105 / Fire and Motion

Hey hey everyone, happy pride month 🌈

Work

• Fire And Motion (joelonsoftware.com)

  Joel Spolsky about flow-state, startups and how to win.

• I gave commit rights to someone I didn't know, I could never have guessed what happened next! (tech.davis-hansson.com)

  Jacob Davis-Hansson tells the story of one of their open-source projects got popular without them noticing.

Software

• Clever Code Considered Harmful (joshwcomeau.com)

  Josh Comeau explains why clever code should be avoided wherever possible.

• Phase Locked State Machines (onevariable.com)

  James explains how they abstracted the state transitions of three components into a single Rust trait.

• All the Hard Stuff Nobody Talks About when Building Products with LLMs (honeycomb.io)

  Phillip Carter shares Honeycomb’s experience building their natural language querying interface. Thanks, Michal!

• CSS wishlist 2023 (ellyloel.com)

  Elly Loel has a wishlist for CSS in 2023, with links to prior work.

Cutting Room Floor

• How to Stare at Your Phone Without Losing Your Soul (simone.org)

  Simone argues that high screen time is not inherently bad, it’s a matter of intention.

• VogelRIP (German) (vogel.rip)

  A German talkshow has commissioned a study to see if German tweets changed, and they did: 20 % less German tweets since last year, smaller and less active bubbles and more right-wing chatter.

• Paragraphica (bjoernkarmann.dk)

  Bjørn Karmann built a camera with a viewfinder that turns what it sees into text and the camera turns that text into an image using AI.

• Why octopuses are building small “cities” off the coast of Australia (arstechnica.com)

  Annalee Newitz tells the fascinating story of the otherwise solitary octopus building “Octlantis” and developing social behaviour.

• These tiny, medical robots could one day travel through your body (colorado.edu)

  Daniel Strain summarises a paper by CU Boulder who created tiny robots that could one day deliver drugs to hard-to-reach places or perform tiny surgeries.