Categories Miscellaneous How to turn a smartphone into a boring tool. Useful rules for interpreting metrics, such as Lead Time or Cycle Time. Here’s Spotify’s Retro Kit.. Even though it’s a few years old, it’s a good read, and a good complement to my all time favorite, the Retromat. Currently, this post about how shoddy code causes 6 minute long loading times in a game is going around. I think this is an interesting case, because it underlines the fact that if you are selling goods which are exceptionally high in demand, and for which there is no competition, then you can drastically save on quality. And that includes customers having to suffer minute-long loading times, either because no one noticed, or, more likely, no one cared. Make some music with Google’s AI driven Blob Opera. This is what a photo looks like after 8 years of exposure. This is how it happened: Regina [the photographer] was interested in capturing images without the use of modern technology; in this case using a beer can lined with photographic paper as a pinhole camera. She placed a can on one of the Observatory’s telescopes, which had been forgotten about until September this year when it was finally removed by the Observatory’s Principal Technical officer. IKEA stops delivering their paper catalogue - but they have put all their old catalogues online. Send an email into a dumpster fire. Interactive map to visualize the true size of countries. Great visualization of how big space is. Awesome WebGL Fluid simulation. It works on mobile, too! Furry soft body animation for Tetris. The soundtrack is great, too! You can now play Mario in vim. Of course, you can do the same and more in emacs, for which a full NES emulator is available. The future is now: Nokia to build mobile network on the moon. So the moon will get fast mobile internet before some spots in Germany? That is not quite the future I imagined! More vibes from the early 00s: This blog posts screenshots from old GeoCities pages, one at a time. Miss that warm fuzzy feeling of the early 2000s? Get it back by browsing this museum of Winamp skins. If you don’t pay attention to tech trends, you end up with unexpected problems. Specifically, it seems that UK Phone Number Assignments have been handled within Yahoo! Groups - which has been shut down. Don’t ask an AI whether or not it’s alive. 1985 interview with Steve Jobs. A very interesting read full of insights around the state of the computer industry in the 80s and the mindset Jobs and his company. Malware for ATMs causes them to spit out all the money that they have.. Looking at the details of this is scary: ATMs are apparently running on Windows They are not always running with the latest patches It seems to be possible to connect any USB device to it in some cases It also seems to be possible to run any program on these windows machines A few days back, someone on Twitter highlighted that viewing a single image on Imgur causes downloading and running a megabyte of React first. The consensus in the thread was that the engineers at Imgur need to be morons in order to let something like this happen. Food for side projects: A list of software and other offerings that have free tiers for developers.. And if you want to learn new stuff, look at this list of learning goodies. Arvind Narayanan on why enterprise software sucks. His main example are baby clothes, where two different groups of stakeholders exist: People who want to buy a cute outfit, and people who actually want to quickly dress and undress their kids. In an eerie case of Real-Life CSI, a stalker was able to track down his victim from reflections in her pupils on Instagram photos. Here’s an interesting piece on security: People where cracking old passwords encrypted by insecure algorithms. A non-standard password with special characters and numbers still took them several days to crack. Bonus points for the password being a representation of a standard opening for chess. The future is now: Adobe deactivates subscriptions for Venezuela. Adobe is mainly offering subscription-only products, with very limited options in case you want to buy instead of subscribe to a product. Also, they are not giving refunds to the holders of the cancelled subscriptions. Performance Metrics for fast web apps. This article handles lots of quirks of JavaScript in a browser. In conclusion, it’s not obvious which metrics should be used, but once you know it, it’s not too difficult: Measure time starting at event.timeStamp Measure time ending at performance.now() in a requestAnimationFrame() Ignore anything that happened while the tab was not focused Aggregate data using “% of events that are under target” Visualize multiple thresholds I normally don’t have the time to read long articles, especially since many texts seem to include a lot of unnecessary fluff or explanations which are not really necessary. I did, however, fully read Typing with pleasure, which explains a lot about typing in general - especially what happens between a single keypress and the finished rendering of the updated character on the screen. It even starts before that, explaining the human system and expectations before going into the technical details. Three important limits regarding Response Time. Fascinating thread about the archtitecture of SNES. It details how the SNES could be extended with additional CPUs within the cartridges, and provides screenshot of games which used that feature. Boris Johnson is using SEO to bury unfavorable articles. In short, Johnson gave an interview where he described himself as a “role model” to make articles about this interview rank higher than an alledged affair with a model. Tanner Christensen on how his weekend project blew up on Apple’s App Store. On March 14, 2015, while reading the book Creative Confidence, I stumbled on a single sentence that seemed to encapsulate the essence of the book in a powerful way. As a blogger and design-driven individual, I wanted to capture the quote in a captivating way that would allow me to share it quickly online. […] Then, one morning a few days after Snaplight became available in the iPhone and iPad App Store, I noticed a slight uptick in downloads for it. A friend messaged me on Facebook to let me know the app was not only trending, it was being featured on the App Store homepage. Here are a few tools which can make your life easier on linux: bat is a drop-in replacement for cat, it displays line numbers, syntax highlighting and more. exa is a replacement for ls. Powerful features include a tree view and git information. oh my zsh is a great ZSH configuration with many very useful features. SpaceVim is a modern vim distribution. It comes with many great defaults. On the difference between a maker’s and a manager’s schedule. Many people I know have observed the following effect: people are going through the motions of Agile, they do everything “by the book”, yet they are struggeling. Or, they are doing the same work as before without any change other than renaming their meetings to use agile vocabulary, and call themselves agile. Or, my personal favorite, working in a chaotic and unpredictable way and justifying it with the word “agile” Software Architecture is overrated, clear and simple design is underrated. This article resonates with me because I have worked with multiple teams before, with different emphasis on architecture, and I - from my anecdotal experience at least - do not think that investing more in upfront architecture is really making the software better in the long run. If you are factoring in the time to refactor as you go, and are working with skilled engineers, minimizing the upfront architecture work and focussing on clear and simple design is the key. Awesome visualization of the most popular programming languages on StackOverflow since 2008. Call me a nerd, but I really like this kind of video. How to harvest data from LinkedIn. Deep Fake with Will Smith in “The Matrix”. I find this interesting because Will Smith turned down the role of Neo in the original films, and he looks nothing like Keanu Reeves, which makes this a very impressive demonstration of Deep Fakes. (see also.) In Germany, the age group of 14-29 are consuming streamed video more than classic TV. This will definitely mean that TV executives will ask for laws against streaming, to preserve their business model - similar to what has happened with print media. Websites about mental illnesses are passing their collected data to advertising companies. When something is free, it’s very likely that you are the product. But in this case, the people who are the product are actively looking for help and might not even be capable of judging the consequences of their browsing. It looks like human speech may have a universal transmission rate of 39 bit per second. A list of dumb password rules (with screenshots!). My personal favorite from the past was a password for a bank which could not contain special characters and no numbers and could not be longer than 8 characters. This is a classic example of hidden complexity: In Tetris, a randomizer is a function which returns a randomly chosen piece. Over the years, the rules of how pieces are chosen has evolved, affecting gameplay and actual randomness. We officially have the first case of a suspected crime in space: Nasa is reported to be investigating a claim that an astronaut accessed the bank account of her estranged spouse from the International Space Station, in what may be the first allegation of a crime committed in space. The whole mess of Boing is going further than originally thought. This makes me deeply uncomfortable, as I always regarded aviation as the one sector where people have time and budget to thoroughly test their software. Aviation was even the example #1 when it came to formal proving of algorithms, back in university. The future is now: Google Search is evolving into a walled garden. Squarespace on three kinds of Good Technical Debt. There are two interesting parts in this article. While trying to be funny, using Null as his vanity plate caused a security researcher to get parking tickets for cars where the plate number was unknown. Guy who authored the rule after which the probability of a comparison involving Hitler grows the longer an internet discussion is was compared to Hitler in a longer internet discussion. Someone has surfed the web on a budget of 50 MB per day: Douglas Hofstadter on “Number Numbness” (1982). He is the author of “Goedel, Escher, Bach”, and also coined “Hofstadter’s law”: The evolution of trust, exlained with Game Theory. The New York Times thinks a blockchain could help stamp out fake news How a JIRA misconfiguration leaks data of NASA and hundreds of Fortune 500 companies. How YouTube killed IE6: What is the difference between Accuracy and Precision? Protesters in Hong Kong are using laser pointers against the Face Recognition AI, and the images look disturbingly like any dystopian sci fi film out there. Shipped with Amazon Poor web performance is unethical Product Managers often tend to frown at users when they do not understand our software, but can you fill in a simple form in less than 5 minutes? Here's Jimmy: On the capabilities of Deep Fakes Back to Blogging! Estimates How Good Are You at Estimating? The longer something has taken, the longer it will take. This effect has a significant impact on any estimate on when an overdue project will finally be done - intuition and hope says it will be done soon, the math and experience says it won’t. Should you re-estimate your work while you do it or not?, discussed in the context of agile estimation techniques. My stance is to never re-estimate after work has been started, even if it’s a huge outlier. Because we tend to only re-estimate stuff where we have been too optimistic, and not items where we have been too pessimistic - which would then skew the final result. Also, even exceptional outliers are part of the usual business - they happen, and if we take them out by re estimating them, we assume that they will not happen in the future. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast Douglas Hofstadter on “Number Numbness” (1982). He is the author of “Goedel, Escher, Bach”, and also coined “Hofstadter’s law”: When it comes to Estimates, don't count on your future self What is the difference between Accuracy and Precision? Your dev team is not too slow - their estimates are too small How to get what you need without interrupting the team Questions to ask before providing an Estimate Should you make optimistic estimates? React-Native Reloading on the Simulator without shaking the device Fakes Deep Fake with Will Smith in “The Matrix”. I find this interesting because Will Smith turned down the role of Neo in the original films, and he looks nothing like Keanu Reeves, which makes this a very impressive demonstration of Deep Fakes. (see also.) The New York Times thinks a blockchain could help stamp out fake news A Chinese video blogger pretending to be a young beauty queen was revealed to be a middle-aged woman as her filter failed during a live stream, which tells you a lot about where we are headed as a society. Here's Jimmy: On the capabilities of Deep Fakes Design Are you debugging your front end code with Chrome Dev Tools? Then you might find these tips useful. Product Managers often tend to frown at users when they do not understand our software, but can you fill in a simple form in less than 5 minutes? Performance Someone has surfed the web on a budget of 50 MB per day: Poor web performance is unethical Web Are you debugging your front end code with Chrome Dev Tools? Then you might find these tips useful. Someone has surfed the web on a budget of 50 MB per day: Poor web performance is unethical Product Management A few days back, someone on Twitter highlighted that viewing a single image on Imgur causes downloading and running a megabyte of React first. The consensus in the thread was that the engineers at Imgur need to be morons in order to let something like this happen. Arvind Narayanan on why enterprise software sucks. His main example are baby clothes, where two different groups of stakeholders exist: People who want to buy a cute outfit, and people who actually want to quickly dress and undress their kids. How to get what you need without interrupting the team Project Management How to get what you need without interrupting the team Tools Here are two useful links for rapid prototyping or testing: A service to generate avatars from user initials, and an API which returns randomly generated users. Are you debugging your front end code with Chrome Dev Tools? Then you might find these tips useful. How a JIRA misconfiguration leaks data of NASA and hundreds of Fortune 500 companies. Technical Debt Squarespace on three kinds of Good Technical Debt. There are two interesting parts in this article. Perception Wikipedia defines Change Blindness as follows:: Change blindness is a perceptual phenomenon that occurs when a change in a visual stimulus is introduced and the observer does not notice it. Ethics Why you shouldn't use AI for automated content filtering Computer Science Why you shouldn't use AI for automated content filtering Censorship Why you shouldn't use AI for automated content filtering AI This tool to copy/paste nearly everything is mind blowing. It lets you quickly select and copy around everything, including real, tangible things that you capture with a quick photo. If you rely on AI for your camera recording during a soccer match, then better make sure to not have a bald referee. Why you shouldn't use AI for automated content filtering Privacy Awesome visualization of the most popular programming languages on StackOverflow since 2008. Call me a nerd, but I really like this kind of video. How to harvest data from LinkedIn. Websites about mental illnesses are passing their collected data to advertising companies. When something is free, it’s very likely that you are the product. But in this case, the people who are the product are actively looking for help and might not even be capable of judging the consequences of their browsing. Streaming In Germany, the age group of 14-29 are consuming streamed video more than classic TV. This will definitely mean that TV executives will ask for laws against streaming, to preserve their business model - similar to what has happened with print media. Architecture Software Architecture is overrated, clear and simple design is underrated. This article resonates with me because I have worked with multiple teams before, with different emphasis on architecture, and I - from my anecdotal experience at least - do not think that investing more in upfront architecture is really making the software better in the long run. If you are factoring in the time to refactor as you go, and are working with skilled engineers, minimizing the upfront architecture work and focussing on clear and simple design is the key. Agile What is an Agile Mindset? Many people I know have observed the following effect: people are going through the motions of Agile, they do everything “by the book”, yet they are struggeling. Or, they are doing the same work as before without any change other than renaming their meetings to use agile vocabulary, and call themselves agile. Or, my personal favorite, working in a chaotic and unpredictable way and justifying it with the word “agile” linux Here are a few tools which can make your life easier on linux: bat is a drop-in replacement for cat, it displays line numbers, syntax highlighting and more. exa is a replacement for ls. Powerful features include a tree view and git information. oh my zsh is a great ZSH configuration with many very useful features. SpaceVim is a modern vim distribution. It comes with many great defaults. retro Fascinating thread about the archtitecture of SNES. It details how the SNES could be extended with additional CPUs within the cartridges, and provides screenshot of games which used that feature. UI 4 rules for intuitive UX, specifically (also) meant for developers. These rules are: Three important limits regarding Response Time. UX Three important limits regarding Response Time. Rust Hecto: Appendices Hecto, Chapter 7: Syntax Highlighting Hecto, Chapter 6: Search Hecto, Chapter 5: A text editor Hecto, Chapter 4: A text viewer Hecto, Chapter 3: Raw input and output Hecto, Chapter 2: Reading User Input Hecto, Chapter 1: Setup Hecto: Build your own text editor in Rust hecto Hecto: Appendices Hecto, Chapter 7: Syntax Highlighting Hecto, Chapter 6: Search Hecto, Chapter 5: A text editor Hecto, Chapter 4: A text viewer Hecto, Chapter 3: Raw input and output Hecto, Chapter 2: Reading User Input Hecto, Chapter 1: Setup Hecto: Build your own text editor in Rust Tutorial Chapter 2: Inline Styles Chapter 1: The Basics Konzept: A simple, yet powerful WYSIWYG-Editor in React Hecto: Appendices Hecto, Chapter 7: Syntax Highlighting Hecto, Chapter 6: Search Hecto, Chapter 5: A text editor Hecto, Chapter 4: A text viewer Hecto, Chapter 3: Raw input and output Hecto, Chapter 2: Reading User Input Hecto, Chapter 1: Setup Hecto: Build your own text editor in Rust Learning Food for side projects: A list of software and other offerings that have free tiers for developers.. And if you want to learn new stuff, look at this list of learning goodies. Projects Food for side projects: A list of software and other offerings that have free tiers for developers.. And if you want to learn new stuff, look at this list of learning goodies. Security Malware for ATMs causes them to spit out all the money that they have.. Looking at the details of this is scary: ATMs are apparently running on Windows They are not always running with the latest patches It seems to be possible to connect any USB device to it in some cases It also seems to be possible to run any program on these windows machines Agility The longer something has taken, the longer it will take. This effect has a significant impact on any estimate on when an overdue project will finally be done - intuition and hope says it will be done soon, the math and experience says it won’t. Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?, authored by StackOverflow, which in itself is reason enough to read it. Should you re-estimate your work while you do it or not?, discussed in the context of agile estimation techniques. My stance is to never re-estimate after work has been started, even if it’s a huge outlier. Because we tend to only re-estimate stuff where we have been too optimistic, and not items where we have been too pessimistic - which would then skew the final result. Also, even exceptional outliers are part of the usual business - they happen, and if we take them out by re estimating them, we assume that they will not happen in the future. Scope Creep Agile doesn't work, because we can't say No! Predictability Agile doesn't work, because we can't say No! Sustainable Pace Agile doesn't work, because we can't say No! Write-Up What is an Agile Mindset? Use Staff Liquidity for Team Growth How Good Are You at Estimating? Code Reviews Should Be the Exception, Not the Rule We Should Stop Focussing on the Wrong Roles, and Start Focussing on the Right Ones Agile doesn't work, because we can't say No! Coding Here is a web quine- a website where the result looks the same as the source code. This is quite similar to an older example, which actually codes itself live. Quine Here is a web quine- a website where the result looks the same as the source code. This is quite similar to an older example, which actually codes itself live. Leadership Use Staff Liquidity for Team Growth We Should Stop Focussing on the Wrong Roles, and Start Focussing on the Right Ones According to Gartner, overplanning is one of the 9 biggest digital business transformation mistakes: Product Ownership I have moved the Product Owner Q&A to a separate space on this page, where I will continue collecting questions and answers in relation to Product Ownership. Role Models Nice little drum-off between Nandi Bushell and Dave Grohl. Random Here is a list of all non-ACME brands from the Looney Tunes. You know, just in case you’ll ever need it. Diversity A short riddle to test how biased you are. Telling you more about it would kind of give it away. Here is the riddle as text, the solution is in the video: Innovation Colibri is a browser without tabs. It offers two replacement concepts: Links, which is essentially a list of interesting links. Instead of opening a new tab, you would place the existing one here. Lists, which helps you grouping links. Quality Code Reviews Should Be the Exception, Not the Rule Engineering Code Reviews Should Be the Exception, Not the Rule Retro Windows XP, written in React, in your browser. Just notice how goddamn fast it loads! 7000+ DOS games playable in your browser. The entries on the front page alone take you back a long time. If you like the work of the Internet Archive, you can donate here. Team Building Use Staff Liquidity for Team Growth Visualization Interactive map to visualize the true size of countries. Great visualization of how big space is. Mindset What is an Agile Mindset? Corona Interesting article on reverse engineering the Biontech/Pfizer vaccine. I have a background in Biology and Bioinformatics, so I feel quite at home in this article, and I appreciate how the author took their time to break this all down. Metrics Useful rules for interpreting metrics, such as Lead Time or Cycle Time. A Tale of Two Metrics Self Organization Why I switch back to paper books Super Nintendo Super Mario World (1992) My Super Nintendo Setup I am starting a Super Nintendo Collection konzept Chapter 2: Inline Styles Chapter 1: The Basics Konzept: A simple, yet powerful WYSIWYG-Editor in React Misc When you order Habeck-Style PR on Wish. Amazon's Hug is Suffocating New Year Resolutions & Announcements I fed songtexts into an AI. Here is the result: Hotel Dall-E Fornia
Here’s Spotify’s Retro Kit.. Even though it’s a few years old, it’s a good read, and a good complement to my all time favorite, the Retromat.
Currently, this post about how shoddy code causes 6 minute long loading times in a game is going around. I think this is an interesting case, because it underlines the fact that if you are selling goods which are exceptionally high in demand, and for which there is no competition, then you can drastically save on quality. And that includes customers having to suffer minute-long loading times, either because no one noticed, or, more likely, no one cared.
This is what a photo looks like after 8 years of exposure. This is how it happened: Regina [the photographer] was interested in capturing images without the use of modern technology; in this case using a beer can lined with photographic paper as a pinhole camera. She placed a can on one of the Observatory’s telescopes, which had been forgotten about until September this year when it was finally removed by the Observatory’s Principal Technical officer.
You can now play Mario in vim. Of course, you can do the same and more in emacs, for which a full NES emulator is available.
The future is now: Nokia to build mobile network on the moon. So the moon will get fast mobile internet before some spots in Germany? That is not quite the future I imagined!
Miss that warm fuzzy feeling of the early 2000s? Get it back by browsing this museum of Winamp skins.
If you don’t pay attention to tech trends, you end up with unexpected problems. Specifically, it seems that UK Phone Number Assignments have been handled within Yahoo! Groups - which has been shut down.
1985 interview with Steve Jobs. A very interesting read full of insights around the state of the computer industry in the 80s and the mindset Jobs and his company.
Malware for ATMs causes them to spit out all the money that they have.. Looking at the details of this is scary: ATMs are apparently running on Windows They are not always running with the latest patches It seems to be possible to connect any USB device to it in some cases It also seems to be possible to run any program on these windows machines
A few days back, someone on Twitter highlighted that viewing a single image on Imgur causes downloading and running a megabyte of React first. The consensus in the thread was that the engineers at Imgur need to be morons in order to let something like this happen.
Food for side projects: A list of software and other offerings that have free tiers for developers.. And if you want to learn new stuff, look at this list of learning goodies.
Arvind Narayanan on why enterprise software sucks. His main example are baby clothes, where two different groups of stakeholders exist: People who want to buy a cute outfit, and people who actually want to quickly dress and undress their kids.
In an eerie case of Real-Life CSI, a stalker was able to track down his victim from reflections in her pupils on Instagram photos.
Here’s an interesting piece on security: People where cracking old passwords encrypted by insecure algorithms. A non-standard password with special characters and numbers still took them several days to crack. Bonus points for the password being a representation of a standard opening for chess.
The future is now: Adobe deactivates subscriptions for Venezuela. Adobe is mainly offering subscription-only products, with very limited options in case you want to buy instead of subscribe to a product. Also, they are not giving refunds to the holders of the cancelled subscriptions.
Performance Metrics for fast web apps. This article handles lots of quirks of JavaScript in a browser. In conclusion, it’s not obvious which metrics should be used, but once you know it, it’s not too difficult: Measure time starting at event.timeStamp Measure time ending at performance.now() in a requestAnimationFrame() Ignore anything that happened while the tab was not focused Aggregate data using “% of events that are under target” Visualize multiple thresholds
I normally don’t have the time to read long articles, especially since many texts seem to include a lot of unnecessary fluff or explanations which are not really necessary. I did, however, fully read Typing with pleasure, which explains a lot about typing in general - especially what happens between a single keypress and the finished rendering of the updated character on the screen. It even starts before that, explaining the human system and expectations before going into the technical details.
Fascinating thread about the archtitecture of SNES. It details how the SNES could be extended with additional CPUs within the cartridges, and provides screenshot of games which used that feature.
Boris Johnson is using SEO to bury unfavorable articles. In short, Johnson gave an interview where he described himself as a “role model” to make articles about this interview rank higher than an alledged affair with a model.
Tanner Christensen on how his weekend project blew up on Apple’s App Store. On March 14, 2015, while reading the book Creative Confidence, I stumbled on a single sentence that seemed to encapsulate the essence of the book in a powerful way. As a blogger and design-driven individual, I wanted to capture the quote in a captivating way that would allow me to share it quickly online. […] Then, one morning a few days after Snaplight became available in the iPhone and iPad App Store, I noticed a slight uptick in downloads for it. A friend messaged me on Facebook to let me know the app was not only trending, it was being featured on the App Store homepage.
Here are a few tools which can make your life easier on linux: bat is a drop-in replacement for cat, it displays line numbers, syntax highlighting and more. exa is a replacement for ls. Powerful features include a tree view and git information. oh my zsh is a great ZSH configuration with many very useful features. SpaceVim is a modern vim distribution. It comes with many great defaults.
Many people I know have observed the following effect: people are going through the motions of Agile, they do everything “by the book”, yet they are struggeling. Or, they are doing the same work as before without any change other than renaming their meetings to use agile vocabulary, and call themselves agile. Or, my personal favorite, working in a chaotic and unpredictable way and justifying it with the word “agile”
Software Architecture is overrated, clear and simple design is underrated. This article resonates with me because I have worked with multiple teams before, with different emphasis on architecture, and I - from my anecdotal experience at least - do not think that investing more in upfront architecture is really making the software better in the long run. If you are factoring in the time to refactor as you go, and are working with skilled engineers, minimizing the upfront architecture work and focussing on clear and simple design is the key.
Awesome visualization of the most popular programming languages on StackOverflow since 2008. Call me a nerd, but I really like this kind of video.
Deep Fake with Will Smith in “The Matrix”. I find this interesting because Will Smith turned down the role of Neo in the original films, and he looks nothing like Keanu Reeves, which makes this a very impressive demonstration of Deep Fakes. (see also.)
In Germany, the age group of 14-29 are consuming streamed video more than classic TV. This will definitely mean that TV executives will ask for laws against streaming, to preserve their business model - similar to what has happened with print media.
Websites about mental illnesses are passing their collected data to advertising companies. When something is free, it’s very likely that you are the product. But in this case, the people who are the product are actively looking for help and might not even be capable of judging the consequences of their browsing.
A list of dumb password rules (with screenshots!). My personal favorite from the past was a password for a bank which could not contain special characters and no numbers and could not be longer than 8 characters.
This is a classic example of hidden complexity: In Tetris, a randomizer is a function which returns a randomly chosen piece. Over the years, the rules of how pieces are chosen has evolved, affecting gameplay and actual randomness.
We officially have the first case of a suspected crime in space: Nasa is reported to be investigating a claim that an astronaut accessed the bank account of her estranged spouse from the International Space Station, in what may be the first allegation of a crime committed in space.
The whole mess of Boing is going further than originally thought. This makes me deeply uncomfortable, as I always regarded aviation as the one sector where people have time and budget to thoroughly test their software. Aviation was even the example #1 when it came to formal proving of algorithms, back in university.
While trying to be funny, using Null as his vanity plate caused a security researcher to get parking tickets for cars where the plate number was unknown.
Guy who authored the rule after which the probability of a comparison involving Hitler grows the longer an internet discussion is was compared to Hitler in a longer internet discussion.
Douglas Hofstadter on “Number Numbness” (1982). He is the author of “Goedel, Escher, Bach”, and also coined “Hofstadter’s law”:
Protesters in Hong Kong are using laser pointers against the Face Recognition AI, and the images look disturbingly like any dystopian sci fi film out there.
Product Managers often tend to frown at users when they do not understand our software, but can you fill in a simple form in less than 5 minutes?
The longer something has taken, the longer it will take. This effect has a significant impact on any estimate on when an overdue project will finally be done - intuition and hope says it will be done soon, the math and experience says it won’t.
Should you re-estimate your work while you do it or not?, discussed in the context of agile estimation techniques. My stance is to never re-estimate after work has been started, even if it’s a huge outlier. Because we tend to only re-estimate stuff where we have been too optimistic, and not items where we have been too pessimistic - which would then skew the final result. Also, even exceptional outliers are part of the usual business - they happen, and if we take them out by re estimating them, we assume that they will not happen in the future.
Douglas Hofstadter on “Number Numbness” (1982). He is the author of “Goedel, Escher, Bach”, and also coined “Hofstadter’s law”:
Deep Fake with Will Smith in “The Matrix”. I find this interesting because Will Smith turned down the role of Neo in the original films, and he looks nothing like Keanu Reeves, which makes this a very impressive demonstration of Deep Fakes. (see also.)
A Chinese video blogger pretending to be a young beauty queen was revealed to be a middle-aged woman as her filter failed during a live stream, which tells you a lot about where we are headed as a society.
Product Managers often tend to frown at users when they do not understand our software, but can you fill in a simple form in less than 5 minutes?
A few days back, someone on Twitter highlighted that viewing a single image on Imgur causes downloading and running a megabyte of React first. The consensus in the thread was that the engineers at Imgur need to be morons in order to let something like this happen.
Arvind Narayanan on why enterprise software sucks. His main example are baby clothes, where two different groups of stakeholders exist: People who want to buy a cute outfit, and people who actually want to quickly dress and undress their kids.
Here are two useful links for rapid prototyping or testing: A service to generate avatars from user initials, and an API which returns randomly generated users.
Wikipedia defines Change Blindness as follows:: Change blindness is a perceptual phenomenon that occurs when a change in a visual stimulus is introduced and the observer does not notice it.
This tool to copy/paste nearly everything is mind blowing. It lets you quickly select and copy around everything, including real, tangible things that you capture with a quick photo.
If you rely on AI for your camera recording during a soccer match, then better make sure to not have a bald referee.
Awesome visualization of the most popular programming languages on StackOverflow since 2008. Call me a nerd, but I really like this kind of video.
Websites about mental illnesses are passing their collected data to advertising companies. When something is free, it’s very likely that you are the product. But in this case, the people who are the product are actively looking for help and might not even be capable of judging the consequences of their browsing.
In Germany, the age group of 14-29 are consuming streamed video more than classic TV. This will definitely mean that TV executives will ask for laws against streaming, to preserve their business model - similar to what has happened with print media.
Software Architecture is overrated, clear and simple design is underrated. This article resonates with me because I have worked with multiple teams before, with different emphasis on architecture, and I - from my anecdotal experience at least - do not think that investing more in upfront architecture is really making the software better in the long run. If you are factoring in the time to refactor as you go, and are working with skilled engineers, minimizing the upfront architecture work and focussing on clear and simple design is the key.
Many people I know have observed the following effect: people are going through the motions of Agile, they do everything “by the book”, yet they are struggeling. Or, they are doing the same work as before without any change other than renaming their meetings to use agile vocabulary, and call themselves agile. Or, my personal favorite, working in a chaotic and unpredictable way and justifying it with the word “agile”
Here are a few tools which can make your life easier on linux: bat is a drop-in replacement for cat, it displays line numbers, syntax highlighting and more. exa is a replacement for ls. Powerful features include a tree view and git information. oh my zsh is a great ZSH configuration with many very useful features. SpaceVim is a modern vim distribution. It comes with many great defaults.
Fascinating thread about the archtitecture of SNES. It details how the SNES could be extended with additional CPUs within the cartridges, and provides screenshot of games which used that feature.
Food for side projects: A list of software and other offerings that have free tiers for developers.. And if you want to learn new stuff, look at this list of learning goodies.
Food for side projects: A list of software and other offerings that have free tiers for developers.. And if you want to learn new stuff, look at this list of learning goodies.
Malware for ATMs causes them to spit out all the money that they have.. Looking at the details of this is scary: ATMs are apparently running on Windows They are not always running with the latest patches It seems to be possible to connect any USB device to it in some cases It also seems to be possible to run any program on these windows machines
The longer something has taken, the longer it will take. This effect has a significant impact on any estimate on when an overdue project will finally be done - intuition and hope says it will be done soon, the math and experience says it won’t.
Does scrum ruin great engineers or are you doing it wrong?, authored by StackOverflow, which in itself is reason enough to read it.
Should you re-estimate your work while you do it or not?, discussed in the context of agile estimation techniques. My stance is to never re-estimate after work has been started, even if it’s a huge outlier. Because we tend to only re-estimate stuff where we have been too optimistic, and not items where we have been too pessimistic - which would then skew the final result. Also, even exceptional outliers are part of the usual business - they happen, and if we take them out by re estimating them, we assume that they will not happen in the future.
Here is a web quine- a website where the result looks the same as the source code. This is quite similar to an older example, which actually codes itself live.
Here is a web quine- a website where the result looks the same as the source code. This is quite similar to an older example, which actually codes itself live.
I have moved the Product Owner Q&A to a separate space on this page, where I will continue collecting questions and answers in relation to Product Ownership.
Here is a list of all non-ACME brands from the Looney Tunes. You know, just in case you’ll ever need it.
A short riddle to test how biased you are. Telling you more about it would kind of give it away. Here is the riddle as text, the solution is in the video:
Colibri is a browser without tabs. It offers two replacement concepts: Links, which is essentially a list of interesting links. Instead of opening a new tab, you would place the existing one here. Lists, which helps you grouping links.
7000+ DOS games playable in your browser. The entries on the front page alone take you back a long time. If you like the work of the Internet Archive, you can donate here.
Interesting article on reverse engineering the Biontech/Pfizer vaccine. I have a background in Biology and Bioinformatics, so I feel quite at home in this article, and I appreciate how the author took their time to break this all down.
