Published
Weekend Reading — Everybody so creative
This week a special section all about bicycles, John Wick on npm, LED regret, AI writes our regular expressions, and what high-tech sector protest looks like.
Tech Stuff
Craft is simply more expensive at scale
Companies with a small, talented team and a clear vision can easily produce high-quality products with a focus on craftsmanship, since everyone is motivated to do things well. As teams and companies grow, the cost of maintaining quality and craft increases exponentially, requiring more time and energy to keep things consistent. To keep “moving fast,” it's essential to allocate an equal number of people to focus on the foundational aspects that have brought the company to where it is now.
Make Bookmarklets Easy peasy bookmark generator.
every time a programmer is like "I'll be clever!" someone should stop them
AI-Powered Regex Solver Regular expressions by example: enter text sample, highlight the text you want to match, and it will suggest the regex for you.
I kind of miss when I had to defrag the computer and I could just watch the little animation of how it was all getting less fragmented and pretend that my life was also coming together like that.
Building stuff with Preact + Signals is easier than using hooks.
You get to write as if the UI is being created fresh on any change (the good part of VDOM), but behind-the-scenes your components generally end up only needing to run once. No need for things like memoization or "useCallback".
Plus you get free reactive models: any part of your state can be built independent of the UI tree using the same 3 functions (signal, computed and effect).
Catalin Cimpanu There are still a few things Safari doesn’t support in the space of PWA, but this is a major milestone:
With the release of Safari 16.4 for iOS, the W3C's Push API and the Notification API are now universally supported across all major web browsers. The two APIs were formally adopted in 2016, but their adoption has been slow on Safari and Apple devices, where Apple tended to use its own proprietary technology.
Eye for Design
The age of average Does it feel like everything looks like everything else?
“The coffee roaster Four Barrel in San Francisco looks like the Australian Toby’s Estate in Brooklyn looks like The Coffee Collective in Copenhagen looks like Bear Pond Espresso in Tokyo. You can get a dry cortado with perfect latte art at any of them, then Instagram it on a marble countertop and further spread the aesthetic to your followers.”
Once this interior design style became dominant in the world’s coffee shops, it began to spread throughout the wider hospitality sector.
The Psychology Behind Loom's Explosive Growth Looks at some of the design decisions behind Loom.
I'd like to add:
- Defaults to include the presenter in the video — feels more personal
- Lack of video editing feature — acceptable "in the moment" videos that feel more authentic
- Pick a clear enemy: face-to-face demo meetings
Machine Thinking
Fun fact: every time someone told me "This is going to completely transform the software industry", it didn't.
AI Written, AI Read cartoon The state of the art of AI is a lossless compression algorithm for exchanging redundant information between people. The intelligent part of it all is charging a $20/month subscription from both senders and receivers.
Volker Weber “The last O'REILLY book”
Bicycle for the mind
Bicycle An interactive article explaining the physics of a bicycle: moving, turning, stopping, spokes, frames, the works.
No one talks about it anymore, but for a solid 6 years of my life, BMX was the absolute coolest brand imaginable
Velocipedia - Gimini Artists asks people to sketch a bicycle from memory, and then recreates them as high-fidelity images. There’s something captivating about these imperfect yet real-looking images.
imbadatlife@twitter.com “don't ask me how I found this out, but the new "AI can't do hands" is "AI can't do unicycles" ”
Insecurity
Not to brag, but I am getting really good at copying 6-digit numbers from my phone to text boxes on my computer.
One In Two New Npm Packages Is SEO Spam Right Now “More than half of all new packages that are currently (29 Mar 2023) being submitted to npm are SEO spam. That is - empty packages, with just a single README file that contains links to various malicious websites.”
These are not dangerous dependencies, but spam submissions — the same spam that caused bloggers to turn off the comment section, and something like that could happen to open-source projects.
For example, here’s npm search for John Wick.
Everything Else
Tanara “everybody so creative” is my latest TikTok obsession. Need something like that but for JavaScript frameworks:
See how that looks like we probably wasn’t supposed to do that, but we did
Shoutout to my fellow GenXrs who hit ⌘S every few sentences in google docs
This MidJourney collections is good. The Avengers if it was released in the 90s:
• Tom Cruise as Iron Man
• Brad Pitt as Thor
• Arnold as The Hulk
• Will Smith as Black Panther
My house isn’t messy it’s decentralized.
Apple QuickTake - Wikipedia I’m going to tell the kids these were digital cameras … oh wait there were
There’s Something Off About LED Bulbs
“After the ban on incandescent bulbs, LEDs will be the only kind you can buy. But they’re cold, they distort colors, and they fail in strange ways.“
That was a timely read. Just the day before I had to replace an LED that died prematurely. The quality control is just not there, and that’s true of all the name brands I tried. In California, we can no longer buy halogens, though, seems like incandescent are making a comeback as Edison Bulbs.
The Future is a Dead Mall - Decentraland and the Metaverse Everything about this sounds bad. The basic premise is that the metaverse is inevitable, therefore everybody will be there (for reasons), we might as well monetize it right now and worry about building something useful tomorrow.
This is how you get a low-rent super buggy version of Second Life that tops at a few hundred daily users. But it’s also a statement about web3 and the metaverse.
ancient catbus “what do you mean, i'm cut off???”
