Published
Weekend Reading — What's Latin for Waffle House?
This week we learn the DALLE language, discover infinite disk space, and bring flexbox to 1986.
35 Old-Fashioned Things That Will Trigger Some Nostalgia
Tech Stuff
Jean Yang 👇 “Upon popular request: skincare products as developer tools, a thread.”
engineering (noun): the art and science of taking one kind of problem and changing it into a different kind of problem.
Discovering the Hidden Vocabulary of DALLE-2 Look, I'm obsessed with these ML generative models. I like how sometimes they produce stuff I can't make on a good day with ample coffee, other times, they produce the most bizarre hallucinations.
Anyways, this research paper suggests that DALLE-2 has developed its own internal vocabulary that can be used to generate images with absurd prompts. Supposedly in DALLE-2 speech "Apoploe vesrreaitais" means "birds". TL;DR in this Twitter thread.
This Twitter thread claims that DALLE-2 didn't invent its own language, just trying to make sense of what looks like Latin — and don't we all?
All the examples of the gibberish text look kind of like Latin names for species, and all of the (working) examples in the paper are related to natural scenarios. 1/n
Janelle Shane Besides, it's fun to mess with (and also stained glass windows):
My new favorite thing is #dalle messing up corporate logos. Here's #dalle prompted with "the local waffle house"
Lily Scott Hot damn …
you ever think about how
export default async functionis longer thanpublic static void main
window.onerror = window.close;For that native feel.
Woah. I just learned that HTML file inputs can access photos, videos, and audio captured directly by the device's camera and microphone like this:
dzhang314/YouTubeDrive “Store files as YouTube videos == infinite disk space” 😂 Cute fun project built using “a Wolfram Language (aka Mathematica) package that encodes/decodes arbitrary data to/from simple RGB videos.”
So apparently the latest season of #StrangerThings has some hacking scenes, and you all know how well Hollywood and hacking scenes go together?
Suzie HACKS the government by decoding HTML and the HTML has CSS using… flexbox
#StrangerThings is set in 1986 lmao
Eye for Design
zoehong “It's mimicry as a learning tool, not mimicry as an aesthetic or business plan.”
Laurel Coons “Graphic design has rules, and they work … 👀”
Business Side
rands 👇 When it's your first tech downturn and you're not sure whether/when to get worried:
- Management will sound especially rah-rah right now, which might sound disingenuous, but… it’s their job. They know you’re worried, and they’re working on it. Right. Right?
François Chollet Remember this whenever someone says "we're data-driven":
Most of the time your sources of data are biased or not statistically significant, but this detail is swept under the rug. And data is a multidimensional thing, that can tell a different story from different angles.
As a result, "data" is often merely used as a narrative device.
Frederik Gieschen Why startups move faster than incumbents:
Bezos: "Let's say a junior exec comes up with an idea. They have to convince their boss, their boss's boss, their boss's boss's boss and so on- any 'no' can kill the idea."
Vs.: if 19 VCs say no, it just takes a 20th to say yes to get an idea into business.
Seth Miller “the audacity....after decimating an entire economy”
Everything Else
Linus Tech Tips “which one are you?”
I have two modes:
- Can we schedule something in 2023?
- I'm around the next hour if you're free!
Neeraj Thakur “Will tell my grandkids this was a Crypto exchange”
Association of Sugar-Sweetened, Artificially Sweetened, and Unsweetened Coffee Consumption With All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality TL;DR people who drink coffee live longer, correlation not causation, who cares coffee is delicious
Moderate consumption of unsweetened and sugar-sweetened coffee was associated with lower risk for death.
U-shaped associations were also observed for instant, ground, and decaffeinated coffee.
