Published
Weekend Reading — All I see is hummus
“Staying organized, writing lots of notes, and blocking out calendar time helps.”
Will McPhail Happy Halloween.
Design Objective
Steve Schoger Which of these UIs would you rather use?
🔥 When making a design responsive, don't stop at simply making things fit on smaller screens – look for ways to borrow usability patterns from native mobile apps, too.
For example, anchoring modals to the bottom of the screen instead of the center, making them easier to reach.
Enterprise Software Is Dead It’s just software for the workplace now:
If you’re an executive making a buying decision in 2019, sure, your board won’t fire you for making a conservative choice. But a mutiny in the rank-and-file will take you down just as fast. So you need to buy a tool that your employees like, and that they find useful. You need to care about design and user experience just as much as SLAs and Magic Quadrants.
I’m not sure if anyone has been fired for refusing to buy Slack, but I do know that a whole era of executives’ lives got a heck of a lot harder until they finally agreed to buy Slack.
On Small Seasons and Long Calendars Wonderful essay on a different way of connecting with time:
Where spring is our “large” season, lasting roughly from March to June, the sekki calendar breaks it down into six small seasons: start of spring, rain waters, the going-out of the worms, vernal equinox, clear and bright, and rain for harvests.2 Both describe a similar period of time, but one does so with a precision that feels much more human.
Tools of the Trade
A Guide To New And Experimental CSS DevTools In Firefox Grid and flexbox inspectors, inactive CSS, accessibility panel, and more.
Google is improving 10 percent of searches by understanding language context Interesting:
The way BERT recognizes that it should pay attention to those words is basically by self-learning on a titanic game of Mad Libs. Google takes a corpus of English sentences and randomly removes 15 percent of the words, then BERT is set to the task of figuring out what those words ought to be. Over time, that kind of training turns out to be remarkably effective at making a NLP model “understand” context, according to Jeff Dean, Google senior fellow & SVP of research.
IBM Says Google’s Quantum Leap Was a Quantum Flop Alternate headline: Google Discovers a Superposition of Leap and Flop.
Manisha Agarwal 50:50
Darrell Huff on how to lie with Statistics:
It's like the tale of the roadside merchant who was asked to explain how he could sell rabbit sandwiches so cheap.
"Well," he explained, "I have to put some horse-meat in too. But I mix them 50:50. One horse, one rabbit."
😁
Ben Lesh Points for accuracy:
6 out of 5 people on Twitter misuse statistics.
Yvonne Lam “My cat opened a file in VSCode and started “helping”.”
Web-end
Playing Beat Saber in the browser with body movements using PoseNet & Tensorflow.js Browsers came a long way since VRML.
Ryan Florence 👇 Thread, on where and how SPA lost their way:
There’s a chance I believe client side routing on the web is usually not preferred. Which is ironic.
Might be best for screens where the majority of the UI persists, which is the edge case.
Browsers handle page transitions really well.
Still working through my thoughts 🤔
Introducing Concurrent Mode (Experimental) Looks very powerful. And deeply confusing.
Lines of Code
Jenn Wallis What about code review?
As an editor, I can spot the exact moment in your copy where you basically said "fuck it".
Amjad Masad This explains why developers are so eager to add dark mode to every app:
Architectural
90% of engineering decisions I make, from the architectural to the semantic, start here:
"How is another developer going to try to extend and maintain this code?"
That's all about people, and my skill at it directly translates to the longevity and impact of the code I write.
There are two types of systems: those you can’t restart and those you don’t want to restart.
Tomasz Łakomy “Is this Docker?”
Peopleware
Malware Unicorn Time management is everything:
One thing I've learned over the years is knowing how to manage time for your brain to switch subjects. Context switching is hard. Staying organized, writing lots of notes, and blocking out calendar time helps.
Gabe Yes.
All of the talented and successful people I know agree on the following:
- There isn’t any secret to what they do.
- Getting the basics right provides the most value over time.
- Nobody got to where they are without help.
- Luck plays a massive role in success.
It's called executive dysfunction but I'm not sure there's actually any executives in my brain. Highest ranked in there is probably an overworked assistant store manager existing entirely on energy drinks and cinnamon rolls.
Tom Gauld “Please tick the box”
Teamwork
betsythemuffin 👇 That question got me thinking. Check the replies for more double-sided phrases:
"You are not your code":
- in toxic environments, it's an excuse to tear people down.
- in supportive environments, it's a tool that encourages a growth mindset.
What are some other phrases like that that y'all have seen?
Locked Doors
Valerie Aurora Friendly reminder:
Y’all, keep work/personal email separate if for NO OTHER REASON that when the lawyers are going through your emails for the lawsuit involving your employer, they won’t be making jokes about your taste in sex toys
And it's not something you can actively avoid. You don't have to be a party to the lawsuit to have your work emails included in discovery.
gduffy Admire the honesty:
Former co-founder & CEO of Dropcam (Nest cam) here.
There's no way to say this humbly, but imo stuff like this is the reason that companies lose their way when they lose an empowered "buck stops here" product-oriented CEO with enough engineering chops to modulate product decisions.
...
This whole privacy mess in home & so-called "IoT" is a result of people who don't even know what would be required to operate ethically with such powerful technology in the first place. I believe they are mostly good people, they just don't have the mindset or philosophy to know what to do. It kinda makes me misty-eyed. They know where to find me if it sounds like some of this could help... I'd be happy to try and get the band back together again.
Grim Reaper
Happy halloween 🎃👻🧟♀️
UnrealAlexander “Just found out you can buy real human remains on Amazon and it just acts like it's super normal like "Hey you want some human fingers to go with those ribs?"”
CascadianSolo “It's always a wild ride reading the voters pamphlet for local elections. See if you can tell what's wrong with this...”
Will McPhail Again because his stuff is hilarious. Check out his Instagram.
None of the Above
Sam Mintz “Grim news for those of us who write for a living”
Me, writing an email:
I'm using an exclamation point so you know I'm friendly and excited! But now I'm using a period so that you know I'm not crazy. Here's another sentence with a period as a buffer, proving my normalness. Thanks so much!
Sophia Armen “all I see is hummus”
one thing you forget about star wars is how much of the original trilogy is just darth vader flying in some place to chew some guy out about construction delays
Mark Serrels “Women's speed climbing record was smashed. Under 7 seconds. Inhuman.”
Dungeons and Dragons is popular because it appeals to the human fantasy of having a group of friends who can come over at a regular time
WebMD Magazine Just saw this at the doctor's office. Weird that WebMD — emphasis on the "web" — has this print magazine … don't doctors hate people who self-diagnose using the internet?
Inside R/Relationships, the Unbearably Human Corner of Reddit “How a subreddit seemingly destined to devolve into chaos stays remarkably sane” TL;DR moderation.
The fact that these rules exist at all is a reminder of something we tend to forget about the internet, which is that we’re as responsible to one another here as anywhere else. Sometimes more. … It’s the rare place with consequences, which come from a crude system, but one created by people who actually have to live within it—not people who are simply getting paid by the people who named the app.
Migrating Russian eagles run up huge data roaming charges Okay well …
Russian scientists tracking migrating eagles ran out of money after some of the birds flew to Iran and Pakistan and their SMS transmitters drew huge data roaming charges.
Kieran Healy 😿 Context: Rats taught to drive tiny cars to lower their stress levels
In Phase 2, rats will be assigned to drive other rats in mazes. Rat drivers will be given a 1-5 star rating by rat passengers. Rat passengers must rate rat drivers or they will see their own rating go down. (This is the origin of the word "rating" btw.)
WeWork HR Invites Employees To Sign Goodbye Checks For Departing CEO Too soon.
Encouraging staffers to give him a good send-off, the WeWork human resources department reportedly invited employees Wednesday to sign goodbye checks for departing CEO Adam Neumann.
rat mic “psychologists dont want you to know this video is the cure for depression”