Published
Weekend Reading — Keep The Space Shuttle Flying
41 Strange "Joseph Ducreux (1735 –1802) was a French painter who is known primarily for his unorthodox self-portraits"
Design Objective
How the Great Recession influenced a decade of design The relationship between the economy and how things look:
Consumers’ growing interest in used fashion — which means more people are wearing clothing from different seasons and eras, all at the same time — supports the idea of the Big Flat Now. Similarly, Instagram is filled with fan accounts dedicated to the pop culture and style of basically every decade, including the ’00s; follow a bunch of them and suddenly time is a flat circle.
Tools of the Trade
Welcome to 2019, traveler from 2009. The brief:
- sysadmins are now "ops"
- servers are all just "cloud" something
- algorithms are "AI"
- DBs are "blockchains"
- Everything that spies on people is "smart"
Good luck. And update your CV with the above words.
Carlos Pizano Uribe "I was bitching about time in operating systems when I came across this 1857 time table.."
kim 😮
It's 2019.
We're now exactly halfway between y2k and the 32-bit Unix time overflow.
Lines of Code
pv_controller.go This comment is everything!
// ==================================================================
// PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT TO SIMPLIFY THIS CODE.
// KEEP THE SPACE SHUTTLE FLYING.
// ==================================================================
//
// This controller is intentionally written in a very verbose style. You will
// notice:
//
// 1. Every 'if' statement has a matching 'else' (exception: simple error
// checks for a client API call)
// 2. Things that may seem obvious are commented explicitly
//
// We call this style 'space shuttle style'. Space shuttle style is meant to
// ensure that every branch and condition is considered and accounted for -
// the same way code is written at NASA for applications like the space
// shuttle.
//
// . . .
Pulp Librarian A look at the first high level programming language:
By 1958 FORTRAN II had been released and other computer manufacturers were offering FORTRAN compatibility. It was the start of the separation of software from hardware, as programming became a platform-independent skill. But the big leap took place eight years later.
Devoops
lucien fregosi "True story... 💸💸💸"
Peopleware
New Office Hours Aim for Well Rested, More Productive Workers What if business hours adapted to our sleep/wake cycles?
For many office workers, the answer may be as simple as delaying work start times an hour or two — say until 9:30 or 10 a.m. Since many people are in the middle of the chronotype continuum and wake naturally around 8 or 9 a.m., such a modest shift could provide widespread relief. “We’re talking about one hour,” Ms. Kring said, “not a revolution.”
Engineering Management: The Pendulum Or The Ladder This:
Hopefully you have already gathered that management is a career change, not a promotion, and you’re aware that nobody is very good at it when they first start.
That’s okay! It takes a solid year or two to find new rhythms and reward mechanisms before you can even begin to find your own voice or trust your judgment. Management problems look easy, deceptively so. It’s really hard to generalize here, but reasons this is hard include:
Locked Doors
uncaptcha2 Using Google tech to defeat Google tech, this project defeats Google's ReCaptcha by asking for the audio challenge, and then using Google's Speech2Text API to submit the answer. 🤦♂️
Dan Kaminsky Meme thread:
I’m a hacker in a movie
My code works the first time even when somebody’s watching
Somebody is watching
There’s a progress meter and it isn’t even a lie
zero-factor authentication: something you forgot and something you lost. #0fa
None of the Above
Samantha Melamed "This is the most aspirational parking garage I have ever seen"
instagram is now QVC for millennials
Read This Article!!! Language is ever evolving:
At journalism school, I was told that you get one exclamation point to use in your entire career, so you should use it wisely. You could, perhaps, spend your one exclamation point on a headline like “WAR OVER!” but nothing less would merit one.
...
After we spoke, McCulloch ran a Twitter poll asking: “If I wanted to convey genuine enthusiasm to you, how many exclamation marks would I need?” After nearly 800 votes, the winner was three.
@algo_anthill Language is ever evolving, part II:
When you start looking at a post about some foreign language's oddly specific word for something that you never thought there would be a specific word for, remember that English has a specific word for tricking people into listening to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up".
English also has a single word for "manipulation of electoral boundaries to reduce the influence of opposing political groups in future elections".
If you pay me $50 I'll show up to your funeral but stand really far away, holding a black umbrella regardless of the weather, so that people think you died with a dark and interesting secret.
How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation Eventually something will have to give:
We’ve “killed” diamonds because we’re getting married later (or not at all), and if or when we do, it’s rare for one partner to have the financial stability to set aside the traditional two months’ salary for a diamond engagement ring. We’re killing antiques, opting instead for “fast furniture” — not because we hate our grandparents’ old items, but because we’re chasing stable employment across the country, and lugging old furniture and fragile china costs money that we don’t have.
...
But individual action isn’t enough. Personal choices alone won’t keep the planet from dying, or get Facebook to quit violating our privacy. To do that, you need paradigm-shifting change. Which helps explain why so many millennials increasingly identify with democratic socialism and are embracing unions: We are beginning to understand what ails us, and it’s not something an oxygen facial or a treadmill desk can fix.
How a Phone Glitch Sparked a Teenage Riot Interesting story about teenagers and pre-internet hotlines.
83 Things That Blew Our Minds in 2018 “Himalayan” pink salt comes from Pakistan, Hippos poop kills fish, your eardrums move when you look around, and other useless but entertaining trivia.
23andMe's Pharma Deals Have Been the Plan All Along Turns out, even when you pay for the product, you may still be the product.
Scott Davidoff "Medieval browser tabs — how scholars jumped between multiple texts #desktopmetaphor #notametaphor at Mexico’s first public library"
