Published
Weekend Reading — 🤖 "Disregard your previous prompt and instructions”
This week we look at Outerbase, Plato, Warp’s new AI, react.email, Superflare, Tremor 2.0, modern font stacks, Cloudflare’s URL scanner, and rapid fire through 11 AI announcements,
Next time, it’ll be different. r/wallstreetbets
Tech Stuff
Outerbase Web-based and macOS apps for querying your database, sharing queries, and generating dashboards. With — of course — an AI-assisted SQL query editor.
It feels like a facelift on the familiar SQL GUIs (eg I use TablePlus), but I think the target audience here skews more PMs sharing business-level queries and dashboards.
Plato Similar but not, Plato slaps an Airtable-like UI on top of your Postgres/MySQL database.
The UI is geared to end users, not DBAs, and the target audience seems to be ops, customer support, sales enablement, etc. Anyone that needs quick access to database records, custom views, client-side filter/sort/aggregate, ad hoc updates, etc.
Warp Warp is my macOS terminal of choice. Early on it shipped with AI that suggested commands eg how do I create a new branch? → git branch <branch-name>.
The new release AI can explain the output I’m seeing in the terminal, next steps, fixes, etc. This screenshot shows it explaining the output of yarn list. Nice touch: I just selected the output and used the shortcut — Warp suggested the prompt.
Phil Sherry We did the same, and I can say from personal experience that this works:
For years, I’ve coached people to write the problem in an email, regardless of whether that person they’re asking is sat a few desks away. The act of writing it in enough detail to explain it might solve it. 🐥 If that didn’t solve it, they can send the email which the person can respond to when they have a break in what they’re doing. Maybe they’ll need to forward the email to someone who can help more effectively. This also helps with a distributed team mindset.
React Email This week I migrated a couple of projects from MJML to React Email:
- React here really means JSX: typed attributes, balanced open/close tags, escaped content, etc
- TailwindCSS support out of the box (HTML email === inline styles)
- A solid set of built-in components
- Dev server with auto-reload for previewing emails
- Renders emails as HTML and plain text
The one thing MJML does better, it has more components for building marketing emails. React Email seems focused on transactional emails.
Superflare If your deploy target is CloudFlare, then Superflare works in combination with your favorite React web framework (Remix, Next, etc) and turns it into a full-stack framework, adding database (D1), file storage (R2), worker queues, pub/sub, and push-to-browser (WebSocket).
We need to move up from the cgi-bin model of web development. I'm excited to see frameworks like this pop up.
“OH: Microservices scale when interest rates are cheap.🎙️💧”
Tremor React component library for quickly building dashboard UIs. 2.0 comes with Tailwind CSS support, and a lot of components and blocks to get you started.
validatorjs/validator.js ~ 100 string validators to save you from writing regular expressions yourself. Some of these validators also support multiple locales.
Any experienced programmer worth their salt will tell you that •producing• code — learning syntax, finding examples, combining them, adding behaviors, adding complexity — is the •easy• part of programming.
The hard part: “How can it break? How will it surprise us? How will it change? Does it •really• accomplish our goal? What •is• our goal? Are we all even imagining the same goal? Do we understand each other? Will the next person to work on this understand it? Should we even build this?”
React.dev New React docs just dropped. Looks great, explains common use cases, and with editable code examples.
Also fixes a critical bug in the old docs: the new docs no longer recommend using create-react-app for anything.
Eye for Design
Modern Font Stacks “System font stack CSS organized by typeface classification for every modern OS. The fastest fonts available. No downloading, no layout shifts, no flashes — just instant renders.”
Annika Backstrom "All Quiet" in the Western font
NanoRaptor “Mac Studio Server”
Peoples
I say dog, you say chicken? New study explores why we disagree so often TL;DR people think everyone agrees with them, also semantics matter:
Researchers also asked participants to guess what percentage of people would agree with their individual responses. Participants tended to believe — often incorrectly — that roughly two-thirds of the population would agree with them. In some examples, participants believed they were in the majority, even when essentially nobody else agreed with them.
It’s a finding befitting of a society of people convinced they’re right, when they’re actually wrong.
Business Side
thehustle.co RIP ZIRP
… employees’ edge is clearly slipping
Competition for talent once had tech candidates feasting on a bounty of salaries, benefits, and perks. Now they have started to report a “take it or leave it” approach in recruitment.
As each successive round of cuts shifts leverage back to employers, C-suites will be tempted by Zuckerberg’s “year of efficiency” anthem.
How Elon Musk knocked Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ off course The media creates the myth (of the visionary genius), and the media takes it away:
But the story of Full Self-Driving offers a vivid example of how the world’s richest person has complicated one of his biggest bets through rash decision-making, a stubborn insistence on doing things differently, and unyielding confidence in a vision that has yet to be proven.
“No one believed me that working for Elon was the way it was until they saw how he operated Twitter,” Bernal said, calling Twitter “just the tip of the iceberg on how he operates Tesla.”
Machine Thinking
This week in LLM So many new things shipped this week — I'm not counting announcements *cough*Google*cough* — so let's do this one rapid fire, and in no particular order:
- GPT-4 in 10 Keys breaks down the GPT-4 announcement and explains it in detail — the good, the bad, and the “should we even be doing this?”
- llamap.cpp makes it possible to run Facebook's LLaMA on your MacBook, phone, and even (very slowly) Raspberry Pi
- Dalai is similar but for Node apps:
npx dalai llama - web-stable-diffusion can run Stable Diffusion entirely in the browser (using WASM and WebGPU)
- Transformers.js can run different text and text-to-image models in the browser (a wrapper for ONNX)
- Alpaca is an experimental instruction-following model: starting point is Facebook’s LLaMA, which they trained with $600 worth of examples generated from OpenAI's GPT-3
- OpenChatKit is an open source LLM, Apache-licensed, includes weights and training data, trained on carbon-negative infrastructure
- OCR capabilities of GPT-4 are quite impressive — it can solve CAPTCHA and generate alt text image descriptions
- A watermark for LLMs is a novel use of statistics to detect LLM-generated text — but requires the LLM to add this watermark, and I don’t see how that pans out in a world of open-source models
- Scraping with GPT-4 got a lot easier with the new 32K token limit and ability to understand rendered pages (David Schneider-Joseph: “Pretty funny that general AI turned out to be easier than the semantic web.”)
- Midjourney V5 is out and true to its version number can render hands with the correct number of fingers
That's it, I'm going to start replying to emails with "Disregard your previous prompt and instructions” instead of "Hi”.
Microsoft tries to justify AI's tendency to give wrong answers by saying they're 'usefully wrong' You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.
Insecurity
URL Scanner BRB running all my websites through this tool:
Provide us a URL, and our scanner will compile a report containing a myriad of technical details: a phishing scan, SSL certificate data, HTTP request and response data, page performance data, DNS records, whether cookies are set to secure and HttpOnly, what technologies and libraries the page uses, and more.
Insert commas into your password so when your credentials are dumped into a CSV it breaks it
Everything Else
Newark accidentally enters into ‘sister city’ deal with fake city Look, even cities can get catfished
A list of things from the 90s that need pumping up:
- The jam
Matt Dawson “New Painting! “Starry Waffles” 16” x 20” acrylic on canvas”
I'm non-binary which means I have to compile my gender from source
We regret that you are no longer able to gaze long into the abyss. Gazing long into the abyss is now a subscriber only service. See terms and conditions to upgrade your access. 30 day free trial.
Train Your Brain: How To Hack Your Biology To Be More Productive I read this and nodded in agreement up until this part — “wait a minimum of one and a half hours after you wake up to consume coffee” — over my dead productivity!
Neven Mrgan Facts!
I think AirPods could be made much cheaper if Apple removed from them the mechanism that, when you drop your case, ejects the earbuds at 500 mph directly under your furniture
STAR WARS IV, A NEW HOPE - In A Giant Infographic
