I wasn't planning to post again so quickly, but I've been reading quite a few interesting things and wanted to share the links before the list gets too big.
- The happy secret to better work: Transcript of this TEDx talk about improving your happiness.
- When Gadget Fixers Turn FBI Informants: Members of Best Buy’s Geek Squad passed incriminating evidence to the law enforcement agency and received payments from agents.
- Saving you bandwidth through machine learning: Interesting both as usage of machine learning and as CPU vs bandwith tradeoff.
- Searching For Half-Life 3: While it is an article about a videogame (never done), I liked it because of the explanations of how radically differently Valve operates as a company, with extreme freedom and creativity.
- Reported "backdoor" in WhatsApp is in fact a feature, defenders say: Feature or not, used or not, the option to read the messages is there.
- Robots Will Devour Jobs More Slowly Than You Think: "it’s tasks that can be automated, not whole positions".
- One Thing: Precisely the technique I use when I get stuck or overflown of important things to do. As I like to say, "when everything is important, nothing really is".
- The Humans Working Behind the AI Curtain: Tasks advertised as AI-driven involve humans behind. "The paradox of automation’s last mile": as AI makes progress, it also results in the rapid creation and destruction of temporary labor markets for new types of humans-in-the-loop tasks.
- Restoring Sanity to the Office: "Silent Thursdays. No talk Thursdays" Me wants this. But so full of good points regarding interruptions, work flow, async vs sync communication... Everyone should just read it.
- Metaphors We Compute By: Really interesting article of we (should) use metaphors, but should also be careful of which ones because of their cognitive implications.
- Beware These Nine Design Elements Your Front-End Developers Hate: This last years I haven't done much frontend (and I still don't know CSS) but I've seen some of them, others I had no idea.
- Amazon Is Becoming the Greatest Threat Google Ever Encountered: After everyone mostly only using web search engines for everything, now a "specific" company becomes the starting point again. A curious evolution.
- Google is abusing its powers: Interesting discussion about how when the reliance on obscure (and many times abused) ranking of webpages by Google now has switched to try to force AMP for "faster content and better mobile" while it could have just penalized slow or non-mobile sites.
- Cartapping: How Feds Have Spied On Connected Cars For 15 Years: "almost real-time audio and location data can be retrieved when cops order vehicle tech providers to hand it over". Scary stuff.
- The Infrastructure Behind Twitter: Scale: Insane numbers and also quite interesting both regarding infrastructure and scalability.
- This is why we have working managers at Basecamp (and why Microsoft and Apple stumbled when they lost their tech CEOs): Alghouth radical, has good points (for me at least) regarding management of a tech company, about not being "driven by sales", and about the importance of having good managers. Short but interesting.
- 4 lessons from robots about being human:
- always question assumptions
- when in doubt, improvise
- when your path is blocked, pivot
- if you want to do something well, there's no substitute for practice, practice, practice
- Trump Knows You Better Than You Know Yourself: Although the title is too provocative, psychometrics/psychographics looks really scary regarding building online profiles/personas, as the article points Trump and Brexit used for.
- Look before you paste from a website to terminal: Scary, just read the (small) article and do the test.
- tutorials.ubuntu.com: A few very specific but varied tutorials, just having in common using Ubuntu as the host operating system you follow them.
- Speed Reading is Bullshit: The whole article has good advices, but I like this sentence: "Reading fast gives you two things that should never mix: surface knowledge and overconfidence"