93 / The Waluigi Effect

Hi ✌🏻

Toot of the Week

#Software can be like bananas: Not yet ripe and and already rotten at the same time. — @ewolff@mastodon.social

Peopleware

• Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content meant for other roles (matthewgrohman.substack.com)

  Matthew Grohman about the advantages of understanding other roles (including a list of resources!)

Software

• I don't want to log in to your website (robinrendle.com)

  Robin Rendle about sketchy sales tactics and the value in simple and honest websites.

• Things DBs Don't Do - But Should (thenile.dev)

  Gwen Shapira has a list of feature requests for the a modern database.

Rust

• I built a startup in Rust, I would do it again. (cloak.software)

  This article describes the advantage of using Rust in a startup.

• When Zig is safer and faster than Rust (zackoverflow.dev)

  zack compares unsafe Rust to Zig and explains why Zig was working better for them.

• Living with Rust Long-Term (video) (youtu.be)

  Jon Gjengset about the things you need to be aware of when building a project in Rust for a long time.

• Tricks of the Trait: Enabling Ergonomic Extractors (video) (youtu.be)

  Rob Ede explains how you can accept functions with different kinds of arguments in a handler in Rust.

AI

• The Waluigi Effect (lesswrong.com)

  Cleo Nardo about the inner workings of the Waluigi Effect and other jailbreak methods for LLMs.

• AI is making it easier to create more noise, when all I want is good search (rachsmith.com)

  Rach Smith describes an AI use-case that trumps content generation: Search.

• Large language models are having their Stable Diffusion moment (simonwillison.net)

  Simon Willison appt the current state and future of LLMs.

Cutting Room Floor

• There’s no such thing as a tree (phylogenetically) (2021) (eukaryotewritesblog.com)

  Georgia Ray explains why most trees developed individually and other weird botanic quirks. Thanks, Eric!

• How the Biggest Fraud in German History Unravelled (newyorker.com)

  Ben Taub tells the story of Jan Marsalek in the Wirecard scandal and how the fraud was exposed. Thanks, Lukas!