Published
Weekend Reading — 🙄 Be someone's reason to roll their eyes
This week we test Remix streaming SSR, use GPT for scraping, design for ADHD, plug into ChatGPT, and visit the video game museum.
Kris Kashtanova <- super cute prompt to brighten up your day
Tech Stuff
r/ProgrammerHumor “We call them Scrum Masters” (in reply to)
Remix without Limits Vercel can now run Remix apps on the edge with streaming SSR.
To test it out, I migrated one of my smaller projects, and even though the full render is no faster (the bottleneck is a 3rd party API), the streaming UI makes it feels more responsive.
I'm trying to compare Remix’s defer with Next’s RSC.
So far, I'm ok with defer. I like that it exposes the wires — I have a good idea of what's happening and it's easy to reason about.
React Server Components has a simpler API (async hooks), but it also feels magical, which always has me worried about long-term maintenance. Also, I need to "use client" annotate a lot of components, some 3rd party, so couldn't find time to try it out yet.
Node.js compatibility for Cloudflare Workers Edge servers typically run a browser-like environment (Web Worker). Server code written for Node won't work out of the box.
The first thing that helps with migration: Node.js compatibility layer — even partial compatibility goes a long way.
Second, a dev environment that can simulate edge servers (Cloudflare's Wrangler does that), so you can tweak code locally.
Typst: Compose papers faster A modern alternative to LaTex. Think Google Docs — a collaborative browser-based text editor — but can produce high-quality PDFs fit for publishing in your favorite research journal.
That being said, I do all my reading on screens, so not a fan of double-column paginated PDFs.
scrapeghost One thing GPT is bad at — accuracy — is also the same thing it's good at — improvising.
If you've done any work with scraping, you know how brittle scrapers are. The idea of an improvising scraper is really interesting:
To me the big three were:
- Changing the underlying HTML (not a small change, literally changing the entire site) and having the extraction continue to just work.
- The ability to kick the first result back to the API to refine the results (fix JSON, reformat dates, etc.)
- Providing extra instructions like "please strip the episode number from the title" without requiring additional code.
Teclada Teclada lets you access the terminal remotely from any browser, and share your browser session.
aadmaa There’s a certain sense of satisfaction in writing the perfect functional code, even though you probably shouldn’t:
For the record, however elegant it may feel to the developer, inscrutable functional programming is not that great to decipher.
To all you functional programming purists who want the rest of us to read a mapped, filtered, reduced, flatmap of an array: give us our hour back.
It's elegant? Sure, like a complex RegEx is elegant.
At least please include an example of what it's supposed to be doing, and a test to prove it.
ThumbHash Inspired by BlurHash, generating smaller hashes, more accurate colors, alpha channel, and encoding the aspect ratio.
@Gary Bernhardt shot:
1960s: "COBOL will let non-programmers make the software!"
1980s: "4GLs will let non-programmers make the software!"
2000s: "UML will let non-programmers make the software!"
2020s: "AI will let non-programmers make the software!"
@Ryan Cavanaugh chaser:
I'm excited to stop writing code and start writing machine-readable specifications of precise intended behavior
Fearless CORS: a design philosophy for CORS middleware libraries Web servers operate mostly in two modes: URLs that authenticate using cookies, and URLs that purposefully ignore cookies (APIs).
It could have been a toggle, but instead, we got 9 different headers, and spend the GDP of a small country trying to get CORS working correctly.
jub0bs/fcors (Go) is an opinionated library for handling CORS, and this post explains the rationale and also compares it against other popular libraries.
David Bisset “When even trash cans are committing code more often than you are.”
Eye for Design
Software accessibility for users with Attention Deficit Disorder (ADHD)
In the physical world one of the worst places for me to be with other people is a restaurant or bar with a non-stop running TV, because I can’t stop myself from looking at the TV and getting distracted even though it shows the sports channel and I don’t even like sports. Don’t be this kind of website or application
You can now try Microsoft Loop, a Notion competitor with futuristic Office documents Imitation is the sincerest form of “nobody likes to use Sharepoint”.
Peoples
Ask HN: Why do many CS graduates lack foundational knowledge? Patience young Padawan:
University interns are mostly 21 years old.
21 year olds won't know very much of anything in general.
A 21 year old 3rd year college intern is... 21 years old
Three quarters of a four year computer science degree doesn't change the fact they're a 21 year old.
Leading Successful Product Teams
Avoid meetings as much as possible. Instead of having them, communicate asynchronous to each other via tools such as Linear, GitHub, Figma, Slack, and similar.
Provide at least three days of focus time per week for designers and developers in the team. There should be no interruptions whatsoever during this time. Let them do their work.
Trust your team to make decisions, they’re the experts. Your job is to make sure they know where they’re heading, clear any roadblocks from the way, and protect them from external cruft.
Business Side
Here's What Happens If the US Bans TikTok Or more specifically, why would Congress train its sights on TikTok?
TikTok might be popular with Americans, but it’s immensely popular with teenagers and young adults, and they see a potential ban as an attack on a platform lawmakers don’t understand and have little control over. “
Job Listings Abound, but Many Are Fake Hiring managers hate it when you apply to every open position without ever reading the job listing, but also:
Among those who said they advertised job postings that they weren’t actively trying to fill, close to half said they kept the ads up to give the impression the company was growing, according to Clarify Capital, a small-business-loan provider behind the study. One-third of the managers who said they advertised jobs they weren’t trying to fill said they kept the listings up to placate overworked employees.
Nothing but love, but didn't Mozilla just announce they're going into the Fediverse? And now they're gonna do AI? And they still make a browser with less than 4% usage? Seems like they're just antitrust insurance for the bigs.
Who Becomes an Entrepreneur? If you’re 41 years old with ADHD, you’re at high risk of contracting entrepreneurship:
Interestingly, this rough age range holds well across various populations. For example, when narrowed in on “high-tech” founders, particularly, there is little change – the mean age ranges from 41.9 to 44.6. In “entrepreneurial hubs” like Silicon Valley, the average declines slightly to 40.8.
Machine Thinking
.well-known/ai-plugin.json OpenAI introduces ChatGPT plugins, which would allow it to search, use the internet, and any interesting combination of new capabilities.
ChatGPT Gets Its “Wolfram Superpowers”! describes what happens when you combine a chatty UI with an information powerhouse.
Or how about using Zapier? You can now automate tasks directly within ChatGPT's interface.
Two interesting things about this announcement:
- It's an open architecture, so other GPTs can also use these plugins
- Other than authentication, the API is open-ended — the plugin developer provides a schema, and GPT figures out how to use it
Smoke screen Hard agree:
To expand on this, the fear that some people may lose their superior status to a machine is the same fear that they may lose it to people they already deem inferior.
Introducing my new organic, all-natural intelligence search engine: Mark.
It's just this guy Mark. He'll do his best to answer your question, and he'll make up a reasonable-sounding answer real quick if he doesn't have one.
How will we scale? We'll hire more guys named Mark as demand ramps up.
Insecurity
Introducing "safe npm" Lees risky npm install:
Socket’s “safe npm” CLI tool transparently wraps the npm command and protects developers from malware, typosquats, install scripts, protestware, telemetry, and more—11 issues in all.
ʝօɦռռʏ Ӽʍǟֆ “Ransomware: a tale in one photograph”
Everything Else
Susan Kaye Quinn “I can't help but respect it.”
Be someone's reason to roll their eyes.
I remember the the last thing Bob said to me, "I know what I'm doing! Do you think I'm an idiot?" Which brings me to the eulogy Bob's family asked me to deliver today.
Avenue 5 nailed this, with a deck filled with attractive, well-dressed actors pretending to work on a bunch of high-tech-looking panels for the sake of the company's image while the actual engineers worked on a bunch of regular computers in a dingy, crowded, messy office.
Me: I bought an elephant for your room.
Them: Thanks!Me: Don’t mention it.
Fly Spaceships, Battle Aliens & Drive ‘Crazy Taxi’ At This Museum I’m not saying my city has better museums than yours but …
Before you close a web page make sure you scroll up to the top, so it’s in the right position for the next person
Negativity drives online news consumption The data:
Consistent with our pre-registration, we find supporting evidence for a negativity bias hypothesis: news headlines containing negative language are significantly more likely to be clicked on, even after adjusting for the corresponding content of the news story. For a headline of average length (~15 words), the presence of a single negative word increased the CTR by 2.3%.”
Now 2.3% might not sound as much, but the more people engage, the more these stories spread — through sharing and algorithmic recommendation — which results in what we’re seeing online having a strong negative bias. And because of availability heuristic, we’re more likely to perceive our world through negative-colored glasses.
everybody thinks survivorship bias jokes are funny but the problem is you only remember the good ones
jd 🔆 “Album cover art”
