Published
Weekend Reading — 🚀 Rapid unscheduled disassembly
This week we prettify TS errors, go offline, celebrate 30 years of web browser, talk about trusts, experiment with 10 different GPTs, and travel up a space elevator.
Parrots learn to make video calls to chat with other parrots, then develop friendships Birds just quick jumping on a zoom call.
Tech Stuff
Pretty TypeScript Errors This looks super useful: a VS Code extension to help make sense of all those cryptic TypeScript errors.
The worst thing that ever happened in software engineering was when Kirk asked Scotty how long something would take and Scotty said thirty minutes and Kirk said you’ve got five and Scotty got it done in five and impressionable children watched this and grew up to become managers.
Offline Is Just Online With Extreme Latency Interesting perspective:
I love the notion of shifting the idea of two binaries, online/offline, to a spectrum of latency where “offline” is merely the most extreme form of latency. It makes you think differently. You even begin to realize that “offline” has its own gradations: latency of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, or more!
“Coding is like writing step by step directions for how to drive somewhere but you also have to add contingency plans for things like what if there is traffic ?
or
what if a UFO lands in the turn lane?”
Load Balancing Load balancing algorithms make more sense when you can see them in action — this article illustrates with animations and an interactive playground.
Kelsey Hightower "is just …"
The cloud is just someone else's computer, power, cooling system, underwater sea cables, networking equipment, data center and the land it sits on, control plane with support for Terraform, insurance policies, roadmaps, and a whole lot of people to build, secure, monitor, and support all of the software that runs on top.
suno-ai/bark Text-to-audio model that can generate highly realistic, multilingual speech, nonverbal communication (laughing, sighing, crying, etc), music, background noise, and simple sound effects. Damn impressive. Try it out.
Grep I think social search is the future.
Traditional search started by looking at what people linked to — from their blogs, home pages, social profiles, etc — but got gamed by content farms. We need to return to those roots, and likely by personalizing search from each user's curated circle.
I don’t think Grep is there yet, but keeping an eye on it:
Search engines have been drowning in SEO and mostly unauthoritative content. … Grep is a new kind of search engine where users follow a minimum of 7 websites they like. From there, we build a 4-degree connection by taking the websites they follow and the websites those websites link to, and so on.
Happy Earth/Browser Day! 🌐
The web browser is 30 years old today — NCSA Mosaic 1.0 was released April 22, 1993!
the most important part of the history of Unicode is the time that a mouse fell out of a light fixture and got added to the count of members present at a Technical Committee meeting
Eye for Design
Inside the mind of a frontend developer What I like about this article is that it’s exploring the thinking process behind designing a hero section, the resulting CSS is just an artifact.
Two types of software engineers
According to my theory, there are two types of software engineers:
Type 1, when presented with a problem, thinks: "easy, people can just do X.”
Type 2, when presented with the same problem, thinks: "very hard, because it requires people to do X.”
One assumes it's easy because it's a non-technical problem, the other assumes that's why it's hard
Peoples
One of the greatest things I've learned as I've gotten older is that you don't have to be good at everything and that, in fact, being mediocre at just a TON of shit is super fun.
You can learn a little about a ton of stuff and then decide if you want to make that time commitment that it takes to make you actually good. You can dance around stuff and put it down and come back to it and whatever.
It's very freeing. I wish I'd learned it earlier.
The Evolution of Trust An interactive guide to the game theory of why & how we trust each other.
Business Side
Career Advice No One Gave Me: Give a Lot of Notice When You Quit Not many people know they can negotiate an exit:
I gave close to 3 months’ notice at a big (7000+ person) Silicon Valley tech company, and about 1.5 months at a small (75 person) digital media company. In both cases it was appreciated and I probably could have given more.
The Underground Economy of Company Reviews "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure“ — if you’re searching for a new job, be mindful of how companies juice their reviews.
Excuse me, is there a problem? Many startups fail despite identifying a real problem and building a product that solves that problem:
Notice that all these forces have nothing to do with your product or its price. They are so powerful, they overwhelm a product that is solving the problem the best, at the best price.
The Commission for Stopping Further Improvements or how to “embarrass and shackle the progress of improvement tomorrow by recording and registering as law the prejudices or errors of today”
Machine Thinking
AI Playground by Vercel Playground for using different GPT models. You can use two models side-by-side, so I did some experimenting. I tried a few questions, code challanges, and a real project — I spent ~3 hours using GPT-4 + Claude to draft a patent application.
My take:
- GPT-4 is "shut up and take my money" level of good; almost always understood me, almost always produced the output I wanted
- GPT-3.4 and Claude come in second place but are far behind; Anthropic’s Claude (
claude-v1notinstant) was consistently better thangpt-3.5-turbo - Everyone else — Alpaca, Cohere, NeoX, OpenAssistant, StableLM — gets a participation trophy
- ChatGPT — I included it in my tests — was uncooperative
This is not the year of "a GPT running on my device that's actually useful".
keep thinking about all those “wrong answers only” tweets and ai training sets.
Inside the secret list of websites that make AI like ChatGPT sound smart In case you’re wondering where the AI training data is coming from.
Though, I wasn't too pleased that an article warning us about misinformation and AI — a real problem — is itself dodgy. Feels like they put facts to the side to maximize engagement.
GPTs are probabilistic, it matters what percentage of the content is misinformation, and while the article shows the percentage out of C4, it leaves the actual calculation to the reader - when the full training set is 40x larger than C4.
And also:
The Post’s analysis suggests more legal challenges may be on the way: The copyright symbol — which denotes a work registered as intellectual property — appears more than 200 million times in the C4 data set.
The copyright symbol lost its meaning before the web was a thing, and hardly anyone registers their web content with the copyright office.
Jonatan Hildén “This webstore has a great Stock of ”Sorry, as an AI” products.”
Spacetime
xkcd 1133 “The part where lots of fire comes out must point towards the ground if you want to go to space today.”
@SpaceX "f*@k it! we're just going to do things our own way":
As if the flight test was not exciting enough, Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly before stage separation
Space Elevator May I suggest a quiet ride up the space elevator? (it's a fantastic infographic well worth your time)
Everything Else
This load of bread I saw at my local supermarket...I think it saw me first!
the heaviest substance known to humans is the psychic weight of all the emails you haven't responded to
“The first rule of mysterious leg bruise club is to press on it every five minutes to make sure it still hurts”
Wilbur “Ok, maybe one worry”
I tried donating blood today. Never again, I'll tell you. So many questions! 'Why do you want to donate blood?' 'Whose blood is it?' 'Why is it in a bucket? ‘
Reeves Connelly on TikTok From the “questions we ask while high” department we bring you: which letter of the alphabet will make the best apartment layout?
pop-shoot fun 80’s style shooter that plays in the browser.
it's a(door)able this 1-minute mini-game is absolutely adorable.
Why You May Do Your Best Thinking in the Shower 🤔
An additional benefit of the shower is that its white noise blocks outside stimulation. The roar of the water produces partial sensory deprivation, taking bandwidth that would have been used for other perceptions and shunting it to the mental space the mind uses to wander. Ideas incubating in the background can rise to consciousness and lead you past a creative impasse.
Rod Hilton The people who complained that Twitter checkmarks are an elite status symbol but always wanted that status symbol are upset that anyone can buy the symbol and so it lost its status:
Attached: 1 image
I'm sorry but this is just the funniest shit ever.
These losers were mad that celebs had checkmarks and they didn't. Now they can buy the same checkmark and they're mad that the celebs won't.
Podcasts as a Source of News and Information Everything you hear on the Internet is true:
Among those who hear news discussed on podcasts, a large majority (87%) say they expect it to be mostly accurate, compared with about one-in-ten who say they expect it to be mostly inaccurate. … This is a much higher level of trust than people have in some other sources of news and information.
nobody:
tomato slices when you start to eat a sandwich:
