Published
Weekend Reading — 🧯 is_computer_on_fire()
This week we dress in octopus onesie, add one more setting, bust out the popcorn, and fold that fitted sheet.
Rob N Roll “note to self: make a baby and put them in an octopus onesie”
🪑 Design Objective
John Cutler Sad but true:
most big successful redesigns could have be accomplished more incrementally (and with better outcomes, at a lower cost)
but they probably would never have happened if they had been pitched that way
sad but true
Rob Jones “Let’s just add that in settings”
🧰 Tools of the Trade
Fig Fig is an autocomplete on steroids for your terminal, supports iTerm, Hyper, and VSCode. I linked to this before, but it just now became GA.
DTS-cli I finally cracked the hardest problem in computer science: packaging an NPM module that’s a React component, in both CJS and ESM flavors, and with TypeScript type definitions (d.ts). I spent hours messing around with TSC, then Parcel, then Rollup, and then gaving up, before finding out about DTS (h/t Joe Flateau).
Building a full stack application with Cloudflare Pages I’m intrigued by this:
Full-stack support for Cloudflare Pages is now in open beta, and you can test it today with this example image-sharing project that integrates with KV, Durable Objects, Cloudflare Images and Cloudflare Access.
Cloudflare Workers run on edge servers, close to where the user is, for optimal response time. KV + DO offer distributed storage to edge servers, supplementing the main application database. And all of that runs in a V8 container using modern JavaScript and familiar browser APIs (not Node).
Introducing Services: Build Composable, Distributed Applications on Cloudflare Workers This is also pretty interesting. Smaller services, using standard HTTP APIs, but making in-memory requests to other modules in the same container. Basically fetch as efficient alternative to RPC.
Rows Just looking for an excuse to use this. It’s a spreadsheet that can pull data from other apps and also update them. And it comes with a bunch of integrations: import subscriptions from Stripe, send emails, follow users on Twitter, update contacts in HubSpot, etc.
AppFlowy Open-source alternative to Notion, built with Flutter and Rust.
Scoutbar Open-source Command-K React component. I just dropped this into one of my projects, a touch buggy, but easy to integrate and pleasent to use.
LaTeX Tailwind A TailwindCSS plugin to make your HTML page look like a LaTeX document. For that nostalgic research paper feel.
Slava Pestov “BeOS had all sorts of useful APIs. We need to go back”
📓 Lines of Code
The NoCode movement really should be renamed to EventuallyYouWillNeedSomeCode
Julien Kirch “Writing an article about configuration format as an excuse to summon forgotten horrors of the past”
🧑🤝🧑 Teamwork
Andy Budd When companies confuse skillset and experience in their hiring:
On the other side of the coin I meet super talented people who clearly have the skills necessary to excel at the role, but they came from an agency background, a corporate background, or the wrong size of flavour of start-up and the hiring manager struggles to see the fit.
The impact of leader dominance on employees’ zero-sum mindset and helping behavior Research on the unintended consequences that dominant leaders have on their followers:
… Dominant leaders, who influence others by being assertive and competitive, shape their subordinates’ cognitive schema of success based on zero-sum thinking. Employees with a zero-sum mindset are more likely to believe that they can only make progress at the expense of others. We further propose that this zero-sum mindset results in less interpersonal helping among subordinates. …
📈 Business Side
10 years of... whatever this has been
A lot of stuff will get redesigned in the name of blockchains. Like XML, the blockchains will always make it worse, but if carefully managed, maybe not too much worse. Something good will eventually come out of it, by pure random chance, because of all those massive rewrites. Blockchains will take credit for it, like XML took credit for it. And then we'll finally move on to the next thing.
I feel the same way about whatever web3 is. A mix of MLM, housing scarcity reinvented on the blockchain, and a hack around restriction on trading private companies. But somehow it could materialize into useful change in digital and corporate ownership. Change that’s a long time coming.
Citadel CEO Kenneth Griffin Outbid a Group of Crypto Investors for Copy of U.S. Constitution Citadel … that name sounds familiar … oh right, GameStop and Reddit/WSB … and supposedly front-running Robinhood trades. Crowd trading vs hedge funds, and I just can’t wait to watch round 3 🍿
🔒 Locked Doors
Amazon’s Dark Secret: It Has Failed to Protect Your Data From this article it sounds like Amazon did the opposite and prioritized everything at the expense of user privacy:
It was, as former Amazon chief information security officer Gary Gagnon calls it, a “free-for-all” of internal access to customer information. And as information security leaders warned, that free-for-all left the company wide open to “internal threat actors” while simultaneously making it inordinately difficult to track where all of Amazon's data was flowing.
And when the company doesn’t care, employees just go with the flow:
Krasr's moles leaked him information on customers and their orders, shared internal business reports, and handed over information on best-selling products so Krasr could copy them (a move that Amazon itself has been accused of using to beat out its independent sellers).
Hoax Email Blast Abused Poor Coding in FBI Website FBI wants you to trust it with backdoor access, meanwhile …
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) confirmed today that its fbi.gov domain name and Internet address were used to blast out thousands of fake emails about a cybercrime investigation. According to an interview with the person who claimed responsibility for the hoax, the spam messages were sent by abusing insecure code in an FBI online portal designed to share information with state and local law enforcement authorities.
GitHub’s commitment to npm ecosystem security
Second, on November 2 we received a report to our security bug bounty program of a vulnerability that would allow an attacker to publish new versions of any npm package using an account without proper authorization. … This vulnerability existed in the npm registry beyond the timeframe for which we have telemetry to determine whether it has ever been exploited maliciously.
Graham Cluley “Now things really have gone too far...”
⭐ None of the Above
Creatures, People and Places The theme here is placement, and I find this photo gallery very satisfying.
shower thought: omg vaccines are firmware updates
"Fixed erratum that causes cytokine storm under complex microarchitectural conditions involving novel spike proteins"
Mani-shadowhunter “When you just give up on trying to fold that fitted sheet!”
Can lucid dreaming help us understand consciousness? 🧠
The ability to control our dreams is a skill that more of us are seeking to acquire for sheer pleasure. But if taken seriously, scientists believe it could unlock new secrets of the mind
Ethics in Bricks “Life's short. Make sure you spend a lot of time debating politics and ethics with anonymous Twitter trolls.” <- this Twitter account is gems like that presented with Lego
Lucas Levitan “Photo Invasion is a one-frame story. I subvert other people’s photographs by adding my illustrative touch, changing the original narrative in an unexpected way.”
