May’s Web Discoveries

Here’s a collection of intriguing links I stumbled upon online, perfect for a quick browse.

The Worst Website In The Entire World・The Worst Website In The Entire World is owned by Broadcom

I Don’t Want To Spend My One Wild And Precious Life Dealing With Google’s AI Search - Aftermath・Google’s AI search has come for me

How to get 7th graders to smoke・OR: “fuzzy, wet, and unfalsifiable”

Woodworking as an escape from the absurdity of software・If you had the choice to sculpt a leg chair out of wood or write a full-fledged audio engine, complete with kernel drivers and whatnot, inside an app for controlling monitor brightness, what wou… Wait, no, that’s not a question, you would do the leg chair for sure. There’s no way that other thing makes sense.

Emoji history: the missing years・During my research into vintage Japanese drawing software, I came across some devices that had built in sketch or handwritten memo functions. I bought a coup…

Bollards: Why & What · Josh Thompson・Naming something we see and benefit from every day

Professional corner-cutting : Havoc’s Blog・Steve Jobs famously cared about the unseen backs of cabinets. Antique furniture built with hand tools isn’t like that at all. Cabinetmakers made each part to the tolerance that mattered. The …

How to be an amateur polyglot — LessWrong・Setting the stage • Being a polyglot is a problem of definition first. Who can be described as a polyglot? At what level do you actually “speak” the…

Simplicity is An Advantage but Sadly Complexity Sells Better・Pushing back on the cult of complexity.

URLhaus - Malware URL exchange・Share malware distribution sites with the community

Google Search Is Now a Giant Hallucination・Google rolled out AI overviews across the United States this month, exposing its flagship product to the hallucinations of large language models.

Feynman’s Garden・The best description of my problem solving process is the Feynman algorithm, which is sometimes presented as a joke where the hidden subtext is “be smart”, but I disagree. The “algorithm” is a surprisingly lucid description of how thinking works in the context of hard problems where the answer can’t simply be looked up or trivially broken down, iterated upon in a bottom-up fashion, or approached with similar methods. Feynman’s thinking algorithm is described like this:

To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language・MIT neuroscientists have found reading computer code does not rely on the regions of the brain involved in language processing. Instead, it activates the “multiple demand network,” which is also recruited for complex cognitive tasks such as solving math problems or crossword puzzles.

Mediocre Engineer’s guide to HTTPS・As a mediocre engineer, I took Internet and HTTPS communication for granted and never dove any deeper. Today we’re improving as engineers and learning a rough overview of how internet communication works, specifically focusing on HTTP and TLS.

Big Data is Dead・Big data is dead. Long live easy data.

Effects Showrom・TerminalTextEffects Documentation

Doing is normally distributed, learning is log-normal - Andrew Quinn’s TILs・There are few things I think about more than the essays on gwern.net, and there are few with as satisfying a theoretical payout to contemplate in my orb as his essay on “leaky pipelines”, aka log-normal distributions. The skulk: Say you’re working on a Laravel web app. You’re about 90% sure you know how to start the app. You’re 80% sure you know how to handle the infra you’ll need to get it online.

Your API Shouldn’t Redirect HTTP to HTTPS・Instead of redirecting API calls from HTTP to HTTPS, make the failure visible. Unfortunately, many well-known API providers don’t currently do so.

I Sold TinyPilot, My First Successful Business・Four years after starting TinyPilot from scratch, I’ve sold the company and handed complete control over to a new owner.

Three Laws of Software Complexity (or: why software engineers are always grumpy) - mahesh’s blog・I posit that most software engineers (particularly those working on infrastructural systems) are destined to wallow in unnecessary complexity due to three fundamental laws.

Meaningful Nonsense: How I generate sentences — Amy Goodchild・I’m coding a system in JavaScript that generates sentences of “meaningful nonsense”. Here are some examples.