Weekend Reading — Eye of Sauron

Evan Kirstel "Genius! #makers #maker #WednesdayVibes"

Design Objective

Keith Stoeckeler “We know our users/customers"

Ben Thompson Born in a different generation, I still Ctrl+S even when I don't need to:

My daughter deleted an entire report because, after only using Google Docs previously, she had to use Word. She was completely befuddled by the idea of "save", especially because she didn't have a pre-existing folder for her class in the dialog. Finally she just quit the app 😬

iPhones are Allergic to Helium TIL if it gives you a funny voice, it may render your electronics useless. Keep your phone away from MRI machines!

That’s when he posted the issue to Reddit, where other sysadmins speculated that it might be caused by the liquid helium used to cool the MRI machine. So he investigated, and found there was a helium leak at the same time that vented into the building.

Eoghan McCabe Relevant because, did you know MRI machines are just huge magnets?

Apple consistently set the bar for simple yet engaging marketing copy. This is light and easy to read. Yet informative and fun. It makes you want to read more. This part made me smile.

Tools of the Trade

Fifty Years of BASIC, the Programming Language That Made Computers Personal Fascinating look at the history of the BASIC language, born in a liberal arts college, to make computers more accessible. A feature of every 70's home computer that was lost to time.

IBM to acquire Red Hat in deal valued at $34 billion What a crazy year for open source:

Open source has been the biggest theme in technology this year. Prior to IBM's purchase of Red Hat, two of the biggest tech deals of the year were Microsoft's $7.5 billion purchase of GitHub, a code-sharing service, and Salesforce's $6.5 billion acquisition of MuleSoft, whose technology stitches together disparate software applications, data and devices. Earlier this month, big-data rivals Cloudera and Hortonworks agreed to merge in a $5.2 billion deal.

I Am Devloper Ghost Of Projects Past:

For Halloween I'm dressing up as all your abandoned side projects and domain renewal emails.

muesli Where is the lie?

In other words: XML combines the efficiency of text files with the readability of binary files...

Alex Novemberg "1 new message"

Devoops

Lorin Hochstein ETOOREAL:

Software engineer (quoting Fred Brooks): The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination.

SRE: Your service fell over after it ran out of file descriptors.

Peopleware

JBD Thread on job interviews and how to present:

Just because you didn't pass via the interview process, it doesn't necessarily mean that you are not eligible to work at that place. It means the signals are not produced. It might be you, might be the system, might be the interviewers.

Electric Dreams

Google Webmasters I guess Waymo has collected all the data it needs to identify street signs and store fronts (citation):

Today, we are excited to announce the launch of reCAPTCHA v3. Your users no longer need to solve any challenges. You’ll get more visibility to the abusive traffic on your site and more flexibility on what actions to take. Watch this video to learn more →

Reinforcement Learning with Prediction-Based Rewards Neural network learns how to solve Super Mario by avoiding boredom:

RND incentivizes visiting unfamiliar states by measuring how hard it is to predict the output of a fixed random neural network on visited states. In unfamiliar states it’s hard to guess the output, and hence the reward is high. It can be applied to any reinforcement learning algorithm, is simple to implement and efficient to scale. Below we release a reference implementation of RND that can reproduce the results from our paper.

Locked Doors

App Scams: Sneaky 'Utility' Apps Are Stealing $260, $2500, or even $4700 Each Year ... Per User This is another fascinating use case of how flaws in user experience (aka edge cases) will be exploited:

“Users open the app and quickly tap a “Start” button or “Continue” button on the first page,” she told me via email. “Unfortunately this loads the Apple payment prompt instead of starting the free app as most users would expect. Users then panic and press the home screen to exit the app – unfortunately on fingerprint devices this makes payment or signs up for the free trial.”

Lukasz Olejnik And at the other hand, we got UX of privacy:

Closing (modern, with T2 chip) MacBook lids causes a physical disconnect of miceophone. Protects from eavesdropping even if the system is hacked/infected. https://www.apple.com/mac/docs/Apple_T2_Security_Chip_Overview.pdf …

None of the Above

Worker at Utah DMV wears best #Halloween costume ever for DMV worker

Max Fagin TIL

November is here, and that means a massive shift is coming. And by "massive" I am of course referring to the redefinition of the kilogram unit of mass that the world has been building up to for more than 100 years. Let me explain:

Fluff Society "Spooky level is rising <- This stuff is why the internet was invented."

Amy Renee "Most accurate time change graphic out there… ⏰😂"

Audrey "The Salesforce tower has turned into the Eye of Sauron for Halloween and I swear it’s staring at me."

Apple’s New Map Fascinating. "Has Apple closed the gap with Google’s map?"

Words matter, and they’re destabilizing the American tribe Bold. We deserve more tech leadership like this:

That’s why we at Twilio banned not just hate speech, but any organization whose primary purpose is spreading hate. It’s in our control to decide who uses our product, and from whom we take money. We choose not to profit from this hatred, or those who spread it.

Nature is Amazing "Look at the happiness on the dog's face after his big jump 😂😂"