuses
💪🏼 you just need to try harder
☕️ can you tidy up after yourself?
🎨 great, another thing you’ll quit
👓 can you just try and focus?
How mathematics built the modern world
Mathematics was the cornerstone of the Industrial Revolution. A new paradigm of measurement and calculation, more than scientific discovery, built industry, modernity, and the world we inhabit today.
It’s not that they can’t consider other people’s perspectives. It’s that they don’t do so automatically.
“It’s like they’re the worst multitaskers,” Baskin-Sommers says. “Everyone’s bad at multitasking but they’re really bad.”
The Great Pyramids of Giza used to look very different from the way it does now.
When they were first completed, their external walls of limestone were sanded smooth to shine bright white and, they had a golden cap called pyramidion.
More details/photos: https://bit.ly/46bx8K4
There's a Faster Way to Type Anything on an iPhone TL;DR hold down the 123 button.
Smart drugs aren’t so smart after all
The team expected that the increased dopamine would boost the participants’ level of motivation to complete the task and, with the increased noradrenaline, raise their effort levels, leading to a better performance.
The results showed that on average, the drugs didn’t affect the chance of a participant finding the solution to a knapsack problem. Contrary to perhaps many students’ expectations, however, participants tended to perform worse after taking one of the drugs, packing a lower total value of items.
Steffen “Ich glaube, ich bin da was Großem auf der Spur … 😳” (I think I'm on to something big)
I started allowing my students to cite Wikipedia as a source for their research presentations years ago.
Every semester when I mention it, my students look around at each other like I’ve given them some forbidden treat and I’m honestly kind of shocked that it is still being treated as a forbidden resource by so many educators.
psycohousecat “They have so many questions 😅”
