Published
Weekend Reading — Only one Wiener
Hot diggity dog! Wienermobiles put on riveting race in Wienie 500 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway In this race there will be only one Wiener.
Tech Stuff
github actions have github consequences
zumerlab/snapdom Captures any HTML element as a scalable SVG image, preserving styles, fonts, background images, pseudo-elements, and even shadow DOM.
Y'all ever see those "utm_" parameters in your web logs and on social media URLs and wonder wtf "utm" stands for?
It stands for "Urchin Tracking Module" and comes from a web stats analysis product made by "Urchin Software Corp.", which Google bought around 20 years ago and then turned into Google Analytics.
Naming things is not only hard, it also is forever.
Hosting Checker Find out where that web site is hosted (also which mailserver and nameserver they’re using).
Voyager 1 and 2 were designed for a 5 year mission. ("Its five year mission"? Hmm.) But both probes have been kept operational since 1977, almost half a century -- an order of magnitude longer than planned. Meanwhile, our consumer electronics products are lucky to make it operationally through a 90 day warranty.
benjojo “good god Lisbon airport is very active on GitHub”
It’s wild that queueing theory is a whole research field.
“You know the whole ‘waiting in line’ thing? Like, in the grocery store? What if we went super-deep into that?”
[object Dragon] “what a deal”
I'm dealing with an XML configuration file that is 76,000 lines long. This is not the future the BBC Model B promised me.
Programmers are usually fed a steady diet of features and bug fixes. But occasionally they get to work on performance problems. This development methodology is known as intermittent fasting.
wesley yotie “i hope the nvidia driver doesn't crash”
Eye for Design
CTA.gallery You should definitely click this link to watch this gallery of call-to-action designs so you can find the one CTA design that’s right for your use case.
As a website visitor, I want a modal popup to appear when I start to scroll down so that I can subscribe to your newsletter and increase shareholder value.
Nothing says "rebel" like a corporation hiring a consulting company to conduct a user survey to determine if the new design enables brands using it to appear sufficiently more "rebellious" than the previous design language.
Business Side
Napster Is Back—Ready to Disrupt AI, Commerce, and Culture I know you missed Napster but don't worry, Infinite Reality is rebranding as Napster as it transitions from the wildly successful Metaverse into a new “AI-powered digital experience”.
Once worth over $1B, Microsoft-backed Builder.ai is running out of money I guess Builder.ai couldn’t build itself:
Builder.ai hired auditors to study its financials, indicating that something may have been off behind the scenes. According to Bloomberg, former employees alleged that the company had inflated sales figures by more than 20% on multiple occasions.
The investment craze that jolted Bay Area tech is back in vogue SPACs are back if you ever need your company to go public while routing around proper due diligence.
Products Need Soul but Markets Reward Scale
This is the tension most companies eventually face. Protecting the soul of the product often pulls in one direction. Respecting what the market rewards pulls in another. Neither path is inherently wrong, but they rarely lead to the same destination.
Sorry, grads: Entry-level tech jobs are getting wiped out I guess bootcamps are out, the new reason fresh graduates are not getting hired by software companies is AI:
They ask, 'Why hire an undergraduate when Al is cheaper and quicker?" said O'Brien, adding that while Al-generated code isn't top-tier, neither is code written by new grads. The key difference, he said, is that the iterative process to make AI code better takes minutes, while a junior coder might need days for the same task.
Love this. In his “I Agree” installation Dima Yarovinsky-Yahel took the content from terms of service statements for companies like Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Tinder and printed them out on A4 paper with a standard font size for legal contracts to demonstrate the length of these agreements.
Machine Intelligence
Check if a number is even with the power of ✨AI✨. Latest version: 1.0.5, last published: 7 months ago. Start using is-even-ai in your project by running
npm i is-even-ai. There are no other projects in the npm registry using is-even-ai.
Dare Obasanjo A brief summary of Authors Are Accidentally Leaving AI Prompts In their Novels:
My pet peeve with AI assisted writing is having to read content that the author hasn’t even read themselves.
If you can’t put in the effort to read what you supposedly wrote, why should I?
My new hobby: watching AI slowly drive Microsoft employees insane Microsoft implemented Copilot on its own GitHub repos and it’s a pit of hallucination. You can see Microsoft engineers begging Copilot to work correctly.
Tom Don’t critique your AI too much or …
As part of my job, I have to evaluate AI tools. Part of that evaluation is pushing them to their limit. Today, I realised Cursor has a setting where if you critique its work enough, it goes silent and refuses to apply changes.
It's a moody junior dev whose overconfidence and bravado quickly turn to surly silence when their work is questioned. The happy, helpful (and frequently wrong) AI is gone, replaced by a useless one with a bad attitude that won't make it past the next performance review.
Christ. I'm used to managing engineers, but I draw the line at managing AIs.
Peek A money tracking app designed for your emotional well-being, with weekly vibe checks, using AI to gracefully deliver a sense of the situation to your over-anxious brain. I haven't tried it myself, but it sounds like a great idea, because money is a huge life-stressor for most people.
Insecurity
Molly White “behold: multi-multi-factor authentication”
I'm a human! I'm a human Cloudflare!
Let me in!
Here's your 3 buses and 4 motorcycles as requested 🚌🚍🚌🏍️🏍️🏍️🏍️
By Default, Signal Doesn't Recall
Signal Desktop now includes support for a new “Screen security” setting that is designed to help prevent your own computer from capturing screenshots of your Signal chats on Windows. This setting is automatically enabled by default in Signal Desktop on Windows 11.
If you're wondering why we're only implementing this on Windows right now, it's because the purpose of this setting is to protect your Signal messages from Microsoft Recall.
Everything Else
Accordion to a recent survey, replacing words with the names of musical instruments in a sentence often goes undetected.
I'm retired in the sense that I was tired yesterday and am tired again today.
Why Is Everybody Knitting Chickens? Because chickens are the best!
A couple years ago, my wife began knitting. And when she takes an interest in something, she goes all in. She’s a perfectionist about learning a new craft, so in a short amount of time, she’s gotten pretty damn good. I can’t even pretend to know anything
I was just reminded of this one kid in grade 3 who brought "my dad's bunk weed stash" for show and tell. The teacher was very confused about what to do about this.
Me: Wow, remember that fun movie I watched hundreds of times as a kid? I wonder if that director made anything else I know.
Wikipedia: This universally panned movie not only destroyed the careers of the director and cast, it lost so much money the studio went out of business.
Me: I see.
jarek “Person(s) who painted the shruggie on Mimico Creek banks near the 401/427 mega-interchange, I see it”
The keywords “MUST”, “MUST NOT”, “REQUIRED”, “RECOMMENDED”, and “OPTIONAL” in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119 and also read like a Beastie Boys song
the scope of every IT job continually creeps until it includes printer support
The massive boat that nearly missed some random guy's house in Norway is still stuck. And I'd seen pictures from the side where it was clear that it was CLOSE to his house, but I had not seen this one before and it really sells exactly how close it is.
So, just remember, no matter how bad you fuck up things today, you have not fucked them up as hard as this boat captain did.
I'm old enough to remember when our #1 concern about the veracity of online information was that anyone could edit Wikipedia
Many moons ago, I wrote a program on a friend's CPC 464 to pick six unique random numbers, from 1-36 - lotto numbers.
His oul fella comes in, sees what I'm doing, and quickly jots down what's on screen - computer generated lotto numbers? Guaranteed winner!
A week later I see the oul fella again and he excoriates me. "Them fuckin numbers you gave me were a bag of shite. Your computer program is a load of bollox."
Thankfully no parallels can be drawn between this incident and current trends.
These photos are literally saving jaguars How do you save Jaguars from extinction? (the animals not the Waymo vehicles)
When those cameras detect a wild cat — a jaguar, puma, ocelot, or bobcat — the nonprofit pays the rancher from a pool of funds they've raised from donors. The idea, said Wolf, who has a background in veterinary medicine, is "to make living wild animals more valuable than dead ones.
I overheard one of the ladies who brought in her therapy dog speak to a young boy who was nervous about reading.
She said, "Ohh, Skye here doesn't care if you read in English or Spanish or are a good reader or nervous about reading. He can't understand you. He's a dog. But he loooooves to be read to. Loves hearing your voice. You just read whatever you like as well as you're able to and Skye will listen to you intently and lovingly."
And now I'm crying.
This article won't change your mind. Here's why
It may seem paradoxical to write this in an opinion piece. But it needs saying: arguments alone have no meaningful effect on people's beliefs. And the implicit societal acceptance that they do is getting in the way of other, more effective forms of political thinking and doing.
My wife told me about this app that identifies birdsong and shows a picture of what’s singing.
It’s called Merlin by Cornell Labs. It’s on the App Store.
I live on a forest. There’s so many birds singing at the same time. This app hears them all, puts a name and picture of the bird, and highlights it when it’s singing.
Calif. man pleads guilty to Ponzi scheme after trying to evade FBI in a submarine Technically it was an "underwater submersible device" in a big lake, but still …
Unrelated, 'I know my truth': Hawaii woman who vanished from LAX speaks out We don’t have all the details yet, but we were just informed that "I got tricked pretty much into giving away all my funds. For someone I thought I loved.“
seriouslyfab “À la team des acheteuses compulsives de livres (j'ai pas noté la source de l'image, mea culpa)”
