All Blips
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The fact that people who are buying the software are not always the people who are using the software is a fundamental truth that has a direct impact on the motivation of developers. I have seen many people run into a trap of developing a "user friendly software" without an understanding about who is actually buying the software. It can be very frustrating putting a lot of effort into a fancy dashboard no one uses as opposed to improving the parts of the software the users are frequently using.
Three important limits regarding Response Time.
The limits are: 0.1 second keeps the user convinced that the system is reacting instantaniously. 1 second delay still lets the user work without interruption, and 10 second delay makes the user lose attention.
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.
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
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.
This is apparently not the first time he tried this: He once gave an interview where he explained how he likes to paint buses to make reports of that interview bury the story behind him and the bus he was using when lobbying against Brexit.
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.
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"
I recently discovered that there is a word for it, and it has been around since 2016: Dark Scrum, or, more generally, "Dark Agile"!
On the difference between a maker's and a manager's schedule.
When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That's no problem for someone on the manager's schedule. There's always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker's schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.
This is why I usually recommend having meetings with developers next to the lunch break, shortly after work start or before the end of the work day. YMMV though, as different people prefer different times.
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 andgitinformation. - 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.
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.
Part of this article reads as an ad for this very app, but for me, the important bit is: Scratch your own itch. Write an app which solves your problem and nothing else, to avoid optimizing it for cases which will never come. And don't be afraid to ship as soon as you're done!
My personal stance is: If you have 100 users complaining about your app, then it's good news - it means that you have 100 users!
Awesome visualization of the most popular programming languages on StackOverflow since 2008. Call me a nerd, but I really like this kind of video.
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.
It looks like human speech may have a universal transmission rate of 39 bit per second.
Italians are some of the fastest speakers on the planet, chattering at up to nine syllables per second. Many Germans, on the other hand, are slow enunciators, delivering five to six syllables in the same amount of time. Yet in any given minute, Italians and Germans convey roughly the same amount of information [...]: they tend to transmit information at about the same rate: 39 bits per second.
This is extremely interesting, as it applies to written languages, where information density per syllable was investigated, as well as spoken languages. The conclusion is also fascinating:
But the “why” is another question entirely. Pellegrino and his colleagues suspect that the answer has everything to do with the limits imposed by [...] how much information our brains can take in—or produce—at any one time. [...]
De Boer agrees that our brains are the bottleneck. But, he says, instead of being limited by how quickly we can process information by listening, we’re likely limited by how quickly we can gather our thoughts. That’s because, he says, the average person can listen to audio recordings sped up to about 120%—and still have no problems with comprehension. “It really seems that the bottleneck is in putting the ideas together.”
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.
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.
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.
Everyone who has ever played around with random numbers has already met the concept of "floods" and "droughts", but possibly not with that name. It's interesting to see which solutions they came up with to strike the right balance between keeping the game unpredictable, but still beatable and fun.
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.
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.