99 / A love letter to make

Hey hey, how’s it going? ✌🏻

Toot of the Week

The difference between NPR and Twitter is that NPR is intentionally a non-profit. #NPR — @MissingThePt@mastodon.social

Work

• How the Push for Efficiency Changes Us (explorewhatworks.com)

  Tara McMullin about the tech industry’s push for efficiency and why more efficiency is not always good.

• Is Critical Thinking the Most Important Skill for Software Engineers? (blog.pragmaticengineer.com)

  Gergely Orosz about critical thinking, why it’s an important skill and how to apply it.

• Excuse me, is there a problem? (longform.asmartbear.com)

  Jason Cohen explains that there’s more to startup success than solving a problem and goes into detail explaining the different factors.

Software

• Recreating the title effect from creativesouth.com (rachsmith.com)

  Rach Smith reproduced a cool mouse-aware text effect using CSS & JavaScript.

• It's time to learn oklch color (keithjgrant.com)

  Keith J. Grant introduces you to the oklch color model and explains why it’s superior to hsl and others.

• Offline Is Just Online With Extreme Latency (blog.jim-nielsen.com)

  Jim Nielsen summarises a talk by Peter Van Hardenberg, who argues that instead of online vs offline software, it should be seen as a spectrum of latencies. Thanks, Lukas!

• A love letter to make (kmaasrud.com)

  The author writes a letter to the build tool, praising its reliability among other features.

• Load Balancing (samwho.dev)

  Sam Rose explains different load balancing algorithms, from round robin to PEWMA.

AI

• Watch the first demo of buzzy startup Humane’s wearable AI assistant in leaked clips (theverge.com)

  JonPorter collected leaked clips from a TED talk by Humane co-founder Imran Chaudhri. Thanks, Jan!

• To understand AI sentience, first understand it in animals (aeon.co)

  Kristin Andrews & Jonathan Birch have written an essay about sentience; how unexplored it really is and the N=1 problem.

• Prompt injection: What’s the worst that can happen? (simonwillison.net)

  Simon Wilson about the worst-Case scenarios of prompt leak attacks with LLMs.

Cutting Room Floor

• This is what it looks like to be colorblind (theverge.com)

  Andy Baio shares life from their perspective as a colourblind person.

• Career Advice No One Gave Me: Give a Lot of Notice When You Quit (davidlaprade.github.io)

  David Laprade about the benefits to everyone when you quit with a lot of notice and do a “phased exit plan”.

• Space Elevator (neal.fun)

  Turn on the sound and enjoy this ride to space, showing your the altitudes of planes, rockets, and balloons and more.

• You'd Be Happier Living Closer to Friends. Why Don't You? (annehelen.substack.com)

  Anne Helen Petersen asks why people don’t live closer to friends (i.e. in the same street).