Tim Kadlec makes a great point about the Ethics of Web Performance:

There is a growing gap between what a high-end device can handle and what a middle to low-end device can handle. When we build sites and applications that include a lot of CPU-bound tasks[…], at best, those sites and applications become painfully slow on people using those more affordable, more constrained devices. At worst, we ensure that our site will not work for them at all.

» 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?

It’s a few days old aldready, but CTRL-SHIFT-FACE has posted an impressive set of deep fakes , starring Jim Carrey in Shining, and showing off the current state of the art for Deep Fakes. Spooky.

» 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.

A few years ago there was a case where a woman was pretending to be a single man by using a voice changing software with Skype - enabling a filter to change the appearance while being live on air is a completely different level though.

(Update: Beauty filter are common among chinese vloggers, and this might very well have been a deliberate Public Relations stunt. )

(via fefe)

I recently took the train to Munich, a 7-hour-ride, and I took the opportunity to working on a React Native project during the journey. Since I could not see myself shaking my phone every few minutes in front of strangers for the better part of the day, I researched a bit and found the following neat trick:

When being confronted with two alternatives - providing an estimate which feels optimistic or one which feels pessimistic - prefer the pessimistic approach over giving optimistic estimates to keep things predictable and avoid chaos. Here’s why.

I started my first blog in 20098. Back then, setting up a blog was a tedious effort, as you had to set up and maintain the server, the database and the software yourself. I only used it infrequently, but it helped me focus on current topics and mentally put things in a certain order.