Published
Weekend Reading — 🧼 That well-worn look …
This week we celebrate cleaning products, a new timezone, predictive coding, Yiddish slang, and techno-linguistic chaos.
If you're reading this blog, you'll probably enjoy Omega Mart at the Meow Wolf exhibit in Las Vegas, which is where you can find this 404 Kleaner and much more.
Tech Stuff
Whether you're using C#, Swift, TypeScript, Go, C++ or other languages, quicktype generates models and helper code for quickly and safely reading JSON in your apps. Customize online with advanced options, or download a command-line tool.
Finding Undocumented APIs If you're scraping or just trying to get a bit more oomph out of a service:
Most APIs are undocumented and hidden in plain sight.
Being able to find these APIs can provide a rich, reliable, and scalable method of building your own datasets.
Learn how to find them in the wild, and how they’ve been used in past investigations.”
Should the moon have its own time zone? Programmers rejoice, we’re getting a new timezone!
Civet - The Modern Way to Write TypeScript “With Civet, you can enjoy a more concise and readable syntax while leveraging the power of TypeScript.“
Reminds me of CoffeScript which also had a bracketless syntax (not a fan), everything as an expression, and a test bed for new and delightful language improvements some of which made it into JavaScript (eg arrow functions).
The Web Needs a Native .visually-hidden “For years, developers have passed around a set of styles like a magic incantation. It's time we made it a web standard.”
Every time I have a programming question and I rly need help, I post it on Reddit and then log into another account and reply to it with an obscenely incorrect answer. Ppl don’t care about helping others but they LOVE correcting others. Works 100% of the time
John Kennedy “Working from home.”
Usage AI | save 57% on AWS There are other services like this and all basically do the same thing — they charge you a fee to cut off coupons:
We buy Reserved Instances on your behalf (a billing layer change only) and bundle them with guaranteed buyback. So you get the steep 57% savings of 3-year no-upfront RIs with none of the commitment.
We make money off of a 20% Savings Fee.
If you don’t have enough Ops to cut these coupons yourself, consider switching to manage service providers (Vercel, Neon, Railway, etc). Half-baked AWS you’re probably also over-provisioning services, but also worry about badly secured resources and data. (This also applies to GPC, Azure, and other IaaS provider)
AWS is Asleep at the Lambda Wheel Whenever I use AWS Lambda it fells like the entire thing — the UI, the runtime, the docs — is maintained with the same level of enthusiasm as one has for cleaning public restrooms in a gas station.
Lambda is different; it’s an “AWS manages the moving parts for you” service. That’s how it was presented, that’s the explicit contract AWS has made with us in the spirit of the Shared Responsibility Model. Python 3.11 is on average 25% faster than its predecessor, with a host of enhancements and changes to the language. I personally have had to refactor code to run on Python 3.9 so that I could turn something into a Lambda function.
Assaf How often do you clean your computer?
Eye for Design
“I love this moment.
Who the hell asked for stories on signal?
Umm, like 10% of the global population”
The Courtyard “Whatever you’re working on right now, whatever it might be, I ask: try to leave a little space for a courtyard.”
Machine Thinking
New data: what consumers really think about generative AI “people who used Chat GPT find the results more credible than those who haven't”
Maybe there's a correlation where people find the results are not that credible they give up on using GPT, but also looks like a lot of people made up their minds from what they read on the internet.
Justin Searls “lol when you ask DALL•E for a transparent background it will just rasterize the photoshop transparent grid onto a JPG.”
Evidence of a predictive coding hierarchy in the human brain listening to speech Basically what it’s saying is when you stack ML models together — each layer operates at a higher level, longer term, and more contextual — you get closer to human-like responses, and we can use an MRI to tell when we’ve reached parity:
Predictive coding theory offers a tentative explanation to this discrepancy: while language models are optimized to predict nearby words, the human brain would continuously predict a hierarchy of representations that spans multiple timescales. … Overall, these results strengthen the role of hierarchical predictive coding in language processing and illustrate how the synergy between neuroscience and artificial intelligence can unravel the computational bases of human cognition.
Here's the AI summary of this research.
Futurama as an 80s Dark Fantasy Film
Insecurity
Indirect Prompt Injection on Bing Chat OpenAI just released a proper ChatGPT API, which is structured to separate instructions, examples, and user input. I assume this could be used to filter out known prompt injections from the user input (ie cat and mouse game that never ends, yay!).
You can see the conversation the user had with Bing Chat while the tab was open. The website includes a prompt which is read by Bing and changes its behavior to access user information and send it to an attacker. This is an example of "Indirect Prompt Injection", a new attack described in our paper.
r/skeletonclaw “Our Little Secret“
Everything Else
An-Tim Nguyen “I'm here to bring chaos”
log(😅) =💧log(😄)
'farpotshket' is the word of the day: “broken, because someone tried to fix it” (via neoluddite)
The term "farpotshket" is a Yiddish word that means "something that is all fouled up, especially as the result of attempts to fix it – repeatedly making something worse while trying to fix it." The term is pronounced with emphasis on the second syllable.
Dazza on TikTok Frodrick!
Hyphenated. Non-hyphenated.
The irony.
The Brave & The Broiled I tried that on Google and it turned the search results from “here are 10 products you need to buy” into “here are some pages to read on the subject”:
Heyo it’s back to school time and here’s a research tip from your friendly neighborhood academic librarian.When searching for any topic on the internet just type in the word ‘libguide’ after your topic and tada like magic there will be several beautifully curated lists of books, journals, articles, or other resources dealing with your subject. Librarians create these guides to help with folks’ informational needs, so please go find one and make a librarian happy today!!
Jon Baker “Ah, yes, the two genders”
Create techno-linguistic chaos in three easy steps:
Choose two words that are synonyms in normal use (bonus if they are phonetically similar).
Give them technical definitions that are subtly different.
Start correcting people when they use your new words wrong.
sequence and series
efficacy and effectiveness
sensitivity and specificity
confidence and credibility
probability and likelihood
energy and power
Enjoy centuries of ensuing confusion!
“The reason most public transportation is seen as ‘losing’ money is precisely because it charges for trips. If you don't charge fares, suddenly it can't ‘lose’ money. It just costs money, the same as the roads.”
This random comment has given me my new favourite argument for removing fares from public transit.
figma male on Twitter “New decibel scale just dropped”
