1 March 2024

86 links · Friday

Weekly Update 388

Cutout.Pro Breach, HIBP UX Redesign Soft Launch, FedEx Phish not Phish, Prusa MK4 3D Printer Build Progress; Sponsored by Report URI

Frontend frameworks are useful

I thought that all frontend frameworks are bloat after being unhappy with the direction taken by React. I feel very different today. I just moved Imgbar, my side project, from JavaScript to Svelte. Imgbar Imgbar is an image editor for inserting text into image…

Brain Pilots

What if there is not just one part of your brain that can say 'I', but many?

Update on apps distributed in the European Union - Support

Apple is sharing changes to iOS, Safari, and the App Store impacting developers’ apps in the European Union (EU) to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA). These changes create new options for developers.

List of 2024 Leap Day Bugs

Well, it's 2024 and leap day is here once again. As I've done in prior leap years, I'll list as many bug reports and outages as I can. This page will be updated frequently over the next few days. Stay tuned! You may also be interesting to seeing the shenaniga…

Zen in the Art of Beat Saber

Contents: Introduction, Step away, come back later, Focus, but not too much, Generalization comes after specialization, Don’t bother if you don’t need to, Let Go Introduction I recently read Zen in the Art of Archery, which isn’t a book about archery as much a…

Apple reverses course on death of Progressive Web Apps in EU

After a few weeks of internet drama, Apple has responded to complaints about the death of Progressive Web Apps in the European Union and is restoring them to how they worked in iOS 17.3 and before.

In praise of Nushell

I'm a little old school and spend a ton of time in the terminal; many programmers and data scientists are the same.

CACM Is Now Open Access – Communications of the ACM

More than six decades of CACM’s renowned research articles, seminal papers, technical reports, commentaries, real-world practice, and news articles are now open to everyone, regardless of whether they are members of ACM or subscribe to the ACM Digital Library.

JPEG XL and the Pareto Front

Version 0.10 of libjxl, the reference implementation for JPEG XL, has just been released. The main improvement this version brings, is that the so-called

UX Crash Course: Nielsen’s Usability Heuristics

Try using Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics for usability review—you might be surprised how much you can improve a product before a user even touches it!

EF Core–.NET 8 update

The .NET 8 release of Entity Framework Core offers a large list of new features. The goal of this post is not to walk you through all these ...

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Mailinator provides Email and SMS Workflow Testing for Developers, Dev Teams, and QA Testing. Automate testing for 2FA and password resets.

Am I a “Chess Tourist”? | Durarbayli.com

In general, I feel like I might have already become a chess tourist because I am not playing for earning money but solely for the enjoyment..

Query Exercise: Finding Sister Locations to Help Each Other - Brent Ozar Unlimited®

For this week’s query exercise, let’s start with a brief query to get a quick preview of what we’re dealing with: [crayon-65e0fba5cf7d0973618611/] That query has a few problems, but hold that thought for a moment. (You’re going to have to solve those problems,…

I looked out the window and saw it was grey outside

But I wondered how grey? Rochester has some of the greyest skies of all cities in the United States but after 9 years here, this felt like one of the sunniest winters ever. I couldn’t prove it, but I did want to compare the sky colors across months and hopeful…

Extraction Matters Most | Dewy

Experimental measurements of a variety of options in a RAG pipeline lead to the conclusion that how you extract content from documents matters most.

Meta Adds Censorship Supporter to Board of Directors

Texas billionaire John Arnold has long held a notorious position for many in the free speech community as the financier for efforts to establish massive censorship systems in the United States. Whi…

How we launch a user-facing feature every week

After two years of launching a user-facing feature a week, we've found a sustainable rhythm that allows us to move fast in unison. We also know what not to do and what we still need to do better.

Goodbye, Skiff Desktop

Hey there, I don't usually write these type of posts, but well.. this isn't a usual circumstance. I apologize for the "rawness" of this post. As you already probably know, Skiff got acquired by Notion less than a month ago. This came as a massive surprise to …

0 to App Store in 60 days

I just shipped my first app to the App Store in years! It was a much different experience this time - it took only 60 days from start to finish. Here's how I…

take notes to understand your language

Someone probably looked up one day and said, “That is the ‘sky’.” They told their friends, and then they told their friends. At some point, when anyone looked up at the vast expanse above them and needed a way to describe it, the word that came to mind was “sk…

Female neediness is real, but it's not a tragedy

In which I discuss the greater female need for commitment, the absurdity of anti-freedom "solutions" to it (coming from reactionary feminists) & argue the only thing that can help is a better Culture

The Unexpected $30,000 Benefit of the Pandemic: Haircuts – Dan Quach Blog

During the early pandemic, a topic came up I never thought I would need to worry about. Who would cut my hair? My Asian hair is a bit funky where it is similar to Wolverine in X-men. After a couple weeks the sides get really pointy and uncomfortable so I wo…

Planned App-solescence

Today is both a good day and a bad day. Bad because I finally have to come to terms with the game I spent four years making is no longer available on the App Store or the Google Play Store which effectively means you can’t run it anywhere anymore. The bitters…

Boundaries Are in the Eye of the Beholder

Here we are, blissfully going about our lives, saying fancy things like "pass me the ketchup, please" and "the projections for our year-close budget ain't pretty, folks," and we're satisfied with that

Why Does 'is-number' Package Have 59M Weekly Downloads?

Why does this simple one-line package have [so many downloads](https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-number)? Is the JS community filled with folks who can't do this simple task without relying on a library? Are they rightfully the butt of all jokes? Have they lea…

Your Product Isn't That Important

When you get a warm introduction or have someone pass along your deck, that’s the first chance you get in front of a VC (and possibly the only chance). As a founder, you think, “all they need to see is how awesome my idea is, our business plan, and then it wil…