Published
Weekend Reading — More time to write
More Time to Write A fully functional clock that ticks backwards, giving you more time to write.
Tech Stuff
Martijn Faassen (FWIW I don’t know how to use any debugger other than console.log)
People tend to look down on print debugging as it's not using sophisticated tools at all. You're not using debuggers or profilers or sophisticated loggers.
But don't look down on print debugging. It's the tool that works for all languages. It's easy to understand and easy to implement. It focuses the mind on thorough reading and understanding of code, rather than getting lost in a forest of data.
Print debugging is really effective in many cases.
David Bisset “When you leave display logs for debugging "on" in production.”
Part of maturing as an engineer is recognizing the difference between "thing you would do differently" and "thing you should comment on during code review"
I tried every email marketing tool — these are the best If you’re planning to ditch MailChimp, Constant Contact, etc here’s a list of better (and cheaper) alternatives.
20 Must-Have VS Code Extensions for Web Developers When you have a few minutes to spare, spruce up your VS Code with some good extensions.
Indexing repositories for Copilot Chat I didn't know you can do that, but apparently you can 😀 In your GitHub repo, open the Copilot chat window and then ask it to index the repository. That’s how you train Copilot on your own code — it will get to write code that looks more like you wrote it yourself.
NextHub When you need to manage your NextDNS account from your phone. BTW this app is really cool — it has a bunch of features and a quite interesting collections of settings. Check out Settings -> Customize Experience. And it’s free (but you can pay if you like to).
Oura valued at $5B following deal with medical device firm Dexcom I don’t have an Oura, nor is the Oura on my shopping list. But this week I’m wearing a Dexcom Stelo because last week I found out that the Stelo is available OTC. No prescription required. Well, technically it’s available by mail order next day delivery, which is just as good. It’s overall a really pleasant experience (and this coming from a needle-phobe, but I didn’t feel any pricking).
turingbirds/ping-clock It's the ping time of the day:
Are you ever in a video call, when the other party suddenly freezes mid-sentence, leaving you wondering after a few seconds of silence: is it my connection that's having issues, or theirs? In such situations, one glance at the ping clock dial provides an immediate overview of your internet connection status and health, measured in terms of ping time.
Mobius Keyboard Wastes Little Space The future is here!
Andri Hopefully one day … 🤞
Has anyone ever created a CI pipeline job, and just have it run flawlessly on the build server the first time?
There should be a medal or some sort of award for that.
myrmepropagandist “Though at some point these keyboards just start to look like a dentist's nightmare... (or dream???)”
Eye for Design
Swede dreams, a collection of old Swedish packaging photos (👈 click the link to enjoy more creative product designs)
Reinkstone I don't know exactly how to describe it other than it’s an iPhone case and it puts an e-ink color display on the back of your phone so you can get creative with style!
Peoples
Sitters and Standers The American worker divide: Those who sit, and those who stand.
Business Side
Android Authority Reports Google Has Cancelled the Pixel Tablet 2 Unfortunately there are no drugs you can take to relieve your bout of institutional ADHD 🤕
A less generous read is that Google is afflicted with institutional ADHD and generally acts with no apparent strategy. They’ve kept their focus on annual updates to the well-regarded Pixel phones for 8 years now, but haven’t managed to make them hit products.
Couple accused of stealing nearly $1 million worth of Lululemon products across the country I have no idea how they managed that but it’s a thing that happened. Since Lululemon named itself so Asians won’t be able to pronounce the name, do I even care if they lost a few dollars?
Another Forbes 30 Under 30 CEO Is Indicted for Fraud The Forbes 30 Under 30 to Prison pipeline is still going strong.
Joanna Smith-Griffin allegedly inflated the revenues of her school chatbot company to secure investments.
Tindra The best of the best:
I was attending a social with non-US peeps in the US and this one person was wondering where she could get some electronics thing. To which I mentioned Best Buy, and the other Americans agreed.
The more we mentioned the Best Buy the more confused she got because she thought we were talking about the concept of a good deal (or exemplary purchase heh) not a literal store name.
Scott Williams Apropos … “Lol, thank you Javascript - I needed that laugh.”
Machine Intelligence
AI Has Enshittified America's Advanced Stealth Fighter
“ALIS had poor usability, required large amounts of maintainer time to complete application tasks, experienced frequent disruptions, did not provide maintainers all desired information and capabilities, and did not present consistent information to maintainers,” the report said. The problems with ALIS were so bad that F-35 maintenance people started to distrust it and developed their own unique workarounds when dealing with the AI system.
ChatGPT or Shakespeare? Readers Couldn't Tell the Difference—and Even Preferred A.I. But 46% … isn’t that worse than 50/50?
When scientists asked participants to identify which poems were fake and which were real, the participants guessed correctly around 46 percent of the time—just a little bit worse than if they’d flipped a coin instead. This finding wasn’t necessarily a surprise, since ChatGPT-3.5 was likely trained on the works of the famous poets.
Napkin The power of visuals: write some text and let Napkin generate the visuals for you — diagrams, charts, scenes, etc.
Insecurity
Malware being delivered by mail, warns Swiss cyber agency
The postal letters, dated to 12 November, claim to be offering people in the country a new weather app developed by the country's meteorological agency, however they contain a QR code redirecting people to a malicious application developed by fraudsters.
⚠️ we have released a new security vulnerability
please upgrade asap, so that you have access to the newest security vulnerability
Palo Alto Networks warns hackers are breaking into its customers' firewalls — again The most cybersecurity experts that ever cybersecured:
Malicious hackers have compromised potentially thousands of organizations by exploiting two new zero-day vulnerabilities found in widely used software made by cybersecurity giant Palo Alto Networks.
The more I learn about cryptography, the more I think Alice and Bob should probably just talk in person.
Microsoft are getting positive press for calling Recall “one of the most secure experiences it has built”.
I’d point out - they haven’t provided a Preview build to Insiders still, and there’s been no externally provided build (outside of NDA), so nobody has been able to assess the security and talk about it. There’s no specific bug bounty for it either.
When they first announced Recall, they called it totally secure - which was laughably inaccurate. It feels like a lot of premature high fiving
This was a new one for me. Instead of treating a weird spam/scam message as if they were a spy who missed a check in, as has been my habit, I did this:
Everything Else
Darth “This is a really good ad.”
Tired: me
Wired: also me, but with caffeine
My cat really doesn't understand the concepts of weekends and sleeping in.
Dgar I’ll be in France in late January/early February, so I have to get caught on my reading. Doesn’t look too difficult.
The worst part about parallel parking is the witnesses.
One sentence horror story:
I thought I was on mute.
Step into the Future with ÜNOS by Sz So Target now sells these Z-shaped shoes that grow with your feet, and they’re priced under $50, so perfect if you’re a fast growing kid on a budget.
"both sides of the Möbius strip"
I feel like this should be a metaphor for something.
I'm a simple girl. give me hummus and a solution to P=NP and I'm happy
Airbnb's idea to hold gladiator battles in Rome's Colosseum isn't going down well with some local lawmakers I believe the scientific term for this is … WTF??
If the person with whom you are negotiating finds it difficult to provide a decisive budget estimate for their project, ask them to try and situate it between two orders of magnitude. As in, "How many zeroes are we talking about here?" Quickly discovering that your ballpark figures are 2 to 6 zeroes apart can save you both a lot of time and frustration.
Casual reminder that next Friday is Unsubscribe Day, when marketers will make it easy to unsubscribe from all the dead weight by contacting you all at the same time.
(Help me make this a thing. This needs to be a thing.)
Last wednesday I chanced upon a man raking leaves in the park. Every fall these smileys appear, no one knows who makes them. Someone must do it, the dog walkers, baby strolling people tell each other when they meet. An article appeared in the local paper, even. Then after three years I saw the man himself. I was excited! Had always thought: I will thank him! I will make a picture! Was too shy, though, ha. Left him raking, sneaked a curious glance only. And later took a pic of the result.
Using abbreviations in text messages comes across as less sincere, study finds LOL
1951 Hannah Arendt quote on the origins of totalitarianism nails it: “this process includes the replacement of all first-rate talents, regardless of their political loyalties, with crackpots and fools…”
These five companies said they'd curb plastic waste. They made it much worse. Just a reminder that Exxon, Shell, Chevron et al care exactly zero percent about the global pollution they’re creating:
Documents from a PR company that were obtained by Greenpeace’s Unearthed team and shared with the Guardian, suggest a key aim of the AEPW was to “change the conversation” away from “simplistic bans of plastic” that were being proposed in 2019 amid an outcry over the scale of plastic pollution leaching into rivers and harming public health.
