Published
Weekend Reading — When you excel …
BasicAppleGuy “Lumon Industries Macrodata Refinement Terminal.”
Tech Stuff
vivus A library that will animate SVG files bringing them to life.
Justified Text: Better Than Expected? When you need your text properly justified:
text-wrap: balance;
hyphens: auto;
hyphenate-limit-chars: 10;
CSS light-dark() Delightful!
Cognitive load is what matters The trick to writing maintainable code is to keep WTF/sec as low as possible:
Once you onboard new people on your project, try to measure the amount of confusion they have (pair programming may help). If they're confused for more than ~40 minutes in a row - you've got things to improve in your code.
A software system's structure is essentially a formalized bet on change patterns you anticipate having to deal with in the future.
Windsurf vs Cursor: which is the better AI code editor? I think that’s a fair comparison.
Tabby An open-source Copilot. There's a free plan coming but also their GitHub repo has a self-hosted version you can run on your Docker.
Software engineers have a very different relationship to lines of code than do the kind of people who are impressed that LLMs can generate lines of code from a simple prompt.
Lines of code are bad. You do not want more of them.
Nothing can contain more relevant information than the spec used to define it. If 2 lines of text turn into 100 lines of code, the natural conclusion must be those 100 lines are doing things you never asked for. But WHICH things? Now you have 2 jobs to do.
Oh Shit, Git!?! An FAQ for all the mistakes you need to correct.
doompdf DOOM has now been ported to PDF!
You might expect PDF files to only be comprised of static documents, but surprisingly, the PDF file format supports Javascript with its own separate standard library. Modern browsers (Chromium, Firefox) implement this as part of their PDF engines. However, the APIs that are available in the browser are much more limited.
Mirumi is a furry little companion bot that imitates a shy infant So adorable!
Mirumi is a furry companion robot that imitates a curious infant using sensors to detect and look at nearby people.
Junior dev: "I messed up badly. I'm so fired."
Senior dev: "Been there, done that...twice. proceeds to drink coffee like it's no big deal"
Me: "They named a production outage after me, and it was in the newspapers. proceeds to drink coffee while staring wistfully out the window"
Dare Obasanjo “Truly bummed that this shirt wasn’t around when I worked at Microsoft.”
Selling your mattress? If it’s memory foam make sure to reformat it so an unscrupulous buyer can’t access your old dreams
Some of you may recall that I told Ashley about rubber ducking. Now she has bought a fleet of small rubber ducks for her entire coding in biology class so every student gets one (all typically students who have never programmed/are often very intimidated by learning to code). They're pretty excited.
This may be my biggest contribution to the future of coding.
Kwak SF Apropos ducks, Kwak SF has every flavor of rubber duck in their store at Pier 39. 500+ styles. You can head there and check for yourself, or order online.
Eye for Design
Color Find Spot the one block that's a different color … and this is hard because some colors (it differs from person to person) are hard to distinguish.
James Chip “There should be a chapter in The Design of Everyday Things devoted to this dial.”
Peoples
The "sprint" metaphor from agile starts to sound pretty fucked up when you realize you're supposed to be sprinting all the time.
Publicly announcing that the 5% of your employees you plan to lay off are the "lowest performers" is probably the meanest thing a company leader could do. First they lose their jobs, then the CEO intentionally tarnishes their reputation in the market so they can't find another?
You can still get the AOL experience in 2025. For only $6.99/month you too can get stuck in the deep reaches of the past and have your very own AOL account! And yes you pay monthly but on the plus side:
In a video posted today, YouTuber Michael MJD tours the app, which is full of ads, subscription offers, turn-of-the-century AOL-style icons, and dated email templates. It even has the old “You’ve got mail!” sound clip!
Business Side
A Personal Note From Our Founder 😢 Hindenburg Research is winding down.
Free Our Feeds wants to build a social media ecosystem ‘resistant to billionaire influence’ There’s an open-source project that’s totally volunteer based and uses a protocol (ActivityPub) that’s been around for years. But apparently, if you want to build something that’s billionaire-proof, you need to get some billionaire juice behind it — $30 million to be exact. Because of course. (Yes, this project is led by two people from Mozilla)
Can we just take a moment to appreciate that Mark Zuckerberg has managed to shit in his own bed so badly in the past few weeks that fediverse image app Pixelfed, made by one person in their spare time, has managed to rise far above Instagram on the App Store?
Apropos, Meta Is Blocking Links to Decentralized Instagram Competitor Pixelfed Just a reminder than Facebook is now 100% behind “free speech”.
This Photo-Sharing App Feels Like a Return to Instagram’s Glory Days If you’re migrating off Instagram before they cause another human disaster, try Pixelfed.
(You can find me on pixelfed.social)
Noticed how black women with Ivy-League degrees and 20 years of experience are called "DEI" hires but some random guy from FoxNews is expertly qualified to run the DOD.
From Suicide' To 'Active Investigation': Open AI Whistleblower Suchir Balaji's Case Reopened I don’t believe Russians randomly fall out of windows, and for the same reason I don’t believe Balaji committed suicide. Unfortunately it will take much longer (if ever) to find out what really happened to the OpenAI whistleblower.
A huge amount of the economy is driven by people who are, simply put, highly suggestible. That is to say that it is very, very easy to get them excited and willing to spend money.
Machine Intelligence
Extension for Gemini, Claude, etc that adds “… or so I have been told” to every utterance
Me, my colleagues, and seemingly everyone else in the world who has to use Google products...
"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that." anyone?
Popular newspapers now use LLM to write many articles and use AI-created images. They have the audacity to ask for a monthly subscription from visitors. Why don’t you ask AI to subscribe or ask Sama, the billionaire, to pay for it? I am not paying for stolen content from all over the web, and your boss is firing newspaper staff to replace it with LLM. Keep your news to yourself. Why do you need another human and their money to pay for it? These people are so delusional
An ‘AI-emulation' of Anne Frank made for use in schools.
Who the fuck thought this is appropriate?
Who in the everloving fuck coded this? Who approved it?
Who didn't stop them?
Insecurity
Chinese Innovations Spawn Wave of Toll Phishing Via SMS If you get a text message because your EZPass/FastTrak/NTTA/whatever got “charged”, here’s the skinny on that new scam.
Millions of Accounts Vulnerable due to Google’s OAuth Flaw The problem with OAuth they don’t want you to know about:
Here’s the problem: Google’s OAuth login doesn’t protect against someone purchasing a failed startup’s domain and using it to re-create email accounts for former employees. And while you can’t access old email data, you can use those accounts to log into all the different SaaS products that the organization used.
BeyondMachines “This is why we must always validate all user input”
Online scammers swarm L.A. wildfire victims. We called them If there's one thing that LinkedIn is really good for:
“Thanks so much :),” one user replied to a scammer. “I just opened the fundraiser this morning so that’s great timing!”
Phishing Attacks Use This Simple Trick to Defeat iPhone Message Security We finally got people to respond to irrelevant message threads with STOP and … well …
Scammers are apparently looking to exploit the familiar "reply STOP" or "reply NO" that often appears at the end of messages from authentic businesses or services … attackers not only enable the previously disabled links but also identify active phone numbers that are more likely to engage with future scams.
Chris Adams “Today in companies training people to be more phishable”
Stay Healthy
UnitedHealth hid its Change Healthcare data breach notice for months They’ll deny your coverage in 2 seconds flat but hold on to that security incident for months …
UnitedHealth, employer of slain exec Brian Thompson, found to have overcharged cancer patients for drugs by over 1,000% We’re still talking about that “healthcare” organization that kills the most Americans per year …
"Deny, Defend, Depose"
Luigi mural spotted in Varna, Bulgaria
Everything Else
elle “water bottle. want.”
I’m currently doing this challenge called January. Where you just try to make it through every day of January.
About a million Americans joined the Chinese social media platform Red Note.
Americans are being radicalized by seeing the grocery bills and medical bills of Chinese people.
Chinese people are being radicalized by learning about the 40-hour work week and overtime pay.
Now it's a race to see if the Chinese government or the US government bans this first.
correlation is suspiciously correlated with causation
whoever said money can't buy happiness must not have realized you can buy a little arm that holds your ereader above your face in bed, and a remote so you can turn the pages without taking your arms out from under the covers
Christchurch mum runs 100 metre sprint on Lego barefoot New Zealand is a weird place:
A Canterbury mum attempted a world-first record this morning – running 100 metres while barefoot across tens of thousands of pieces of Lego.
(For the curious, I’m currently watching The Brokenwood Mysteries which is why my phone — who’s definitely monitoring me — is feeding me news from NZ)
Apropos New Zealand, Gavin Shoebridge:
Adamski's Getting Fit this Year
Sure, I was assigned a gender at birth. I also got assigned homework at school but I didn't do that either.
It was the fuck aroundest of times, it was the find outest of times.
Gavin Shoebridge “It was at this moment when humanity peaked.”
It's okay to turn off the news.
You were never meant to carry the burden of the entire world.
A Marriage Proposal Spoken Entirely in Office Jargon
GARY: Hey Cindy, remember the other day when we were talking about optimizations?
CINDY: Yeah, I wanted to circle back on that.
GARY: Me too. You said you wanted to see hockey-stick growth. Well, I’ve realized that I want to see hockey-stick growth too—in our relationship.
CINDY: Unpack that for me.
GARY: This relationship has been such a value-add. Some of my friends were worried that it would take too long for us to get into alignment. But you have been an absolute rockstar …
halva “the american mind cannot comprehend trains”
New: this OnlyFans model publishes her machine learning explainers to both YouTube and Pornhub. Although YouTube may get a million views, that'll generate around $300. The same content posted to Pornhub, with ~30k views, makes $1000. We spoke to her
Jess 💪
Use encrypted comms platforms like Signal everywhere you can. ESPECIALLY for banal and innocuous stuff like organizing your little league team or your neighborhood potluck or your coworker's lunch bunch. The more people using encrypted comms platforms for absolutely boring things, the easier it is for those of us to NEED encrypted comms to be lost in the noise.
Jerome G It’s never too late …
I started doing photography when I was 35 and I ran my first half marathon when I was 44. I’ve never been embarrassed about being an adult learner. I wasted enough of my younger days being embarrassed about things I should’ve been proud of.
Longevity-Obsessed Tech Millionaire Discontinues De-Aging Drug Out of Concerns That It Aged Him This headline is not from The Onion.
Lisa “This is where you charge your cats.”
