Published
Weekend Reading — As asap as possible!
Ben “Nice lil guy I just found out we own”
Tech Stuff
AI Prompt: Writing Supabase Edge Functions This is a new Supabase article but it's also a good example of how to write prompting rules for Cursor, which I just learned are easy to structure as plain text files.
Programming languages train you to not want what they don't provide, which is why programmers should learn a wide variety of different styles in order to not take any shit from language designers
let he whose programming language has nice syntax cast the first stone
Conventional Commits I just learned there's a ~/.gitmessage I can customize. So cool.
You Didn't Notice MP3 Is Now Free
The licensing and patents on MP3 encoders have expired, meaning you can now include them in your applications without paying royalties.
I just solved a merge conflict in SVN by displaying the diff on my screen; taking a photo of the screen with my telephone; accept "theirs"; then re-implement my change from the screenshot I took with my phone.
Can you do /that/ with Git?
Quack Quack mini M4 Pro Press the Mac Mini’s power button by pressing the duck’s bill.
In programming, there are exactly 2 levels of logging:
ERROR: Unknown Error
Greeting my good developer! Allow me to regale you with the long and illustrious history of the initialization of this fair class we call IErrorUnknownFactory! It all started... [Repeated 15 times per second]
The Taylorator is a piece of software which allows you to use an SDR (such as a LimeSDR) to transmit music on every valid frequency in the FM broadcast band. It's named the Taylorator because it was originally written to broadcast Taylor Swift on every channel at once, to force everyone to listen to her music.
people tell me I have trust issues but after dealing with vendor toolchains for a while, I can only conclude I don't have enough trust issues yet
Some people don't realize how well old computers can work for everyday tasks if you just switch out the spinning hard drive for an SSD.
The difference is incredible. You may not need a new computer.
deech “It's too late for me but stay away from Emacs kids” (article)
Eye for Design
The reality of dating apps A great exploration of the match.com empire of dating apps, how they all do pretty much the same thing, how they're tweaked and gamed to retain customers, and how some design decisions make no financial difference:
Verification is not mandatory on most dating apps, I don't think this is an important topic. We initially had a lot of criticisms for having too many fake profiles on the app, and it was completely wrong, we never had fake profiles, we just had too many pretty girls and guys would think they are fake. Today we don't have any people complaining of fake profiles etc., so I guess people trust the apps nowadays. The verify your profile thing has no interest for me unless you are Match Group and you share phone numbers between different apps (device ID on iOS are stable per app ID). Bots are much dumber than we think, there is no race to fight all mechanisms.
Tired: I don't believe in angels
Wired: I'm sans-seraph
CSS—now available in Safari:
text-box. It helps with buttons:h1, p, button { text-box: trim-both cap alphabetic; }
Peoples
I once worked for a client in the Silicon Valley who insisted on “brainstorming” every now and then. For them, this meant going to a meditation facility at their offices and spending 10 minutes eyes closed. At the end of these sessions they often announced “Couldn’t think of anything” I shit you not
If you work from home, you may go several days without speaking to another human being, but there are also disadvantages.
Educated but easily fooled? Who falls for misinformation and why
The researchers found no significant impact of education on people’s ability to distinguish between true and false information. This contradicts the widespread belief that more educated individuals are likely to be less susceptible to misinformation, especially as higher education teaches us critical thinking. The study also challenges assumptions about age and misinformation. While older adults are often portrayed as more vulnerable to fake news, the analysis found that they were actually better than younger adults at distinguishing between true and false headlines. Older adults were also more skeptical and tended to label headlines as false more often. Paradoxically, however, previous research has consistently shown that older adults engage with and share more misinformation online.
Business Side
It’s a great point, and Amazon is a perfect example. They’re a company that provides amazing convenience, yet they deserve very little trust.
I think this can apply to many (all?) of the big tech companies, with Google likely topping that list. Some of their services are wildly convenient, but Google as a company deserves almost no trust.
Neodog with Glasses Plushie “New way to get customer support just dropped”
Machine Intelligence
The End of Programming as We Know It Yes. I know a lot of people would object to the idea because instinctively we value connecting physical circuits and rationalize it in so many ways. But the future is coming and it will run on a different machine:
The magic that’s coming now is the most powerful yet. And that means that we’re beginning a profound period of exploration and creativity, trying to understand how to make that magic work and to derive new advantages from its power. Smart developers who adopt the technology will be in demand because they can do so much more, focusing on the higher-level creativity that adds value.
Irony alert: Anthropic says applicants shouldn’t use LLMs
We suppose this means they trust their applicants not to use undetectable AI tools that Anthropic itself would be quick to admit can help people who struggle with their writing (Anthropic has not responded to a request for comment from Ars Technica).
Prompt patterns for LLMs that help you design better software
Large language models (LLMs) may not be replacing developers anytime soon, but can still be of use in the design process.
S1: The $6 R1 Competitor? 1K is all that was needed to achieve o1-preview performance on a 32B model:
S1 is important because it illustrates the current pace of AI development that’s happening in the open. When you consider how much compute is available to the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, the potential true pace of AI development is mind melting.
S1 isn’t a replication of R1 or o1. Those were demonstrations in pure reinforcement learning (RL). S1 shows that supervised fine tuning (SFT) shows just as much potential. That means researchers have multiple paths to investigate for pushing forward inference-time scaling.
Not Gouda-nough: Google removes AI-generated cheese error from Super Bowl ad
This "experimental" status hasn't stopped Google from heavily selling its AI writing assistant as a godsend for business owners in its planned Super Bowl ads, though. Nor is this major caveat included in the ads themselves. Yet it's the kind of thing users should have at the front of their minds when using AI assistants for anything with even a hint of factual info.
Insecurity
Apple Ordered by UK to Create Global iCloud Encryption Backdoor That the British government wants to spy on its citizens by disabling Apple’s security feature … that’s a problem for the British and their approval of the “Snooper's Charter”. But for every other person around the world?!?
The undisclosed order is said to have been issued last month, and requires that Apple creates a back door that allows UK security officials unencumbered access to encrypted user data worldwide – an unprecedented demand not before seen in any other democratic country.
Everything Else
Jack Daniel “Oh hell, this escape room looks impossible.”
It is now safe and unsafe to turn off your quantum computer.
As asap as possible!
Sometimes, at high speed, my brain struggles to tell the difference between car and curbstone. Though for once I don’t think it’s entirely my bad.
I regret to inform you that significant quantities of homemade granola were lost to quality control
I haven’t even STARTED procrastinating yet
Build Your Own Pomodoro Bot With Viam This is such an adorable DIY Pomodoro Timer! And also a 100% attempt to avoid some important task by building the cutest productivity tool — the most ADHD thing ever!
I don’t have adhd I have multiprocessor speculative multithreading with dynamic thread termination and aggressive resource scavenging and termination
Yeah sure Markdown tables are severely limited and don't have any useful features. But on the plus side, they're incredibly inconvenient to write
MissInformation “A blockchain. That's all, that's the post.”
Tonight's the night I am finally going to read that browser tab that's been open since last year with the article on time management, I can feel it!
There’s no shame in comfort food. No shame in comfort movies. Cherish your comfort.
GeriAQuin “Reality is merely an illusion …”
Me: So I had a few things flare up this winter in terms of what I recognize as crush feelings
My Therapist: Possibly the most autistically phrased expression of this ever I love it
😂 (save me)
Be the hermit you don't want to see in the world.
This is a tug boat called Caleb that's been abandoned and slowly sinking in our local harbor for the last few years
I just found out it was abandoned by a cult of (allegedly) murderous vegans
Related: The Zizians and the Rationalist death cults
A thing that gets missed in fascism discussions sometimes is that fascism is by design unevenly applied. There must always be doubt whether a rule applies or not, must always be doubt whether a new draconian law is feasible, must always be a doubt whether your routine trip to the government office will be successful, a failure, or land you in jail or the gallows.
When the rules are inconsistent, power decides, and that's all fascism wants, is power. The fascists love to have folks beg them to make an exception, love to be told they're kind and generous when they bend their own laws to let someone live. They adore hearing people be met with skepticism when they tell their friends how awful an experience was, and their friends say "Well, it wasn't that awful for me."
Don't expect efficiency or competence when dealing with a fascist government. It will NOT get better as the fascists settle in. The disparities are baked in, they're a feature not a bug.
Tilly Bridges “just want you to know I would ride this thing everywhere INCLUDING TO THE MOON”
Just as a small step to stop normalizing current fascists:
Do not ever - even ironically - title anything "Make X Y again". Don't give further power to those memes and (TBH inherently conservative) modes of thinking about the world.
The Guardian view on Donald Trump’s power grab: a coup veiled by chaos
Mr Trump’s chaos isn’t confidence – it’s desperation. He’s trying to conjure power he doesn’t actually have. He is manufacturing a perception of dominance in the hope that Americans will simply accept it. The real danger is letting his illusion of power become reality.
feedle A search engine for blogs and podcasts!
A secret weapon in agriculture's climate fight: Ants
Ultimately, their greatest trick is what Jensen’s newest research reveals: Ants also inherently have antimicrobial bacteria and fungi on their bodies and feet, which can reduce plant diseases in afflicted crops, with these microorganisms deposited as the critters walk. When the bugs are cultivated in fruit orchards, they march all over trees, their feet coating the plants in microbial organisms that can curb emerging
New Study Finds 90% of Cat Owners Experience oofjfjjggigiiiiifohhhjjfjfjjjjj))))))))))))))
