Published
Weekend Reading — The whisky war of 1973
sjvn “Best snow truck name ever.”
Tech Stuff
trimMiddle This is such a cool function: it trims any string to the desired length by dropping text from the middle of the string, like Finder does with filenames. And a lot of times when you’re trimming text, eg email address, that’s exactly how you want it to trim.
LogLayer An API that provides a consistent experience across a variety of logging libraries and services — AWS, console, Pino, Winston, Datadog, New Relic, and many more.
pkt-zer0/templates I wouldn't use it myself but I do like the concept of making template strings smarter to save up unnecessary code and you might find it useful.
Stagehand Quickly build browser automations using an LLM to create the code, Playwright for browser control, and a very simple API to work with: act, extract, and observe.
Using LLMs and Cursor to become a finisher
Struggling to finish side projects due to limited time? In my latest blog post, I share how I improved my productivity using AI tools like LLMs and Cursor IDE. Learn to refine specs, bootstrap code, and iterate effectively to rapidly build and deploy your projects—even with a busy schedule.
Trickle Use AI to build websites — landing page, contact form, survey, etc — these won't amaze your web designer friends and yet 99% of all websites are just that — putting simple functionality in front of people.
How I’d use generative AI to modernize an app
Sometimes an app modernization requires some open-heart surgery. It’s not about light refactoring or swapping a frontend framework. No, there are times where you’re yanking out major pieces or making material changes.
MyST makes Markdown more extensible and powerful to support an ecosystem of tools for computational narratives, technical documentation, and open scientific communication.
Mistakes engineers make in large established codebases
On top of that, lack of consistency is the primary long-term killer of large codebases, because it makes it impossible to make any general improvements. Sticking with our auth example, if you want to ever introduce a new type of user, a consistent codebase lets you update the existing set of auth helpers to accommodate that. In an inconsistent codebase, where some API endpoints are doing things differently, you’ll have to go and update and test every one of those implementations. In practice, that means that the general change does not happen, or that the hardest 5% of endpoints to update are just left out of scope - which in turn decreases consistency further, because now you have a user type that works for most-but-not-all API endpoints.
4 ways to pay down tech debt by ruthlessly removing stuff from your architecture
You simply don’t need a couple dozen serverless functions to serve a static web app. Simmer down. Or a big complex JavaScript framework when your site has a pair of pages. So much technical debt comes from over-engineering systems to use the latest patterns and technology, when the classic ones will do.
JFC please don't use floating point types for calculating financial transactions or storing monetary values. I just got asked to review some code by someone and it is the first thing I spotted.
There was a time when you could do this in JS:
document.body.innerHTML = "Hello World".fontsize(7);And it would write this into the body:
<font size="7">Hello World</font>Actually, that time is now. You can still do this, although it's deprecated, along with a bunch of really intriguing String methods like
String.big(),String.anchor(),String.blink(),String.italics(), and more.
Eye for Design
Flexoki Damn this color scheme looks amazing!
Flexoki is an inky color scheme for prose and code. Flexoki is designed for reading and writing on digital screens. It is inspired by analog inks and warm shades of paper.
Flexoki is minimalistic and high-contrast. The colors are calibrated for legibility and perceptual balance across devices and when switching between light and dark modes.
This is how we make slides at Apple.
- Clearly define how the deck will be distributed.
- One idea, one slide.
- Death of the bullet points.
- Thirty or above. That’s the font size.
- Animations
Peoples
As a hiring manager who has interviewed plenty of candidates, here’s some advice for recruiters, interviewers, and HR people who are involved in the hiring process.
Are you ready? Here it is.
Stop focusing so heavily on the candidate’s interviewing skills, and focus on their job related skills. They’re nervous. They may be in financial distress. They’ve been an engineer/analyst/clerk for years, but they’ve only spent a few hours in their entire life in interviews. If they suck at interviewing, so what? It’s your job to see what they bring to the table after the interview is over.
Instead of putting the burden on the candidate to be impressive, put the burden on yourself to uncover the talent and traits that are needed.
Is it cynical to do what your manager wants?
Doing what your management chain wants is an expression of optimism. It comes from a belief that your company knows what it’s doing, and that the people it chooses to set strategy are basically competent. For large successful tech companies, that belief justified by the fact that the current company setup has attracted a lot of customers and made a lot of money, so it’s probably doing something right. In short, it’s a belief that your management chain aren’t idiots, and can be trusted to do their job without you second-guessing them.
Reading Platform Engineering again and I came across this interesting quote:
If you only promote people who solve big technical problems, you’re going to have
a hard time retaining the people who do the work to smooth out the usability edges, actively listen to the customer teams, and adjust their work priorities to fix the stuff that is causing the most pain. So, look closely at what you are celebrating, compensating, and promoting, and make sure you are including work that makes the product better, whatever that looks like, even if it isn’t the hardest technical bits. You may even want to reevaluate your engineering ladder to make sure the expectations at each level reflect all of the skills you now demand. Remember, this is a cultural change, and cultural changes that don’t involve changes to what is valued (as seen by what you recognize and reward) are destined to fail.Might be something that people find interesting for no particular reason.
How I ship projects at big tech companies
In my experience, projects almost always ship because one single person makes them ship. To be clear, that person doesn’t write all the code or do all the work, and I’m not saying the project could ship without an entire team behind it. But it’s really importantthat one person on the project has an end-to-end understanding of the whole thing: how it hangs together technically, and what product or business purpose it serves.
Parkinson's Law: It's Real, So Use It
Projects that don't have deadlines imposed on them, even if they are self-imposed, will take a lot longer than they need to, and may suffer from feature creep and scope bloat.
Business Side
Microsoft Bing shows misleading Google-like page for 'Google' searches Apparently a lot of people don't know how to switch their default search engine, so when they need to “Google something” they search for Google, which Microsoft capitalized on:
What makes this even more deceptive is that this Google search listing page is automatically scrolled down so that you do not see Bing's normal header, further disguising that you are in the Bing search results.
brentpatterson Technically because they were training AI to make a profit in this market they weren’t “stealing content” they were just cultivating new intelligence:
I haven't told anyone about this yet, so let's go: Last fall, attorney's working for a certain social media company we will call "Schmeta" reached out to me asking for help with a copyright suit specifically because I was an academic who is also an 'expert' with Blender. 🧵
ToS About The good, the bad, and the ugly of every ToS you ever agreed to.
Have you had that "Upcoming price change for your Microsoft 365 subscription" email yet? They want to charge you an extra 50%ish for AI features, and they do not make it easy to find the way to turn it off. It took me minutes of searching - this is a particularly evil dark pattern.
"Switch plan" just lets you pick between annual and monthly billing. You want "Turn off recurring billing" and then "Current subscription without AI".
You're welcome. Please boost for others.
Machine Intelligence
Killed by LLM “A memorial to the benchmarks that defined—and were defeated by—AI progress”
The day I taught AI to read code like a Senior Developer
A messy experiment that changed how we think about AI code analysis Last week, I watched our AI choke on a React codebase - again. As timeout errors flooded my terminal, something clicked. We’d been teaching AI to read code like a fresh bootcamp grad, not a senior developer. Here’s what I mean.
En Which book should I read next? Ask En (the LLM) and it will come back with a few suggestions by considering your prompt.
"Do not treat the generative AI as a rational being" Challenge
Rating: impossible
Asking a LLM bot to explain its reasoning, its creation, its training data, or even its prompt doesn't result in an output that means anything. LLMs do not have introspection. Getting the LLM to "admit" something embarrassing is not a win.
Omi, a competitor to Friend, wants to boost your productivity using AI and a 'brain interface' For the super low price of only $89 this device will look like you have a computer that’s powering your brain:
The device is constantly listening and running your conversations through GPT-4o, and it also can remember the context about each user to offer personalized advice.
(BTW this is from one of the bros who started “Friend”, not the bro who bought the $1.8m domain name, but the other "Friend")
Insecurity
Déjà vu: Ghostly CVEs in my terminal title This is a good exploration of what it takes to determine a CVE.
Candy Crush, Tinder, MyFitnessPal: See the Thousands of Apps Hijacked to Spy on Your Location
A hack of location data company Gravy Analytics has revealed which apps are—knowingly or not—being used to collect your information behind the scenes.
Pants on Fire
Parents For Future “Somehow we need to monetise this - and quickly”
In light of the awful fires and air quality in Los Angeles, I've made Breathable free and app will remain free permanently. I charged for the app prior only so I could donate the proceeds to climate change charities, but paying Apple 15% for that privilege is silly. https://breathable.app
'Right thing at all costs': Bay Area app thrives amid Palisades, Eaton fires I just learned about this app and of course I installed it because if you need to get information (I live in CA where we always have fires) this is a better source than any 24×7 “news” channel.
Watch Duty, born in the Bay Area woods and based in Santa Rosa, is humming with new users amid Los Angeles’ destructive Palisades and Eaton Fires.
An illustration of survivor bias: yesterday the speaker in our seminar asked of anyone was affected by the ongoing fires. Everyone present assured the speaker that they were not significantly impacted.
Attendance was about half of the normal size.
Republicans refusing to acknowledge the role of climate change in our worsening disasters is exactly the same as Republicans refusing to acknowledge the role of guns in mass killings.
ALERT California A site where you can view real-time images and video from surveillance cameras throughout California. For example, if you wanted to see the smoke in Los Angeles right now.
NotOpenAI
ChatGPT was used to plan Cybertruck explosion outside Trump hotel in Las Vegas So basically he used Sam Altman’s product to blow up the Musk truck in front of the Trump hotel.
Ann Altman has filed a lawsuit accusing her brother, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, of sexual abuse between 1997 and 2006, starting when she was three.
Sam Altman, along with his mother and brothers, denied the allegations in a joint statement, calling them "utterly untrue."
OpenAI whistleblower's death sparks dark conspiracy theories Did OpenAI kill the whistleblower? Look, I’m not going to trust any statement coming from the SF city government on that. But on the other end: “The case of Suchir Balaji has united a coalition of right-wing pundits, conspiracy-minded journalists, crypto enthusiasts — and the software engineer's own family.”
Everything Else
DOOM: The Gallery Experience … but can it play DOOM? Well, this art gallery sure can, and you can walk around with a glass of wine, snack on some hors d'oeuvre, glance at some art, collect cash …
I think I'm going to cancel my 14-day free trial on 2025 early. It hasn't gone well and has more problems than any beta I've ever been involved in.
You can tell Monopoly is an old game.
There's a luxury tax and rich people can go to jail.
Following up yesterday's post: here is the same view of Varick Street by the Holland Tunnel, as seen today (Friday) at 5pm. Normally at this time my office is filled with a symphony of horns honking and traffic managers screaming at drivers. To see this and hear mostly silence at 5pm on a Friday would have been unthinkable even a week ago.
Needless to say, I am 100% sold on congestion pricing in New York City.
It's only cancel culture if it originates in the Cancelle region in France. Everything else is just sparkling consequences.
As a chef I keep an internal leaderboard where I score all the stupid questions the front of house staff come to ask me. It's been 5 years and no one has been able to take "is there cheese in the halloumi" off of the top spot
Tombot creates "hyper-realistic" robotic puppy for cognitive health aid To be clear I don’t want a toy dog for myself and I don’t think a battery powered robot is going to be anything better than a toy, but I 100% love what this company is doing to help elders facing mild cognitive impairment:
Tombot has unveiled Jennie the puppy, a battery and AI-powered robot designed to provide comfort to those with cognitive health struggles
Today my 7 year old taught me that just because they don’t have sprinkles on the menu, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ask. Ask for sprinkles. Always ask for sprinkles.
Asleep at the Wheel in the Headlight Brightness Wars
The activists and Reddit nerds are out to prove that it’s not just your imagination—headlights are indeed brighter than ever
I’m not even sure where to set my expectations for this: Vegan Korean-style poutine in an oriental food court in London 🤷♂️
Toto set to triple US showroom network With Toto expanding their presence could US butts finally unseat Big Toilet Paper?
Los Angeles man is trapped in circling Waymo on way to airport: ‘Is somebody playing a joke?’
“It’s circling around a parking lot. I got my seat belt on. I can’t get out of the car. Has this been hacked? What’s going on? I feel like I’m in the movies. Is somebody playing a joke on me?”
Stimulation Clicker If you have ADHD there’s a pretty good chance you’d love playing this game. I did. I got all the way to the beach! 🎉
Annual ‘winners’ for most egregious US healthcare profiteering announced It’s the 2024 8th annual Shkreli Awards:
Selling body parts without consent and billing desperate parents $97,599 for air transport among worst examples
L'égrégore André Related:
A surgeon had been called out of surgery because some United Healthcare jackass "needed to know" if the cancer patient she was operating on needed to stay overnight.
Info he could have gotten from another UH department instead of putting the patient at risk (being sedated for longer than necessary).
Awful, awful people in a horrible system.
Italian village forbids residents from becoming ill
The mayor of Belcastro said the "humorous provocation" was an attempt to expose the state of the region's healthcare system.
Around half of Belcastro's 1,200 residents are over the age of 65 and the nearest Accident & Emergency (A&E) department is over 45km (28 miles) away, the mayor said.
He added that the A&E was only reachable by a road with a 30kmh (18mph) speed limit.
Mark Zuckerberg points to California 'bias,' moves team to Texas Meta is now 100% behind “free speech”:
The outlet reported that Meta has deleted several internal posts from employees criticizing new board member Dana White over an account of domestic violence against his wife.
How 3D Pedestrian Crossings Are Slowing Down Speeding Drivers in Iceland
In the small fishing town of Ísafjörður, Iceland, an exciting development in pedestrian crossing safety has just popped up – almost literally. Speed bumps has been painted that appears to be 3D by way of a cleverly-detailed optical illusion.
Chicago keeps its New Year's resolution: All city buildings now use 100% clean power Chicago goes green:
As of January 1, every single one of them — including 98 fire stations, two international airports, and two of the largest water treatment plants on the planet — is running on renewable energy, thanks largely to Illinois’ newest and largest solar farm.
How Shen Yun tapped religious fervor to make $266 million
Shen Yun has kept its own costs down by wringing countless volunteer hours, and sometimes personal savings, from followers of Li, who has suggested he created the universe and instructed believers that Shen Yun performances can save people from a coming apocalypse by exposing them to his teachings.
Whisky War - Wikipedia Just a reminder that Canada and Denmark (protector of Greenland) were at war with each other from 1973 to 2022. It was a very long yet bloodless war!
In 1984, Canadian soldiers visited the island and planted a Canadian flag, also leaving a bottle of Canadian whisky. The Danish Minister of Greenland Affairs came to the island himself later the same year with the Danish flag, a bottle of Schnapps, and a letter stating "Welcome to the Danish Island" (Velkommen til den danske ø). The two countries proceeded to take turns planting their flags on the island and exchanging alcoholic beverages
