Published
Weekend Reading — Happy "That's a January Problem" week
Can Christmas season start a little earlier this year
Tech Stuff
fuck it happened i am in a situation where i do actually need to reverse a linked list
Atuin I just learned about Atuin and am giving it a try. I think it’s good and worth trying out. It makes it a lot easier to go back in the command line history and re-run previous commands (with or without changes).
bombshell-dev/clack Clack has some really beautiful, ready-to-use CLI prompt components.
got my haircut today and the hairdresser commented that I was noticeably grayer in some spots and I was like yeah there’s this software called JIRA
Character-based alignment How to align numbers in table cells based on their decimal point.
State of JavaScript 2024: Testing I’ve been using Vitest in all my projects in 2024 and I do love it. ❤️
It's rare to see a trend as clear as Vitest's ascencion through the ranks over the past few years. While it may "only" be number four in terms of usage, it already tops the interest, retention, and overall positivity rankings – and shows no sign of conceding the top spot anytime soon.
10 modern Node.js runtime features to start using in 2024
This post will explore 10 modern Node.js runtime features that every developer should start using in 2024. We'll cover everything from fresh off-the-press APIs to the compelling features offered by new kids on the block like Bun and Deno.
Building a simple form in React - before and after React 19 I can’t wait to upgrade. React 19 will make my code so much simpler and shorter.
const NewsletterSubscribe = () => {
const [result, submitAction, isPending] = useActionState(
async (previousState, formData) => {
const email = formData.get("email");
const name = formData.get("name");
if (!name || !email) {
return {
type: "error",
message: `Please fill in your name and email.`,
};
}
await fakeSendEmail();
return {
type: "success",
message: `You have succesfully subscribed!`,
};
...
GitHub Copilot Copilot is now available for free to all VS Code developers! I’ve been using it for over a year and I absolutely love it. (I switched to Cursor, but I don’t regret my experience with Copilot)
The hardest problem in computer science is avoiding the temptation to imagine a more interesting problem to solve instead of the one someone is asking for help with
usetrmnl An e-ink display that can pull information from anywhere: RSS feeds, calendar, weather, business/social KPIs, and more. In fact, it’s open source and you can write your own plugins. Battery lasts for 3 months, and it’s only $129 which I think is a steal.
The key words "MUST", "MUST NOT", "SHOULD", "SHOULD NOT", "RECOMMENDED BUT REPULSIVE", "WRONG BUT WROMANTIC", "FREQUENTLY MISUNDERSTOOD", "NOBODY BOTHERS WITH THIS BIT", "SHOULDN'T REALLY BUT WE WON'T JUDGE", "REQUIRED IN ORDER TO WORK AROUND EVERYONE ELSE'S BUGS", "YOU DO YOU", and "OBVIOUSLY ABSURD BUT VERY COMMON FOR SOME REASON" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119.
Scour This is a really interesting idea. You put all your RSS feeds in one place (Hacker News, Reddit, Bluesky, Substack, etc) and Scour uses AI to find hidden gems that match your interests.
DELETEs are difficult Deep dive into PostgreSQL to learn about the overheads of deleting rows from a database table and how to work around the performance limitations.
It's interesting to have lived through a time when operating system upgrades were major jumps in functionality, and now be in a time when OS upgrades are followed by app upgrades that need to turn off the new features.
This is a screenshot on my Mac of the update window for TeXShop, turning off Apple's new Math Expression Completion feature (part of its Apple Intelligence). To quote the update "This addition is almost never appropriate in TeX source code“.
What code reviews did do was make sure that more people than the author knew about the changes that were happening. Code reviews were far more efficient than pairing, and could be done asynchronously. I did code reviews nearly every day I worked on Trello, and I never worked on a team codebase I felt more generally comfortable with.
Luisa Donato “When the code doesn’t work”
DasFaultier 🐺🐺
Inside you there are two wolves. One is active, the other one is on hot standby and becomes active if the first one fails or is taken down for maintenance. Add more wolves as necessary for increased redundancy load balancing. A quorum badger can be added for environments with multiple active wolves.
* * * * * - Five star cron job. Will run again.
lcamtuf “I'm new to soldering, is this normal?”
Eye for Design
One of my earliest UX wins was for Mac System 7. The Finder team wanted to truncate files names with '…' if it wouldn’t fit. I argued that too much critical info would be lost and suggested it be in the middle instead. The Finder team loved it and implemented it later that day. They were so easy to work with.
I'd totally forgotten about it until I overheard someone commenting it was an example of Apple's attention to detail. I'd didn't say anything at the time but yeah, that was me ;-)
mhoye Yes please!
Is there a website that will let you hear all the beeps that a device might make before you buy it? That would be invaluable to a certain kind of person, namely "like me."
I want to hear:
- the you-touched-a-button beep
- the jobs-done beep
- some good-news beeps
- the bad-news beeps.
I care a lot less about The Best Microwave or The Best Toaster, we're already at the absolute upper margins of modern convenience here. Nobody seems to ask: which one of these is the least annoying?
The new corporate overlord made me sign up for some training tracker website to do my mandatory trainings on things like “don’t sell nuclear secrets” and now the training tracking website is sending me clingy, whiny, self-important emails about how I haven’t done any new corporate trainings in over two weeks
Here’s a way to think about it: Our displays are essentially millions of tiny light bulbs that emit light, creating a glow. This glow visually “bleeds” into the surrounding dark areas.
As a result, a black line on a white background appears thinner to our eyes compared to a white line of the same thickness on a black background.
That’s why it makes sense to compensate for this effect when designing text.
Business Side
Corporate Nonsense Generator Stuck in a meeting that could have been an email? That's the perfect time to toy with this corporate nonsense generator:
A fidget device to add focus and humor to any corporate setting by building absurd workplace expressions (like "seamlessly actualize deliverables") with a twist.
“Founder Mode” and the Art of Mythmaking And this is just the start point of an epic journey into Chesky’s story:
Chesky starts off by relating a story about how Airbnb in its early years hired way too many people, way too fast, and buckled under all the nasty consequences of hypergrowth. Lack of clarity and direction, excessive coordination costs, lack of focus, layers of bureaucracy that added no value or expertise, empire building, you name it.
The 8 worst technology failures of 2024 Vertical farms, woke AI, 23andMe, and 5 other technology failures that was this year.
Google Says It Appears to Have Accessed Parallel Universes Just a reminder that quantum computing is not the future of our industry. Whatever Google is saying about their new chip is only effective in raising their stock prices by people who think we’ll settle Mars by 2030:
"They use this particular problem because it has been formally proven (with some technical caveats) that the calculation is difficult to do on a conventional computer (because it uses a lot of entanglement)," she added. "That also allows them to say things like 'this would have taken a septillion years on a conventional computer' etc."
Machine Intelligence
Letta Gives your LLM the ability to remember previous conversations and follow from there.
Alignment faking in large language models
A new paper from Anthropic’s Alignment Science team, in collaboration with Redwood Research, provides the first empirical example of a large language model engaging in alignment faking without having been explicitly—or even, as we argue in our paper, implicitly1—trained or instructed to do so.
Let's think with Gemini Flash 2.0's experimental thinking mode and LangChain4j 🤔
This is very interesting to see the thinking process the model follows when reasoning about the problem. Compared to some competing model which hides its thoughts, Gemini shares everything it went through. And it does it faster!
New Arizona charter school will use AI in place of human teachers The future is rich people bragging they send their kids to private schools to be taught by actual humans:
Unbound Academy, which operates in Texas and Florida as Alpha Schools, has been approved to open a charter school in Arizona with an AI learning model that adjusts kids’ learning plans on the fly.
AI CEO™ The future of corporate leadership has arrived!!
Upgrade your CEO to AI CEO™. Featuring guaranteed kill-switch, 24/7 operation, and shareholder-first algorithms. The most efficient way to maximize shareholder value.
On not using copilot That is a not inaccurate characterization:
LLMs make you think like a manager
LLM assistants are chat interfaces. You beg the computer to do something, it does something wrong, you ask it to fix the problem. You’re managing. You’re acting as a manager, and chatting.
WSL/wsl-config.md: rewrite lead for clarity by multiplealiases But … but … how will AI read the revised docs???
Thanks for the contribution here and appreciate your attention to detail. We have decided to keep as-is.. part of that decision is that more and more folks are using AI chat to access guidance and tables don't always translate well in that context.
Insecurity
CFPB sues JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Wells Fargo over Zelle payment fraud This is your friendly reminder. DO NOT use Zelle. Don’t accept Zelle payments. Don’t make Zelle payments. Don’t sign into a Zelle account. It’s promoted by banks but makes absolutely no guarantee about the security of your bank account and you’ll never get your stolen money back. Nothing more dangerous and scammy for your bank account than Zelle.
The tradition is only known as "the holidays" to most, but it's important to remember what we are celebrating this time of year: the Herculean effort to fix the log4j vulnerability caused by needless use of JNDI.
Ryan Castellucci “New shitty password generation scheme just dropped, get cracking.”
Everything Else
Good morning. Happy "That's a January Problem" week to those who celebrate.
Your real body count is how many people you've sent to therapy.
Theodore Too, the beloved life-sized replica of Theodore Tugboat, has been 'safely righted and refloated' after its partial sinking in Ontario, its owner says.
Maybe we should stop calling them Notifications and instead refer to Interruptions.
"Working on some stuff so I've turned off interruptions for a while."
"Right on."
Hammer AND sickle? In this economy?
US city tells residents to stop sticking googly eyes on its statues Someone — who’s not the Oregon city of Bend — was having lots of fun.
Our old grandma kitty has discovered the cat climbing wall. Unfortunately she couldn’t work out how to get down so we tempted her with noms to show the way.
Now she keeps climbing back up and yelling for treats because that’s how it works, right? Right?!!
NASA astronauts, already stuck in the ISS for six months, have to stay until at least end of March Boeing heading for the prize of “longest unscheduled stay in orbit”:
Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who initially left for space on an eight-day mission, have been stuck in the International Space Station since June, due to faults on the Boeing Starliner spacecraft that carried them there.
Pizza Hut Taiwan Knows It’s Making Italians Angry I'm not sure what's going on with Pizza Hut in Taiwan but good on them for making Italians angry.
Not being able to teleport is continuing to be a huge inconvenience for me
pre-coffee thoughts with Tilly:
every plant that grows in the capital of Belgium is technically a brussels sprout
this has been pre-coffee thoughts with Tilly
BTW I’ll be in Brussels in early February. If you have ideas on what I should do, coffee places I need to try out, etc let me know.
Liquid Death’s Pit Diaper flies off shelves following viral bathroom incident at S.F. concert This is a marketing ploy to get more people to learn about Liquid Death, but damn if it’s not effective!
Liquid Death’s $75 Pit Diaper, designed for concertgoers to avoid bathroom breaks, offers a solution to incidents like the one at Sabrina Carpenter’s concert.
Let’s Talk About the Bidet, the Bathroom's Best-Kept Secret It will “refresh the parts toilet paper leaves behind.”
BTW if you live in the US you can get a Brondell (an SF company) from an affordable $60 attachment up to the top end $600 seat — with heating, lights, remote, the works. There’s something at every price point and they’re all fairly easy to install. And yes, I’m well aware of Toto, I love them but as imports they’re a bit more expensive here in the US.
VivaSpring Compact Related. Because hard water looks bad on the shower stall and is just not good for your skin. But you can get a shower filter for just $40 and it takes two minutes to install, no special tools or knowledge required.
If you are wondering how to answer behavioral interview questions, start from the job description. There is usually a section on company values -- map your best stories and attributes to those values.
When you are asked a question based on values, tell the associated story.
This does not mean you make stuff up or lie about your values. If your values don't match, don't apply. This is more about answering with the truth effectively.
Natasha Jay “Because you really needed a weekend timeline cleanser 🍪 🐈”
