Links of Interest for August, 2023

Interesting & Educational

• How Modernity Made Us Allergic
• How to See Bright, Vivid Images in Your Mind's Eye
• Inside the largest Loch Ness Monster hunt in decades

Technology & Code

Interesting & Educational

• A visual book recommender
• Wake Up and Smell the Coffee
• It’s very unlikely we’re observing alien aircraft

Technology & Code

• The Rise of the AI Engineer
• I don't need your query language
• A glitch in the SEO matrix

Interesting & Educational

• Social learning amplifies moral outrage on social networks
• Maps Distort How We See the World
• The Will to Believe

Technology & Code

• The Grug Brained Developer
• AI-powered 2d game levels
• The future of education in a world of AI

Interesting & Educational

• Rooms.xyz
• Will Wright: Interfacing to Microworlds (1996)
• How social learning amplifies moral outrage expression in online social networks (Paper)

Technology & Code

• RSC From Scratch. Part 1: Server Components
• Load Balancing
• Why Engineers Need To Write

Interesting & Educational

• If we already understood the brain, would we even know it?
• Sal Khan: The amazing AI super tutor for students and teachers
• Researchers Taught Parrots to Video Call Other Parrots

Technology & Code

• The End of Front-End Development
• Nine ways to shoot yourself in the foot with PostgreSQL
• Spinning Diagrams with CSS

Interesting & Educational

• What Isaac Asimov Can Tell Us About AI—And Robots That Love
• The Age of AI has begun
• Plane Lands/Takes Off In Only 20 Feet

Technology & Code

• SQL or NoSQL? Why not both?
• Malleable software in the age of LLMs
• Tech Companies Are Ruining Their Apps, Websites, Internet

Interesting & Educational

• The Machines of Mastery
• The Last Question
• It’s time to rethink our entire approach to pre-K

Technology & Code

• What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?
• Self hosting in 2023
• AI commit messages

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• Patterns, culture and theft
• We live in the era of mids
• The DIY Scientist, the Olympian, and the Mutated Gene

⚛️ Development / Technology

• Video: Bret Victor The Future of Programming
• Just use a monorepo
• The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• The Mechanical Professor
• Reversals in psychology
• How to Cook for Odysseus

⚛️ Development / Technology

• Draw SVG rope using JavaScript
• Color Formats in CSS - hex, rgb, hsl, lab
• Building A Virtual Machine inside ChatGPT

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• Underrated reasons to be thankful
• How mud boosts your immune system
• Emperor Charles V’s secret code cracked after five centuries

⚛️ Development / Technology

• Sam Bankman-Fried’s worldview facilitated the creation & destruction of a crypto empire
• Time is an illusion, Unix time doubly so…
• The Unholy Perfection of the 1993 Murder She Wrote VR Episode

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• How Far Can a Cat Fall and Survive? The Limit May Not Exist.
• A List of Things People Blamed on Bicycles
• My Top 10 Tips for Doing Time In ‘the Hole’

⚛️ Development / Technology

• Programming Portals
• I Won My Three Year AI Progress Bet In Three Months
• Prompt engineering is hard

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, I Deserve More Than All
• The Eye of Providence: The symbol with a secret meaning?
• Power Causes Brain Damage

⚛️ Development / Technology

• Get in Zoomer, We’re Saving React
• Posits, a New Kind of Number, Improves the Math of AI
• useSyncExternalStore - The underrated React API

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• Old jokes
• Put down devices, let your mind wander
• 50 Minutes of 80s Daytime TV Commercials

⚛️ Development / Technology

• Optimized for Change
• Stable Diffusion is a really big deal
• A face-detection library in 200 lines of JavaScript

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• Pizza Sceptisicm in the 1950s (Twitter thread)
• The most notable people from every city
• New Tolkien book: The Fall of Númenor to be published

⚛️ Development / Technology

• What’s the deal with all those weird wrong-number texts?
• Music for programming
• The new wave of React state management

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• ‘Blade Runner’ at 40: Why It’s Still the Greatest Sci-Fi of All-Time
• America Is Growing Apart, Possibly for Good
• Books Around America: Uncover the Books Set Nearest to You

⚛️ Development / Technology

• DALL-E 2 has a secret language
• Web3 is going just great
• Code Review: How to make enemies

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• The Real Reason America Doesn’t Have Gun Control
• How Frank Peretti’s Christian horror novels shaped today’s moral panics
• Taking a Break from Social Media Makes you Happier and Less Anxious

⚛️ Development / Technology

• Learnings from 5 years of tech startup code audits
• My deepfake DALL-E 2 vacation photos passed the Turing Test
• Coinbase admits users may lose crypto if exchange goes bankrupt

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• 103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known
• Why I Walk
• Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid

⚛️ Development / Technology

• Programmable Notes
• Elon Musk Got Twitter Because He Gets Twitter
• Those HTML Attributes You Never Use

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• Why Is Every Movie Poster Orange and Blue?
• Tolkien’s Paintings
• Small subgroups of the population seem much larger to many Americans

⚛️ Development / Technology

• My guiding principles after 20 years of programming
• Inspecting Web Views in macOS
• Video: The Story of Next.js

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• Magic circles
• The Ultra-Introverts Who Live Nocturnally
• Five Things You Notice When You Quit the News

⚛️ Development / Technology

• Making the web better. With blocks!
• The false religion of scalability
• Game Engines as an Art Form

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• The Royal Game of Ur
• The forgotten medieval habit of ‘two sleeps’
• The Scientist and the Psychopath

⚛️ Development / Technology

• All you need is links
• Creating a Schema-Based Form System
• Xenobots: World’s first living robots can now reproduce

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• Omicron Is the Beginning of the End
• People mistake the internet’s knowledge for their own
• Is internet addiction eradicating the habit of reading?

⚛️ Development / Technology

• Tao of React
• Magic Beans: The best mental model for NFTs
• Big Data May Not Know Your Name. But It Knows Everything Else

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• “Dune” (the movie), annotated
• Spiders are much smarter than you think
• Those Bullet Effects In Terminator 2 Weren’t CGI

⚛️ Development / Technology

• How Not To Sort By Average Rating
• Web3 — A vision for a decentralized web
• Remix - Build Better Websites

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• An Art History of The Bad Concept Video
• Flowers make a nice gift
• Tony Soprano’s Decadent Society

⚛️ Development / Technology

• Universal data portability
• New Internet logic
• RSS is Wonderful

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• Why Is Every Young Person in America Watching ‘The Sopranos’?

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• Why Is It So Hard to Be Rational?

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• First You Make the Maps
• The House That Vanished
• Welcome to the Modern Age of Cults

⚛️ Development / Technology

• Coding with Character
• People Staring at Computers
• CRDTs go brrr

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• The Brain Maps Out Ideas and Memories Like Spaces

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• I’ve had the same supper for 10 years
• Meet the marine worm with 100 butts
• We Become What We Behold

⚛️ Development / Technology

• The data model behind Notion’s flexibility
• HTML Tips
• Coinbase’s animated TabBar in React Native

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• Let Us Now Praise Tiny Ants
• The Last Prank Before PR Ruined Everything
• Fish Sticks Make No Sense

⚛️ Development / Technology

• The unreasonable effectiveness of print debugging
• Farming Robot Kills 100,000 Weeds per Hour With Lasers
• From sci-fi to reality: Evidence that the metaverse is closer than you think

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• Nothing Breaks Like A.I. Heart

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• The man who produced Steve Jobs’ keynotes for 20 years
• A single cell slime mold makes decisions without a central nervous system
• The Board Game of the Alpha Nerds

⚛️ Development / Technology

• Not Lisp again….
• Graph theory, graph convolutional networks, knowledge graphs
• Deep Dive Into Roam’s Data Structure

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• Maps, the territory, and meta-rationality

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• The economics of Christmas trees

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• On Learning Chess as an Adult
• I should have loved biology
• The Cactus and the Weasel

⚛️ Development / Technology

• Programs are a prison
• Git is simply too hard
• The Unreasonable Syntactic Expressivity of RNNs

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• A Celebration of the Syllabus

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• Secrets about People: A Short and Dangerous Introduction to René Girard
• Car Seats as Contraception
• Wittgenstein’s Revenge

⚛️ Development / Technology

• Hypertext as a Thought Construction Kit
• Simple Anomaly Detection Using Plain SQL
• Security by Obscurity is Underrated

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• This Is not a game

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• Why Tacit Knowledge is More Important Than Deliberate Practice
• The Feynman Technique Model
• The Map Is Not the Territory

⚛️ Development / Technology

• GPT-3: An AI that’s eerily good at writing almost anything
• GPT-3 and the future of human productivity
• How GPT3 Works - Visualizations and Animations

🎓 Interesting / Educational

• From mental map to mental atlas

⚛️ Development / Technology

• Second-guessing the modern web
• In defense of the modern web
• A Text Renaissance

🎩 Business / Productivity

• Will We Work From Home After the Pandemic?
• The optionality fallacy: how to build an antifragile life
• Never attribute to stupidity that which is adequately explained by opportunity cost

⚛️ Development / Technology

• Augmenting Human Intellect
• A visual guide to React Mental models
• The Smallest Large Display Is Projected Straight Onto Your Retina

🎩 Business / Productivity

• The Long-Term Implications of Extended Work From Home
• The only thing that matters
• People who write extensively about note-taking rarely have a serious context of use

⚛️ Development / Technology

• Why JavaScript is Eating HTML
• AI for 3D Generative Design
• Build stuff!

📐 Design

• Video: Why Big Companies Make Bad Products
• How our design team switched to Figma
• Overly descriptive color palettes

📝I’m in England with the family for all of March, so Links of Interest may be a bit different and/or delayed.

⚛️ Development / Technology

⚛️ Development / Technology

• I went to see a movie, and instead I saw the future

⚛️ Development / Technology

• To Understand The Future of AI, Study Its Past
• Don’t Learn to Code - Learn to Automate
• A Primer on Investing for Designers and Developers

📐 Design

• Making Room for Variation
• Marketing Examples
• The 8 biggest web design trends 2020

⚛️ Development / Technology

• The Thought Process Behind a Flexbox Layout

⚛️ Development & Technology

• Can a Machine Learn to Write for The New Yorker?
• How Figma’s multiplayer technology works
• Everything is Amazing, But Nothing is Ours

📐 Design

• ⭐️ How can we develop transformative tools for thought?
• Your UI isn’t a Disney Movie
• Flash Is Responsible for the Internet’s Most Creative Era

📐 Design

• A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design

📐 Design

• Why You Only Need to Test with 5 Users

⚛️ Development / Technology

• Arrival of the Babel Fish
• Avoiding Booleans
• Algebraic Effects for the Rest of Us

📐 Design

• Shape Up
• Take the Time to Use Fewer Words
• Choas Design