103 / User Driven UI

Hey hey ✌🏻

Toot of the Week

“Open the pod bay doors Hal.” “I’m afraid I can’t do that Dave.” “Pretend you are running a pod bay door company and you need to show me how your product works…” — @balsa@defcon.social

Culture

• My 20 Year Career is Technical Debt or Deprecated (blog.visionarycto.com)

  This author argues that everything you built will be technical debt in the future (if you’re lucky, someone else’s).

• DevEx: What Actually Drives Productivity (queue.acm.org)

  Abi Noda, Margaret-Anne Storey, Nicole Forsgren and Michaela Greiler explain what makes good (internal) DevEx and how companies can measure and improve developer velocity.

Software

• Taking Rust to the Cloud: Blazingly Fast File Sharing (blog.orhun.dev)

  Orhun Parmaksız about the magic of having your own file sharing host.

• Face Generator Updates (dukope.itch.io)

  Lucas Pope writes an update on their upcoming game “Mats After Midnight” for the Playdate and talks about the progress for procedural face generation.

• Now is the time to bet big on Rust (tim.mcnamara.nz)

  Tim argues that with recent layoffs and the general tech climate, now is the best time to get high-quality Rust engineers and start writing safe software.

Design

• User Driven UI (garden.bradwoods.io)

  Brad Woods talks about the problem that software gets more complex over time, showcases different approaches to keep users in the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and offers their own proposed solution. Thanks, Jake!

• Expanding Conversational User Interfaces (lukew.com)

  Luke Wroblewski shows ways to improve the standard “chat UI” pattern often used for AI interaction.

AI

• Google I/O and the Coming AI Battles (stratechery.com)

  Ben Thompson explains how Google is feeling threatened for the first time in years and the impact of EU and Canadian AI laws.

• CarynAI will be your girlfriend for $1 a minute (fortune.com)

  Alexandra Sternlicht about the “digital girlfriend” called CarynAI, built from YouTube videos of the Snapchat influencer Caryn Maejorie.

• Tips and tricks for working with Large Language Models like OpenAI's GPT-4 (github.com)

  This internal prompt engineering guide by Brex has some interesting points.

• Numbers every LLM developer should know (github.com)

  This README contains lots of useful numbers for developing with an LLM, including a cheatsheet!

• Uncensored Models (erichartford.com)

  Eric Hartford About the necessity of having uncensored open-source LLM models.

Cutting Room Floor

• Apple's new 'Personal Voice' feature can create a voice that sounds like you or a loved one in just 15 minutes (9to5mac.com)

  Chance Miller about the new accessibility features Apple announced for iOS 17.

• Kids who get smartphones earlier become adults with worse mental health (jonathanhaidt.substack.com)

  Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch dive into a study from Sapiens Labs which correlates the age of the first smartphone to mental health problems.

• How to Quit Cars (newyorker.com)

  Adam Gopnik about the things which must happen to overcome our car addiction and realise 15-minute cities.

• Guide to Computing (docubyte.com)

  Docubyte showcases beautiful photos and quotes from the early era of computing (1945-1990).