Published
Weekend Reading — Healthy living isn't available in your country
Tech Stuff
AllTrails Going hiking? This app lists 400K trails, with offline maps showing routes and elevation changes, trails that are verified by experts and reviewed by members, real time updates, etc. 4.9 stars on the App Store because it’s really a remarkable app.
Airline List Find your airline/airplane/airport by filtering from the list.
Headline driven development My software development process in a nutshell:
Have everyone work only on one headline at a time– the upcoming one. Ignore everything else. Don’t work on anything that doesn’t help you ship the headline. Once the headline is shipped, switch to the next headline in the stream and repeat. That’s all, you can fire your agile consultant.
Paletro Adds a command palette (⇧⌘P) to any applications on macOS.
ButterDocs You ever write documentations for a living? I think that’s the tool for it. It’s like an IDE but specifically for writing structured text: word processing, branching and merging, Kanban board, outlines, focus mode, and more. Mind you, it is missing some features you may need for documenting APIs, like embeds or code snippets.
Nasa are currently working to fix a computer error aboard Voyager 1. The probe's computer system runs at around 8000 instructions per second and has about 68kB of memory. Due to the interplanetary distances involved, even at light speed it takes 45 hours to send a signal and get a response. When asked about the unique challenges this poses, an engineer said "that's actually about average for a modern CI system“.
whobrings.com Create simple group pack lists for your next gathering!
"or" and "else" are both common constructs in programming languages, but "or else" is typically a syntax error. this is a major deficiency. we need to be able to threaten our code.
Creatie A design tool that loves using AI. Maybe a bit too much … I think also this landing page was also written by AI: “Creatie not only simplifies complex processes but also builds bridges for communication and collaboration, sparking new ideas through creative collisions.”
Eye for Design
The (not so) subtle reason you hate chatbots
Virtual agents, decision trees and ChatGPT-powered conversations aren't exactly the future of customer service that we were promised.
Tesler’s Law “Tesler’s law, also known as the law of conservation of complexity, states that for any system there is a certain amount of complexity that cannot be reduced.” Overall I think it’s a good article to read about UX, but it is somewhat dated — it was published in February this year, and seems to mistake Amazon Go for using real AI :(
Michael M Brilliant devilish: “Got a tattoo of the windows mouse cursor so that I can sit like this on Teams calls in the hope that someone frantically tries to move it.”
Peoples
How to Discuss the Undiscussables on Your Team “Surfacing the undiscussables on your team may be uncomfortable, but it must be an ongoing campaign, or they will sneakily build up in the background and impact your employees’ morale.”
there's a bit in my stand-up comedy about how one way you can tell the difference between someone who's been responsible for a complicated system lots of strangers depend on, and someone who hasn't, is whether they ever say "why don't they just....?”
An asshole filter happens when one has set of norms which results in one primarily, or at least disproportionately, coming into contact with assholes.
Miss Americana “Wow... just saw this in a job listing”
Business Side
Why you won't find a technical co-founder If you have a really big business idea that will replace Facebook for all of humanity in 2 years, you better read this article and get your bearings back:
If you're 25+, looking to start a business and do not have access to 10.000€, I question your abilities.
You are the money part of the business. 10.000€ is a lot of money, but if you're looking to start a company and you're taking this as serious as many of you project outwards: This should be one of the first problems that you solve.
Florian Haas Right:
Tapping the sign:
You don't take meeting notes for the people in the meeting. You take them for people who aren't in the meeting.
That includes three-months-from-now-you, who also isn't in the meeting.
Marissa Mayer’s eternal Sunshine Have you ever had a “too big to fail” CEO giving your orders to build a product nobody likes?
In the office, employees placed bets on how many downloads the app would get on its first day. Mayer set hers high, at 12,000 (12 is her lucky number). But the actual number was closer to 1,000, Platformer has learned.
Stability AI reportedly ran out of cash to pay its AWS bills The math isn’t mathing (and that's true for many of the AI giants): “Generative AI darling was on track to pay $99M on compute to generate just $11M in revenues”
Amazon Ditches 'Just Walk Out' Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores
Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped.
Machine Intelligence
this new RFC 9564 is comedy gold: "Faster Than Light Speed Protocol (FLIP)" - this uses LLMs to predict what packets
be sent, thus obviating the need to actually send them. The Acknowledgements section is just... <chef's kiss>. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9564.html
‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza Some people read this and got it wrong. Israel did not delegate assassination decisions to its AI. No. They did worse: reduced the human role to just deciding whether the target is a man (target) or a woman (not target). Which I think AI could have done just as well, for cheaper, maybe they didn’t get far enough to build speech recognition yet?
BTW this article names the top intelligence unit 8200, which for many years was the glory of the IDF (remember Stuxnet?). The head of 8200 is having a very not good week for not knowing how to use Google: Top Israeli spy chief exposes his true identity in online security lapse
AI chatbots 82% more likely to win a debate than a human One thing AI does really well is articulate a persuasive argument.
So much better, in fact, that with a limited bit of demographic data GPT-4 is reportedly able to convince human debate opponents to agree with its position 81.7 percent more often than a human opponent, according to research from a group of Swiss and Italian academics.
Also when it comes to people: The fine art of human prompt engineering: How to talk to a person like ChatGPT “People are more like AI language models than you might think. Here are some prompting tips.”
Is prompt engineering’s party over?
Prompt engineering is on the path to rapidly becoming an afterthought … AI models make better prompt engineers than humans.
Don’t Be Fooled: Much “AI” is Just Outsourcing, Redux
“AI,” in these cases and many others, is a shiny distraction that begs us to “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” But behind that curtain is the familiar phenomenon of outsourcing: expensive, skilled labor in the US or other advanced economies traded for cheap, unskilled labor in developing economies.
Tjeerd Royaards “The future is AI.”
Insecurity
NYC Has Tried AI Weapons Scanners Before. The Result: Tons of False Positives “Over seven months in 2022 at Jacobi Hospital, Evolv scanners yielded false positives 85 percent of the time.”
Babe are you ok? You’ve barely posted 5 key takeaways from the xz debacle
Everything Else
Dr. Lucky Tran “You gotta respect the New York hustle”
April Fool's is over - return to your previously scheduled believing everything you read on the internet
for Godzilla, every city is walkable
Charlie read his book, blissfully unaware that he sat mere inches from international super spy, and master of disguise, Bernardo Andolini, a.k.a. “The Chameleon.”
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and the time an online recipe promises it will take to prepare a meal.
We put round pizza in a square box and eat it in triangles.
Rob Fahrni “Solid advice.”
A friend of mine with a functioning uterus told me recently she was having an IED put in, to keep her from getting pregnant.
I said I thought that was a little extreme, and that maybe an IUD would be better.
As obesity rises, Big Food and dietitians push ‘anti-diet’ advice Yes, English is a weird language: “dietitians push ‘anti-diet’ advice”. Also, I’m going to avoid any food products from General Mills for now on. Thank you for coming to my Ted talk.
Dr. Lucky Tran “UPDATE: In the US, COVID wastewater levels are now low.”
Wait, does America suddenly have a record number of bees? Is the beepocalypse over?
A gold-standard source shows a stunning boom in U.S. honeybee populations. Could that possibly be right? A Department of Data analysis found two possible explanations, one more surprising than the other.
ADHD: The history of a diagnosis “Our difficulties diagnosing attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have spawned debate for decades.”
Bold brick-waving vision zero campaign expands to another Vancouver crossing
The brilliance of this campaign lies in its ability to capture attention and stimulate conversation around a critical issue while injecting a touch of humour into the discussion. By playfully suggesting the use of bricks as a means of asserting pedestrian rights, the campaign effectively draws attention to the often-overlooked vulnerability of those on foot in urban settings.
