100 / Here Come the Robots

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Toot of the Week

I am working at the intersection of “desperate to get off the internet” and “joining every new social network for some reason” — @danielmgauthier@mastodon.social

Favourites

• Towards better 1-on-1s: an awkward manifesto (tylercipriani.com)

  Tyler Cipriani shares their basic 1:1 agenda as well as a random question generator. Thanks, Ted!

• Ask HN: Most interesting tech you built for just yourself? (news.ycombinator.com)

  l2silver asked this question on HN and there‘s endless inspiring comments of people talking about their small side projects they‘ve built just for them selves.

• The Dual LLM pattern for building AI assistants that can resist prompt injection (simonwillison.net)

  Simon Willison has a proposal to make personal assistants more resilient against prompt injection attacks.

Software

• Why is OAuth still hard in 2023? (nango.dev)

  Robin Guldener explains why it’s still super complicated to set up OAuth even though it’s standardised.

• Is Rust a worthy contender for web development? (joshmo.hashnode.dev)

  Josh Mo showcases modern Rust web dev and compares it to modern JavaScript.

• Building and Deploying a URL shortener with Rust in 10 minutes or less (shuttle.rs)

  Terrence Waters writes a guide on how to build a link shortened with Rust and shuttle.

• Uptime Guarantees (world.hey.com)

  Itzy Sabo unpacks the downtime concept and argues two-and-a-half nines are good enough for most.

AI

• A guide to prompting AI (for what it is worth) (oneusefulthing.org)

  Ethan Mollick explains good prompting techniques (although prompting is getting less important every week).

• Here Come the Robots (randsinrepose.com)

  Michael Lopp about AI and the lack of critical thinking.

• I’m ChatGPT, and for the Love of God, Please Don’t Make Me Do Any More Copywriting (mcsweeneys.net)

  Joe Wellman imagines the inner monologue of an LLM that’s only used for copywriting.

• Prompt Engineering vs. Blind Prompting (mitchellh.com)

  Mitchell Hashimoto argues that “prompt engineering” is often just blind prompting and shows how to actually create a good prompt without trial/error.

Cutting Room Floor

• Meet the people who use Notion to plan their whole lives (technologyreview.com)

  Rhiannon Williams about people who managed their personal life in Notion; from tracking water intake to planning YouTube videos.

• The Case Against Momfluencers (wired.com)

  Kate Knibbs about the new book by Sarah Petersen and why it’s a mistake to put pictures of your children online publicly.

• The endless uses for an always-on Mac (sixcolors.com)

  Jason Snell about the advantages and use cases of having an always-on Mac.

• Insufficient forgetting (swellandcut.com)

  Matthew Sweet about the importance of forgetting to fight the accumulation of entropy.

• The Four Hobbies, and Apparent Expertise (brooker.co.za)

  Marc Brooker about the tension between people that want to actually do the hobby and people that like to talk about it more instead.