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Weekend Reading — Great to be back!
It's great to be back!
I'm still going through recovery, but got far enough that I'm back to reading good content, and collecting it into a weekly newsletter. So Weekend Reading is back. Hope you enjoy this week's edition.
Tech Stuff
Photoshop is now on the web! “Enabled by WebAssembly + Emscripten, Web Components + Lit, Service Workers + Workbox & new Web” Impressive!
if i can offer younger developers any advice its this: develop a visceral allergy to complexity as soon as you can and nurture that allergy your whole life until it approaches debilitating.
all else being equal complexity is bad. more "stuff" is bad, period. there are dopamine triggers and corporate metrics that may indicate otherwise but they are catastrophically wrong.
fight to make simpler things. sometimes you really cannot, but thats a fight you need to have and lose if thats the case…
The Tron Project: How Japan Almost Ruled IT The Tron announcement was a moment of reckoning. It felt like Japan could take over the world of personal computers. Yet it didn’t, and this article explains why.
Ranging from about $23,000 a year down to a modest $4,600. Microsoft feared that a TRON PC would end the dominant position of NEC Corp. within Japan, which was offering a highly popular computer that used Microsoft’s MS-Dos system.
The Saga of the Closure Compiler, and Why TypeScript Won
Unless you've worked on frontend at Google at some point in the past 20 years, it's unlikely that you've ever encountered the Closure Compiler. It occupied a similar niche to TypeScript, but TypeScript has absolutely, definitively won.
Long gone, DEC is still powering the world of computing Remember DEC? Once upon a time, at the top of the computing world. I read this out of curiosity, wish it covered 70’s and 80’s computer in more detail (and less about Windows NT).
Wow, VS Code can now debug #WebAssembly if the #Wasm code is annotated with Dwarf debugging information (via the
-gflag in #Emscripten): https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/nodejs/nodejs-debugging#_debugging-webassembly.
getting fired from apple for printing out little pieces of paper that say ".DS_Store" and leaving them everywhere
vita snackville-west “Learning about cpu architecture”
People
Let it shine: the unexpected benefits of sun exposure on skin
For years we’ve been told to avoid sun to prevent skin cancer. But research suggests a dose of rays can boost your immune system and increase lifespan. We look on the bright side
Machine Thinking
Decomposing Language Models Into Understandable Components Anthropic’s research paper details how decomposing groups of neurons in a neural network into interpretable "features" may improve safety by enabling monitoring of LLMs.
How to AI “Three approaches on deploying generative AI for brands and corporations” Overview of where AI is right now, and how we got here.
Before Skynet and The Matrix, This 50-Year-Old Movie Predicted the Rise of AI - IGN “When artificial intelligence becomes god, who will come to love it? We're looking back at the AI classic, Colossus: The Forbin Project.”
Insecurity
Turnstile is free for everyone CAPTCHAs are over. They’re not user friendly, and too easy for machines to hack. Cloudflare replaces them with Turnstile, which they make freely available for everyone for unlimited use.
Humans give up on CAPTCHA puzzles approximately 15% of the time and, maddeningly, CAPTCHAs are significantly easier for bots to solve than they are for humans.
Everything Else
ErrantScience “October is a great time to remember that botany is crazy and makes no sense 🎃”
iPhone 15 Pro Max Camera Review: Depth and Reach Everything you want to know about the iPhone 15 Pro Max camera.
For the first time scientists observe the creation of matter from light
When two ions passed by each other without colliding, some of their virtual photons interacted and turned into real photons with very high energy. These photons then collided with each other and produced electron-positron pairs, which were detected by the STAR detector at RHIC. The scientists analyzed more than 6,000 such pairs and found that their angular distribution matched the theoretical prediction for matter creation from light.
NanoRaptor “It is now safe to switch off your consciousness.”
A prehistoric cosmic airburst preceded the advent of agriculture in the Levant 🤔
Agriculture in Syria started with a bang 12,800 years ago as a fragmented comet slammed into the Earth's atmosphere. The explosion and subsequent environmental changes forced hunter-gatherers in the prehistoric settlement of Abu Hureyra to adopt agricultural practices to boost their chances for survival.
'Israel's 9/11': Political analysts react to deadly Hamas attack Good explainer of what happened in Israel over the weekend (now officially war that will last for a very long time).
MissConstrue “Feeling Boo-tee-full. Endearing and wonderful art from Nick Maskell.”
Erik McClure “with apologies to xkcd #1420”
This EV restomod highlights the joys and flaws of the classic MGB “It's lighter and more powerful than the original but only by a sensible amount.”
I’ve opened a can of worms. They just sit there, the worms. Hardly the chaos that’s been advertised.
Victor Wynne “Ooh 😯 new emoji category”
