Published
Weekend Reading — Happy and safe new year!
Dr. Lucky Tran Viruses aren't like Pokémon, "gotta catch 'em all" shouldn't be your goal.
Tech Stuff
daedalOS Desktop environment in the browser!
2023 JavaScript Rising Stars An overview of the JavaScript landscape in 2023: frontend, fullstack, React and Vue.js, build tools, state management, etc.
(For 2024, you can now run JavaScript inside your Oracle MySQL database)
Cold-blooded software “A cold-blooded project uses boring technology. The build and test scripts don’t depend on external services that might change, break, or disappear entirely. It uses vendored dependencies.”
React Server Components: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Evaluating Next.js's implementation of React's new server features**:**
As a final note, I just want to emphasize that it is currently very difficult to draw a line between React and Next.js. Some (or many) of these new APIs might look and feel different within a framework that has more respect for standards (à la Remix). I’ll be sure to post an update when that happens.
Passwordless Authentication Powered by Passkeys Add Passwordless Authentication to your web app with just a few lines of code.
who decided to call it a monorepo instead of a unicode
Heynote A scratchpad for developers. Works great for that Slack message you don't want to accidentally send, a JSON response from an API you're working with, notes from a meeting, your daily to-do list, etc.
RSS Anything Transform any old website with a list of links into an RSS or Atom Feed.
The Y2K bug is a great illustration that a well-handled potential disaster looks like “nothing happened” in retrospect. The fact that Y2K seemed to be a non-event is a testament to how seriously people took this emergency, and how everyone buckled down and averted a worldwide infrastructure disaster.
…
People buckled down, found the bugs, ran simulations, got FAA sign-offs, and deployed the fixes to all affected aircraft well before Y2K. Thanks to the effort, “nothing happened”. But I assure you (bad) things would have happened if we did nothing.
Cassette A small, Lisp-like programming language.
Why I'm skeptical of low-code That’s my experience as well: “Low-code can be a great tool but it often fails to live up to its marketing”
jasonjmcghee/rem Remember everything — An open source approach to locally record and enable searching everything you view on your Apple Silicon. This project is very alpha, so maybe wait a bit before trying it out on your work computer.
NPM registry prank leaves developers unable to unpublish packages A package called “everything”, which lists all other NPM packages as a dependency, so you can’t unpublish any of these (all) NPM packages! Fortunately, this project was quickly removed by the masters of the NPM universe.
The IDEs we had 30 years ago... and we lost I’m old enough to remember me using EDIT.COM.
Eye for Design
How inclusive design shaped me
It’s not just about designing exclusively for minorities, extreme users or for disability. To be inclusive is not to be nice, it is to be smart. When you apply this mindset during your design process you are able to create more meaningful experiences and extending it to a larger number of customers with a more diverse range of needs.
For the more than 8 million people in the US alone who have low-vision or are blind, assistive #technology makes lives much easier.
Screen readers built into iPhones and Windows have made many things more accessible.
BUT there are huge limitations, with large numbers of #accessibility problems on websites, including ones used to apply for jobs.
https://theconversation.com/digital-inaccessibility-blind-and-low-vision-people-have-powerful-technology-but-still-face-barriers-to-the-digital-world-212600
James Waldner – Graphic Designer The perfect logo for a pet store!
Peoples
Structured Success Ask any person with ADHD:
"You forgot? Must not be important."
Listen bro, I can and have forgotten to eat, pee, sleep, cash cheques. I've lost my car by taking the bus home after driving there.
Importance is not a distinguishing factor here. The fact a commodore 64 has more RAM than I do is the issue
Get your work recognized: write a brag document
your manager doesn’t remember everything you did
And if you don’t remember everything important you did, your manager (no matter how great they are!) probably doesn’t either. And they need to explain to other people why you should be promoted or given an evaluation like “exceeds expectations” …
So if your manager is going to effectively advocate for you, they need help.
What do we want?
Passive-aggressive behaviour!
When do we want it?
Never mind, you’re clearly too busy.
UX professionals who are good at all steps of the UX lifecycle, including both research and design, are called “UX unicorns” because they are rare. But AI narrows skill gaps and may create many more UX unicorns.
Business Side
2024 Startups Advised to Prioritize Real Numbers Over Capital Raising | Brief TL;DR The new plan moving forward is the same as the old plan of building a sustainable business!
Remote collaborators don't generate as many breakthrough scientific ideas: study I believe the same is also true of other professions, specifically software development: "We can divide many things, but not ideas."
The changing economics of open-source software TL;DR layoffs and the demise of zero interest rate phenomenon (ZIRP), neither of these are good news for open source software.
Insecurity
Ads, overlays and paywalls, oh my! How to get around the web’s worst annoyances A toolkit of browser extensions and strategies to make the web more tolerable:
Over the years, I’m assembled a toolkit of browser extensions and strategies that have made the web tolerable, allowing me to block overly intrusive ads, bust through overlays and scale paywalls.
PSA: Here's a Facebook data-gathering tool you'll want to disable A guide to quickly disabling Link History, which a) you don’t need, and b) you don’t want Facebook installing a key logger in the app browser.
Grrr. Dear PG&E, nobody wants to break into our house and hack our computer passwords in order to pay our energy bills. You can let a web page stay logged in for a little while longer than that.
Proton VPN's Free Tier Is the Best You'll Find When you need to use a VPN for a simple task—to open a page from a different country, maybe, or to mask your location. For times like that, and perhaps even as a default option, you can use the free tier of Proton VPN.
Machine Intelligence
How bad are search results? Let's compare Google, Bing, Marginalia, Kagi, Mwmbl, and ChatGPT Choke full of details and specifics, but I do wish they also compared with Microsoft Copilot which, unlike plain GPT, comes with a search capability.
Microsoft Copilot Copilot for iOS: you get both GPT-4 and DALL-E 3, all for the price of you just need a device to run this on. iPhone, iPad, or Android, and because it runs on the iPad quite nicely, you can use it on macOS, which is exactly what I’m doing.
'If Only AI‘ A collection of some seriously cool images, all generated using AI.
Everything Else
Dave Dawkins (D. Harrigon) Shoeshi!
The Void is experiencing extremely high call volumes right now. Please hold. Your screaming is very important to us.
It’s called being condescending; maybe you’ve heard of it.
Clicks for iPhone Do you miss the BlackBerry with it’s real keyword? “Clicks brings a REAL KEYBOARD to your iPhone. Enjoy the feel of buttons, type with precision and double your space to create.”
I just saw three people jogging outside and it inspired me to get up and close the blinds.
wikipedia has so many gems, but this has to be one of the best.
related, English is such a clusterfuck, what a crazy language
but also I'm completely obsessed with heteronyms, they're the best thing ever
The best way to avoid losing your head is by not marrying Henry VIII.
Tune in tomorrow for another secret the Illuminati don't want you to know.
66 Good News Stories You Didn't Hear About in 2023 Not everything in 2023 was about the end of the world. Some news was excellent — making great progress on health, clean energy, politics, etc. Just that your day-to-day news doesn’t like to report the good stuff, they’d rather keep you scared and on edge.
Modelling the seasonal cycle of Uranus’s colour and magnitude, and comparison with Neptune
Color processing in space imagery is tricky. For example, the colours of Uranus and Neptune. You all know the famous Voyager 2 images of both and the stark contrast of shades of blue. Well, it turns out that they have very similar if not the same shades of blue. As usual, it has sparked an amusing debate online.
News flash: the States begin to realize that prisons that are not hellholes by design help reduce recidivism.
Inside California's new prison model 'Prisneyland’
crisp-game-lib Play PacMan but in 1 dimension! (much harder than it looks)
The Magic Of New Beginnings January 2024 wallpapers, because what’s better than saving a new wallpaper to the Desktop?
