Labnotes

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Weekend Reading — Redesign the landing page

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Chris Shehan_Art “I hope there’s a post-credit scene at the end of the Mr. Rogers movie where Bob Ross shows up and teases the PBS Cinematic Universe.”


Design Objective

HaraldurThorleifsson Sigh. Yes:

  1. Most businesses don't understand design very well.

  2. Most designers don't understand business at all.

If you are a frustrated designer you can either moan about the first point or you can actually do something about the second point — starting with yourself.

Mini rant: Sometimes I feel like the designer I'm working with never left their high-school counter culture club — all adults are wrong, business is a dirty word, and only cool things have the right to exist.

Geoffrey Litt 👇 This is actually a thread about immediate utility and learnability:

A key superpower of spreadsheets is that a beginner can just store some data in a table without any formulas... which is actually useful for achieving real goals

Unlike, say... printing "hello world" onto a screen

Does your design support immediate utility?

Khalil Sehnaoui “I approve of this loading graphic.”

Elizabeth Yin 👇 What is product-market fit?

  1. Product-market fit is one of those concepts that seems easy to understand as a concept but in practice, hard or impossible to articulate what it actually means. Most people lazily say "Product-market fit is like porn...when you see it, you just know!" But what does that mean?

Pulp Librarian 👇 Takes us down memory lane of fonts in print:

If your story is about computers then use Computer Monotone! David Moore created this in 1968 as an alphabetical extension of the E-13B font used on the bottom of cheques. It smells like Fortran an tastes of 4 bit processing, just like a real computer should.

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Tools of the Trade

Lisa Braun It always amazes me that these little dongles are in fact tiny computers:

Here is my little thread about Lightning video adapters – also known as Haywire – which are actually computers that feature Apple Secure Boot and run Darwin kernel

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1995parham/github-do-not-ban-us TL;DR Github restricts access to developers from Crimea, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Syria. The US always had export restrictions, applied for political gain, and open source was one way to route around those restrictions. I was hoping Microsoft will stand up for the worldwide developet community.

Jane Manchun Wong “I didn't know JavaScript is capable of doing these... thanks Google”

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Web-end

Angie Jones This meme is just 🤣

Therapist: And what do we do when CSS stresses us out?

Me: !important

Therapist: No.

Justin Potts I've been outed:

Therapist: And what do we do when we feel stressed

Me: Redesign the landing page

Therapist: No

Jesse Vincent “Feeling very old today.”

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Lines of Code

Ali Spittel 💯

Why would you ever spend a few minutes reading the documentation when you can spend a few hours randomly trying things?

I'm guessing this has something to do with focus and attention. Just like we have people on the introvert-extrovert spectrum, we have people on the planner-tinkerer spectrum.


Teamwork

Amy Isikoff Newell True, but I feel like "baggage" has the wrong connotation, maybe "scar tissue"?

Nobody leaves a job until they've packed their bags. By which I mean, we all show up with baggage from previous jobs. As a manager, it's important for me to know what my own baggage is, and as I get to know new hires, to try to understand theirs.

The Most Common Type of Incompetent Leader According to research, being ignored is worse than being treated poorly:

The impact of absentee leadership on job satisfaction outlasts the impact of both constructive and overtly destructive forms of leadership. Constructive leadership immediately improves job satisfaction, but the effects dwindle quickly. Destructive leadership immediately degrades job satisfaction, but the effects dissipate after about six months. In contrast, the impact of absentee leadership takes longer to appear, but it degrades subordinates’ job satisfaction for at least two years.

mikko 💯

Rarely is anyone thanked for the work they did to prevent the disaster that didn't happen.

Our performance review does include "disaster X didn't happen", and you get to show how you contributed towards these goals.


Electric Dreams

Pranay Pathole “How AI products actually work”


Locked Doors

Welcome To The Equifax Data Breach Settlement Website Claim your Equifax settlement to make sure they feel the consequences of this breach.

Apple bleee. Everyone knows What Happens on Your iPhone Interesting to see how much information your phone broadcasts over Bluetooth:

Well, AirDrop seems to be less anonymous than we thought. It’s possible to identify you: your phone sends out SHA256 your phone number hash to all the devices around you every time you hit Share.

ErrataRob 👇 Thread about cryptography, and why it's either 0% or 100% secure, no middle ground:

In the following graph I show the time it takes to crack keys by length, using three devices, a $35 Raspberry Pi, a $1000 desktop computer, and the NSA buying a million desktops for a billion dollars.

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And on the topic of "military grade security":

Your iPhone has all the latest advances in crypto. It gets updated monthly. Nuclear silos still use floppy disks. Consumer grade crypto is therefore way better than what's protecting our launch codes, simply because it's newer.

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None of the Above

Jay Arnold “Am I a horrible person to get schadenfreude from this?”

Whitney Cummings 👍 (hint):

You are not a hypocrite if you change your mind after getting new information

Dick King-Smith HQ “Who knew that manatees sometimes come out of the water to graze on land?”

Open Ocean Exploration “This is your weekly reminder that baby octopus ride on jellyfish in the open ocean and it is adorable.”

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Turgut “Pets doing pranks is my new favt thing”

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