News and Articles
A mixed bag this week of security and AI news: Troy Hunt covers the “3 Billion People” national public data breach in detail, a vulnerability in Microsoft apps allowing to spy on Mac users rains on their smug parade following the CrowdStrike outage and a MacOS Trojan posing as the screen recorder Loom spreads via Google Ads. Google's new AI search forces site owners to share data or not get indexed. Benedict Evans has more details in his competing in search essay.
Companies are starting to avoid "AI" as a brand as it turns off customers, and
flag AI risks in their annual reports. GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke asks for more competition in the AI industry - so get innovating. Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt continues to be controversial after his work from home bit, stating in a speech at Stanford that AI startups can steal IP and hire lawyers to ‘clean up the mess’. Another baffling piece of news is that signing up for Disney+ means you can never sue the company, even when your spouse dies from food poisoning at Disney World. Zoom can now handle one million simultaneous participants. Microsoft removes FAT32 partition size limit in Windows 11 and to end with a video, check out why Japanese web design is weird, but works.
Code and Tools
Coding Horrors is a blog series where engineers share the worst that happened to them in products. Sometimes things should be obvious, but worth repeating, for example that you should never filter private data client-side and that passkeys are not passwords. Canva has an interesting explanation how they implemented real-time mouse pointers, making collaboration much smoother for lots of users. Talking about things colliding, sort, sweep, and prune is a great write-up about collision detection algorithms for games. If you want things faster, here is a way to optimise TypeScript type checking performance and making SPA load times shorter with async chunks preloading. If you want to know how big players set up their developer environments, here's an explanation of Stripe’s monorepo. Visual tools are great, but they often create large and complex code. Figma's SVG is one of these examples and animating SVG Exports is a great article how to clean them up. In CSS land, it might be time to talk about “CSS5” and it's great to see a RTL Styling 101 article explaining how to support Arabic or Hebrew better. We talked last week about TSVs for our bulk video editing script but there is a more generic level, explained in "CSVs Are Kinda Bad. DSVs Are Kinda Good.". Last but not least, the pitfalls of in-app browsers explains my own feelings about giving people an outdated, probably insecure browser because you want to control the experience instead of benefitting from data stored in your visitor's own browser.
Some tools for you:
- pdom - run heavy DOM operations in a worker thread.
- Use PHP right inside of your Next.js project - make code reviews weird.
- Next Video - high-performance video to your Next.js app.
- A11y - Focus Order - a Figma plugin to help creating inclusive interfaces.
- That editor - code like it is 1995.
- CSS mesh gradients to copy and paste.
Cool code demos
Talks and Videos
Dive into AI's role in today's tech landscape with Scott Hanselman from Microsoft. Explore ethical dilemmas, live demos, and AI myths. Check it out!
Other videos and talk write-ups of note:
- Zan Markan - You are not an AI developer (24m)
- Ricky Holtz - Diving into Developer Experience (21m)
- Hanselman, Rajan, Jones - The Power of Developer Communities (31m)
Work and Jobs
Turns out there is an explanation why things work on your machine and not in production. You can get from high school math to cutting-edge ML/AI in 4 stages - but have you also forgotten most of it? Software estimates have never worked and never will sounds a tad damning, but there is a lot of truth in there. Analysing the results of various surveys, it seems developers hate their job, but like to code outside work so what could your company do to make coding on the job fun? Last, but not least, whilst companies force workers back to the office, most CEOs are running companies from afar. That's not setting a good example, is it?
Procrastination Corner / Wonderful Weird Web
- Play Diablo in the browser - more info
- Rateloaf - Rate how well your cat sits like bread
- Iceberger - draw an iceberg and see how it would float
- Keyboard simulator - satisfaction with every key press
