159 / Shitposting Our Way Through the Singularity

Hey hey, we’ve just come back from a wedding in Bavaria—hope you find something great to read in this week’s selection!

Software

• Bypassing airport security via SQL injection (ian.sh)

  Ian Carroll and Sam Curry found a security issue with a system that airline staff to skip security and were able to add arbitrary people to the allowlist.

• The Cult of the Complex (alistapart.com)

  Jeffrey Zeldman about the growing dependency on frameworks in the web industry and how it can be harmful.

GenAI

• Shitposting Our Way Through the Singularity (joanwestenberg.com)

  Joan Westenberg explains why we need to embrace the human weirdness to distinguish ourselves from the bland content generated by LLMs.

• Chatbots Are Primed to Warp Reality (theatlantic.com)

  Matteo Wong explains how genAI chatbots can implant memories and why that’s dangerous.

Cutting Room Floor

• You Are NOT Dumb, You Just Lack the Prerequisites (lelouch.dev)

  Lelouch explains the important difference in being smart vs missing pre-requisite knowledge.

• Web Design Museum (webdesignmuseum.org)

  The web design museum is an archive of screenshots of old websites, app and software.

• This bird came back from extinction - now scientists in an aircraft are teaching it to migrate (theguardian.com)

  Phoebe Weston tells this amazing story of humans teaching Waldrapp, a species that was extinct outside of zoos, a migration route.

• Confiscate Their Money (hamiltonnolan.com)

  Hamilton Nolan explains why billionaires should not exist.