Published
Weekend Reading — 🤯 Can't wait to explain this week to my therapist
This week we watch the GameStop Show, dig into the history of lower case letters, drop into Clubhouse, and dig some Cookie Monster rocks.
Ygrene™ I feel attacked
🧰 Tools of the Trade
next-translate Next.js plugin and i18n API. Tiny library (~1kb, no dependencies) loaded with features.
deep-email-validator One library that handles all the email validation strategies: regex, common typos, disposable email blacklists, MX record lookup, and SMTP to check the inbox exists.
Jordan Singer “Flat image → interactive layers ✨ A Figma plugin to convert a flat image into text and shape layers on the canvas.”
Cypress vs Selenium vs Playwright vs Puppeteer speed comparison Microbenchmark for five of the leading E2E testing frameworks.
Mock Service Worker Seamless API mocking library for browser and Node.
leahneukirchen/nq These small utilities allow creating very lightweight job queue systems which require no setup, maintenance, supervision, or any long-running processes.
Alvaro Videla “What’s the reason old programming languages where often typed in CAPSLOCK ?”
Funny story. In the beginning we programmed computers using punchcards. You wrote the program on a piece of paper, and someone would punch that into a card. Handwritten uppercase (print) is easier to read.
When computers had limited memory, we used them for data processing. Only in the 70's did we start using computers for word processing and publishing, where you do need lower and upper case.
And it didn’t come cheap. Check out this ad from 1976, you can add lower-card letters to your terminal for $100. That’s about $450 in today dollars!
I want to know who made C:\Program Files\ with a space in it so I can hold them accountable.
🕸️ Web-end
Minko Gechev “You can set your cursor to an emoji using an inline SVG in CSS”
📓 Lines of Code
David Copeland 👇 From a thread about sustainable development with Rails. I mostly write about JavaScript, though, so here’s the choice quote:
In the world of JS, your biggest enemy is instability and churn, thus picking highly popular, highly supported, broadly used libraries is even more of a factor than usual. "Best tool for the job" HAS GOT to account for the ecosystem. 23/59
Maximizing Developer Effectiveness It’s all about tight feedback loops.
Really great write-up on "That XOR Trick":
https://florian.github.io//xor-trick/
I'm convinced a lot of these stupid interview questions that ask things like this are mostly just filtering for people who went to the same university where you're introduced to things like this.
🧑🤝🧑 Teamwork
Latesha Byrd ⭐️
Normalize supporting your employees' career goals even it expands beyond working for you, your team or your company.
Marco Rogers Yeah, what's up with that?
Did y'all know that a lot of white people don't have the cultural concept of "real talk"? You know where you stop saying the diplomatic thing and tell people what's really going on. They just don't have it. You try to have a moment of "real talk" and they freak the fuck out.
Assaf So I wrote this thread about something that’s bothering me in certain corners of technical discourse. “No“ should be an acceptable answer, but instead we get pushed into faux technical objections, and maybe we can stop doing that?
I’ve been to technical commitees, where people would just fling technical maxims at each other all day long, and then break for coffee.
And I’ve seen developers learning to internalize this as what a technical discussion should look like. Maybe let’s do this instead:
If users ask for something, look into that
- Raise doubts, but don’t go overboard with technical maxims
- Don’t stop at blank statements, show with code that “this adds too much complexity” or ”that won’t scale”
- Accept “we’re not doing that“ as an answer
🚫 no hello I love this website. Who’s building a bot that auto-responds to dangling “hi” with a link to this page?
📈 Business Side
Reddit 😂
can't wait to explain this week to my therapist
The GameStop Game Never Stops. Everybody is talking about GameStop, so maybe I won’t. Just kidding. I totally enjoyed this episode of Reddit vs WallStreet, the reality TV distraction we all needed after secessionists tried to storm the US Capitol. But also worried about the potential to financial market meltdown due to the unintended consequences.
Story so far, WSB is a Reddit forum where people congregate to discuss their trading strategy. DeepFuckingValue is a long term investor in GameStock, and bet on their success (< $1M). Citadel is a hedge fund that took a bigger and opposite bet that GameStop will go the way of Blockbuster ($20B).
It turned into a meme (meme + stock = stonk) a bunch of people decided to pile on and bet on GameStock, driving the stock up, and putting a squeeze on Citadel. They poured money to make money, with a side dish of seeing a hedge fund go bust. Occupy WallStreet Online Edition.
As the stock started getting hot, bigger investors joined in and bought the majority of shares on the way up. It got hot enough that Robinhood (and other brokerage) stopped retail investors from buying more shares. Side note, Robinhood doesn’t make money from its users, but from hedge funds, Citadel is one of their biggest customers.
If you’re curious what shorting even is, BUST Magazine explains it in clear terms:
Here's the story of hedge funds, told in a dress: Let's say you bought a dress at Target for $30. I say to you hey, can I borrow that dress for a few weeks? I'll give you $5, and I'll also give you the dress back. 1/4
Sure this is gambling. Reddit bet on GameStop, and Citadel bet against it, and right now Citadel has the losing hand. And while retail investors bought 30% of the stock, large investors bought the other 70%. In the end, the house always wins.
Nobody in Wall Street is shocked about the gambling, but that “the wrong people” — who don’t own Bloomberg terminals, and don’t work in Lower Manhattan — are moving the market.
By design, the stock market gives limited access to a few insiders — market makers, activist investors, hedge funds, HFTs — to capture most of the gains. They have a good story about fundamental investing — revenues, P/E ratio, dividends — that they tell retail investors, so they don’t complain when they make scrap returns in their 401K. That is about to change.
Avalon Penrose “a normal person explains what’s happening on the stock market:”
The day Volkswagen briefly conquered the world Paywalled, but a reminder that back in 2008, a short squeeze made VW the most valuable company in the world. Porsche made more money that year from its ownership stake in VW than from selling cars. Also, we had a financial crisis in 2008 …
🔒 Locked Doors
Apple warns of “remote attacker” security threat on iPhone and iPad, releases iOS 14.4 update You really want to have this iOS update.
Google researcher discovers new iOS security system With iMessage becoming an operating system in its own right — you can install and run apps — make sense that it has a dedicated sandbox:
After probing around in the iOS 14 inner workings for a week, Groß said he believes that Apple finally listened to the security research community and improved iMessage's handling of incoming content by adding the BlastDoor sandbox to iMessage's source code.
BleepingComputer “DarkSide ransomware updates their "policies". Interesting new exclusion.”
can't get phished if you never answer any messages
🏛 Politechs
Coinbase spent $230k to lobby Congress in 2020, records show Remember when Coinbase instituted a “no politics” rule?
⭐ None of the Above
bigsurkate 30 minutes into the disaster flick:
As of 7 am, photo by Heath Johnston, Rat Creek, MM 30”
We are closing early today. A lot went wrong like way faster than usual
maytreeofficial Windows sound effect Acapella
A homeless guy asked me for money today. I looked in my pocket and all I had was a $20 bill. "Do I really want this money going towards drugs"?, I thought to myself. "Nah"! So I gave him the $20.
jordan_the_stallion8 I don’t know what to call this genre of comedy — I love it. Check his other videos as well.
Clubhouse: Drop-in audio chat I’m starting to get a feel for Clubhouse. Clubhouse is to podcasts what Twitter is to blogs. It has the immediacy (and FOMO) of “you’re listening or it didn’t happen”. A disorganized chaos that works extremely well. While Clubhouse lacks the production value of podcasts (scripts, editing, quality mics), the content is so much better. RIP podcasts. 🪦
I got five invites to give, share this post if you want one.
The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class This theory breaks society into three separate social ladders. And I’m thinking how many people only see (or acknowledge) the ladder they're on, and judge everyone based on that ladder. A lot of social interactions make sense.
alex Life motto: "run the dishwasher twice”
My partner sent me this post and it really really helped me reframe how I think about how I live my life as a person with chronic/mental illness There are no rules. Run the dishwasher twice.
In Philadelphia, A Scandal Erupts Over Vaccination Startup Led By 22-Year-Old Cool. Cool. I mean, the guy has no healthcare background, but he can mansplain how healthcare should work, which is obviously better than relevant experience. What could possibly go wrong?
Doroshin made it clear that he wasn't that concerned about standard clinical protocols.
…
"Stop using best practices," Doroshin said during a recent interview with HealthDay.
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Then she saw Doroshin grab a handful of vaccines and stuff them in his bag, along with the corresponding CDC vaccination record cards.
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The city cut ties with Philly Fighting Covid on Jan. 25, citing the company's abandonment of its testing work and the company's new privacy policy, which would have allowed it to sell patient data.
Alex Adelman “The Onion never misses.”
Telegram can now import your WhatsApp chat history FYI
Dr. Jacqueline Antonovich “My kind of news day: Geologist Finds Rare Formation Inside Rock That Looks Exactly Like Cookie Monster on Sesame Street"
