Published
Weekend Reading — 🐈 I'm not a cat
This week we flip the script on dns, meet to discuss productivity, smell the antitrust storm, and slice with tomatoes.
Me too YouTube, me too
So I woke up on Wedensday like every other day, made a fresh pot of coffee, sat in front of the computer, opened the calendar, discovered it’s actually Thursday … I feel cheated out of a day. I got a lot done this week, just didn’t notice the passage of time.
How was your week?
🪑 Design Objective
Same Energy Love the domain name: same.energy. It’s a visual search engine, and when you pick an image, it shows you other images like it. Great source for inspiration.
Julie Zhuo 👇 Thread:
Great designers are strong at "product thinking." This is a key aspect of many design interviews, as well as many PM or VC ones.
But what exactly is product thinking? And how does one get good at it?
Pinot W. Ichwandardi “Pixel art and the hardcopy.”
🧰 Tools of the Trade
Zero configuration message queue Super easy way to add job queues to any web app. Make HTTP requests through the zeplo.to/ URL and the service will queue your requests, retry them, and if you want to, can also delay and schedule requests. Use the dashboard to trace jobs and setup email alerts. 10x easier to use than AWS SQS.
Sentry I love this little detail from Sentry (error tracking and monitoring):
I'm a long-time Rollbar user, and recently started on a project that uses Sentry. So now I'm A/B testing Rollbar and Sentry on the same project, and so far I'm leaning towards keeping Sentry. Better email alerts, and overall find it more pleasent to use.
Conceptboard Online collaborative whiteboard.
Penpot Design and prototyping app. Web app, uses SVG, open source. Also, if you want to read a lot of Clojure code.
oh my god “sup” upside down is “dns”
(Stop us if you've heard this one...)
Nick: I've been trying Tailwind on my blog.
Jerod: I didn't know you had a blog.
Nick: Because I don't post to it. I just change the technology that runs it.
📓 Lines of Code
Beth It took me years to notice how much business logic lives outside the function body:
If you have 100% test coverage and your tests use mocks, no you don’t.
Business logic loves to hide in the quiet spaces between the classes, in the function tables, amongst the matchers. It wants us to miss it, to break at the most inopportune time, but we can outfox it by clearly stating our intentions for the system’s behaviour.
ARCHITECTURE.md Helping contributors by laying out the project’s physical architecture:
One of the lessons I’ve learned is that the biggest difference between an occasional contributor and a core developer lies in the knowledge about the physical architecture of the project. Roughly, it takes 2x more time to write a patch if you are unfamiliar with the project, but it takes 10x more time to figure out where you should change the code.
Dynamic Static Typing In TypeScript TypeScript type definitions are their own mini language with conditionals, recursion, template literals:
type ParseRouteParams<Rte> = Rte extends `${string}/:${infer P}/${infer Rest}`
? P | ParseRouteParams<`/${Rest}`>
: Rte extends `${string}/:${infer P}`
? P
: never;
🧑🤝🧑 Teamwork
How Levels Does Meetings When you need to convince your manager that fewer meetings result in better work:
We keep meetings of all kinds to a minimum, both inside and outside of the company. Recurring status meetings were the first to go when we set out to build this culture, and we've set a very high bar for scheduling ad-hoc meetings.
We've been surprised at how effective work can still be without those meetings, and we hope you find the benefits of working with us in this way, too.
Why Aren't You Coding? “Meeting.”
📈 Business Side
Lucas Shaw Building a market vs expanding into a market:
It took Netflix 9 years to reach 95 million customers. It took Disney 14 months.
Highlighting Notable Funding To Black Founders In 2020 Last year was hard for many industries. For the tech industry, though, it was a banner year of disruption and transformation, in all things except …
Last year, U.S. companies raised record amounts of venture capital, at just under $150 billion. But of that capital, only $1 billion went to Black or African-American startup founders, which comes out to less than 1 percent of total funding, per Crunchbase data.
🔒 Locked Doors
Lumi “sorry there was a data breach on localhost:8080”
If any person behaved like an app—rifled through your address book, fitted a tracking device to your car, obsessively logged what books and TV shows you watched, and wanted to disturb you at any moment of the day or night—you’d throw them out of your house and call the police.
Dependency Confusion: How I Hacked Into Apple, Microsoft and Dozens of Other Companies The npm attack vector (h/t Damien Joyce):
This type of vulnerability, which I have started calling dependency confusion, was detected inside more than 35 organizations to date, across all three tested programming languages. The vast majority of the affected companies fall into the 1000+ employees category, which most likely reflects the higher prevalence of internal library usage within larger organizations.
Image "Cloaking" for Personal Privacy It’s called Fawkes, of course!
Fawkes takes your personal images and makes tiny, pixel-level changes that are invisible to the human eye, in a process we call image cloaking. You can then use these "cloaked" photos as you normally would, sharing them on social media, sending them to friends, printing them or displaying them on digital devices, the same way you would any other photo. The difference, however, is that if and when someone tries to use these photos to build a facial recognition model, "cloaked" images will teach the model an highly distorted version of what makes you look like you.
A Hacker Tried to Poison a Florida City’s Water Supply I’m going to guess they were all comfortably sharing the same TeamViewer account:
Initially, he wasn't concerned; the plant used the remote-access software TeamViewer to allow staff to share screens and troubleshoot IT issues, and his boss often connected to his computer to monitor the facility's systems.
…
But a few hours later, police say, the plant operator noticed his mouse moving out of his control again. This time there would be no illusion of benign monitoring from a supervisor or IT person. The cursor began clicking through the water treatment plant's controls.
alkali “IoT device browser doesn't let you enter file:///? Use view-source:file:///. It works 80% of the time, every time”
🏛 Politechs
iOS 14.5 lets you set Spotify and others as Siri’s default music service You know how the air gets this distinct smell just before a storm comes through? Well … this is the scent of an antitrust storm.
😷 Mask Up
Mount Sinai Study Finds Wearable Devices Can Detect COVID-19 Symptoms and Predict Diagnosis The study used Apple Watch, but basically any wearable that can measure HRV will help with early detection:
The Warrior Watch Study found that subtle changes in a participant’s heart rate variability (HRV) measured by an Apple Watch were able to signal the onset of COVID-19 up to seven days before the individual was diagnosed with the infection via nasal swab, and also to identify those who have symptoms.
⭐ None of the Above
Ethics in Bricks “Happiness in times of COVID-19: Finding that one clean shot for your ZOOM call.”
Chicago: proud to be the pizza capital of the world. #nationalpizzaday
New Jersey: ur pizza is a casserole
TimHerrera 😆 Where is the lie?
the heaviest substance known to humans is the psychic weight of all the emails you haven't responded to
Joe Lycett “So glad they’ve introduced these new ‘slicing tomatoes’ so I can finally stop having to pull tomatoes apart with my fists”
Patrick Debois Dopamine hacking:
What is the name of the phenomenon that we avoid doing harder items on the backlog in favor of smaller/easier ones ?
How Reddit put together that five-second Super Bowl commercial in less than a week The brilliance of the 5-second ad is that if you blinked, you missed it, but then everyone will make sure you know about it. Which I guess is what I’m doing right now. That's viral marketing.
Interesting piece of trivia: the shortest Super Bowl ad was half a second long!
Is This Beverly Hills Cop Playing Sublime’s ‘Santeria’ to Avoid Being Live-Streamed? Bonkers:
Instagram in particular has been increasingly strict on posting copyrighted material. Any video that contains music, even if it’s playing in the background, is potentially subject to removal by Instagram.
Most people complain about these rules. Beverly Hills law enforcement, however, seems to be a fan.
Omar Wasow “New study finds ”places with Black Lives Matter protests experience a 15% to 20% decrease in police homicides over the ensuing five years.” Further, the effect ”is most prominent when protests are large or frequent.” https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3767097”
Massachusetts regulators subpoena GameStop bull ‘Roaring Kitty’ Roaring Kitty (aka DeepFuckingValue) started investing in GameStop back in 2019. He researched and made a good for why GameStop was undervalued. Then during the GameStop Mania of 2021, few notable figures showed up to fan the flames: Chamath, Musk, Portnoy. Guess who regulators are going after?
Massachusetts securities regulators have issued a subpoena seeking the testimony of a YouTube streamer who helped drive a surge of interest in GameStop as part of a review of his registration, including his “outside business activities,” an official said Wednesday.
Judge Roy Ferguson “IMPORTANT ZOOM TIP: If a child used your computer, before you join a virtual hearing check the Zoom Video Options to be sure filters are off. This kitten just made a formal announcement on a case in the 394th (sound on). https://youtu.be/KxlPGPupdd8”
"I'm not a cat" is exactly what a kitten lawyer would say
Oracle’s TikTok acquisition reportedly “shelved” indefinitely Remember back in September TikTok had to sell itself to a US company or else? So, else.
Barry Lewis “Life hack: got a white cat? Put an orange on it to look like a big egg 🍳”
