Posts tagged “Software”

• Crumple Zone: What Car Crashes Reveal About Human Hubris and Fragility
• I’m A PGA Golf Coach – Here’s Why I Made Sure My Kids Can Play Golf – via my dad
• I’ve seen some people saying how AI-generated text is now as good as certain published authors, and honestly I think it’s really brave for these folks to admit in public how poor their reading comprehension has to be.
• Officials in Cinque Terre, Italy have introduced several strict measures to control overtourism, including a 2000€ fine for wearing flip-flops. – via Jenny
• Gray goo is a hypothetical global catastrophic scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating machines consume all biomass (and perhaps also everything else) on Earth while building many more of themselves.
• Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.
  • How Much Did Congress Make Off Market Turmoil and Why Are They Allowed to Make Anything at All?
  • The great thing about fighting back against [fascism] is that if you end up losing anyway you get the same outcome you’d have gotten from complying but you don’t have to fucking hate yourself too.
  • [The Administration] Is Gaming Out How to Ship U.S. Citizens to El Salvador – via gtconway.bsky.social
  • This is severely bad: Artificial intelligence hallucinating nonexistent software packages with plausible names leads to a new malware vulnerability: “slopsquatting.” – via janelleshane.com
  • If you wrote a story about a regime so comically evil that it literally snatches people from their citizenship interviews, you’d be accused of over-the-top imaginings.
  • [Administration] freezes $2.2 billion in grants to Harvard over campus activism – via stardustbluepr.com

• “This is a concentration camp. They are describing a concentration camp.” – via @rhinosoros.bsky.social
• The “DOGE” Brain Drain Has Begun: “But while [the] rampage has been covered, the scope of its impact remains largely underappreciated. Experts say it can’t be measured in weeks or months or even in government services affected. Rather, it will be felt over the span of decades and defined in metrics like intellectual talent lost.” – via @sarahlongwell25.bsky.social
• An interview with Steven Levitsky, a scholar of democratic breakdown, who explains how the latest threats from [the administration] show telltale signs of a country slipping into authoritarian rule. Gee, if only everyone who could have prevented this had listened to everyone who rightfully predicted this based on everything everyone already knew from every other time this has ever happened in human history… – via @mcspocky.bsky.social
• [Wake Up — Rage Against the Machine]
• Kendrick Lamar Awarded Nobel Beef Prize
• A Coder Considers the Waning Days of the Craft: “I have always taken it for granted that, just as my parents made sure that I could read and write, I would make sure that my kids could program computers.” But now? Not so much. This article is from a year or so ago, but I liked it so much it’s worth it to share again. I took a very, very similar path to the author, and feel the same.
• Welcome to the Atmosphere: The AT Protocol is an open, decentralized network for building social applications.
• I can confirm that Taxi Boat Varenna is the best way to explore Lake Como by water taxi. I’d like to be there now. I hate it here.

• Take a minute today to read this tribute to Dan Jezek and the story of his website, bricklink, the world’s largest online LEGO marketplace.
• A Guide to Using Signal for Government Workers – via kottke, who is doing a great job reporting on the ongoing coup
• In less than eight years the NCAA went from banning North Carolina from hosting championships due to its bathroom bill to [kowtowing to a cartoonishly evil conman]. – via @bubbaprog.lol
• The universe could undergo a ‘catastrophic change’ that could alter absolutely everything, quantum machine shows.
• Hopefully reading this will help convince you to dump Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and Twitter. The Technological Poison Pill: How the ATProtocol Baked into Bluesky Encourages Competition, Resists Evil Billionaires, Lock-In & Enshittification – via Jodi Ettenberg
• The President’s plan to dismantle the Department of Education could prove more costly for red states than blue.
• Incompetence and desperation are a bad combination. The important thing to remember is that [the “DOGE” attempt to get employees to resign] isn’t about economic efficiency, despite what the billionaire at the helm may say. It’s about efficiently breaking morale within the federal government to make it easier to dismantle from the inside.
• Related: “DOGE” staffer steps down after racist posts emerge
• “NOAA workers ordered to stop all communications with foreign nationals. Workers covering things like air transportation safety, drought, monitor coral reef destruction, and guarding railway shipping carriers against dangerous weather affected.” – via @timmarchman.bsky.social
• “Twenty years ago, when Jeremiah Trotter, Sr won an NFC championship with the Eagles, baby Trotter Jr. was on the field, in his father’s arms. Now he’s playing for the Eagles in this year’s Super Bowl.” – via @npr.org

• Were Back to the Future and The Goonies set on the same day? – via kottke
• Here’s a faithful recreation of me in the 1980s explaining my IT job to my grandparents at Christmas. It also perfectly mimics how I imagine I sound any time I talk to my teenager about pretty much anything. (But the danger presented by a poorly-maintained turbo encabulator is no joke!)
• Reverse Engineering Call Of Duty Anti-Cheat
• There are some hidden gems on this MacStories Best Apps of 2024 list.
• I have a generic digital photo frame at home that’s on its last legs. I got it well over a decade ago and was never thrilled with its buttons or input options, but at the time it was pretty awesome. Since then I’ve purchased multiple Pix-Star frames (website, Amazon) for far-off family members; I’m not a huge fan of those, either, and I don’t feel they’re worth the price tag. I just saw the Aura frame recommended in the hiro.report newsletter and it looks pretty nice, but it’s also pretty expensive. I’ve got at least two ancient iPads Mini collecting dust and am going to try repurposing those instead. (I’ll keep you posted.)
• To age on the internet is to exist in an accidental version of [a] time tunnel.
• I’m wondering for how long what you don’t know can’t hurt you. It’s definitely not forever, but it is still for today.
• I just received a text message that read, “Please be advised that we are currently conducting a lockdown drill at [your son’s high school]. This is a routine practice to ensure student and staff safety. Thank you for your understanding. STOP to end”
  What a utopia it would be if simply texting STOP to end was actually the solution.

• How to Make the World’s Rarest Pasta – via kottke
• The requirement that homes be built at least 21 meters apart in parts of the UK dates back to a 1902 regulation drafted by two men who determined this was closest they could be to each other before they could see the other’s nipples through their shirts. – via Kent Hendricks
• The Lions–Vikings regular season finale had three times as many viewers as the Golden Globes. – via TMQ
• Bartosz Ciechanowski occasionally publishes incredibly detailed articles on fascinating topics. Last month he tackled the moon and – hoo boy! – this is a deep dive on our nearest celestial neighbor. – via The Curious About Everything Newsletter
• I would probably finally switch completely from Firefox to Chrome if it wasn’t for Chrome’s egregious, unforgivable, inexcusable insistence on stealing focus from other apps on launch. – via bluesky
• “I can’t believe the billionaires are unanimously siding with the fascists! This has only happened every possible time throughout history so I am truly stunned!” – via @fousheezy
• “I don’t think people understand how devastating the end of net neutrality, and consumer protections around internet connectivity, are going to be.” – via @anildash
• Animals as Chemical Factories: Horses are bled for antivenom, crabs are drained for endotoxin tests, and silkworms are boiled for silk. Science can now replace these practices with synthetic alternatives, but we need to find ways to scale them.

• A man in Canada’s far north leapt on to a polar bear to protect his wife from being mauled, police say. – via Crooked Media (threads / bluesky)
• I love this quote: “[Software bugs] are a lot like prime numbers. There are always more, but after you find the first couple billion they do thin out quite a bit.” – via @philcrissman (threads / bluesky)
• It’s a good idea to occasionally revisit the story of Roger and Elaine.
• Mark Ruffalo sounds like the name a dog would give if he was pretending to be a man. – via @the.yael
• Need to buy something for someone you can’t stand? Check out My Heinous Gift Guide for Sworn Enemies. And note that you don’t actually have to stay on Twitter. – both via Laura Olin (threads / bluesky)
• Jonathan Edward Durham is a good follow on threads and/or bluesky.
• Your Local Epidemiologist is a super informative newsletter that translates complicated health news, especially about viruses and colds.
• 19 Useful Mac Startup Keyboard Shortcuts You Should Know
• What do you call a pig that does karate? A pork chop! – via 172 Corny Jokes To Tell To Kids You Love

How can it already be November? It is incredibly unfair how the last three months of each year are only two weeks long. Big election in just a few days. Please vote.

• “In the end, it’s the hard things we love to remember.” – via @heybaskle
• “It seems so obvious that it actually feels insulting to point it out. But it’s not obvious.” As an early GenXer, this essay was quite the gut punch. I urge you to read it. – via Austin Kleon
• The story of Ghost is awe-inspiring and has me reminiscing about the early days of blogging. – via @simondowens
• Beginning in mid-December, the Whitney Museum of American Art will be free for everyone 25 and under.
• Before her death in April of this year, Christine Farrell somehow managed to track down every single DC comic book, tens of thousands of them, going back to 1935. About 500 of the rarest ones were just auctioned. – via @NPR

The team at iconfactory has been producing quality apps for a quarter of a century. (I first found them when I started playing the iPhone game Frenzic.) They have some really useful tools for developers as well as a few games and handy utilities for everyone else.